No, hang on, don’t turn to Dear Mary yet. This is not as dull as it sounds. It’s just that I was mystified by not having heard of the term mechanistic insight when, to my husband, it was a common as an August blackberry on a Sussex hedgerow. ‘Look,’ he said, shaking some printouts from medical journals. ‘Mechanistic insights are two a penny.’
At first I thought it was simply a silly scientistic way of saying ‘How it works’. For example, one paper had the title: ‘Mechanistic insight into how multidrug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii response regulator AdeR recognises an intercistronic region.’ There is no need to know what any of this is about (except Acinetobacter baumannii is a bacterium that does nasty things in hospitals). But one might understand the title none the worse for the loss of its first three words, ‘Mechanistic insight into’.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in