"Between 1980 and 2005, I commissioned working scientists to write for The Guardian newspaper — from astronomers royal to impoverished doctoral students — and almost all of them delivered high-standard, well-focused newspaper prose and many of them went on to live by the pen. I also encountered distinguished scientists who had already become literary stars. One was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who told me that his literary hero was Thomas Henry Huxley. Another was the industrial chemist, poet and writer Primo Levi, who when I tried to ask him about the Two Cultures debate — the apparent divide between the humanities and sciences — gently reminded me that Dante Alighieri (himself the subject of at least one paper in Nature), was a member of the Florentine guild of physicians and apothecaries. And a third was the Czech poet and dissident , who wrote his occasional Guardian column in English, and asked that at the end of each I describe him as the author of Immunology of Nude Mice (1989). All three were better writers than most writers: two will still be famous as writers a century from now."
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Tim Radford (science writer)
(born 1940) is a New Zealand-born, British journalist and editor, specialising in science writing. He worked for ' for 32 as a reporter and editor. From 1980 to 2005 he was The Guardian’s science editor. He is the author of the 1990 book The Crisis of Life on Earth: Our Legacy from the Second Millennium and the 2018 book The Consolation of Physics: Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy. Radford won four times the science writer of the year award from the . He is a Fellow of the and
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