Events

Gail Davies (UCL Geography) travels around the world looking at laboratory mice, and the scientists who study them. To find out why a geographer would be spending her life doing this, I went to hear her in conversation with Steve Cross – Head of UCL’s Public Engagement Unit (and a closet geneticist) – at the event Mice People: Cultures of Science organised as part of the Humanimals season at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology.

Gail is a human geographer interested in how science works, both in terms of the interface between nature and culture, and the spatial aspects of science.

A big part of her work is looking at how science varies internationally. Taking an extremely broad view of science, there have been two big “science migrations”. The first was after World War II when many European scientists moved to America. The second is happening now, with a huge shift in science going towards south-east Asia.

However, scientists don’t move around the globe alone. In the case of quite a few biologists, they take their mice with them. In fact, as Gail explained, if you take away apparatus, knowledge of standard methods etc., “the international knowledge economy looks rather furry”.

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Professor Steve Humphries (UCL Institute of Human Genetics and Health) delivered an insightful and comprehensive Lunch Hour Lecture, on 23 February, regarding the issues surrounding genetic testing for risk of heart disease.

The lecture was broken down into four manageable chunks: (1) The causes and mechanisms of heart disease (2) What is a gene? (3) What is SNP and how is it useful? (4) How can we use DNA tests?

The causes and mechanisms of heart disease
To begin the lecture Professor Humphries challenged the audience to suggest known risk factors for heart disease. This was effective in engaging the audience and a wide-ranging list was compiled, including: high blood pressure, obesity, smoking, diabetes, age and male gender. The risk factors could be genetic or environmental, but in reality, many are a combination of both.

Professor Humphries then proceeded to explain briefly the mechanisms of heart disease illustrating his points with some supportive graphics.

To summarise, he described the fact that after being born with clean arteries there can be the process of ‘silent build up’, which takes place in early adulthood. Although this can be reversed, in many it will lead on to fatty streaks, atherosclerotic plaques and in the unfortunate; chest pain, plaque rupture and myocardial infarction.

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Jack Ashby writes about the last UCL Lunch Hour Lecture of 2011, held on 8 December.

Every zoologist has their own favourite group of animals, and mine is marsupials. However, this group sometimes suffer a lot of stick from the more common type of zoologist who studies placental mammals. They say marsupials are boring, stupid, primitive, too few in number and are altogether inferior to ‘normal’ mammals. I was hoping that the Lunch Hour Lecture by Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution and the Environment and UCL Earth Sciences) would set some of these accusations straight.

Whenever I go to Australia to undertake ecological fieldwork I am struck by the diversity of the mammals there. You can travel 200km and find a different species of marsupial mouse doing a similar thing to the one you saw the day before, only in a slightly different environment. Go another 200km and you could find a third.

However, the three species do look pretty similar. One of the major downsides of marsupials, from a biodiversity point of view, is that they haven’t evolved the range of forms that placental mammals have. While there is a semi-aquatic species of marsupial – the yapok – it could hardly be compared with a whale or a seal; there are gliding marsupials too, but they can’t do what bats can do. Marsupials and placentals have both been evolving for the same length of time – 125 million years; why did flying, swimming or event galloping never arise in marsupials? Anjali put it down to methods of reproduction.

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Dave Weston reports on a Lunch Hour Lecture guaranteed to generate robust debate.

Same-sex sexual behaviour is often condemned on the grounds that it’s ‘against nature’. Indeed, biology tells us that selection favours those who leave more offspring. But then, homosexual behaviour is widespread – not only among humans, but also throughout the animal kingdom.

So, does that constitute a paradox for Darwinian theory? And is there a connection between what goes on in nature and what is morally desirable? These were the tricky questions that Professor Volker Sommer set out to address in a Lunch Hour Lecture on 17 November.

I’ve heard Volker speak several times before. His official title is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at UCL and he’s an expert in behavioural ecology, having spent many years studying the behaviour of monkeys, apes… and people. The combination of an eminently quotable and engaging speaker with a live audience and potentially controversial subject matter meant this was always going to be a popular lecture.

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