Gavin Ritchie

Binary oppositions come easily to the human mind. Good and evil. Joy and sadness. Chalk and cheese. But, attracted as we are to neat categories, one question is whether these clean absolutes always exist in reality?

We last reported on Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell immunotherapy treatments in a blog from 2018, where it was noted that progress within solid tumour cancers was still at early stages.

Stephen recently questioned whether the hype around AI models for Life Insurance might be a case of The Emperor's New Clothes. In this blog we discuss an important point of difference: whereas in the fable, a youth reveals the expensive "invisible" new clothes have no substance at all, in our scenario, we find precisely the opposite. AI models utilising machine learning are, far from being see-through, simply not transparent enough.

More than a decade ago, we first posted on public health interventions proposed or implemented by the Scottish Government. A key focus area from those initiatives, alcohol mortality, has recently reported status, and the news does not seem encouraging. Despite the introduction of a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol in 2018, Scottish alcohol deaths reached a new high in 2024.

How should we describe a lifestyle change that doubles our likelihood of suffering a major traffic accident? Oddly,  evidence from Scotland suggests the answer is "worth making". Let me explain.

In criminal investigation, it is well known that passing time obscures the facts, making what happened more difficult to discern. Eventually, the case turns cold - unlikely to be solved unless we discover new evidence. In some ways for over a century, epidemiologists have been dealing with just such a cold case, picking through the rubble of the 1918 Influenza pandemic and trying to make sense of what they find. But as we will see, debate continues in a number of areas.