Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz has joined the call for governments throughout the world to ensure all children are afforded the right to an education by the end of 2015.

The Stand #UpForSchool petition has already attracted more than three million signatures from people around the world, ranging from UN Special Envoy for Education Gordon Brown, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi to celebrity names like Sharon Osbourne all joining the global call for education for all.

The petition is run through A World at School, an international campaign bringing together a movement of people from civil society, teachers, faiths, youth, business, international and non-governmental organisations demanding world leaders take immediate action to get all children into school and learning.

The Vice-Chancellor said: “At the start of the academic year I said that the University’s responsibilities go deep and wide and that at the forefront of those, education has to take pride of place.”

“Our responsibility to education starts much earlier than at the university stage. We are working globally and locally to ensure we deliver on our responsibilities. Education is a key factor in raising people out of poverty. I believe that boys and girls across the world have the right to an education, but I know that some cannot exercise that right. It is everyone’s responsibility to change this.”

A World at School was launched in 2013 in the face of the grim statistic that there are currently 58 million children out of school around the world because they are child labourers, they married too young, they are discriminated against, exploited or living in war-torn regions where their schools are under attack.

The petition states: “We, the world's youth, teachers, parents and global citizens appeal to our governments to keep their promise, made at the United Nations in 2000, to ensure all out-of-school children gain their right to education before the end of 2015.

“We are standing up to bring an end to the barriers preventing girls and boys from going to school, including forced work and early marriage, conflict and attacks on schools, exploitation and discrimination. All children deserve the opportunity to learn and achieve their potential. We are #UpForSchool."

Pauline Rose, Professor of International Education, joined the Vice-Chancellor in signing the petition.

With over 90 Nobel Prizes already occupying our shelves, space is at a premium but how many Oscars in total have Cambridge University Alumni won? 

Turning to Twitter we asked our followers to help us bring together a list of known recipients. Help us complete the list by tweeting winners' names using #CantabOscars

If you're interested in meeting potential winners of the future you could do worse than to come along to Watersprite 2015 - the Cambridge International Student Film Festival. The student-run festival has been growing from strength to strength since 2010 when it began. As well as meeting the filmmakers - and perhaps Academy Award winners of the future, it's also a chance to hear from industry heavyweights. 2013 saw a visit from Eddie Redmayne himself.

The event brought together opinion leaders in global business, politics, academia, media and the arts from India and internationally.

They considered Nehru’s contribution in policymaking, institutional and scientific infrastructure and international affairs, assessing his impact in his time and his legacy in contemporary India.
Dr Karan Singh, Rajya Sabha MP (pictured with the Vice-Chancellor), was the Chief Guest and inaugurated the proceedings by delivering the opening plenary.

Speaking to a capacity audience at the India Habitat Centre, Dr Singh described his interactions with Nehru during the latter’s early years as Prime Minister, when the country was still finding its feet after independence.

Commenting on the recent elections in Delhi, Dr Singh expressed his delight that the principles of democracy in India so firmly established by Nehru were alive and well “because they have proven the vibrancy and power of our democracy."

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, spoke of the commitment of the University of Cambridge, which currently has over 300 active research links with India, to working with and within India.

Through six dynamic panel discussions titled “Economy and Development”; “Religion and Democracy”; “Nehru’s Image”; “Writing Nehru”; “Founding and Building India”; and “Internationalism” the symposium explored a variety of areas, in each of which the role of the India of Jawaharlal Nehru’s years remains both foundational and controversial.

Discussions ranged well beyond questions of the domestic state and policies to consider India’s international role over the last fifty years since Nehru’s death.

On the opening Economy and Development panel, which was broadcast by the popular television network NDTV, former Planning Commission member Arun Maira; Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University Jayati Ghosh; former Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh; Professor of History at Harvard University Sugata Bose; Chairman of DCM Engineering Dr Vinay Bharat Ram; and noted economist Professor Surjit Bhalla, looked back at the Planning Commission as a creation of Nehru, and assessed NITI Aayog, India’s new policy think-tank to advise the central and state governments, in the context of Nehruvian planning.

