Tag Archives: Wellcome Trust

Dirty science at Glastonbury

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Science outreach doesn’t have to take place in a squeaky clean museum or classroom or theatre hall; it can place in the unhygienic and dirty outdoors. Zoe Cormier in her June 30, 2011 posting on the Guardian Science blogs describes it this way,

It ended for one man with a weeping confessional about how much he missed his mum. Another told us he had a shameful preference for instant coffee. A few couldn’t remember their own names. Many screamed at the top of their lungs into the microphone. Quite a few got naked in the glow of pink neon before we swabbed them down with wet wipes

The scene was the 2011 Glastonbury Music Festival and the science outreach was performed by a group calling itself Guerilla Science (more from the Cormier posting),

It began at the entrance to a giant white cube, the Decontamination Unit, amid the muddy mess of Glastonbury. Bewildered guests – who thought it was a night club – were greeted by two guides in biohazard suits, who led them to a Microbial Zoo: an array of colourful Petri dishes bearing swirls and stripes and spots of rainbow-coloured bacteria.

Some of the strains produced these artful patterns all on their own. Proteus mirabilis, with to its whip-like tails, swims in circles at high speeds through the agar, producing concentric rings.

“Drawing people in like this helped them to learn that you really wouldn’t be able to live without these ‘dirty, disease-causing things’,” says Sarah Forbes, a microbiology PhD student at the University of Manchester, who grew the plates. She gives the example of Staphylococcus epidermidis, which lives on our skin and prevents other more virulent bacteria from taking hold.

Appearing at Glastonbury isn’t Guerilla Science’s only project, they are presenting a Dirt Banquet (at the Secret Garden Party, July 21-24, 2011). The Dirt Banquet will take place on July 22, 2011. From the Guerilla Science website homepage,

Working in partnership with chef Joe Gray, Guerilla Science will host a Dirt Banquet on the evening of Friday July 22 at the Secret Garden Party at sunset – the second and last time we will host this unparalleled experience. The first was held inside London’s unrivaled Crossness Pumping Station with experimental food artisans Bompas & Parr.

As before, this feast of filth will showcase dirty delicacies such as radioactive cheese serum, ambergris, Islay whiskey, and an aphrodisiac dessert – each course inspired by the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt. Full menu, which will vary from the Crossness feast, will be announced a week before the date.

Eminent experts will accompany each course, feeding guests with ideas about the nature of dirt. Neuroscientists Zarinah Agnew and Aidan Horner will introduce us to the dirty bits of the brain. Gastronomist Rachel Edwards-Stuart, former apprentice of Heston Blumenthal, will accompany canapes. Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores … , wh0 will speak on sexuality over dessert. And beatboxer Yasson will serenade us with the snarling trills of the spiralidoo.

Here are a few more details about Guerilla Science’s plans for their day at the Secret Garden Party,

As always, we will hold court at one of the UK’s most colourful and riotous music festivals, the Secret Garden Party.

For our fifth first-class year we will celebrate with four days of explosions, brains, balloons, showdowns and sounds, complete with (in imagination-perfect-land), a 150-person capacity tent, a zoo, an island and a boat.

…

In the meantime, we can tell you this: funded by our most generous benefactors the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events, we will host a Dirty Day of filthy good fun.

I notice that this description on the Guerilla Science website was written by Zoe, I wonder if that’s Zoe Cormier, the writer of the piece in The Guardian. ETA July 13, 2011: Yes, Guerilla Science Zoe is the Zoe Cormier who wrote for The Guardian. She also let me know that she’s Canadian and has had some pieces published in the Globe and Mail, including this one about frogs (how could I resist?).

I like this approach and found the contrast between this creative, fun science outreach for adults as opposed to the more lecture-oriented, sober style of science outreach found in Vancouver (and, as far as I can tell, the rest of Canada too) quite striking. In Canada, the fun is usually saved for the kids.

Here’s a little more about Guerilla Science,

We mix science with art, music and play.

Every summer throughout London and the English countryside thousands of people discover our installations, films, music, live demonstrations, interactive experiments, debates, games and talks at music festivals and arts events around London.

I hope the July 21, 2011 Dirt Banquet and their other Secret Garden Party events are a great success and if I were in the UK, I’d definitely check this out (provided it’s not sold out).

The Primitive Streak: developmental biology and fashion, two sisters collaborate

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The primitive streak in developmental biology refers to the first cells which hint at structure in the embryonic stage for avians, reptiles, and mammals. From the article, Primal Fashion by Cristina Luiggi for The Scientist,

The most important event in a human’s life — to paraphrase a famous quote by developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert — occurs during the second week of embryonic development, when, out of a blob of cells, the first hint of structure appears. Known as the primitive streak, it heralds the massive reorganization of cells that results in the formation of the three germ layers that form all the tissues in the body.

Luiggi’s story is about two sisters, Kate Storey, a developmental biologist, and Helen Storey, a fashion designer, who collaborated in 1997 under the auspices of a Wellcome Trust project to produce a collection of dresses known as the Primitive Streak (downloaded from Luiggi’s article in The Scientist).

Primitive Streak (African Streak) dress and illustration courtesy of Helen Storey Photograph: Justine. Model: Korinna (downloaded from The Scientist)

In 2011 (fourteen years later), the sisters have collaborated again. From the Primitive Streak website Introduction page,

Helen and Kate collaborated in 1997 to create a series of fashion/textile designs, spanning the first 1,000 hours of human life. Producing these at London College of Fashion, Helen and Kate worked interactively using design at multiple levels to evoke the key embryonic processes that underlie our development. Seen and acclaimed by millions internationally and called a ‘cultural hybrid’, it changed the course of Helen’s career – her time is now devoted to ideas and work rooted in science. Kate is dedicated to the public understanding of science.

14 years on, Helen and Kate have collaborated again to produce new dresses, which explore the science behind the development and function of the lungs.

The full collection is 27 dresses, 10 of which originate from this new collaboration while the other 17 were created for the 1997 exhibit. In describing how the sisters worked together, a fascinating tidbit about the heart emerges (from the Luiggi article),

To help Helen with the creative process, Kate suggested an interesting fact of heart development: the heart forms from cells that are in front of the developing brain, which are eventually displaced into the chest cavity.

“So your heart actually starts above your head,” Kate says. [emphasis mine]

The science immediately clicked in Helen’s mind, who reached out to a milliner to help her mold the tubes of a primitive heart into a Nylon straw hat with a base shaped like a diaphragm — the structure in which the mature heart finally rests.

I think for anyone of a philosophical bent that fact about heart cells could lead to some interesting speculation. Luiggi’s article features more details, pictures, and a slideshow or there’s the Primitive Streak website for anyone who’d like to delve deeper.

Prince Charles, evolution, and Baba Brinkman

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It’s the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square not the prince himself that I’m talking about. Baba Brinkman, the Vancouver-based rapper whose Rap Guide to Evolution performance is about to be launched in a June off-Broadway show in New York, is launching yet something else tomorrow, May 25, 2011. From Baba Brinkman’s May 23, 2011 newsletter,

On Wednesday May 25 at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London, we will be premiering the Rap Guide to Evolution Music Videos [emphasis mine], sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. The new website, www.rapguidetoevolution.co.uk, is now live, please take a moment to check it out! Over the next few months the site will be populated with a whole series of new music videos, links to evolution news and information, resources and discussion, all in aid of teaching evolutionary science through rap.

Here’s a preview of one of the new videos which will be premiered tomorrow night,

Here’s one more tidbit from Baba’s newsletter,

I’ve also just had word that Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, who has written a biography of Darwin and whom I had the pleasure of meeting two years ago in Cambridge, will be the opening speaker at the event. I just spoke to Randal half an hour ago and he said he’s really looking forward to the launch as well.

David Bruggeman at the Pasco Phronesis blog has more details about this launch in the UK (excerpted from his May 16, 2011 posting),

The new phase of the project is visual, with a grant from the Wellcome Trust and over 12,000 additional pounds (raised from volunteers) used to shoot and produce videos for each of the tunes. It was prompted by requests from teachers for a DVD edition of the Rap Guide. There is also a new track out, which Brinkman says is the first track from a forthcoming remix album. The project gets a proper U.K. rollout (the home of the Wellcome Trust) in London on May 25th.

Good luck to Baba Brinkman and the various teams working with him to produce these videos and shows.

Some life at BC Genome

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It’s been a couple of years since I’ve gotten an invitation for an event put on by Genome BC. I thought they’d disappeared but I was wrong; they are celebrating their 10th anniversary on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre. From the invite,

While DNA can’t talk, the information inside the genome of every living thing, including humans, can say a lot. We’ve heard about successes in sequencing the genomes of certain cancers, emerging global diseases such as H1N1, SARS, and others. We can even have our personal genome sequenced for a few thousand dollars. But what does this really mean?

Globally, our world faces serious challenges to our health and sustainability. Fields such as genomics open new doors to solving seemingly insurmountable health and resource issues. So what will genomics bring to your health and the health of your family?

Please join us for an evening of engaging and meaningful dialogue at the inaugural Don Rix Distinguished Keynote Address featuring Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK. [emphasis mine]

This free event will provide participants an opportunity to learn where health care is heading in the 21st century from the groundbreaking developments in “cancer genes”, genetic breakthroughs in Parkinson’s, new insights into the aging process, and epidemics that sweep our globe.

There will also be a wine and cheese reception, for registered guests only, that will provide you an opportunity for dialogue with Mark Walport and some of BC’s top research scientists, policy makers, and physicians. You will have an opportunity to learn more about the relevance of genomics research taking place right here in BC – how it impacts you and your family across every major sector in BC – from health care to forestry and fisheries – and the environmentthe environment.

The guest speaker, Sir Mark Walport, is not familiar to me but the Wellcome Trust is. I have come across more than reference to it over the years. I gather they are an important funding agency in the UK for biomedical and other associated research. From their Vision page,

Our vision is to achieve extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. In pursuit of this, we support the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities.

We focus on three key areas of activity, reaching across five major research challenges.

Our funding focuses on supporting outstanding researchers, accelerating the application of research and exploring medicine in historical and cultural contexts.

There’s a talk with a Q&A session from 4:30 to 6:00 pm and a wine and cheese reception for registered guests (there’s free registration) follows from 6:00 to 7:30 pm. I gather that if you don’t register, you won’t be welcome (so to speak) to help yourself to wine and cheese at the reception.