The editors recount how the volume came about and the choices that were made to invite contributors. The themes of the volume are discussed, both those in the organisers’ minds at the start, and those that emerged during the course of the lecture series.

This chapter explores different forms of thermoregulation of blood in animals living in a range of contrasting environments, from the Kalahari Desert to the Antarctic ice. In a wide diversity of species, a range of anatomical adaptions are considered, including heart and blood vessels morphology, natural insulation, and as behavioural and life-cycle adaptations. The strategies of endotherms and ectotherms are compared, and the very particular biology of the icefish is considered.

The chapter opens with a concise history of the recognition of blood types that, as well as informing the human immune system, incidentally provide an ideal genetic data set for phylogenetic enquiry. The chapter goes on to relate that enquiry to the author’s People of the British Isles project. This project draws upon genetic data from just over 2,000 volunteers to construct a genetic map of the human population of the British Isles. From that genetic map, the peopling of the British Isles is inferred and reconstructed.

Blood as the foundation of life and health is the focus of this chapter, which assembles a series of heroes and villains in the quest for good blood health. The heroes comprise a pioneer of the blood transfusion service and a designer of economic sanitary pads; the villains comprise an experimenter on the accident-strewn path to mastery of life-saving (rather than life-taking) transfusion.

In conversation with one of the editors (Iosifina Foskolou), Marc Quinn discusses his life and practice as an artist, and how that brought him to work with blood. After discussing the technical challenges of sculpting with blood, the conversation moves to notable artworks, including: Self, Our Blood, Breath, and A Surge of Power.

This chapter addresses how stakeholders of scientific research can assess whether research is compliant with the scientific method and then promote useful scientific research to improve products, services, processes, methods, and decision-making. We address stakeholders in sections for universities, scientific journals, governments, regulators and courts, and media and interested individuals.

The invitation for those nominating candidates for the Nobel Prize in economics, the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” described the award of the prize as being “based solely on scientific merit.” No criteria for judging scientific merit were provided, but nominators were directed to “consider origin and gender” of the nominees. Without clear criteria for the award, to what extent can one be confident that the prize was based on the scientific merit of the findings?

Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, commented on reading papers in the Journal of Experimental Psychology from the 1920s and 1930s. He observed that “This was professionally a most depressing experience, but not because these articles were methodologically mediocre. On the contrary, many of them make today’s research pale in comparison with their diversity of methods and statistics” (Gigerenzer, 2000, p. 296).

We believe that the primary role of a scientist is to make discoveries that can help to improve peoples’ lives, whether directly such as through the discovery of a vaccine against a disease or indirectly such as through the invention of a procedure that can improve efficiency or lead to better decisions. In this chapter, we provide practical advice on how to identify important problems, how to choose which important problems to research, how to design a study, how to collect data, and how to analyze them.

We intend that our checklist provides a common understanding among all stakeholders in science of what the scientific method entails. To that end, we describe it in terms that are simple and commonly understood.