In the second panel on Religion and Democracy, which was also broadcast by NDTV, political theorist and Labour Party Peer Bhikhu Parekh; Rajeev Bhargava, Professor of Political Studies with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Naman Ahuja, Professor of Indian art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Arif Mohammad Khan, former Uttar Pradesh State minister, and senior journalist Swapan Dasgupta evaluated Nehru’s views on organised religion, and religious campaigning and politics.

Subsequent panels included speakers like historian and writer Patrick French; eminent historians Professors Romila Thapar and Christopher Bayly; jurist and former Attorney-General of India Soli Sorabjee; Lok Sabha MP and former Minister of State Dr Shashi Tharoor; former Ambassador and Foreign Secretary Salman Haider; political campaign advisor Dilip Cherian; Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee; Director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum Tasneem Zakaria Mehta; and former Union Minister of External Affairs Salman Khurshid.

The conference ended with a reception and dinner at the Oberoi Hotel hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, which was attended by the panellists from the day’s proceedings and guests including CK Birla, Chairman of the of the CK Birla Group; Meira Kumar, Former Speaker of the Lok Sabha; and Nand Khemka, Chairman of the Sun Group, amongst others.

The joint Cambridge convenors of Nehru and Today’s India, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy Dr Jennifer Barnes, and Dr Shruti Kapila, Lecturer at the Faculty of History, highlighted how by bringing leading figures from India and across the world to make a measured judgement on Nehru’s legacy, the event helped frame and lead discussions on new policies, perspectives and ideas that are shaping India’s future and engagement with the global order.

The world’s national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale of nature-based tourism in protected areas. The paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, is the first global-scale attempt to answer the question of how many visits protected areas receive, and what they might be worth in terms of tourist dollars.

The authors of the study say that this number of visits could generate as much as US$600 billion of tourism expenditure annually - a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than US$10 billion spent safeguarding these sites each year.

Scientists and conservation experts describe current global expenditure on protected areas as “grossly insufficient”, and have called for greatly increased investment in the maintenance and expansion of protected areas – a move which this study shows would yield substantial economic return – as well as saving incalculably precious natural landscapes and species from destruction.

“It’s fantastic that people visit protected areas so often, and are getting so much from experiencing wild nature – it’s clearly important to people and we should celebrate that,” said lead author Professor Andrew Balmford, from Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology.

“These pieces of the world provide us with untold benefits: from stabilising the global climate and regulating water flows to protecting untold numbers of species. Now we’ve shown that through tourism nature reserves contribute in a big way to the global economy – yet many are being degraded through encroachment and illegal harvesting, and some are being lost altogether. It’s time that governments invested properly in protected areas.”

Dr Andrea Manica, a corresponding author also at Cambridge, said these are ballpark estimates based on limited data, so the researchers have been careful not to overstate the case: “These are conservative calculations. Visit rates are likely to be higher than eight billion a year, and there’s no doubt we are talking about hundreds of billions of tourism dollars a year,” he said. 

The attempt to calculate these figures was in part borne from frustration, said Balmford. “We study what people get out of nature, so-called ‘ecosystem services’. While some ecosystem services are difficult to measure – such as cultural or religious benefits – we thought that nature-based recreation would be quite tractable: there’s a market and tangible visits you can count.   

“However, when we started to investigate we found no-one had yet pieced the data together. So we got to work trawling for figures ourselves. After a few months we had constructed a database from which we could build our models. It’s limited, but it’s the best there is at the moment,” Balmford said. 

The database consists of visiting figures for 550 sites worldwide, which were then used to build equations that could predict visit rates for a further 140,000 protected areas based on their size, remoteness, national income, and so on.

The results surprised even seasoned conservation researchers. Nature tourism expert and team member Dr Matt Walpole of the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre calls their cautious estimate of eight billion annual visits an “astonishing figure that illustrates the value people place on experiencing nature”.

