Chapter 1 Cancer
Chapter 2 Changing bodies
Chapter 3 Living in the natural world
Chapter 4 Living in the virtual world
Chapter 5 Getting to the heart of things
Chapter 6 Changing Behaviour
Chapter 7 Working Together
Rheumatology Consultant Andrew Filer co-authored the essay Rheumatoid Arthritis — does time matter? with Chris Buckley and Karim Raza in the book The New Optimists.
Dr Filer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham and a Consultant Rheumatologist at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust.
Nick James is at the forefront of the battle against cancer. In his paper about targeted therapies (in Part 1: Microcosm: Tackling the big challenges in The New Optimists) he explains the latest cancer treatments, particularly the success, but also the cost of targeted molecular approaches to cancer treatment.
As Professor of Clinical Oncology at the University of Birmingham and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Nick James’ current research focusses on urological tumours, and he leads a number of international trials. In 1994, he co-founded the leading patient website, CancerHelpUK which has won numerous awards.
He qualified from St Bartholomew’s Hospital with the principal class prize in medicine. After general training in London and Brussels, he undertook oncology training at Hammersmith, the Royal Marsden, St Marys and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals and at the Cancer Institute, Tokyo.
I’ve just re-read the email Keith Richards sent to me way back in July 2009, when he’d received the first batch of ~50 essays by the scientists. This is what he wrote:
“What I’m left with at the end of working closely with these papers is the conviction that your original conception is bang on: exciting things are happening . . . I’ll see what ideas I come up with for organising the collection. There are obvious topics (the brain, evolution, etc) but there are also less obvious ones that might be more revealing . . . I think we need to strike a convincing balance between scientific optimism and the sadder tone of quiet doubt in the face of human venality and incompetence. In short, I want to negotiate Pope’s “glory, jest and riddle of the world” in terms of what we have here.”
It seemed right that an image of brain cells was on the spine of the book. After all, science is the product of human brainpower down the ages, and here are some of the most erudite of those scientific minds.
Several of the scientists in the book, too, have written about the brain. Professor of Neuroimaging Gina Rippon, for example, talks about its plasticity, and how running repairs might be made to the brain itself, and consultant neurologist Professor Adrian Williams has written a radical response to the question What are you optimistic about, one that dares to raise the prospect of immortality.
Others, for example David Burden and Kathleen Maitland, take us into a world where the interface between humans and computers has evolved to the point where current distinctions between our perceptions of reality and virtual worlds are difficult to sustain.
One of Spike Walker’s images on the book cover is of the moment before a human IVF. It won a 2009 Wellcome Image Award.
The Wellcome judges found it very powerful. “I think it’s an image that possibly all the judges had seen before – but the clarity of the image was what impressed me,” says James Cutmore. “You can see all the processes that are going on in the image, and the colours are also very beautiful.”
Catherine Draycott agrees: “One of the things that makes this image so strong is the colour. Many images like this that are light micrograph images are just pale shades of blue and grey, with a little bit of iridescence possibly around the edge of the egg cell. But this one is so incredibly vivid.”
Note that it was a failed IVF so you’re not seeing the moment before a person’s life began . . .
The cover of The New Optimists contains seven stunning images. They are by many times Wellcome Image Award winner Spike Walker, reproduced with his kind permission and that of the Wellcome Trust.
You can see more of his images here. Look and be amazed!
Dr. Miriam Gifford is an Assistant Professor at Warwick HRI/Warwick Systems Biology. She’s excited by new technological advances sweeping biology; there are new genome sequences every day. What she’s really optimistic about, however, is a critical component to all these systems — a whole new way of thinking. It’s no surprise then that her contribution to The New Optimists is in Part 4: The Ways of Science.
Her team are, she says, ” interested in how an organism interacts with its environment. The mechanisms that facilitate this interaction are particularly important for plants since they are sessile yet still cope with environmental extremes. They can’t simply walk away from trouble, instead they modify their body plan and development to deal with stresses such as nutrient deficiency, herbivore attack and drought.”
In April 2010, she awarded a BBSRC grant of ~£1 million (£998K) for a project entitled ‘Comparative cell specific profiling to understand the molecular basis of nodulation’. The project is for 3 years, and is with Nigel Burroughs and Sascha Ott at Warwick Systems Biology.
Miriam is one of the panelists for the British Science Festival event on 15th September 2010, chaired by Sue Beardsmore. Please do come, or participate on-line — more information about how to do so will be posted shortly.
More about Miriam’s personal research interests: She uses bioinformatic and cell-specific genomic techniques to understand how specialised cells in the root function to enable plants to cope with nitrogen limitation in the environment. Current research in her lab uses comparative genomics to compare environmental responses in the legume Medicago truncatula to the non-legume Arabidopsis thaliana at the cell-type level to gain insight into the evolutionary origin of nodulation.
Tim Bugg, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Warwick University, suggests that in the next few decades, we’ll see the development of ‘bio-refiners’, producing a range of useful products from biomass in the same way that oil refineries produce chemicals from oil. a ‘bio-refinery’ mimics the process of photosynthesis that Nature uses to convert light into biochemical energy.
He is one of the panelists for the British Science Festival event on 15th September 2010, chaired by Sue Beardsmore where you can meet and talk with him. Please do come, or participate on-line — more information about how to do so will be posted shortly.
His personal research interests are the understanding of important enzyme-catalysed reactions. Major areas of interest are enzymes involved in the bacterial degradation of aromatic compounds, and enzymes involved in bacterial cell wall peptidoglycan biosynthesis, as targets for the development of novel antibacterial agents.