The Life Scientific

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Dean Lomax on discovering ichthyosaurs and defying nay-sayers

May 26, 2026

Have you ever been told you aren't good enough to do something, then gone ahead and proved the naysayers wrong by doing it anyway - in glorious, headline-grabbing style? That is the satisfying story of Dr Dean Lomax. Dean grew up in Doncaster with a passion for fossils but after failing various school exams, was told by teachers that he'd never make it as a palaeontologist. Undeterred by leaving school with no qualifications, Dean sold his childhood Star Wars collection to fund a fossil-hunti...

Helen Hastie on the future of human-robot relations

May 19, 2026

What if robots of the future weren’t just clever machines, performing tasks in isolation, but trusted teammates you could have a chat with? That could respond naturally to conversational cues and even explain their work? Making this relationship a reality is a focus for Helen Hastie, Professor of Human-Robot Interaction and Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Helen’s career has taken her from developing early dialogue systems - the ancestors of today’s generati...

Seth Berkley on the importance of vaccinating the world

May 12, 2026

Dr Seth Berkley is an epidemiologist and global health leader whose career has been shaped by one central problem: vaccines save lives, but only if people can actually get them.His 40-year career has spanned the global, from helping to build Uganda’s first HIV surveillance system and founding the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; to leading Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance for more than a decade – overseeing the immunisation of hundreds of millions of children worldwide. And when COVID-19 stru...