It used to be said that you should never judge a book by its cover. And yet, one look at the unmistakable dayglo colour references to Jamie Reid’s infamous album sleeve of 1977 relieves you of that responsibility. And just as Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten explained the title of the band’s album - which famously survived an obscenity court case – as being an imprecation to strip away the nonsense and get to the objective root of the matter, so here does Luke O’Neill.
Don’t be fooled by the guitar-playing immunologist’s eyeball-friendly rock’n’roll cultural magpie stance. There’s a lot of deadly serious stuff going on in ‘Never Mind the B*ll#cks, Here’s the Science’. It’s a book about nothing less than why the public is reluctant to think scientifically, or trust engineers for that matter, as if they ever did.
If for the past year you’ve been mystified by the endless stream of single-issue politics that seems to drag science and technology through the...