Visit rates were highest in North America, where protected areas receive a combined total of over three billion visits a year, and lowest in Africa, where many countries have less than 100,000 protected area visits annually.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area near San Francisco had the highest recorded visit rate in the database with an annual average of 13.7m visits, closely followed by the UK’s Lake District and Peak District National Parks, with 10.5m and 10.1m. By contrast, Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park got an annual average during the study period of 148,000 visits.

Team member Dr Jonathan Green, based in Cambridge, points out that it is far from just exotic places and large national parks that contribute to the visitation value of protected areas. “For many people, it’s the nature reserve on their doorstep where they walk the dog every Sunday”. Fowlmere nature reserve, a few miles south of Cambridge University, receives an average of almost 23,000 visits a year. 

By combining regional visit rates with region-specific averages for visitor spending – on everything from entry fees to transport and accommodation – the researchers were able to derive the most complete picture yet of the global economic significance of protected area visitation.  

“Our US$600 billion figure for the annual value of protected area tourism is likely to be an underestimate – yet it dwarfs the less than US$10 billion spent annually on safeguarding and managing these areas,” said Dr Robin Naidoo of World Wildlife Fund, another author of the study. “Through previous research, we know that the existing reserve network probably needs three to four times what is currently being spent on it”.

“While that may seem a lot of money, it’s a fraction of the economic benefit we get from protected areas – nature-based tourism is just one part,” said Balmford.

By way of context, he points to the recent announcement by computing giant Apple of record profits of US$18 billion in a single quarter. “Stopping the unfolding extinction crisis is not unaffordable. Three months of Apple profits could go a long way to securing the future of nature. Humanity doesn’t need electronic communication to survive. But we do need the rest of the planet.”

After being awarded £100,000 by the Art Fund to build a collection of work from Australia, South Africa and Canada, the museum officially opened The Power of Paper yesterday. The exhibition focuses on artworks made in those countries during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by Aboriginal, Inuit and black South African artists – a rich variety of indigenous art from the 1950s onwards as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land and belief, as well as struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

"This show is a revelation," said Nicholas Thomas, Director of MAA and the exhibition's curator. "It presents visions of place and history that are rarely given the attention their eloquence and power deserve, even in today's supposedly global and inclusive art world.

“I'm taken aback by the sheer artistic accomplishment of all the works included, but also love the quirkiness of the artists' take on everything from empire, to township life, to climate change. Why should a military helicopter be hoisting an oversized caribou, walrus and polar bear through the air? You need to come to the show to find out."

Modern art was more than just a project of great Europeans. From the late 1950s onward, as the end of empire gathered momentum, artists in native and local communities began to produce work in modern media in both remote community workshops and city studios; wryly expressing everyday life in townships or settlements, and often illuminating both personal and collective concerns in artworks that could be evocative, oblique or polemical.

Responding to the very limited representation of modern indigenous art movements in British collections, in 2011 the Art Fund awarded the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge £100,000 to build a collection of work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa.

For more than two years, working with a network of artists, workshops and specialist curators, Thomas embarked on what he described as a ‘dream shopping trip’, building a unique collection of around 300 works. While some of the artists are internationally famous, only a few of the works have been on display in Europe.

Art on display in Britain for the first time includes the very first prints produced at the famous Rorke’s Drift print workshop, which played a major role in the development of black art during apartheid.

South African artist Frank Ledimo, whose work King Ubu Encounter (2002) is featured in the exhibition, said: “I create work that is based on the urban landscape in which I live. I have been fascinated by the representation of the figure to relay messages of urban squalor, city life, survivors and victims of urbanisation.”

Added Thomas: “The Power of Paper gives voice to great but marginalized artists, whose words caption their own work. The exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom.”

The Power of Paper runs at MAA until December 6, 2015. The exhibition will also feature a working press with opportunities to participate in practical workshops as visitors explore the medium of printmaking as a form of expression.

There was a time when diagnosing and treating cancer seemed straightforward. Cancer of the breast was breast cancer, for example, and doctors could only choose treatments from a limited arsenal.

Now, the picture is much more complicated. A study published in 2012, led by Carlos Caldas, showed that breast cancer was actually at least ten different diseases. In fact, genome sequencing shows that even one ‘type’ of breast cancer differs between individuals.

While these developments illustrate the complexity of cancer biology, they also offer the promise of drugs tailored to an individual. Chemotherapy is a powerful, but blunt, instrument – it attacks the tumour, but in doing so also attacks several of the body’s other functions, which is why it makes patients so ill. The new generation of cancer drugs aim to make the tumour – and not the patient – sick.

But telling if a patient is sick is easy; telling if the tumour is sick is more challenging. “Conventionally, one assesses whether a tumour is responding to treatment by looking for evidence of shrinkage,” explained Professor Kevin Brindle from the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Cambridge Institute, “but that can take weeks or months. And monitoring tumour size doesn’t necessarily indicate whether it is responding well to treatment.”

Take brain tumours, for example. They can continue to grow even when a treatment is working. “The thing is that a tumour is not just tumour cells. There are lots of other cells in there, too.”

For some time now, oncologists have been interested in imaging aspects of tumour biology that can give a much earlier indication of the effect of treatment. Positron emission tomography (PET) can be used for this purpose. The patient is injected with a form (or analogue) of glucose labelled with a radioactive isotope. Tumours feed on the analogue and the isotope allows doctors to see where the tumour is.

An alternative technique that doesn’t expose the patient to ionising radiation is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which relies on the interaction of strong magnetic fields with a property of atomic nuclei known as ‘spin’. The proton spins in water molecules align in magnetic fields, like tiny bar magnets. By looking at how these spins differ in the presence of magnetic field gradients applied across the body, scientists are able to build up three-dimensional images of tissues.

In the 1970s, scientists realised that it was possible to use MR spectroscopy to see signals from metabolites such as glucose inside cells. “Tumours eat and breathe. If you make them sick, they don’t eat as much and the concentration of some cell metabolites can go down,” said Brindle.

Around the same time, scientists hit upon the idea of enriching metabolites with a naturally occurring isotope of carbon known as carbon-13 to help them measure how these metabolites are used by tissues. But carbon-13 nuclei are even less sensitive to detection by MRI than protons, so the signals are boosted using a machine developed by GE Healthcare, called a hyperpolariser, which lines up a large proportion of the carbon-13 spins before injection into the patient.

In 2006, Cambridge was one of the first places to show that this approach could be used to monitor whether a cancer therapy was effective or not. Combined with the latest genome sequencing techniques, this could become a powerful way of implementing personalised medicine. What’s more, because no radioactive isotopes are involved, an individual could be scanned safely multiple times.

“Because of the underlying genetics of the tumour, not all patients respond in the same way, but if you sequence the DNA in the tumour, you can select drugs that might work for that individual. Using hyperpolarisation and MRI, we can potentially tell whether the drug is working within a few hours of starting treatment. If it’s working you continue, if not you change the treatment.”

The challenge has been how to deliver the carbon-13 to the patient. The metabolite has to be cooled down to almost absolute zero (–273°C), polarised, warmed up rapidly, passed into the MRI room and injected into the patient. And as the polarisation of the carbon-13 nuclei has a half-life of only 30–40 seconds, this has to be done very quickly.

This problem has largely been solved and, with funding from the Wellcome Trust and CRUK, Brindle and colleagues will this year begin trialling the technique with cancer patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. If successful, it could revolutionise both the evaluation of new drugs and ultimately – and most importantly – the treatment of patients.

“Some people have been sceptical about whether we could ever get a strong enough signal. I’m sure we will. But will we be able to do something that is clinically meaningful, that is going to change clinical practice? That’s the big question we hope to answer in the coming years.”

Inset image: Kevin Brindle and Stefanie Reichelt.

Previous studies have already suggested a possible association between sleep and risk of stroke, but today’s study, published in the journal Neurology, is the first to provide detailed information about the British population and to examine the relationship between a change in sleep duration over time and subsequent stroke risk.

