science writer crashes bank

When Northern Rock building society crashed a few weeks ago and was saved by emergency measures by the government, I noticed for a split second that its chairman had the same name as one of my science writers colleagues, Matt Ridley.
Only yesterday I found out from George Monbiot's column that the author of books like The Red Queen, and Genome, and the crash-landed Northern Rock chairman are actually the same person.

How deeply embarrassing for the community of science writers ... First of all, if you have the intelligence and education to deal with the wonders of the physical world, why would you want to deal with something as profane as running a bank? Secondly, if you have to run a bank, driving it into a ditch might give all of us a bad name. I mean who will leave a science writer in charge of a business ever again, after this 16 billion pound disaster?

And to all those who like to diss Wikipedia, George Monbiot's column appeared yesterday, and I checked Ridley's entry in Wikipedia today at 10am and found that it had already been updated based on yesterday's paper.