I came across Professor Townsend on Twitter. Sadly, during the epidemic she decided to withdraw from the platform. ‘I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter but during the dark days of 2020–21, I witnessed reprehensible behaviour by some academics,’ she told me. ‘People who I previously admired have behaved in dreadful ways and said absolutely vicious things about other academics that were completely unwarranted. Science, or at least scientific debate, has died in these times. I decided to leave the toxicity of Twitter and focus my energies on other ways of communicating that
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