The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown into relief the way that scientific facts can be distorted by commercial imperatives, unconscious bias or self-delusion as they make their way into the collective consciousness. Walter Gratzer was a pioneer in the subgenre of science writing that calls out such biases, yet as a researcher in molecular biology he celebrated the self-correcting tendencies within science as well as gently mocking its failings.
Gratzer, who has died aged 89, was a modest man who never became a household name, yet he influenced the way science has come to be communicated beyond the confines of highly specialised journals, and his writings encouraged readers in the research community to raise their heads from the bench and reflect on what they were doing.
He first ventured into…
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