Monday 5 March 2012 Royal Northern College of Music 7.00 pm THE COURTAULD LECTURE Human Viruses: Family Heirlooms and New Pandemics Professor Robin Weiss FRS Professor of Viral Oncology, University College London We humans are hosts to all sorts of infectious microbes. Some are innocent or even useful, whereas others are deadly. It is the harmful infections, known as pathogens, that I shall discuss in this talk. Family heirlooms are the types of viruses and bacteria that have been in the human population ever since we diverged from our closest ape-like ancestors around 5 million years ago. The ‘new’ acquisitions represent the infections that we have picked up along the way such as measles about 10,000 years ago, smallpox 4,000 years ago and syphilis 500 years ago, while influenza and HIV came along more recently. The newcomers tend to be the pandemic diseases because our bodies have not yet adapted to handle them. Prevention is always better than cure and the most effective modes of prevention, where they are available, are through immunisation with vaccines. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday 14 March 2012 MANDEC 7.00 pm The House of Murder: The Christie Case and the Making of the Modern Crime Scene Dr Ian Burney Senior Lecturer, School of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester This lecture uses the notorious case of the serial murderer John Christie (1953) to explore the relationship between two paradigms of twentieth-century forensic homicide investigation: a body-centred forensics, associated with the “celebrity” lone pathologist, and a “forensics of things”, based in the laboratory and geared to the analysis of traces from the crime scene. The Christie investigation enables an examination of the ways that the traditional corpse-centred approach to murder investigation was being re-shaped by new approaches and by developments in trace detection. I will show how the investigation, led by the pathologist Francis Camps, transformed Christie’s home at 10 Rillington Place into an excavation site, the stage for a prolonged and intensely public search for bio-evidence. By focusing on the multi-disciplinary excavation of the scene and later post-mortem work, I will suggest that the new emphasis on trace collection and analysis interacted with the traditional investigative model associated with the autopsy, showing this as a complex dialogue rather than simple opposition. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday 19 March 2012 MANDEC 7.00 pm The Royal Society and Radio 4 Deborah Cohen MBE Editor of the BBC Radio Science Unit In 2010 the oldest scientific institution in the world, the Royal Society, celebrated its 350th birthday. To mark this anniversary, the BBC designated 2010 the Year of Science. The Year began on Radio 4 with a four-part series presented by Melvyn Bragg that told the story of the remarkable history of the Royal Society, from its beginnings at Wadham College in Oxford to its role in the 21st century. Melvyn Bragg was joined by some of the UK’s leading historians of science at locations in Oxford and London to bring the major turning points in the story of the Royal Society to life for a non-specialist audience. On the journey we met major figures in British history such as Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Banks and Benjamin Franklin. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday 26 March 2012 Royal Northern College of Music 7.00 pm THE MANCHESTER LECTURE Alan Turing: His Theory of Morphogenesis demonstrated in Radiolaria Professor Bernard Richards former Professor of Medical Informatics, UMIST Alan Turing is best known as a mathematician who worked on the code-breaking effort at Bletchley Park during WW2 and developed the basic theory on which the design of modern computers is based. In his schooldays he was interested in the growth of plants and flowers and then, in the early 1950s, he became interested in Mathematical Biology, in particular the idea of Morphogenesis. This is the biological process causing an organism to develop its shape and is determined by cell development in early life. The full understanding of this mechanism required the discovery of DNA but Turing's theory remarkably anticipates the work of Franklin, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins which followed soon after. This lecture deals with Professor Richards' work on the growth of the marine organism Radiolaria as a research student supervised by Turing at Manchester University 60 years ago, showing how his results vindicated Turing’s Hypothesis. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |