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Scientists create artificial mouse ‘embryo’ from stem cells for first time

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Understanding the very early stages of embryo development is of interest because this knowledge may help explain why a significant number of human pregnancies fail at this time.

Once a mammalian egg has been fertilised by a sperm, it divides multiple times to generate a small, free-floating ball of stem cells. The particular stem cells that will eventually make the future body, the embryonic stem cells (ESCs) cluster together inside the embryo towards one end: this stage of development is known as the blastocyst. The other two types of stem cell in the blastocyst are the extra-embryonic trophoblast stem cells (TSCs), which will form the placenta, and primitive endoderm stem cells that will form the so-called yolk sac, ensuring that the foetus’s organs develop properly and providing essential nutrients.

Previous attempts to grow embryo-like structures using only ESCs have had limited success. This is because early embryo development requires the different types of cell to coordinate closely with each other.

However, in a study published today in the journal Science, Cambridge researchers describe how, using a combination of genetically-modified mouse ESCs and TSCs, together with a 3D scaffold known as an extracellular matrix, they were able to grow a structure capable of assembling itself and whose development and architecture very closely resembled the natural embryo.

“Both the embryonic and extra-embryonic cells start to talk to each other and become organised into a structure that looks like and behaves like an embryo,” explains Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, who led the research. “It has anatomically correct regions that develop in the right place and at the right time.”

Image: Stem cell-modelled embryo at 96 hours (embryonic (magenta) and extra-embryonic (blue) tissue with surrounding extracellular matrix (cyan)). Credit: Berna Sozen, Zernicka-Goetz Lab, University of Cambridge

Professor Zernicka-Goetz and colleagues found a remarkable degree of communication between the two types of stem cell: in a sense, the cells are telling each other where in the embryo to place themselves.

“We knew that interactions between the different types of stem cell are important for development, but the striking thing that our new work illustrates is that this is a real partnership – these cells truly guide each other,” she says. “Without this partnership, the correct development of shape and form and the timely activity of key biological mechanisms doesn’t take place properly.”

Comparing their artificial ‘embryo’ to a normally-developing embryo, the team was able to show that its development followed the same pattern of development. The stem cells organise themselves, with ESCs at one end and TSCs at the other. A cavity opens then up within each cluster before joining together, eventually to become the large, so-called pro-amniotic cavity in which the embryo will develop.

While this artificial embryo closely resembles the real thing, it is unlikely that it would develop further into a healthy foetus, say the researchers. To do so, it would likely need the third form of stem cell, which would allow the development of the yolk sac, which provides nourishment for the embryo and within which a network of blood vessel develops. In addition, the system has not been optimised for the correct development of the placenta. 

Professor Zernicka-Goetz recently developed a technique that allows blastocysts to develop in vitro beyond the implantation stage, enabling researchers to analyse for the first time key stages of human embryo development up to 13 days after fertilisation. She believes that this latest development could help them overcome one of the main barriers to human embryo research: a shortage of embryos. Currently, embryos are developed from eggs donated through IVF clinics.

“We think that it will be possible to mimic a lot of the developmental events occurring before 14 days using human embryonic and extra-embryonic stem cells using a similar approach to our technique using mouse stem cells,” she says. “We are very optimistic that this will allow us to study key events of this critical stage of human development without actually having to work on embryos.  Knowing how development normally occurs will allow us to understand why it so often goes wrong.”

The research was largely funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Research Council.

Dr Andrew Chisholm, Head of Cellular and Developmental Science at Wellcome, said: “This is an elegant study creating a mouse embryo in culture that gives us a glimpse into the very earliest stages of mammalian development. Professor Zernicka-Goetz’s work really shows the importance of basic research in helping us to solve difficult problems for which we don’t have enough evidence for yet. In theory, similar approaches could one day be used to explore early human development, shedding light on the role of the maternal environment in birth defects and health.” 

Reference
Harrison, SE et al. Assembly of embryonic and extra-embryonic stem cells to mimic embryogenesis in vitro. Science; 2 March 2017; DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1810

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have managed to create a structure resembling a mouse embryo in culture, using two types of stem cells – the body’s ‘master cells’ – and a 3D scaffold on which they can grow.

We knew that interactions between the different types of stem cell are important for development, but the striking thing that our new work illustrates is that this is a real partnership – these cells truly guide each other
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz
Stem cell-modelled embryo at 96 hours (left); Embryo cultured in vitro for 48 hours from the blastocyst stage (right)

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Meeting local needs: how the Fens can learn from research in Africa

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When Dr Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi first arrived in Africa in 2003, the situation regarding HIV – her specialism – was “just awful”, she says. We’re all familiar with the devastating images of emaciated and very sick African patients dying in hospital wards, but to see this first hand, she says, was truly shocking.

At the time, antiretroviral therapy (ART), which in developed countries were helping patients manage their condition and limit the spread of the disease, were not widely available in Africa. People were dying from opportunistic infections which most of us were not at risk of or could fend off with adequate treatment.

She had been practising as a doctor in London and had seen HIV treatment transformed. No longer did it carry a death sentence; for the majority of people, if diagnosed early enough, it could now be managed as a chronic condition, like for example diabetes.

Seeing and hearing about the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, which carries by far the greatest global burden of the disease, Parkes-Ratanshi headed to Uganda to carry out a PhD at the UK Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute. She was looking at the treatment of cryptococcal meningitis, a potentially life-threatening fungal infection of the brain and spinal cord in Masaka in the rural South West of the country.

Turning the tide

Parkes-Ratanshi saw the tide begin to turn on HIV. Masaka Regional Referral Hospital and The AIDS Support Organisation (an NGO) where she worked were among the first to trial the rollout of ART. The government and the president had recognised the severity of the problem very quickly and sought help from the international community. It also promoted public health messages around ‘ABC’ – abstinence, be faithful, wear a condom. At its peak, around 15% of Ugandans were HIV-positive – this figure has now fallen to just over 7%.

Nowadays, a person living with HIV in Uganda should be able to manage their HIV as in the West. In fact, the national and international efforts to control the epidemic have been so effective that a cohort of infected individuals has been recruited to help researchers study how people live with their chronic infection.

“We used to look at cohorts to try to understand what patients were dying from,” says Parkes-Ratanshi, “but now we have patients who have been on ART for over ten years. They’re no longer dying from infections related to a poor immune system, but face other issues such as treatment fatigue, stigma and non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancers.”

​Parkes-Ratanshi is working with the cohort as part of her involvement with the Ugandan Academy for Health Innovation and Impact, of which she is Director. The Academy is a joint initiative between Janssen, the pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson, the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda and the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust to address unmet needs in HIV and TB. It is there, she says, to ensure that the outcomes of clinical research are embedded in health policies that benefit the population. “It’s more translational than translational! It’s not lab to clinic, it’s clinic to population.”

One of its flagship programmes is Call for Life™, a randomised controlled trial which aims to promote healthy behaviours and adherence to drug regimens amongst the HIV cohort through the use of mobile phone technology. Participants receive a call at certain times of the day and are offered advice on adherence, health tips and reminders to attend clinic. This simple, cost-effective intervention could help patients manage their infection without over-reliance on the country’s limited resources.

“The thing I’m particularly interested in is this concept of ‘differentiated care’,” she adds. “How can we offer a light touch for those that are doing well and are taking their drugs well and responding well to treatment, and save the resources for those that really need extra help – they’ve only just been diagnosed, or they’re adolescents or pregnant or kids, for example.”

The Academy is about more than just conducting research, however. It is about providing much needed skills and training to researchers across Africa. It works with the Infectious Diseases Institute,which has provided training through short courses to some 16,000 clinicians and scientists across Africa, and is developing a series of online courses using a smartphone and desktop platform so that scientists/ clinicians who are unable to attend in person can still benefit.

Learning from each other

In 2015, Parkes-Ratanshi returned to the UK and took up a position as a lecturer at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health. She has not given up her ties to Uganda – she is still Director of the Academy – but felt this was the right time to increase links with the UK. There were, she says, two main reasons that influenced her decision.

In Uganda, HIV is treated using a standardised approach using national pathways and limited, but effective, treatments. If you’re a patient with HIV, you get the first line treatment recommended by the Ministry of Health and WHO; if and when that fails, you receive the second line treatment, and so on. In the UK, however, treatment is individualised to a patient so that they receive maximum benefit with minimum side effects. “In order to know what the options are, I need to be clinically ‘on the ball’,” she says. “I need to be up to date with clinical skills from an international perspective to know what the opportunities are for research and clinical care in Uganda.”

But it is the strengths of Cambridge’s research networks – Cambridge Institute of Public Health, Cambridge-Africa and Cambridge Infectious Diseases to name but a few – that hold real appeal.

“When you’re working in a resource-poor setting like Uganda, you are thinking about the immediate problems facing you and there aren’t huge amounts of basic science and translational medical research. There are initiatives like the Ugandan Academy and Cambridge-Africa that are looking to change this, trying to bring up a generation of basic scientists, but at the moment, that capacity isn’t there.

“If we’re going to think of ways to benefit the widest possible group, we’re going to need to make collaborations with other researchers in other areas. For somebody like me, those cross-university networks are vitally important. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to solve problems for our resource-limited environments.”

Parkes-Ratanshi is now working with Professor Carol Brayne, Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, to look at how evidence generated in a well-resourced part of the world might be linked with that from lower-resource settings. In the spirit of initiatives such as Cambridge-Africa, this isn’t about making assumptions about research priorities and carrying them out on particular populations. “It’s very much about community participation,” she explains, “It’s about going to the communities and asking them ‘What are your priorities around ageing? What are you interested in? What’s concerning you on a daily basis?’ and then co-developing research that’s relevant to them.”

One might assume that when she refers to “lower-resource settings”, she means Africa. Not necessarily. “There’s great inequality even within the UK,” she says. And so, while they have identified sites in Uganda and South Africa, as well as in Bali, they are also looking at areas in the Fenlands around Cambridge, where deprivation levels are high.

And in a sense, this is one of the real benefits of encouraging collaborations between geographically and economically diverse areas of the world: everyone has something to give, everyone has something to learn. “When you’re in a poorly-resourced setting, you generate ideas and innovations that might help in a resource-rich setting as well as your own. And who knows, some of the ideas that come out of this might be helpful in the future as the UK itself becomes more resource-limited.”

Dr Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi is used to working in resource-poor settings. She spent over a decade on the frontline fighting HIV and AIDS in Uganda. Now in Cambridge, she plans to focus on working in areas of deprivation – in Africa and south east Asia, but also much closer to home.

We used to look at cohorts to try to understand what patients were dying from, but now... they’re no longer dying from infections, but face other issues such as treatment fatigue and stigma
Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi
Safe sex billboard, Kabale, Uganda

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Celebrating Black Cantabs

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Gloria Claire Carpenter was probably the first black woman at the University of Cambridge. A Jamaican, she studied law at Girton College in 1945 and became a prominent social reformer, playing an instrumental role in the foundation of the Law Faculty of the University of West Indies in Jamaica.

Efua Sutherland, from Ghana, studied at Homerton College, Cambridge, in 1947, a year before women were admitted as full members of the university. A playwright and filmmaker, she contributed to the development of theatre in Ghana.

Professor Thomas Odhiambo became the first black Kenyan to matriculate at Queen’s College, Cambridge, in 1959. He went on to found the renowned International Centre for Insects Physiology which has helped farmers across the world to  protect their crops through biological pest control methods, contributing to food security in Africa in the process.

Until recently, their stories were little known within the University.

However, a pioneering student-led society has decided that the achievements of early black students at the university needed to be documented to fill a gap in the university’s history and influence present-day attempts to forge a more inclusive culture.

The Black Cantabs Research Society was formed after NjokiWamai, a Gates Cambridge Scholar who recently completed a PhD in Politics, met Godfrey Sang, a visiting scholar who was in Cambridge researching the life of Jean Marie Seroney, a Kenyan politician and human rights activist who had visited his friends at Cambridge in the 1950s. Njoki, who is also Kenyan, says: "Godfrey unearthed interesting stories about East Africans Seroney met in Cambridge and I got interested in finding out about the earliest African scholars at Queens' College.”

Initially the research was limited to early black African alumni at Queens' College, Njoki’s college, but she then joined forces with classics student Nnenda Chinda from Downing College and alumna Siana Bangura from Peterhouse to form the Black Cantabs Research Society. Their aim was to unearth rich histories of black Cambridge alumni. Siana and Nnenda were inspired by the election of Priscilla Mensah, the first black female student to Cambridge's student governing body CUSU. Eva Namusoke from Caius College later joined the team as a historian. Other Black Cantabs like Flora Tasse, a Cameroonian computer science graduate from Hughes Hall, designed the society’s website and database. The society's patron is Dr Monica Moreno Figueroa, a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Other alumni highlighted by the Society include:

-  Alexander Crummell [pictured] who matriculated in 1849 and is the first Black Cantab to matriculate and graduate from the University. He was an African American priest who later  became an important activist and educator in Liberia and was one of the first professors at Liberia College, now the University of Liberia. His contributions to education, the field of moral philosophy and the intellectual life of Liberia are huge. The Black Cantabs' Research Society is working with the president of Queens’ College to get a portrait of Alexander Crummell hung in a prominent location to celebrate him.as one of the first professors at Liberia College, now the University of Liberia. 

- Professor James Ezeilo who, with Chike Obi and Adegoke Olubummo, was one of a trio of black mathematicians who pioneered modern mathematics research in Nigeria. Sometimes called the "father of mathematics" in Nigeria, he started his studies at Cambridge in 1953, becoming only the second Nigerian at Queens' College. He was Vice-Chancellor of both the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Bayero University, Kano, as well as Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and the founding Director of the National Mathematical Centre, in Abuja.

The Black Cantabs Research Society officially launched in 2015 and has won support from a number of colleges, including Queen’s. Its new website was launched at Queen's last week and includes an online database which anyone can update.

The process of recovering the information has been fairly arduous. Most university records are based in Cambridge’s colleges and access to recent information is barred for privacy reasons. Most of the old records do not record the country of origin of students. That means checking matriculation photos, looking in the university records for students’ names and then Googling for more information.   The University’s alumni department provides a useful guide which the Society has been using.

“It’s a daunting task," says Njoki, adding that she hopes the university can help to continue the work. She feels it is very much needed and says: “Cambridge can be an overwhelming place for black students. You feel you carry so much weight and that you have so much to prove.”

Njoki’s background is in human rights activism and she says it was not until she came to Cambridge that she ‘became black’, rather than simply African, and part of that was to do with the lack of black academics and the lack of black representation among well-known alumni. As an activist who has focused on, for example, women’s inclusion, she wanted to tackle that sense of exclusion which, she says, influences many aspects of black students’ experience of the university.

Njoki is confident that the new president of the Black Cantabs Research Society, Nafisa Waziri, another PhD student from Hughes Hall College, will continue to build on what has been achieved so far. “I would like to see the colleges invest in this kind of research as it plays an important role in creating a more inclusive culture,” says Njoki.

The organising committee plan to put together periodic exhibitions to celebrate the diversity in Cambridge's past and also to normalise it. This will include a Black Cantabs Speaker Series which invites distinguished Black Cantabs to share their experiences of their time in Cambridge and the paths they have taken since graduating. Eventually the Society would like to publish a book of black scholars and to form a community of Black Cantabs which connects alumni from the distant past to the present.
 

The Black Cantabs Research Society has just launched a new platform which will help further its aims of connecting early Black alumni from the University of Cambridge with present-day students.

Alexander Crummell 1866

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Race Equality Charter Bronze award

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Students

The Charter is a national scheme run by the Equality Challenge Unit, and addresses the representation, progression and retention of staff and students of ethnic minority backgrounds within higher education.

Cambridge is one of 27 universities that are currently Race Equality Charter members. Nine of these institutions are currently REC award holders.

The work on the Race Equality Charter will be coordinated by a Self-Assessment Team (SAT) chaired by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations, Professor Eilís Ferran, and the University Race Equality Champion, Professor Roel Sterckx.

The SAT will split into sub-working groups that will focus on specific areas of REC application.

Professor Ferran said: “The University is committed to creating an environment where students and staff can realise their potential regardless of their ethnic, racial or national background.

Applying for the award provides a powerful framework to facilitate further progress in the area of equality and inclusion.”

The SAT and its sub-groups include 25 members from across the University, among them academic and professional and support staff, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students.

Individuals were invited to join the SAT on the basis of their expertise and relevant experience as well as position in the University structure to ensure that the SAT is representative of the different categories of staff and students across the University. 

As part of the application process, the SAT and its sub-groups will undertake an analysis of data and institutional procedures, and develop initiatives to address any issues revealed by the analysis.

There will be numerous occasions for staff and students to be involved and provide feedback on University work in the area of race equality in the form of surveys, focus groups, and University- and School-wide events.

To ensure that the opinions of students and staff are captured and can inform University initiatives in the area of race equality, Race Equality Charter surveys will be run in March and April 2017.

Professor Eilís Ferran will contact students this week encouraging them to complete the survey. By taking part in the survey, students will help to identify areas for improvement in University practices and procedures, and potential ways of making those improvements.

Sophia D’Angelo, International Officer at the Graduate Union and a Postgraduate representative on the SAT, said: “As a new international student here at Cambridge, it’s encouraging to see all of the initiatives that the University is taking to ensure that it is a diverse and inclusive community.

Athena SWAN and the Race Equality Charter are good examples of our commitment to building culturally sensitive environments and cultivating values of tolerance and compassion.”

Amatey Doku, President of CUSU, said: "CUSU has been championing issues to do with racism and prejudice at Cambridge for many years and it is good to see the University taking a proactive step which will not only identify issues of concern but also give the opportunity for the University to seek to address these issues in clear and concrete ways."

​The University is making an application for a Race Equality Charter (REC) Bronze award and will invite students to complete a survey this week, followed by staff in April.

The University is committed to creating an environment where students and staff can realise their potential regardless of their ethnic, racial or national background. Applying for the award provides a powerful framework to facilitate further progress in the area of equality and inclusion.
Professor Eilís Ferran

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Cambridge scientist shares world’s largest neuroscience prize for research on the brain’s reward system

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The capacity to link reward to events and actions is the foundation of human and animal survival, and problems with the processing of reward lie at the heart of many neurological and psychiatric disorders.

The Brain Prize, awarded by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark, is worth €1 million.  Awarded annually, it recognises one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience.  

The research of this year’s winners has far-reaching implications for understanding human behaviour, including decision-making, gambling, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour and schizophrenia.

Reward is essential to survival because humans and other animals need to learn to direct their decisions and their actions towards outcomes that will satisfy their needs, and away from danger.  This means that they have to learn which events in the environment predict future rewards and punishments. For instance, if you feel hungry and see a building with a sign ‘restaurant’, you are likely to enter because the sign predicts that your hunger will be reduced if you go inside.

The sense of reward is surprisingly complicated. It is influenced and determined by many things, such as taste and smell, as well as by fundamental motivations such as hunger or thirst. In turn, it influences choices, decisions and even attention. Many regions of the brain process information associated with reward, but one central linchpin for the regulation of learning and performance is a neurotransmitter (chemical messenger) in the brain called dopamine.

Thirty years ago, German-born Wolfram Schultz, professor of neuroscience now at the University of Cambridge, was studying learning in monkeys at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He developed methods for recording activity from neurons (nerve cells) that use dopamine to transmit information to other neurons.  He found that before learning, these dopamine neurons respond whenever a reward - fruit juice - is given to the monkey, but if the monkey is shown various visual patterns and has to respond to one of them in order to secure the reward, the pattern of response changes as the animal learns. The dopamine neurons now respond when the correct visual pattern appears, and the response to the reward itself disappears. If no reward is given, the activity of dopamine neurons actually decreases at the expected time after the visual signal; but if the reward is delivered at an unexpected time, the neurons respond to it.

“This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work,” said Schultz. Every time we get the reward, our dopamine neurons affect our behaviour.  “They are like little devils in our brain that drive us towards more rewards.”

Dopamine neurons play a ‘devilish’ role in drug addiction. “Addictive drugs generate, hijack and amplify the reward signal and induce exaggerated and uncontrolled effects of dopamine on the brain,” Schultz explained. 

British computational neuroscientist, Peter Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, is recognised internationally as a leader in the rapidly developing field of computational neuroscience. When working at the Salk Institute in California, Dayan realised that the pattern of activity of dopamine neurons described by Schultz corresponds to a signal known - from the earliest days of artificial intelligence - as a ‘reward prediction error’.

This signal is the difference between the reward that is actually delivered and the reward that is predicted to be delivered.  Prediction errors sculpt our expectations and experience of the world.

“For example, imagine that you choose between restaurants based on predicting how good they are. Then, if the one you chose is better than expected, the positive prediction error allows you to update your prediction. Next time you are faced with a restaurant choice, you are more likely to pick the one that was better,” said Dayan.

This link between dopamine and prediction error was one of the spurs for an explosion of work using theoretical ideas and computational models to link artificial intelligence, economics, mathematics, engineering and statistics to swathes of results in psychology and neuroscience.

Professor Ray Dolan was born in the Irish Republic and is the director of the new Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing at University College London, and the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging. Dolan has been a leader in the development and use of methods for imaging the human brain, in order to understand the mechanisms of emotion, learning and decision-making. 

Through his pioneering application of mathematical models to brain imaging and behaviour, together with his discoveries on the action of dopamine and other neurotransmitters, he has shown how humans learn about reward and punishment and also how we learn about the preferences of other people.

Dayan and Dolan have worked collaboratively over the past decade to probe how reward learning impacts on complex human questions, including motivational drive, variation in happiness, and a propensity towards gambling. 

“One puzzling clinical problem is why some patients treated with drugs that boost dopamine function, for example in Parkinson’s disease, fall prey to pathological gambling. Our work has shown that this effect is, at least in part, due to dopamine amplifying an innate tendency to repeat activities that are rewarding,” said Dolan.

Schultz gratefully acknowledged the contributions of his many colleagues and collaborators, as well as the institutions and funding agencies that have supported his work, especially the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust.  

“The Brain Prize is a fantastic reward for our research group. I can hear our dopamine neurons jumping up and down!” Schultz said.

Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, chairman of the Brain Prize selection committee said, “The judges concluded that the discoveries made by Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan were crucial for understanding how the brain detects reward and uses this information to guide behaviour. This work is a wonderful example of the creative power of interdisciplinary research, bringing together computational explanations of the role of activity in the monkey brain with advanced brain imaging in human beings to illuminate the way in which we use reward to regulate our choices and actions. The implications of these discoveries are extremely wide-ranging, in fields as diverse as economics, social science, drug addiction and psychiatry.”

The winners will share the prize of €1 million, which will be presented to them at a ceremony on 4 May in Copenhagen by His Royal Highness Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark.

Adapted from a press release by the Lundbeck Foundation.

A Cambridge neuroscientist has today won the world’s most valuable prize for brain research, shared with two London neuroscientists. This year, The Brain Prize for 2017 is awarded to Cambridge’s Wolfram Schultz, together with Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan from University College London for their analysis of how the brain recognises and processes reward. 

The Brain Prize is a fantastic reward for our research group. I can hear our dopamine neurons jumping up and down!
Wolfram Schultz

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Patients with OCD have difficulty learning when a stimulus is safe

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OCD is a disorder characterised by intrusive thoughts and repetitive, irrational behaviours, for example an obsession with cleanliness leading to repetitive hand washing, or a fear that something terrible will happen if they don’t check the door dozens of times, making leaving the house extremely difficult.

A common way of helping treat OCD is to expose people to something they consider threatening – for example, if their obsession is around cleanliness, they may be made to touch a toilet seat but then prevented from washing their hands. However, so-called ‘exposure therapy’ often only has limited success and compulsions can return in times of stress. This new research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may explain why memories about safety don’t stick.

In this study, researchers at Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute tested 43 OCD patients and 35 matched healthy volunteers to see how well those people with OCD were able to reverse their thinking when a previously threatening stimulus became safe and vice versa, to examine safety versus threat learning as well as cognitive flexibility, which is thought to be significantly compromised in patients with OCD.

Volunteers lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity, while successively being shown one of two faces: when shown the red face, nothing happened, but when shown the green face, the volunteer would sometimes receive a mild electric shock. By measuring changes in skin conductance caused by tiny amounts of sweat, the researchers were able to see whether the volunteers learned which stimulus was safe and which threatening.

After a period of time, the researchers swapped the stimuli – now, the red face was paired with an electric shock while the green face was safe.

The researchers found that while OCD patients were able to learn initially which stimulus was threatening, they never learned that the second stimulus was safe – in fact, they seemed to pay little attention to this safe stimulus. When the stimuli were reversed, participants were unable to differentiate between the previously threatening stimulus and the newly threatening stimulus. This was also reflected in their brain activity – OCD patients showed a lack of activity in an area at the front of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex when viewing the safe stimulus.

“Our study suggests that something is going wrong in the brains of people with OCD when they are learning what is safe, and this in turn affects how they perceive threats under updated circumstances,” explains Dr Annemieke Apergis-Schoute, the study’s first author. “This needs to be taken into consideration when we’re developing future therapies to tackle the disorder. Current exposure therapies may help the patient take control over their compulsions, but our work suggests that they might never learn that their compulsions are unnecessary and they may return in times of stress.”

In a second study, published recently in Biological Psychiatry, Cambridge researchers showed that this cognitive inflexibility might be in part a result of a lack of ‘chatter’ between specific brain areas.

The research, led by PhD student Matilde Vaghi, found that poor connectivity within some of the brain’s key networks as measured in an fMRI scanner while the patient was at rest may account for this inflexibility. It also may account for OCD patients’ poor goal-directed abilities (where we consciously act with a goal in mind – for example, when driving home and our route is disrupted, forcing us to take an unfamiliar route). Both are related to common symptoms of OCD.

The researchers found disrupted connectivity within discrete frontostriatal circuits – neural pathways that connect the front of the brain with the basal ganglia (responsible for important functions such as the control of movement and ‘executive functions’ such as decision-making, learning and habit formation). They believe these may underlie the repetitive behaviours seen in OCD.

Professor Trevor Robbins, Head of Psychology at Cambridge, senior author on both studies, says: “When we look at this two studies together, we can see that there is a clear imbalance between key regions at the front of the brain in people with OCD. These may underlie some of the symptoms of inflexibility that we commonly see in patients with this condition.”

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

References

  1. Apergis-Schoute, AM et al.Neural basis of impaired safety signaling in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. PNAS; 6 Mar 2017; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1609194114
  2. Vaghi, MM et al. Specific Frontostriatal Circuits for Impaired Cognitive Flexibility and Goal-Directed Planning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Evidence From Resting-State Functional Connectivity. Biological Psychiatry; Aug 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2016.08.009

People who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are poorer at learning about the safety of a stimulus than healthy volunteers, which may contribute to their struggles to overcome compulsive behaviour, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

Current exposure therapies may help the patient take control over their compulsions, but our work suggests that they might never learn that their compulsions are unnecessary
Annemieke Apergis-Schoute
OCD Letter Blocks

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Abandoned Liszt opera finally brought to life - 170 years later

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David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, first discovered the opera languishing in an archive in Weimar more than ten years ago. A trailer with extracts of the opera being performed can be seen by clicking on the link above.

Known only to a handful of Liszt scholars, the manuscript – with much of its music written in shorthand and only one act completed – was assumed to be fragmentary, often illegible and consequently indecipherable.

However, after Trippett spent the last two years working critically on the manuscript, a ten-minute preview will now be performed for the first time in public as part of the world-famous BBC Cardiff Singer of the World contest in June.

“In 1849 Liszt began composing an Italian opera, but he abandoned it halfway through and the music he completed has lain silently in an archive for nearly 170 years,” said Trippett. “This project is about bringing it to life for the very first time.”

“The music that survives is breath-taking – a unique blend of Italianate lyricism and harmonic innovation. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world. It is suffused with Liszt’s characteristically mellifluous musical language, but was written at a time that he was first discovering Wagner’s operas.

“The only source for this opera is a single manuscript containing 111 pages of music for piano and voices. It was always assumed to be impossible to piece together, but after examining the notation in detail, it became clear Liszt had notated all the cardinal elements for act 1. You have to think through the artistic decisions traceable in the manuscript and try to reconstruct the creative process, to see how Liszt’s mind went this way and that.”

A critical edition of the music for act 1 will be published by Editio Musica Budapest (Universal Music Publishing) in 2018. Although Trippett has worked alone on rescuing the music Liszt notated, Cambridge’s Francesca Vella has worked on deciphering the Italian text alongside musicologist David Rosen, whose principal role has been to translate the libretto into English.

The libretto, based on Lord Byron’s tragedy Sardanapalus, tells the story of Sardanapalo, King of Assyria, a peace-loving monarch, more interested in revelry and women than politics and war. He deplores violence and brutality, and, perhaps naively, he believes in the innate goodness of humankind, but is overthrown by rebels and burns himself alive with his lover, Mirra, amid scents and spices in a great inferno.

A ten-minute scene from the opera will be performed at the final of the BBC Singer of the World event by Armenian soprano and rising talent Anush Hovhannisyan.

“In effect, the manuscript has been hiding in plain sight for well over 100 years,” added Trippett. “It was written for Liszt’s eyes only, and has various types of musical shorthand, with spatial gaps in the manuscript. A lot of it is very hard to read, but the scruffiness is deceptive. It seems Liszt worked out all the music in his head before he put pen to paper, and to retrieve this music, I’ve had to try and put myself into the mind of a 19th-century composer, a rare challenge and a remarkable opportunity.

“Fortunately, Liszt left just enough information to retrieve what was evidently the continuous musical conception he had at the time. We will never know exactly why he abandoned his work on the opera and I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that it is resurfacing in the 21st century. But I like to think he would have smiled on it.”

Ahead of the BBC event in June, Trippett and his colleagues are putting the finishing touches to a documentary film for the University of Cambridge chronicling the resurrection of Liszt’s forgotten masterpiece, with singers Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Samuel Sakker (tenor) and Arshak Kuzikyan (bass-baritone). This will be released on 15 May.

“Who else gets to premiere a new opera by a superstar composer from two centuries ago?” said soprano Hovhannisyan. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the entire process of making it work – from thinking about the character and what Liszt would want – has been a privilege. We have had a wonderful, deeply creative and imaginative time piecing this together and I feel very blessed to have been a part of it.”

A great Italian opera by Franz Liszt – which lay incomplete and largely forgotten in a German archive for nearly two centuries – will be given its world premiere this summer after being resurrected by a Cambridge academic.

The music that survives is breath-taking. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world
David Trippett
Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Samuel Sakker (tenor), and Arshak Kuzikyan (bass-baritone) record the trio finale with pianist and musicologist David Trippett, in Jesus College Chapel, University of Cambridge

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Yes

Opinion: New ways to treat depression in teenagers

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Around one in 20 teenagers suffers from depression. Episodes can last for several months. Unfortunately, about 50% of teenagers who have a depressive episode are at risk of falling ill again, increasing the likelihood of relationship difficulties, educational failure and poor employment prospects. It’s important that treatments have a lasting effect to reduce the risk of becoming ill a second time. The Conversation

My research investigates the causes of and treatments for adolescent mental illnesses, with a particular focus on depression. One of our key projects is evaluating the importance of various psychological treatments that are effective in helping young people with depression.

Only one treatment – cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – is approved by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for treating depression in teenagers. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of CBT therapists in the UK. This means that many young people with depression are placed on a waiting list, increasing their risk of worsening mental health.

With a growing rate of self-harm among depressed teenagers and no signs of the suicide rate going down, we have arguably reached a tipping point in services where we need to improve availability of therapies using existing mental health staff. With limited resources available for youth mental health in most countries, we need new therapeutic approaches that could be taught more easily than CBT but carry at least the same effectiveness for the depressed teenager.

Our “Improving mood with psychoanalytic and cognitive therapies” (IMPACT) study published in The Lancet Psychiatry considered three treatments: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (STPP) and brief psycho-social intervention (BPI).

CBT in this trial was a 20-session treatment focused on correcting negative thinking about the self, the world and the future, together with efforts to alleviate low mood arising from negative thoughts. STPP is a 28-session psychoanalytic treatment that aims to improve the ability to regulate mood and make and maintain positive relationships. BPI, in contrast, is a 12-session intervention that aims to provide information and explanations about depression, advising on immediate problems including keeping safe at this time of vulnerability, together with caring and support in making decisions about family school and friends.

There is good evidence that CBT works in adolescents. There is evidence that STPP is as good as CBT in adults, but, at the start of the trial we did not know if it worked for adolescents. We used BPI as a reference treatment, likely to be less effective than CBT or STPP because it uses fewer sessions and there is no evidence for or against its effectiveness.

We carried out a randomised controlled trial of 465 teenagers, referred to 15 NHS clinics across England. Each participant had a diagnosis of depression. We wanted to know if STPP is as effective as CBT. We also expected that both of these more intensive and specialist therapies would be more effective than BPI.

Our main goal was to find out which of these therapies showed the most enduring effects a year after the end of treatment. If we could show such a long-term effect we may have revealed a therapy that is not only a useful treatment but, importantly, also reduces the chances of a second episode occurring – something which is very common in teenage years.

There is no sign of the suicide rate going down.SpeedKingz/Shutterstock.com

More to choose from

We found that two-thirds of the depressed teenagers from each of the three treatments (CBT, STPP, BPI) showed improvements. Participants who responded continued to do so up to a year after their treatment ended.

Treatment effects (defined as a drop in depression symptoms of 50% or more, 12 months after the end of treatment) were obtained with between six to eleven sessions of therapy delivered over a three to six-month period for each category. These improvements were had using about half of the sessions planned for each treatment. We believe that many teenagers do not remain in longer-term treatments once they are confident they are functioning reasonably normally again or because they believe there is little likelihood therapy will do them any good.

We are currently analysing detailed information from the patients to understand their experience of treatment and confirm our speculations about the preference for shorter than planned therapy.

The total costs of treatment, including the subsequent use of health and social services after the end of treatment, were no different across the three therapies. The results are important as there is a limited choice of talking therapies. The fact that all three therapies are equally effective, and cost about the same to implement, means that we can now offer alternatives to depressed young people.

The next step is to see how we can target these treatments more precisely to patients’ needs as we suspect that there are important individual differences in determining which psychological treatment suits each type of depressed young person. We believe that each of these psychological treatments may have advantages for distinct groups of adolescent depression. Targeting the treatments in a more personalised manner may deliver more efficient and effective therapy and further reduce time to remission as well as lower the risk of further episodes.

Ian Michael Goodyer, , University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Prime Minister Theresa May recently announced measures to improve mental health support at every stage of a person’s life, with an emphasis on early intervention for children and young people. Writing in The Conversation, Professor Ian Goodyer from the Department of Psychiatry looks at the options for helping teenagers.

Owen in the Abandoned House

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Yes

Another India exhibition gives voice to India’s most marginalised communities

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Putting on display never-before-seen objects from the Museum’s historic collections, as well as stunning, newly-commissioned works from contemporary Adivasi sculptors, Another India tells the stories behind a remarkable collection of artefacts while confronting head-on the role played by Empire and colonialism in the gathering together of this material.  The exhibition also features 23 works acquired by its curator Mark Elliott, using a New Collecting Award from Art Fund.

“This is an exhibition about the India – or the many Indias – that most people in the UK don’t know,” said Mark Elliott. “It’s about 100 million people of Indigenous or Adivasi backgrounds who are marginalised by majority populations and the state. It’s an exhibition about identity, diversity and belonging; and the role that objects play in creating a sense of who we are.

“These are issues that affect all of us, particularly now when Identity – who we are, where we come from and where we belong – is being fought over here in Britain. Another important story is how these things came to Cambridge in the first place. Many of the artefacts were acquired through colonialism: sometimes fair exchanges, sometimes gifts, sometimes not. This is about legacies of empire for people in the UK and India.”

Among the objects going on display are a head-hunters skull, pieces of the Taj Mahal and a snake-charmer’s flute. Ten new sculptures, specially commissioned by Elliott after working closely with Adivasi and indigenous artists at workshops across India, will also take pride of place in Another India, thanks to the prestigious New Collecting Award from Art Fund. The workshops took place from Gujarat in the west to Nagaland, right on the border with Myanmar (Burma) in the North east.

The sculptures, the largest of which is 13 feet (3.9m) high and the heaviest of which is almost a tonne, have been shipped from the sub-continent and will sit alongside stunning photographic portraits of Indigenous Indians – from the late 19th century to the 21st. The most recent works include photos of Naga men in their 80s and 90s proudly displaying their tattooed faces and bodies.

 

“We are trying to make this less of a show about dead white guys by living white guys,” added Elliott. “We showed artists across India some of our collections and said ‘here’s the stuff we have from your place, what do you think? What would you make now if we asked you?’ The whole brief was to produce new works in response to the collections we have.”

Ruby Hembrom, an Adivasi writer and activist, who has worked closely with Elliott and MAA on the planning of the exhibition, said: “Another India is the only India we Adivasis know. Identity is belonging and we belong to this India. We belong to the objects of this India and belong to the feelings they trigger and emotions they evoke. The India that ‘others’ use is the one where we are confronting hatred, racism, sexism, exploitation, brutality, dehumanisation and stereotyping in our everyday lives.

“No matter how much we’ve talked of or engaged in social and political change, very little has changed for us. This is not the India our ancestors sacrificed for, or hoped for us, and this is not the one we want for our descendants.”

Among the historic objects going on display at MAA is a coin necklace from the ‘Criminal Tribes’ settlement in Maharashtra which was collected by Maguerite Milward in 1936. Milward went on expedition to make portrait sculptures of Indigenous and Adivasi men and women. The necklaces show how Adivasis whose lives were transformed by colonialism, reappropriated and repurposed coins issued by the British Raj as jewellery, signs of wealth and status.

The head-taker’s skull meanwhile comes from Nagaland and was worn on the chest by a Konyak warrior who had captured an enemy head. The monkey skull, with red, white and black hair woven into the crown, was collected by JH Hutton, Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills and later a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, who put it in a glass jar and kept it in his office until he retired.

Headhunting was a popular but ambivalent topic of anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. It was an aspect of Naga culture that the British sought to eradicate but found fascinating, and which despite the coming of Christianity, remains a hugely important part of Naga identity today.

“Another India is talking about a very different India to most people’s expectations in Britain and possibly India too,” said Elliott. “We didn’t want to do a show about Bollywood, saris and curry, but instead highlight a massive body of marginalised people – numbering nearly twice the population of the UK – who to a great extent aren’t seen as having culture, heritage and history of their own.”

Many of the objects going on display – whittled down from the 10,000 plus Indian objects in MAA’s collections – are the product of an extraordinary industry of exploration, survey and classification whose advance started with the East India Company and continued under the Crown until independence in 1947.

By the mid-19th century, scholars and administrators were working through masses of linguistic, economic, ethnographic and criminological data to decode the demography of India, defining groups of people as distinctive on the basis of shared language, customs, religious belief and ‘racial’ characteristics.

By the end of that century, such groupings had been consolidated into a fundamental distinction between ‘castes’ and ‘tribes’. Tribes were identified as groups of people who were separated geographically, socially or both from ‘mainstream’ caste society. Often living in more isolated territories away from large population centres such as hill and forest regions. These groups were defined first as being outside the caste system but furthermore as ethnically or culturally distinct, often being described as ‘primitive’.

While the constitution of India identifies these groups as Scheduled Tribes or ‘Tribal’, this term is widely seen as derogatory with connotations of primitivism, backwardness and even savagery. In truth, all the categories are remarkably slippery. Indigenous, Adivasi and Tribal identities are still fiercely contested.

“The objects on display resist pigeonholing, just as people do,” added Elliott. “The identities presented here are ambiguous and contested. But this is not just an historical exhibition, the artefacts and the stories they tell are the stories of communities who are living, struggling and thriving today.

“Putting together this exhibition has brought me and the museum into contact with extraordinary people: scholars, activists and artists and more – from the tribes, groups and communities that we are incredibly proud to represent here in Cambridge.”

Another India is the centrepiece of the University’s wider celebrations entitled India Unboxed. To mark the UK-India Year of Culture 2017, the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden, are hosting a shared season on the theme of India with a programme of exhibitions, events, digital encounters, discussions, installations and more within the museums and the city of Cambridge. Rooted in the Cambridge collections, the programme will explore themes of identity and connectivity for audiences in both the UK and India. 

Hundreds of objects which tell the story of 100 million of India’s most marginalised citizens – its Indigenous and Adivasi people – are to go on display for the first time in a ground-breaking exhibition at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from today.

We didn’t want to do a show about Bollywood, saris and curry, but instead highlight a massive body of marginalised people.
Mark Elliott
A head-hunter's skull from Nagaland which was worn on the chest of a Konyak warrior who had captured an enemy head.

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Yes

Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences aims to create world-leading industry-academia collaborations

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CATS will foster science that underpins the discovery of new treatments and diagnostics, and the safe and effective use of existing medicines. It will combine excellent science with efficient translation, working across biological, physical, clinical and social sciences and engineering, in partnership with industry.

The arrival in Cambridge of major pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Otsuka, and the closeness of GSK, put Cambridge firmly at the epicentre of commercial drug discovery in the UK and internationally. Cambridge has strong clinical trials and clinical science sectors, a network of aligned organisations supporting contract research, and excellent epidemiology and public health networks.

Many of these are situated on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States. From early 2018, the Campus will also house the Milner Therapeutics Institute, a partner organisation within CATS, which will act as a research hub and partner with institutions in aspects of drug development research.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz says: “Healthcare in the future will be provided by a complex interplay of patients, industries and service operators. It will involve sophisticated diagnostic tools, digital scrutiny and interpretation using artificial intelligence, and access to an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual patient, and available through a redesigned primary and hospital healthcare environment.

“There are few places in the world as well placed as the University of Cambridge to take advantage of this highly multidisciplinary scenario. The Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences will ensure that this capacity is fully exploited to speed up the development of new treatments that will benefit patients locally, nationally and internationally.”

The Academy will focus on three main areas:

  • Research facilitation – through collaboration, networking and capacity building, encouraging people and skills exchanges between academia and industry in the UK, with the aim of expanding to involve international collaborations, particularly in in developing countries;
  • Education – from undergraduate through to postdoctoral, CATS will provide education and training opportunities, and facilitate networking and internships with industry partners; a key plank in this strand will be to develop a new modular Master’s course in therapeutic sciences.
  • Policy – working closely with the University’s Centre for Science and Policy, and the Research Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, CATS will take the lead in addressing key legal and policy matters across the spectrum of pharmaceutical sciences, and beyond.

One key theme that the Academy will focus on is medicine safety, through the involvement of the Cambridge Alliance on Medicines Safety, a partnership between the University, the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit (due to transfer to the University in 2018), GSK and AstraZeneca. Its main aim is to connect scientists at the University whose work relates to safety of medicines to build an active academic research programme with strong collaborative links to pharmaceutical and human-safety related companies.

Professor Chris Lowe, Director of CATS, adds: “With CATS, we will develop a way of fostering and supporting the community in and around Cambridge to develop new concepts, deliver new knowledge, and to produce people who are better educated in all elements of modern therapeutics.

“We believe the opportunities that CATS provides for research, collaboration and education will attract academic and industrial researchers from around the world.”

The Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences (CATS), a new initiative that aims to establish a world-leading platform for collaboration between academia and industry in the development of therapeutics, will be launched today by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

With CATS, we will develop a way of fostering and supporting the community in and around Cambridge to develop new concepts, deliver new knowledge, and to produce people who are better educated in all elements of modern therapeutics
Chris Lowe

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Yes

Final biomedical trial on captive chimpanzees is first oral Ebola vaccine for saving wild apes

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The results from the final biomedical research trial on captive chimpanzees for the foreseeable future have been published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The trial was of a vaccination for Ebola: the first orally administered vaccine for any disease developed specifically for the purpose of conserving wild apes.

In addition to poaching and forest loss, diseases such as Ebola and anthrax have devastated wild ape populations. Ebola alone is estimated to have killed one third of the world’s wild gorillas over the last three decades.

Now, new findings have shown an effective oral vaccine for Ebola in chimpanzees, and that the captive animals involved in the trial exhibited very few signs of stress as a result. Researchers say the work demonstrates a model that could be harnessed for other diseases and ape species in the wild.

However, after decades using chimpanzees to test vaccines destined for humans, changes in the law have seen enforced retirement of captive populations and the closing of chimpanzee research facilities in the US – the last developed country where biomedical testing on chimpanzees was legal.  

In what researchers describe as a “horrible irony”, they say these reforms – a victory for long-standing campaigns by animal welfare groups – will ultimately prove detrimental to chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild, as any vaccination for wild animals must be tested in captivity first to ensure its safety.

Consequently, the promising new vaccine model may never progress to the point where it can be used to inoculate endangered wild apes, say the research team from the universities of Cambridge, UK, and Thomas Jefferson and Louisiana, US.  

“In 2014 the world was gripped by fears of an Ebola virus pandemic. Yet few people realise that Ebola has already inflicted pandemic scale mortality on our closest relatives,” says lead researcher Dr Peter Walsh from the University of Cambridge.

“African apes are also threatened by naturally occurring pathogens like anthrax, and the increasing overspill of human pathogens such as measles. A glimmer of hope lies in the fact that many of the disease threats are now vaccine preventable.

“We have developed a very promising tool for inoculating ape species against the myriad deadly diseases they face in the wild, but continued progress relies on access to a small number of captive animals.

“This may be the final vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees: a serious setback for efforts to protect our closest relatives from the pathogens that push them ever closer to extinction in the wild.”

Previous attempts to vaccinate wild apes have resorted to administering individual animals with hypodermic darts – a laborious task feasible for only a small number of apes habituated to human approach. By contrast, oral vaccines encased in appealingly edible baits could be distributed across wild ape territories to inoculate large numbers over longer periods.

Such an approach has already proved successful in other species: almost eliminating fox rabies (and the consequent need to cull foxes) across continental Europe.

The latest study was carried out with ten chimpanzees in one of the last remaining chimpanzee research facilities in the US in New Iberia, Louisiana. Six received the oral vaccine, while four were injected as a control group.

All the animals displayed a robust immunity without side effects after 28 days – when the trial was terminated due to new Endangered Species Act regulations banning biomedical research on chimpanzees.

Throughout the trial, scientists closely monitored animal behaviour and physiology for signs of severe stress. Other than very minor weight loss (2% of body mass), they say that signs of trauma were “entirely absent”.

“Some pressure groups argue that all research on captive chimpanzees is tantamount to torture, not just because of procedures but also due to confinement,” says Walsh.

“Enclosures and animal care are now of a very high standard, with chimpanzees housed in large social spaces. The modest traces of stress we detected during our trial were akin to the values observed in college students anticipating exams.”

Captive chimpanzee trials are technically still legal in the US in instances that benefit the species. However, Walsh says that the limited funds available for conservation research makes it unviable for biomedical facilities to retain populations, while zoos and sanctuaries are either “ideologically opposed” or unwilling to risk any public backlash from testing.

Further work to enhance the vaccine, such as ensuring effectiveness after exposure to high tropical forest temperatures, may now never get done due to the closure of captive chimpanzee facilities.      

“In an ideal world, there would be no need for captive chimpanzees,” says Walsh. “But this is not an ideal world. It is a world where diseases such as Ebola, along with rampant commercial poaching and habitat loss, are major contributors to rapidly declining wild ape populations.

“Oral vaccines offer a real opportunity to slow this decline. The major ethical debt we owe is not to a few captive animals, but to the survival of an entire species we are destroying in the wild: our closest relatives.” 

Oral vaccine offers hope for ape species ravaged by Ebola and other diseases, as it can be widely dispersed to save more wild animals. However, scientists say recent law changes on captive chimpanzee testing may stop the conservation work in its tracks.

This may be the final vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees: a serious setback for efforts to protect our closest relatives from the pathogens that push them ever closer to extinction in the wild
Peter Walsh
One of the captive chimpanzees in the research trial receiving the oral Ebola vaccination

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Yes

Detect. Lock on. Intercept. The remarkable hunting ability of the robber fly

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The robber fly Holcocephala is a relatively small fly – at 6mm in length, it is similar in size of the average mosquito. Yet it has the ability to spot and catch prey more than half a metre away in less than half a second – by comparison to its size, this would be the equivalent of a human spotting its prey at the other end of a football pitch. Even if the prey changes direction, the predator is able to adapt mid-air and still catch its prey.

An international team led by researchers from the University of Cambridge was able to capture this activity by tricking the fly into launching itself at a fake prey – in fact, just a small bead on a fishing line. This enabled the team to witness the fly’s remarkable aerial attack strategy. Their findings are published today in the journal Current Biology.

To read more, see our article on Medium.

See the world through the eyes of a robber fly in the Plant and Life Sciences Marquee at the Cambridge Science Festival, Saturday 18 March 2017.

Reference
Wardill, TJ et al. A novel interception strategy in a miniature robber fly with extreme visual acuity; Current Biology; 9 March 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.01.050

A small fly the size of a grain of rice could be the Top Gun of the fly world, with a remarkable ability to detect and intercept its prey mid-air, changing direction mid-flight if necessary before sweeping round for the kill.

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Yes

Museum archive reconnects a London-based Congolese community with its heritage

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The community is a London-based group called the Congo Great Lakes Initiative (CGLI). Its members aim to help people with Congolese and African heritage, some of whom are victims of post-conflict trauma, better integrate in the UK.

“One way for building confidence and skills has been to re-connect ourselves and our children to their heritage through museum collections,” says Didier Ibwilakwingi Ekom, Executive Director of CGLI and project coordinator. “It’s helping us to find new ways to tell our stories.”

Reverend Smith’s collection of 242 photographs is held at Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and now forms part of a collection that numbers around 650 images from the Congo Basin, many of them still on their original glass plates. In addition, the Museum has around 1,200 objects from the Congo, just under 400 of them associated with members of the Baptist Missionary Society.

With funding raised from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the CGLI worked with the Museum to unlock new understanding of the images through CGLI members’ unique indigenous insights. Their collective efforts have resulted in an exhibition, 'Carriers of Culture: Women, Food and Power from the Congo Basin', currently at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Hear what matters about the photographs to the community, how the Museum has some brand-new materials, and why every party needs kwanga...

“During the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain was a major supplier of missionaries to Africa and around the world, many of them sending home materials from these early encounters,” explains the Museum's Dr Chris Wingfield. “Missionary collections have been under-researched and overlooked in Britain and yet histories of missionary activity can really matter to people in these now strongly Christian parts of the world. One of our interests has been to understand who cares about this material today, in what ways, and how this can influence the ways we engage with collections.”

The Great Lakes region of Africa straddles the equator of the continent and in recent decades has suffered interlinked conflicts, famine, violence and refugee-related problems. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone, the war that officially ended in 2003 claimed up to six million lives, displacing over two million people.

“When refugees first arrive, questions of heritage are not necessarily the priority,” adds Wingfield. “But after 10 or 20 years there can be a search for connection and a desire to discover traces of shared histories. This group in particular has been very active in drawing out those aspects of Britain’s history that connect and crossover with the Congo.”

One CGLI member describes what the exhibition has meant to her and her family: “Involvement in political activities led to me fleeing my country. This exhibition has made me really proud that [information] can be passed on from generation to generation. I’ve got my grandson who is five years old and he keeps on asking me questions. He has learned, and in the future he can pass it to his brother, his siblings.”

Wingfield adds: “Re-engaging with the collection, identifying themes and then co-curating the exhibition with the community has been enlightening. This project has partly been about giving children who are growing up in London a link to their Congolese heritage. These kinds of collections are a resource they can draw on. But it’s also given the Museum a sense of the different ways people feel they have an ongoing stake in historic collections.”

Among the collection is a series of photographs showing women making kwanga, a manioc bread. It’s a laborious process. Manioc roots are harvested, then soaked, dried, sieved, boiled, pounded, wrapped, re-steamed and re-dried – the multistep process is needed to rid the starchy vegetable of its cyanide-like poison.

The community returned again and again to these images, and suggested they form the heart of the exhibition. “We looked at these pictures of women carrying huge baskets of manioc to market and we thought that’s really where the power lies – in those who sustain life,” explains Pamela Campbell, Vice Chair of CGLI. “That’s not to denigrate men. But keeping things going is powerful and that power lies with women.”

Kwanga is still an important part of Congolese life both in the DRC and in the UK. As Ibwilakwingi-Ekom says, “there is no single party where you won’t find kwanga… if there is none there has not been a party.”

Remarkably, women are still processing the vegetable almost the same way, a century on, as shown in contemporary photographs donated to the Museum by the CGLI. One photograph taken in the DRC shows a woman carrying the manioc she’s harvested, the effort etched on her face of hauling the heavy basket. It’s surprisingly similar to photographs taken in the 1890s by Smith; the basket is almost identical to one collected by Baptist Missionaries and given to the Museum in 1910, and which now forms the centrepiece of the exhibition.

For Wingfield and his colleague Dr Johanna Zetterström-Sharp, the project represents a “new path” for working with museum collections. “It’s really important to work with communities like the CGLI because they bring fresh approaches to the curation of objects,” she says. “We often think about our collections in relation to the disciplines that we come from but there are lots of other forms of knowledge and understanding that projects like this bring out, and our perspectives are shifted as a result.”

The community describes the partnership as one in which universities have the knowledge, but members have the information.

Ackys Kituba, President of the Congolese Community in the UK, adds: “Although we are educated, we are discovering new things about our country. The link will be stronger than before. We are learning something as a group but we are doing it for our children.”

Nine-year-old Enoch was born in the UK and travelled to Cambridge with his Congolese family to see the exhibition. Asked what he’d remember most, he says: “How they make kwanga. It was really interesting. It’s helping me find out more about my family. It’s kind of clever… they wouldn’t make it for no reason.”

'Carriers of Culture: Women, Food and Power from the Congo Basin' is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology until 2 April 2017.

Inset images: photographs from the exhibition (credit: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).

 

When Reverend Kenred Smith captured moments of life in the Congo over 120 years ago, he couldn’t have imagined that the photos – now in Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – would be chosen by a Congolese community to help them remember a country that many of them had fled.

We looked at these pictures of women carrying huge baskets of manioc to market and we thought that’s really where the power lies – in those who sustain life.
Pamela Campbell, Vice Chair of CGLI
CGLI members visit the exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

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Cambridge Science Festival begins today

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Hundreds of mostly free talks, exhibitions and hands-on events will take place around the city during the annual two-week festival, covering everything from astronomy to zoology. This year’s theme is ‘getting personal’ – looking at health and disease, our place in the world and our impact on the environment in which we live.

Free events taking place tonight (13 March) include talks on the search for life outside our solar system, which infectious diseases are going to kill you, and what brain scans can reveal about the inner workings of our minds.

In his talk Exoplanets: on the hunt of universal life, Professor Didier Queloz from the Cavendish Laboratory will show how early results from planets outside the solar system are paving the way for atmospheric studies of habitable exoplanets with a similar composition to Earth. After much speculation and philosophical debate, the existence of life outside our solar system is close to becoming a testable scientific hypothesis.

Dr Colin Russell from the Department of Veterinary Medicine will discuss what scientists are doing to predict the emergence of new diseases and combat existing threats in his talk How to feel safe: which infectious diseases are going to kill you. And Professors Barbara Sahakian, John Pickard and Molly Crockett and Dr Julia Gottwald will discuss some of the ethical issues raised by our increasing ability to ‘read’ thoughts through the use of functional MRI (fMRI) in their talk Sex, lies and brain scans: can scans reveal what goes on in our minds?

This Saturday and Sunday, dozens of events for families will be taking place around the city. Highlights include Dr Peter Wothers creating lots of loud bangs as he looks at the science of explosions; James Grime discussing Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine; Chemistry in the Kitchen; and David Bainbridge’s investigation of whether teenagers really are unproductive and worthless in his talk Zits, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

The Cambridge Science Festival runs until 26 March, and is presented by the University and its partner institutions, local charities and businesses. To browse the full programme or to pre-book events, visit the Cambridge Science Festival website, or call 01223 766766. Follow the Festival on Twitter or Facebook.

Do aliens exist? Can brain scans reveal our naughtiest thoughts? And what’s the point of teenagers, anyhow? These are just some of the questions which will be tackled at the Cambridge Science Festival, which kicks off today. 

Tree of life

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Celebrating 10 years of European research excellence

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When European government representatives met in Lisbon in the year 2000, and expressed an aspiration that Europe should become the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, they agreed on the need to create a body to “fund and co-ordinate basic research at European level”.

This was the impetus underlying the creation, in 2007, of the European Research Council (ERC).

Ten years after its foundation, the ERC has become a European success story. It has supported some 6,500 projects through its prestigious grants, and has become a unique model for the fostering and funding of innovative academic research.

To mark the anniversary, events are being held across Europe during ERC Week, running from 13-19 March. At the University of Cambridge, various recipients of ERC grants will be sharing their findings with a wide audience in talks scheduled as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research will be joining in ERC Week celebrations by hosting a conference on Thursday, 16 March.

On the same day, a reception for Cambridge recipients of ERC grants, attended by ERC president Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourgignon, will be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is currently showing the ERC-supported exhibition, “Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy”.

The ERC supports outstanding researchers in all fields of science and scholarship. It awards three types of research awards (Starter, Consolidator, Advanced) through a competitive, peer-reviewed process that rewards excellence. Its focus on “frontier research” allows academics to develop innovative and far-reaching projects over five-year periods.

The United Kingdom has been the largest recipient of ERC awards –between 2007 and 2015, it received 24% of all ERC funding.

To date, the ERC has supported 1524 projects by UK-based academics. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have won 218 of those grants, in fields ranging from Astrology to Zoology.

“What is special about an ERC grant?”, asks Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, who was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for her project “IN-AFRICA”, which examines the evolution of modern humans in East Africa.

“An obvious side is that it’s a lot of money. But I think it’s more than just the money. Because it’s five years, the ERC grant allows you to get a group and build a real community around the project. It also allows you to explore things in greater depth.”

An ERC grant allowed Dr Debora Sijacki, at the Institute of Astronomy, to attract “a really competitive and international team, which otherwise would have been almost impossible to get.”

Being funded for a five-year period, she adds, “gives you time to expand and really tackle some of the major problems in astrophysics, rather than doing incremental research.”

It also allowed her access to facilities: “In my case, it was access to world-leading supercomputers. And without the ERC grant this would have been difficult.”

“Real progress in research is made when researchers can tackle big important questions," says Prof David Baulcombe, of the Department of Plant Sciences, the recipient of two ERC grants. "The ERC programme invites researchers to submit ambitious, blue-skies, imaginative proposals. There aren’t many others sources of funding that allow one to do that sort a thing.”

Dr Christos Lynteris, of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Visual representations of the third plague pandemic.

“An ERC is a unique opportunity, he says: “it fosters interdisciplinary work. It also fosters analytical tools and the creation of new methods.”

“It offers a great opportunity to work with other people, over a period of 5 years, which is something very unusual, and with quite a liberal framework, so you are able to change and shift your questions, to reformulate them. For me, it means freedom, above everything.”

For Prof. Ottoline Leyser, Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, it is the “ERC ethos” and its “emphasis on taking things in new directions” that has made all the difference.

