Events

The Lunch Hour Lectures at UCL serve to provide a thought-provoking presentation to eat your lunch to (surprisingly), and last week’s Thursday instalment was no exception. Professor Ian Robinson from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, a joint venture between UCL and Imperial, walked us through the study of nano-materials using X-ray diffraction, and how such technologies can help us develop better medical devices.

The resolution of a given form of microscopy is dictated by the wavelength of the radiation exploited. In simpler terms, you can only measure the size of something with an appropriately sized ruler. X-ray crystallography is the technique by which we can probe the structure of molecules on an atomic scale. This is the technique that allows us to deduce structures from the simplest chemical compounds to the mysteries of the DNA double helix.

Robinson was keen to fill his crowd in on the history of crystallography and X-ray diffraction, as well he should be considering what influential fields they have been for the last century. Indeed, these sciences are almost exactly 100 years old, as Max von Laue demonstrated X-ray diffraction in crystals in 1912. A year later the father and son Bragg duo (William Henry and William Lawrence) described their eponymous Law, showing that the position and structure of atoms within a crystal could be inferred from their diffraction patterns.

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Dr Mark Lythgoe (UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging) took the audience of his Lunch Hour Lecture on 13 March on a journey to explore the greatest brain of the 20th century. The lecture to mark Brain Awareness Week drew in a large crowd; potentially explained by the promise of seeing a real brain!

The journey began with a video clip of Dr Lythgoe and Dr Jim Al-Khalili from the programme The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain (Channel 4, National Geographic USA, 2005). The two presenters were getting into a red convertible in southern California and setting off in search of the brain of Albert Einstein.

The presenters could not agree, however, on where genius originates from and consequently where it can be found. Is genius determined by biology and therefore can Einstein’s brain show us how? Or is genius a culturally dependent term that lives in the ideas produced?

Dr Lythgoe threw the question to the audience: “Did Einstein need to have published his work to be considered a genius? Or if he had done exactly the same amount of work and drawn the same conclusions, but never published, would he still be a genius?”

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Thursday 8 March saw worldwide celebrations for International Women’s Day, one of which was held at Stanmore College. The College linked into a live stream of the UCL lunch hour lecture titled ‘Having it all – dispelling the myths about work and motherhood’ which was delivered by Dr Anne McMunn (UCL Department of Epidemiology & Public Health).

Dr McMunn presented fascinating data which indicated that there are significant behavioral differences between daughters of mothers who work and those who stay at home; the behavior of those whose mothers go out to work being more positive. Interestingly, the significance was not as high with regard to sons. Data was also provided to show that the BMI (body mass index) for mothers who work tends to be healthier than for those who remain at home.

Watch the full lunch hour lecture below

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“So long as men are governed by unexamined prejudices and led away by sounds, it is natural for them to regard Patents as unfavourable to the encrease of wealth. So soon as they obtain clear ideas to annex to these sounds, it is impossible for them to do otherwise than recognize them to be favourable to that encrease: and that in so essential a degree, that the security given to property can not be said to be compleat without it.”

In his Lunch Hour Lecture on 6 March, intellectual property guru The Rt. Hon Professor Sir Robin Jacob (UCL Laws) began his talk about the benefits of patents with the above quote from UCL’s very own ‘spiritual father’, Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham’s younger brother Sam was a naval engineer credited with a number of inventions relating to naval architecture and weapons, so the interest in patents was a family affair.

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