Researchers from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge followed just under 10,000 people aged 42-81 years of age from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC)–Norfolk cohort over 9.5 years. During 1998-2000 and then again four years later, they asked the cohort how many hours on average they slept in a day and whether they generally slept well.
Almost seven out of ten participants reported sleeping between six and eight hours a day, whilst one in ten reported sleeping for over eight hours a day. Participants who slept for less than six hours or more than eight hours were more likely to be older, women and less active.

Over the almost ten year period of the study, 346 participants suffered a stroke, either non-fatal or fatal stroke. After adjusting for various factors including age and sex, the researchers found that people who slept longer than eight hours a day were at a 46% greater risk of stroke than average. People who slept less than six hours a day were at an 18% increased risk, but the small number of people falling in this category meant the association was not statistically significant*.

Participants who reported persistently long sleep – in other words, they reported sleeping over eight hours when asked at both points of the study – were at double the risk of stroke compared to those with persistently average sleep duration (between six and eight hours a day). This risk was even greater for those whose reported sleep increased from short to long over the four years – their risk was close to four times that of people who maintained an average sleep duration.

In addition to studying the EPIC-Norfolk cohort, the researchers carried out a study of combined data from 11 other studies related to identify the association between sleep duration and patterns of stroke risk. Their final analysis, including 560,000 participants from seven countries, supported the findings from the EPIC-Norfolk cohort study.

Yue Leng, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, says: “It’s apparent both from our own participants and the wealth of international data that there’s a link between sleeping longer than average and a greater risk of stroke. What is far less clear, however, is the direction of this link, whether longer sleep is a symptom, an early marker or a cause of cardiovascular problems.”

While older people have less work and fewer social demands and therefore often have the option of sleeping longer, previous research has shown that in fact, they tend to sleep on average for shorter periods.

The researchers say it is unclear yet why the link between sleep and stroke risk should exist. Lack of sleep has been linked with factors such as disrupted metabolism and raised levels of the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol, all of which may lead to higher blood pressure and increased stroke risk. However, the current study suggests that the association between longer sleep duration and higher risk of stroke was independent of normal risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Professor Kay-Tee Khaw, senior author on the study, adds: “We need to understand the reasons behind the link between sleep and stroke risk. What is happening in the body that causes this link? With further research, we may find that excessive sleep proves to be an early indicator of increased stroke risk, particularly among older people.”

The study was supported by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.

*The absolute risk of stroke was 4.1% for less than six hours’ sleep, 3.1% for six to eight hours, and 5.3% for over eight hours. Note: these figures are before adjustment for age, sex, etc. – figures for after adjustment were not available.

Reference
Leng, Y et al. Sleep duration and risk of fatal and nonfatal stroke: A prospective study and meta-analysis. Neurology; 25 Feb 2015

While the prevalence of smoking in pregnancy has declined, it remains high amongst more socially deprived groups. In England, one in eight (12%) of women smoke throughout pregnancy, ranging from one in 200 (0.5%) in areas of low deprivation to one in four (27%) in areas of high deprivation. A recent review found that financial incentive schemes to be the single most effective intervention for encouraging women to stop smoking during pregnancy. However, this work was based on a few small trials in the USA and only measured smoking cessation after one week.

In order to assess the potential effectiveness of financial incentives and inform their use in clinical practice – and also to see to what extent it leads to mothers ‘gaming’ the system – researchers carried out a study of women attending antenatal clinics at a hospital in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, an area of high deprivation. 239 pregnant women – two out of five women who attended the clinic – enrolled into the financial incentives scheme.

At each visit to the antenatal clinic, the women were asked if they had smoked since the last visit and were given a carbon monoxide breath test (which showed positive if the individual had smoked in the preceding few hours). If they had not smoked, they were given a shopping voucher – the first voucher was worth £8 and the value increased by £1 for each visit up, providing a potential maximum of £752 in vouchers. Testing positive for smoking resulted in the incentive being withheld at that visit and the value being reset to £8 for the next visit; following two consecutive test results indicating no smoking, the incentive was re-set to the highest point attained prior to the lapse.

The researchers also used saliva samples from the women to assess at time of delivery and then six months later whether the women had stopped smoking, complemented with urinary and saliva tests at enrolment, 28 and 36 weeks into pregnancy and then two days and six months after the birth of their child.

Of the women who enrolled into the scheme, 143 received at least one voucher, suggesting that they had attempted to quit. One in five of the women (48 women) had managed to quit by the time of delivery. 25 women (10%) were still not smoking six months after the birth of their child. This compared to the previous year, when only a very small number of women (less than 1%) were recorded as having stopped smoking. In all cases, women from areas of highest deprivation were the least likely to succeed in quitting. Urinary or salivary tests suggested that ten women (4%) had smoked cigarettes whilst claiming vouchers.

Professor Theresa Marteau from the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, said: “We all know of the dangers of smoking, particularly during pregnancy, but quitting can be extremely difficult. Offering financial incentives clearly works for some women – with very few ‘gaming’ the system and a significant number stopping smoking at least for the duration of their pregnancy.”

Julie Hirst, Public Health Principal at Derbyshire County Council, said: “Giving every child the best start in life is crucial to promoting health and reducing health inequalities across the life course. Helping pregnant women to quit smoking is one of the most effective ways to achieve both of these outcomes. The health benefits for these babies and their mothers will be felt for the rest of their lives.

“Smoking is very addictive and these women have done incredibly well to quit. The incentive scheme gave them that bit of extra help that made all the difference. As a Council we are committed to extending this scheme the other areas of Derbyshire where there is a higher than average prevalence of smoking in pregnancy.”

In total, £37,490 was spent on the financial incentive, which the researchers believe is likely to prove an acceptable ratio of cost to benefit. Based on modelling of other interventions for smoking cessation in pregnancy, they argue it is most likely that these schemes would fall within the acceptable range of cost effectiveness set by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

Diana Ierfino from the Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, King’s College London, added: “The big question will be whether offering financial incentives is economically viable. Our estimates suggest that the ratio of cost to benefit is likely to be acceptable, given the financial implications of treating the health consequences of smoking.

“However, before a scheme like this is rolled out nationwide, there is still work to be done to understand the amount, frequency of type of incentives that would be most effective.”

The scheme was funded by NHS Derbyshire County Primary Care Trust and Derbyshire County Council, with funding for the evaluation coming from the Wellcome Trust.

Reference
Ierfino, D et al. Financial incentives for smoking cessation in pregnancy: a single arm intervention study assessing cessation and gaming. Addiction; 26 Feb.

The finding is one of the outcomes of research using a powerful new genetic tool that mimics the behaviour of certain anti-inflammatory drugs. The technique allows researchers to study the effects of inhibiting interleukin-1, a master regulator of inflammation, on a range of different outcomes not yet investigated in clinical trials.

Interleukin-1 plays a central role in regulating the body’s inflammatory response, setting off a cascade of signals within the body against infection and other damage. Certain drugs, such as anakinra, reduce inflammation by blocking interleukin-1. This action also occurs naturally in individuals who carry particular genetic variants.

Although inflammation is meant to be protective, a disproportionate response can be damaging to the body – for example, causing potentially life-threatening symptoms seen in severe cases of influenza infection. It also plays a crucial role in a number of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Although scientists suspected that it would also be likely to increase risk of cardiovascular disease, until now little evidence existed to confirm or disprove this suggestion.

To examine the long-term implications of blocking this pathway, researchers from the Interleukin-1 Genetics Consortium developed a ‘genetic score’ to combine the effects of two of these natural genetic variants. They looked at the effect of this score on key biological indicators of inflammation, comparing it to the effect of anakinra. They investigated this score in relation to several medical conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and coronary heart disease by analysing data from over a million individuals.

The researchers found that individuals who carried the genetic variants – in other words, had naturally-occurring interleukin-1 inhibition – showed a decreased risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis. This was as anticipated: anakinra is one of the drugs used to treat the condition. The variants had no impact on the risks of developing type 2 diabetes or ischaemic stroke.

Surprisingly, however, blocking interleukin-1 increased an individual’s risk of developing coronary heart disease: the risk of a heart attack was 15% higher in people who inherited a greater tendency to block interleukin-1. The researchers also observed raised levels of LDL-cholesterol – so-called ‘bad cholesterol’ – in these individuals, which may explain some of this increased risk.

Blocking interleukin-1 also increased an individual’s risk of developing abdominal aortic aneurysm, a swelling of the main blood vessel that leads away from the heart, down through the abdomen to the rest of the body; one in 50 deaths amongst men over 65 years of age is due to such an aneurysm rupturing.

Although anakinra has been tested in clinical trials and shown to be effective in treating symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, there has been little research into its effect on coronary heart disease. This is, in part, because of the complexity of studying heart disease and the number of individuals and length of study required in order for an effect to become apparent. By studying naturally-occurring interleukin-1 inhibition, the researchers have been able to infer that the drug could potentially elevate the risk of coronary heart disease and abdominal aortic aneurysms.

Professor John Danesh from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, who leads the consortium, says: “Drugs such as anakinra are licensed for the treatment of inflammatory conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, but we know little about the long-term health consequences of blocking interleukin-1.

“Our approach was to use ‘nature’s randomised trial’ to get answers currently beyond the resolution of drug trials. Our genetic analysis suggests, surprisingly, that blocking interleukin-1 over the long-term could increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases.”

Dr Daniel Freitag, lead author of the study, also at the University of Cambridge, adds: “The common view is that inflammation promotes the development of heart disease – we’ve shown that the truth is clearly more complicated. We need to be careful that drugs like anakinra that aim to tackle rheumatoid arthritis by inhibiting interleukin-1 do not have unintended consequences on an individual’s risk of heart disease.”

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, which helped fund the study, said: “It is important to remember that this is not a study of an anti-arthritis drug but a gene that can mimic its effects. The effects of a gene are lifelong, whereas a drug only affects a person while it is being taken.

“Nevertheless the study suggests that patients who are prescribed anakinra should have their cardiovascular risk factors carefully managed by their doctor.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council, the British Heart Foundation, the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the European Research Council and the European Commission Framework Programme.

Reference
The Interleukin-1 Genetics Consortium. Cardiometabolic consequences of genetic up-regulation of the interleukin-1 receptor antagonist: Mendelian randomisation analysis. Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. 26 February, 2015.

In the spring of 1991 Franck Billé sat in a north London cinema watching the movie Urga. Nikita Mikhalkov’s award-winning film tells the story of the unlikely friendship that develops between a Russian truck driver and a Mongolian herder. Billé, a Russian language student at the University of Westminster, was captivated by the movie’s narrative and the stunning landscapes. He decided that, instead of going to Moscow for the semester abroad required by his course, he would travel to Ulaanbaatar.

A few months later Billé flew in to Mongolia’s capital city airport where he was met by the local family he was going to stay with. His knowledge of Mongolia, a country three times the size of France, was confined to what he had read in the Lonely Planet guidebook. “I spoke fluent Russian but only a few words of Mongolian which I’d picked up from an old conversation book,” he says. All this was to change as he immersed himself in Mongolian culture, and began studying the language.

Today Billé is one of around a dozen researchers based in the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at the University of Cambridge. Recently published books by Billé and his MIASU colleague Dr Christopher Kaplonski make important contributions to the scholarship that has emerged from MIASU since its establishment in 1986. Both books are the outcome of recent fieldwork in Mongolia and both deal with universal human issues that are deeply uncomfortable. A launch of the books takes place at Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge next Tuesday (3 March 2015).

In Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity, Franck Billé explores the identity of a country that feels increasingly under pressure from its booming southern neighbour. The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia by Christopher Kaplonski challenges accepted narratives about the violent crushing of the Buddhist establishment in the 1930s as the monasteries that had dominated life for centuries were torn apart.

With a population of 2.8 million, Mongolia shares a border with two of the world’s foremost powers which have long played a pivotal role in its identity. Russia, lying to Mongolia’s north, is a declining player on the global stage. China, to its south, is a flourishing economy hungry for the resources that Mongolia possesses – notably coal, copper and gold.