The ERC values an innovative, risk-taking approach “in a way that conventional grant-funding schemes don’t –they usually want to see that slow build rather than the risky step into the unknown.”

Prof. Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH, was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for his project “Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture”. It has given him “the unique opportunity to do a genuinely interdisciplinary collaborative project with the time and space it takes to make such interdisciplinarity work.”

“Most importantly,” he adds, “the financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world, and Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.”

The sentiment is echoed by Prof. Ruth Cameron, of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. The impact of an ERC grant for her project “3D Engineered Environments for Regenerative Medicine” has, she says, “exceeded expectations”.

So what has the ERC ever done for us? Quite a lot, say Cambridge academics, as they mark the 10th anniversary of Europe’s premier research-funding body

The financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.
Prof. Simon Goldhill, CRASSH

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Visualising the genome: researchers create first 3D structures of active DNA

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Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology used a combination of imaging and up to 100,000 measurements of where different parts of the DNA are close to each other to examine the genome in a mouse embryonic stem cell. Stem cells are ‘master cells’, which can develop – or ‘differentiate’ – into almost any type of cell within the body.

Most people are familiar with the well-known ‘X’ shape of chromosomes, but in fact chromosomes only take on this shape when the cell divides. Using their new approach, the researchers have now been able to determine the structures of active chromosomes inside the cell, and how they interact with each other to form an intact genome. This is important because knowledge of the way DNA folds inside the cell allows scientists to study how specific genes, and the DNA regions that control them, interact with each other. The genome’s structure controls when and how strongly genes – particular regions of the DNA – are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’. This plays a critical role in the development of organisms and also, when it goes awry, in disease.

The researchers have illustrated the structure in accompanying videos, which show the intact genome from one particular mouse embryonic stem cell. In the film, above, each of the cell’s 20 chromosomes is coloured differently.

In a second video, below, regions of the chromosomes where genes are active are coloured blue, and the regions that interact with the nuclear lamina (a dense fibrillar network inside the nucleus) are coloured yellow. The structure shows that the genome is arranged such that the most active genetic regions are on the interior and separated in space from the less active regions that associate with the nuclear lamina. The consistent segregation of these regions, in the same way in every cell, suggests that these processes could drive chromosome and genome folding and thus regulate important cellular events such as DNA replication and cell division.

Professor Ernest Laue, whose group at Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry developed the approach, commented: “Knowing where all the genes and control elements are at a given moment will help us understand the molecular mechanisms that control and maintain their expression.

“In the future, we’ll be able to study how this changes as stem cells differentiate and how decisions are made in individual developing stem cells. Until now, we’ve only been able to look at groups, or ‘populations’, of these cells and so have been unable to see individual differences, at least from the outside. Currently, these mechanisms are poorly understood and understanding them may be key to realising the potential of stem cells in medicine."

The research, by scientists at the Departments of Biochemistry, Chemistry and the Wellcome-MRC Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, together with colleagues at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, is published today in the journal Nature.

Dr Tom Collins from Wellcome’s Genetics and Molecular Sciences team said: “Visualising a genome in 3D at such an unprecedented level of detail is an exciting step forward in research and one that has been many years in the making. This detail will reveal some of the underlying principles that govern the organisation of our genomes – for example how chromosomes interact or how structure can influence whether genes are switched on or off. If we can apply this method to cells with abnormal genomes, such as cancer cells, we may be able to better understand what exactly goes wrong to cause disease, and how we could develop solutions to correct this.”

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the European Union and the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Stevens, TJ et al. 3D structures of individual mammalian genomes studied by single-cell Hi-C. Nature; 13 March 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature21429

Scientists have determined the first 3D structures of intact mammalian genomes from individual cells, showing how the DNA from all the chromosomes intricately folds to fit together inside the cell nuclei.

Knowing where all the genes and control elements are at a given moment will help us understand the molecular mechanisms that control and maintain their expression
Ernest Laue
3D genome from individual mouse stem cell

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Scientists harness solar power to produce clean hydrogen from biomass

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One of the challenges facing modern society is what it does with its waste products. As natural resources decline in abundance, using waste for energy is becoming more pressing for both governments and business.

Biomass has been a source of heat and energy since the beginning of recorded history.  The planet’s oil reserves are derived from ancient biomass which has been subjected to high pressures and temperatures over millions of years. Lignocellulose is the main component of plant biomass and up to now its conversion into hydrogen has only been achieved through a gasification process which uses high temperatures to decompose it fully.  

Dr Moritz Kuehnel, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, joint lead author on a new research paper published in Nature Energy, says:

"Lignocellulose is nature's equivalent to armoured concrete. It consists of strong, highly crystalline cellulose fibres, that are interwoven with lignin and hemicellulose which act as a glue. This rigid structure has evolved to give plants and trees mechanical stability and protect them from degradation, and makes chemical utilisation of lignocellulose so challenging."

The new technology relies on a simple photocatalytic conversion process. Catalytic nanoparticles are added to alkaline water in which the biomass is suspended. This is then placed in front of a light in the lab which mimics solar light. The solution is ideal for absorbing this light and converting the biomass into gaseous hydrogen which can then be collected from the headspace. The hydrogen is free of fuel-cell inhibitors, such as carbon monoxide, which allows it to be used for power.

The nanoparticle is able to absorb energy from solar light and use it to undertake complex chemical reactions. In this case, it rearranges the atoms in the water and biomass to form hydrogen fuel and other organic chemicals, such as formic acid and carbonate.

Joint lead author, Dr David Wakerley, also of the Department of Chemistry, says:

“There’s a lot of chemical energy stored in raw biomass, but it’s unrefined, so you can’t expect it to work in complicated machinery, such as a car engine. Our system is able to convert the long, messy structures that make up biomass into hydrogen gas, which is much more useful. We have specifically designed a combination of catalyst and solution that allows this transformation to occur using sunlight as a source of energy. With this in place we can simply add organic matter to the system and then, provided it’s a sunny day, produce hydrogen fuel.”

A piece of paper placed in front of a solar light source

The team used different types of biomass in their experiments. Pieces of wood, paper and leaves were placed in test tubes and exposed to solar light. The biomass didn’t require any processing beforehand.

The technology was developed in the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. The head of the laboratory, Dr. Erwin Reisner, adds:

“Our sunlight-powered technology is exciting as it enables the production of clean hydrogen from unprocessed biomass under ambient conditions. We see it as a new and viable alternative to high temperature gasification and other renewable means of hydrogen production.

Future development can be envisioned at any scale, from small scale devices for off-grid applications to industrial-scale plants, and we are currently exploring a range of potential commercial options."

With the help of Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University, a UK patent application has been filed and talks are under way with a potential commercial partner.

Reference

David Wakerley et al: Solar-driven reforming of lignocellulose to H2 with a CdS/CdOx photocatalyst

Nature Energy 13th March 2017 DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.21

A team of scientists at the University of Cambridge has developed a way of using solar power to generate a fuel that is both sustainable and relatively cheap to produce. It’s using natural light to generate hydrogen from biomass.

Our sunlight powered technology is exciting as it enables the production of clean hydrogen from unprocessed biomass under ambient conditions
Dr Erwin Reisner
Paper releasing gaseous hydrogen under solar light

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​Student welfare at the University of Cambridge receives funding boost

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Funding body the Higher Education Funding Council For England announced today it was backing the University’s plans to roll out a series of initiatives, in collaboration with students, promoting responsible behaviour and enhancing victim support. This follows the introduction of a new, centralised procedure to deal with harassment and sexual assault between Cambridge students (link to website) last month.

HEFCE has awarded the University funding that will enable Collegiate Cambridge to invest an extra £87,000 in prevention and support over the next year.

The money will fund the expansion of awareness-raising on consent with additional online training, while students will be coached on how to spot and tackle inappropriate behaviour at events under the new  bystander programme, the Intervention Initiative. The 'Good Lad' campaign to promote respect and tolerance will also be rolled out across sports clubs.

The grant will also support a new service offering emotional and practical support from a specialist for students who have experienced harassment or sexual assault. An anonymous reporting system will also be brought in to make it easier for students to come forward and report incidents.

To complement the service, in collaboration with the university, Cambridge Rape Crisis will train key staff in the University and Colleges, teaching them how to support victims of sexual misconduct.

The work will build on a series of initiatives at the Collegiate University to promote responsible behaviour, including the introduction of a code of conduct for students, and work on culture change. Support for students continues to be offered through the University Counselling Service and specialist welfare support in the Colleges.

Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Cambridge, Professor Graham Virgo, said: "Providing students with a safe environment has always been a priority at the University of Cambridge. 

"In order to allow our students to thrive, and take full advantage of the world class education Cambridge offers, our community must remain one where all students and staff are safe and protected from any form of violence, sexual harassment or hate. 

"We welcome HEFCE's support, which will allow us to build on work to ensure our students receive the appropriate advice and services to support their mental health and wellbeing. 

"We recognise there is more to do to tackle these complex and important issues effectively and make sure that discrimination is a thing of the past.

"However, this funding will help us take a significant step forward in embedding a culture of zero-tolerance to all forms of abuse and discrimination."

Cambridge University Students’ Union Women’s Officer Audrey Sebatindira said: "The prevention and support work will build on the awareness raising around consent and culture change work by CUSU, clearly demonstrating to students that the Collegiate University takes allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct very seriously and is putting in place the right support for victims."

The HEFCE funded initiatives are being developed with input from Cambridge Rape Crisis, Cambridgeshire Police, Cambridgeshire Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence Partnership, Cambridge University Students’ Union, the Good Lad initiative and the student-led social action society Cambridge Hub.

​Student welfare at the University of Cambridge received a funding boost today as part of a sector-wide drive to embed a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of harassment on campus.

We welcome HEFCE's support, which will allow us to build on work to ensure our students receive the appropriate advice and services to support their mental health and wellbeing
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Cambridge, Professor Graham Virgo
Old Schools University of Cambridge

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Opinion: The ICC can’t live with Africa, but it can’t live without it either

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On the first of February, 2017, the African Union issued a resolution encouraging member states to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Whatever comes of it, the reported plan is the culmination of a highly publicised pushback by African states, which have accused the court of political bias, interference in African affairs and even racism. The Conversation

Today’s African opposition represents a crisis for the 15-year-old court. But it’s also a symptom of a deeper dilemma faced by the ICC: how to enforce international criminal law impartially in a world of vast inequalities of power?

