Tom Whipple

Perhaps more than any other discipline, Science and Technology journalism is about explanation. It is about conveying complexity, understanding caveats, and synthesizing information. It is about knowing when and how to simplify, and - especially - when not to. These three articles in different ways demonstrate Tom Whipple's ability to do just this, while also doing the most important thing of all: holding the reader's interest.

The first is an account, ten years on, of the disappearance of flight MH370*. There have been whole books written on this topic, as well as official reports inches thick. But amid the conspiracies and contentiousness, there are now a string of facts dotted across the Indian Ocean on which most agree. Tom joined those dots, some involving describing highly technical deductions, to outline what we can now say with relative certainty about the century's greatest aviation mystery.

The second article chronicles the life and death of an extraordinary woman. One of the biggest stories of the year was the treatments for Alzheimer's. These drugs in turn are explained by exquisitely complex molecular biology and medical statistics. But they are also explained by the life of one stubborn woman, whose insights about the sickness in her family started all of modern Alzheimer's research. Tom followed her for the last year of her life, as she succumbed - as she always feared she would - to the toxic proteins she helped discover. Hers was a very different, very human, way into a story that will affect many of us.

The final article is about reducing and synthesizing complexity, but also about accepting that complexity - and the uncertainty it brings. As the covid inquiry entered its most crucial phase, interrogating the decision making in Downing Street, this was an analysis of the biggest question of all: should we have locked down? The article was informed by all we had learned from the inquiry - including hundreds of pages of testimony from Dominic Cummings and senior civil servants. It was also informed by all that Tom had learnt from four years covering the pandemic. The goal was not to persuade. Instead it was to outline the terms of the question, where the unknowns will always reside, and leave the rest to readers. *The joint byline in the MH370 article went for the quotes in the final section, from Richard Godfrey and Simon Maskell, which came from a freelancer who had followed some of the latest efforts to locate it.