A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA
May 30th 2021USING MESSENGER RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the…
An ex-president is on trial, but graft still blights South Africa
AT TIMES IT can be hard to find the right metaphor for the dysfunction of the South African state. But then, on a recent morning, your correspondent found himself in the middle of a broken sewage works, knee-deep in excrement. Like the other six plants in the municipality of Maluti-a-Phofung, the one in the town…