As I argue in a recent article, the ICC sought to escape this dilemma by focusing exclusively on Africa. At first, African states went along with it because cooperation entailed significant benefits. When the ICC shifted gears, however, and began to prosecute African heads of state instead of siding with them, the relationship went sour.

Africa’s push back is thus a result of the ICC’s own strategy for the continent. But it also needs to be seen in the context of Africa’s long experience of damaging foreign intervention within a highly inequitable international order.

The ICC’s Africa strategy

Without Africa to turn to, the ICC may not have survived in the post-9/11 world. The Middle East was ablaze with US wars, and the US actively threatened the court’s survival. The ICC was without enforcement power and depended on state cooperation to conduct investigations and arrest suspects. So it had to avoid US opposition, while finding support for its prosecutions.

Africa seemed the perfect target for the ICC’s first cases. The continent was politically marginal enough that intervention there wouldn’t interfere with US interests. In addition, Africa was politically weak enough that those subject to intervention were considered unlikely to challenge the court.

Involvement was made easier by a history of Africa being represented as a terrain of barbaric violence, of savages committing atrocities against victims in need of a Western saviour. This humanitarian image fit squarely with the international court’s stark moral narrative of inhuman criminals and helpless innocents.

In 2003, Luis Moreno-Ocampo was elected as the ICC’s first Chief Prosecutor. Once he embarked on his Africa adventure, another advantage became clear. African heads of state could be encouraged to refer situations in their own countries to the ICC in a tacit bargain: African leaders provided assistance in arresting suspects, and the ICC gave those leaders effective immunity in return.

Uganda, for instance, called in the ICC to investigate the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The ICC eagerly undertook the case with close assistance from the Ugandan military, for all purposes taking Uganda’s side in its long-running civil war.

While no one disputes the LRA’s brutality, the ICC’s selective approach raised deep concerns. The Ugandan government was also accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of its counterinsurgency. Despite demands for equal justice for both sides, the ICC has failed to issue any arrest warrants for Ugandan government officials.

In the ICC’s early years, Africa thus came to the court’s rescue. It could avoid US censure while claiming that it was ending global impunity by pursuing a few minor Congolese or Ugandan rebels. Meanwhile, African leaders obtained a new tool in their arsenal of external support to use against internal opposition.

A shift

This cosy relationship changed when the ICC started going after African state elites.

The ICC thought it could depend on Western support to trump African sovereignty. While it was proven correct in Libya, it was wrong in Sudan and Kenya. For their part, while many African states were happy to cooperate with the ICC when it served their interests, when the court turned against them, accusations of neocolonialism were soon heard.

The ICC made gestures to appease its critics. It appointed an African Chief Prosecutor and opened the first formal investigation outside Africa. But these efforts failed, and African states stepped up their opposition. First Burundi, and then The Gambia and South Africa, declared their intention to exit the Rome Statute. Then came last month’s AU resolution.

The ICC and its supporters have taken an uncompromising stance on African moves to withdraw. Moreno-Ocampo denounced uncooperative African heads of state as being complicit with genocide and abandoning African victims.

Of course, the declared intention by The Gambia or Burundi to withdraw from the ICC can be seen, in part, as defensive moves by authoritarian leaders looking to shield themselves from prosecution.

However, to reduce all African opposition against the ICC to the self-interest of African elites ignores the context of Africa’s response. It fails to see that African states and people are justified in having very real concerns about the way the ICC has intervened in the continent, given Africa’s historical experience with destructive international interference.

A decade of criticisms

For one thing, for African actors to reject the ICC’s current involvement in the continent is not to reject international law. Africa has its own histories and traditions of international law, in which international law has been used in the struggle for self-determination, dignity, and sovereign equality within the international community. An ICC that can interfere arbitrarily with fundamental internal political processes, or undermine regional efforts at peace and security, has no place within these African traditions of law.

Africa’s opposition has a specific material foundation - specifically, the ongoing commodity boom, fuelled by heightened demand from rising global powers. For instance, in Kenya, the backlash against the ICC has been couched in an anti-imperialist narrative of a declining West and a future of growth for Africa.

While the pushback by African states has gained the most attention, and poses the greatest threat to the court, it had been foreshadowed by over a decade of intense criticism by African civil societies, peace activists, and academics. They have accused the ICC of taking sides in conflict, being a tool of Western powers, of manipulating victims, and of undermining African ideals of reconciliation.

Today, it’s becoming clear that the ICC cannot live with Africa, given that it faces opposition both for its alliances with African state elites as well as for its efforts to prosecute those elites.

But it’s equally doubtful that the ICC can live without Africa, since intervening anywhere else looks increasingly far fetched. The ICC seems unable to prosecute anyone except minor African rebels who have fallen out with their state sponsors and former African heads of state who have been overthrown by Western military intervention.

The ICC can try to dump the blame for its current problems on the continent, but this dilemma is one that the court looks to have little chance of escaping.

This article was published on The Conversation

The International Criminal Court’s focus on African states has led to pushback from the continent, yet intervening anywhere else looks increasingly unlikely, argues Adam Branch from the Department of POLIS. 

International Criminal Court, The Hague

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Opinion: How mapping teenagers’ brains has helped us understand more about schizophrenia

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When I was studying for my PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, I spent an awful lot of my weekends asking teenagers to lie still in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. While they were lying as still as they could they also had to answer questions they saw on the screen. The Conversation

We were interested in which parts of the brain these young people were using when they completed an analogical reasoning task. They saw three pictures and were asked to choose the fourth picture to complete the relationships, for example dress is to wardrobe, as milk is to fridge.

We found that association cortex – the parts of the brain that bring together information from many other regions – was used to answer these questions and, importantly, that these regions are activated more and more as you get older. The study was recently published in Developmental Science.

A question teenagers answered during a functional MRI scan. Association cortex was activated during this task (top right, orange) and regions in prefrontal cortex were more active as participants got older (bottom right, red).Kirstie Whitaker

Fast forward a few years and I’m now a member of the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN), a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and University College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

NSPN aims to better understand the biological mechanisms that lead to young people developing a variety of mental health disorders. The network includes experts in epidemiology, adolescent psychopathology, cognition and brain development who are investigating the question of adolescent mental health from multiple angles.

Beautiful brains

I’m in the MRI team, which has collected brain scans from 300 young people between the ages of 14 and 24. This time, instead of asking them to complete questions while they were lying in the scanner, we took structural MRI scans. These are different to the brain scans we use to assess what the brain is doing (“functional MRI”) and they look really beautiful.

A vertical slice through the author’s head using a structural MRI. Cortical thickness (the distance between the red and yellow lines) decreases during the teenage years as adolescents refine their brain networks.Kirstie Whitaker

One of the measures we extract is “cortical thickness” – the depth of the outside layer of the brain (the cortex) that contains synapses. A synapse is where two brain cells (neurons) join together and transmit messages. We have around 100 billion neurons but 100 trillion synapses in our brains. It is the complexity of these connections that allows humans to generate and understand complex thoughts and feelings, including being able to solve analogies in the real world.

Changing minds

In work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2016 the NSPN consortium showed that the cortex got thinner between the ages of 14 and 24. In particular, association cortex – the same regions that are used for complex thought and reasoning – showed the greatest amount of change.

This finding may seem counter-intuitive – at first glance you’d imagine that getting better at something would mean having more brain cells working on the project. In fact, you are born with more neurons than you’ll ever have again, and one of the most important developmental processes is “synaptic refinement” – pruning away some of the connections to ensure your brain is working efficiently.

We also looked at the brain as a network. You can imagine an airline network with connections going around the world between different airports. The really important locations are network “hubs” – they have lots of flights in and out every day. In the brain, we found that these hubs are located in association cortex. It makes sense that the brain regions that are important for complex thought need information to liaise with many other different parts of the brain.

The brain as a network: different brain regions (nodes) are connected by edges. These regions show prolonged development during adolescence and are important for complex thought.

We found that the hubs of the brain’s structural network change most during adolescence. This is likely to reflect prolonged development for these regions – the other parts of the brain are closer to their adult structure and have slowed down by the age of 14. If you think back to my descriptions of synapses being pruned away, it makes sense to keep as many as you need for a long time, until you’re sure of which connections are going to allow you to best reason in the complex world around you.

I made a big deal earlier about the fact that we can not see the actual cells and connections in the brain using MRI. However, innovative work by Petra Vértes and data shared by the Allen Institute for Brain Science gives us some clues as to what is going on at the cellular level in these brain regions.

The Allen Institute has measured the expression of 20,000 genes at 500 locations around the brains of six brains donated to research after their owner died. Vértes showed that the brain regions in association cortex – the same ones that change structurally the most during the teenage years – have greater expression of genes related to synaptic plasticity. This means that genes controlling how our brain cells adapt their connections based on our experiences are more active in these regions.

These regions are also related to genes associated with schizophrenia– a psychiatric disorder that is most likely to emerge during the late teenage years. Our work provides evidence for a mechanism as to why people with a genetic risk for schizophrenia may not experience symptoms until they are around 20-years-old. The affected brain regions are still developing and it may take these many years before the differences in brain structure are big enough to cause the hallucinations and delusions associated with this mental health disorder.

There is still a long way to go in our search to understand the biological underpinnings of mental health disorders. We will continue to work together, both within the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network and with other researchers around the world, to find treatments for mental health disorders, and, if possible, to find ways to prevent the symptoms from emerging all together.


The author is appearing on March 21 as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

Kirstie Whitaker, Research Associate, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Teenage years can be difficult enough, but for people affected by schizophrenia, this is when symptoms first tend to arise. Dr Kirstie Whitaker (Department of Psychiatry), who is speaking at this year's Cambridge Science Festival, explains in The Conversation how her work may shed light on why this is the case.

The brain’s structural network. The hubs of this network continue to develop during adolescence.

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