Wade was a
science writer and editor for the journals
Nature from 1967 to 1971, and
Science from 1972 to 1982. In a 1976 article in
Science, Wade documented the controversy surrounding
E. O. Wilson's book
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis: portraying Wilson in a sympathetic light, and the opposing
Sociobiology Study Group more critically. Wade's 1977 book,
The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution, covered the then new and controversial field of
gene splicing. His 1981 book, ''
The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists' 21-Year Race to Win the World's Most Coveted Research Prize, described the competition between Andrew Schally and Roger Guillemin, whose discoveries regarding the peptide hormone led to them sharing the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science (1982), co-authored with William J. Broad, discusses historical and contemporary examples of scientific fraud. Wade joined The New York Times in 1982 as a staff and editorial writer, he left the Times'' in 2012. In the 2000s, Wade's books began to focus on human evolution. He released
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors in 2006, which is about what Wade referred to as "two vanished periods" in human development, and
The Faith Instinct in 2009, about the
evolution of religious behaviour. In 2007,
Before the Dawn received a
Science in Society Journalism Award from the
National Association of Science Writers. A Troublesome Inheritance In 2014, Wade released
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in which he argued that
human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional" and that
genes may have influenced a variety of behaviours that underpin differing forms of human society. The book has been widely denounced by scientists, including many of those upon whose work the book was based. Marks, for instance, described the book as "entirely derivative, an argument made from selective citations, misrepresentations, and speculative pseudoscience." Biologist
H. Allen Orr called the book "lively and generally serviceable", but said it was "not [...] without error", stating that Wade had overstated the evidence for recent
natural selection in the
human genome.
COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis In May 2021, Wade published a 10,000-word article on
Medium and later in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled "The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora's box at Wuhan?" in which he argued that the possibility that the
novel coronavirus was
bioengineered and had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, couldn't be dismissed. Wade's article fuelled the controversy around the
origins of the virus, and has become one of the most-cited pieces in support of the
lab leak hypothesis. Wade's argument is at odds with the prevailing view among scientists that the virus most likely has a
zoonotic origin.
David Gorski of
Science-Based Medicine described Wade's argument as a
conspiracy theory. == See also ==