Ehsan Masood is Nature’s Editor for Editorials. He also has responsibility for the journal’s science news from Africa and the Middle East. He has been a science policy journalist and broadcaster for nearly 30 years and has written several books, including GDP: The World's Most Powerful Formula and Why it Must Now Change (Icon Books, 2021); and Science and Islam: A History (BBC/Icon Books, 2008). Both have also been featured in BBC documentaries. Ehsan was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied the impact of the McCarthy era on scientists in the United States. He also taught international science and innovation policy at Imperial College London from 2007 to 2017.