Leigh Phillips is a science writer and European Union affairs journalist. Writing for Nature, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman, Jacobin, Scientific American, amongst other outlets, he has visited appallingly ill-equipped Siberian tuberculosis hospices, interviewed Mexican nanotechnology researchers bombed by eco-terrorists, tricked into eating whale meat by Norwegian diplomats in the high Arctic, followed Hungarian fascists on a torch-lit march threatening a gypsy village, and been tear-gassed and punched in the face by Italian Carabinieri. A long-time Brussels-based reporter, he also spent a decade exposing corporate capture of EU law-making and its accompanying hollowing out of democracy.