Christopher Booker

Wednesday

Christopher Booker

Mind over matter

From our UK edition

Why Us?, by James Le Fanu The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.

Saturday

Christopher Booker

Beware the politician posing as a scientist

From our UK edition

One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery, with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue,,however far removed it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. In 2000, when he was appointed just before the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface chemistry’. Yet almost immediately top of his agenda was the need to fight an animal disease.

Wednesday

Christopher Booker

No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

From our UK edition

Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt, bureaucratically hamstrung state of their economy. ‘The problem with India,’ he said despairingly, ‘is the problem of want creation.’ If he could return to India today, he would rub his eyes in disbelief. From the ubiquitous roadside hoardings proclaiming ‘Making a billion dreams come true’ to the shiny new shopping malls and business parks springing up round every city, the world has rarely seen such an explosion of ‘want creation’.

Saturday

Christopher Booker

Killer peak

From our UK edition

Imagine you have been walking up into the sky for four days on end, until you reach a frozen plateau as high as Mont Blanc. Only now does the serious business begin. Starting at midnight, you climb continuously for six hours in the dark up what seems like a near-vertical scree slope the height of Snowdon, at 20 degrees below zero while gasping for breath at 50 per cent oxygen. You have reached the crater rim of the highest free-standing mountain in the world, capped with cliffs of ice, only a few miles from the equator.