Dick Taverne was the Labour MP for Lincoln from 1962 to 1972, when he resigned to fight the famous Lincoln by-election as an independent social democrat in 1973, and won. In 1974 he wrote The Future of the Left, Lincoln and After (Jonathan Cape), which predicted the split in the Labour party that happened seven years later. He is now a Liberal-Democrat peer. Becoming gradually more and more concerned about the increasing mood of hostility and suspicion towards science, in 2002 he founded the association 'Sense About Science' to promote an evidence-based approach to scientific issues.