How Life Works: dealing with biology’s changing narrative

We are excited that the 2025 CPM Annual Lecture will be given by Philip Ball.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than 20 years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and How Life Works. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.

Philip was the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol.