Dick Taverne, Baron Taverne was born in 1928. Educated at Charterhouse School, and then Balliol College, Oxford he graduated in law and became a QC.

In 1962 he was elected Labour MP for Lincoln, serving in government under Harold Wilson. In 1972 he was asked to stand down by the Lincoln Constituency Labour Party, who disagreed with his pro-European Economic Community views. He resigned from the Labour Party and parliament and established the Lincoln Democratic Labour Association for his supporters.

He was a leading social democratic thinker, writing The Future of the Left - Lincoln and After in 1972, and his political manouverings in the 1970s foreshadowed those of the SDP in the 1980s.

He resigned from parliament to force a by-election in March, 1973, in which he won the Lincoln seat as a Democratic Labour candidate. Later that year he established the short-lived Campaign for Social Democracy that folded in 1974. It was an attempt to forge a new social democratic political force in the UK, but met with no success. Taverne lost his seat in parliament at the October 1974 general election, but he continued to remain active with the Democratic Labour Association until it folded after the 1979 general election.

In 1979, bankrolled by his friend David Sainsbury's Gatsby Foundation . he founded the Institute for Fiscal Studies, now an influential independent thinktank.

When the Social Democratic Party (SDP) formed in the early 1980s he joined them, serving on their national committee from 1981 until 1987. He was also twice a parliamentary candidate for the SDP. When the SDP merged with the Liberals he joined the new Liberal Democrat party, serving on its Federal Policy Committee from 1989 until 1990.

In 1996 he was created a life peer and sits in the House of Lords.

Classically trained but married to a scientist, he became interested in science as part of public policy and in 2002 founded Sense About Science , a group with the objective of advancing science education and promote public understanding of scientific research.

He was elected President of the Research Defence Society in 2004. He was a member of the House of Lords Committee on the Use of Animals in Scientific Procedures and is currently a member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee . He is the author of The March of Unreason – science, democracy and the new fundamentalism , published by Oxford University Press in March, 2005.