Photograph by Clive Frost Pick a thorny scientific issue--genetically modified foods, stem-cell research, conservation--and Lord Robert May of Oxford, head of the Royal Society of London and former chief scientific advisor to the British government, is most likely sitting in the middle of the fray. In the 1970s, May, a theoretical biologist at Oxford University, showed how to apply chaos theory to biology. Today he is developing mathematical techniques for modeling biodiversity and for charting the spread of infectious disease. He shared his views with associate editor Kathy A. Svitil.
Does your work support Stephen Wolfram's recent book, A New Kind of Science, in which he claims we can model all of nature using simple, self-replicating, mathematical rules?
