Foreword
Molecular Diagnostics: Current Technology and Applications
| We live in a risk society, so sociologists tell us. We are worried about the food we eat, the water we drink, as well as globalisation, terrorism and, one has to say, threats posed by novelties based on science, like genetically modified crops. Another way of putting it is to say that never before has the public had such high expectations that all threats to health - real or imagined - should be removed or neutralized. The paradox is that the public expects this to be delivered by science and scientists! But of course there is no problem. Science delivers. Molecular Diagnostics: Current Technology and Applications illustrates this in an excellent fashion; how fast, sensitive and specific diagnostic tools address problems in the real world. Its strength is not only that its account is state-of-the-art, but is in its breadth, ranging from plant pathogens, food borne pathogens, GMCs and human pathogens in general to entomology and to bioterrorism. Hugh Pennington |
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Professor T Hugh Pennington Hugh Pennington graduated in medicine and obtained his PhD in virology from St Thomas's Hospital, London. In 1979 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen (emeritus 2003). He chaired an expert group to learn lessons from the 1996 E.coli outbreak in central Scotland, and is currently chairing a Public Inquiry into the 2005 E.coli outbreak in South Wales. He is an expert commentator on microbiological subjects for general readers and his lectures and essays cover wide ranging topics of public interest including BSE, vCJD, anthrax, smallpox and bioterrorism, SARS, syphilis and food toxic microbes. He is President of the Society for General Microbiology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences. |
