Laura Spinney

Education Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University in 1993.

Career Spinney has written for Nature, National Geographic, The Economist, New Scientist, and The Guardian. She is the author of two novels, The Doctor published by Jonathan Cape who acquired the global rights in an auction in 2015. Spinney indicates that the global pandemic was the biggest disaster of the 20th century, exceeding the death tolls of both World War I (17 million) and World War II (60 million dead). Its full scope has only been recognised in the 21st century as researchers have examined old records, determining that 1 in 3 people became ill and between 1 in 10 and 1 in 5 died. At the time illiteracy was common, germ theory relatively new, antibiotics had not been discovered, and long-distance communication was often limited. In 2019 she spent two months as a journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.