I’ve always been rather fond of the laboratory as it’s depicted in gothic literature. From Victor Frankenstein to Henry Jekyll, the scientists of Victorian fiction always come to us hunched in delightfully putrid chambers, muttering darkly amid instruments of unspeakable malice.

So when I learned that scientists in Utrecht had grown human tear glands in their lab – only to deliberately make them cry – I was instantly put in mind of fiction’s cruel gothic doctors. I was a bit off the mark: their tearjerking experiments were conducted in bright, modern and sanitised laboratories. And their tear gland “organoids”, grown in Petri dishes from human stem cells, were induced to weep for an admirable cause: to find treatments for dry eye disease, which afflicts 5% of the global population.

Elsewhere, researchers have shown that 20% of the world’s coastal population, some 150 million people, are living in “sinking cities” that are subsiding into the earth faster than sea levels are rising. And somewhat comfortingly, we’re reminded that our antibodies mutate just as the coronavirus does – likely boosting our natural ability to ward off infections by variants.

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