From his first visit, Billé was fascinated by the politics of Mongolian nationalism and how this informs the country’s relationships with its neighbours. His initial encounter with the country took place just eight years after its liberation from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had held the country in a tight grip for 70 years and had presided over the dismantlement of Mongolia’s traditional nomadic society, a process that saw many thousands of deaths.

Primed by dire warnings in the pages of his guidebook, Billé was nervous that as a Russian-speaking stranger, he would be unwelcome. His fears were unfounded. Instead, he was struck by the lack of post-socialist resentment shown by the Mongolians he met, including the family with whom he lodged. Yet, as Buriads, a Mongolian ethnic group living mostly in the Russian Federation to the north of Mongolia, their community had suffered tremendously, particularly in the political purges of the 1930s. Many of those considered to be ‘intellectuals’ were Buriad and, as ‘enemies of the people,’ they were deported to Siberia, never to be seen again.

Why, wondered Billé, were the Mongolians so apparently accepting of their recent history as a nation until the control of an outside force?  “Russians have made mistakes but generally their presence was positive. They brought a lot of good things,” he was told by his hosts in Ulaanbaatar. These good things included forms of ‘high culture’ (such as ballet, opera, urban living) and protection from Chinese territorial ambitions.

On each successive visit, Billé became increasingly aware of the striking differences in Mongolian attitudes to its neighbours – and modern Mongolia’s discourses about China form the backbone of his book. Over the course of his fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, he has built up a picture of a nation whose identity is contingent on a deeply-entrenched distrust and dislike of its Chinese neighbours – a phenomenon described as Sinophobia.

Since Mongolia’s southern border reopened in the early 1990s, the Chinese have invested heavily in Mongolia, quickly becoming its main trade partner. Mongolia’s coal resources were crucial to China’s rapid growth. In turn, China has been able to supply household goods that are no longer available in Russia. While the Mongolians have undoubtedly benefited from their position on the border with China, they have remained deeply suspicious of their southern neighbour’s intentions. China is suspected of sending men to reproduce with Mongolian women and dilute the gene pool. Chinese vegetables are said to be purposefully poisoned. It is even rumoured that China is biding its time to take over the country.

“In the west, we see Mongolia as part of Asia, its people and culture enmeshed with those of its neighbours. But this is not how the Mongolians see themselves. They draw a clear line between themselves and other Asians, particularly the Chinese. Because Mongolians are so keen to deny any cultural and ethnic overlap, to be called Chinese is perceived as a great insult,” says Billé.

“It’s common to hear derogatory statements about the Chinese and to see insulting graffiti. Hip hop songs, in particular, have been an important vector of national pride and anti-Chinese sentiments. Tourists visiting Mongolia may well return home with little idea of the level of anti-Chinese sentiments but anyone who can read and understand Mongolian will be immediately aware of the Sinophobia that pervades public discourse.”

At its most extreme, Sinophobia takes the form of Dayaar Mongol (All Mongolia), a far-right nationalist group.  In 2009, Dayaar Mongol  signalled its disapproval of Sino-Mongolian relationships by posting a video of a woman with her hair shorn as punishment for the ‘crime’ of having sex with a Chinese man.

“These extreme groups do not enjoy widespread support and are generally seen as hooligans. But, for the vast majority of Mongolians, dislike of China isn’t seen as racist. It is perceived primarily as self-defence. Voicing criticisms of the Chinese is functionally equivalent to a patriotic statement,” says Billé.

“Many Mongolians will confide in private that they do not have anything against the Chinese. However, making such statements in public would render them suspect. They would be seen as unpatriotic and potentially traitors. And they would also be suspected of being part Chinese.”

Christopher Kaplonski comes to the subject of his book, which explores the violence again Buddhist monks in Mongolia in the 1930s, culminating in genocide, as an anthropologist interested in the way in which nations and individuals build narratives around political violence and its aftermath.  Kaplonski was one of the first Western anthropologists to carry out fieldwork in Mongolia. He has worked on collective memory, political violence, identity, and coming to terms with the past. 

Kaplonksi’s research covers the dynamics of political conflict, as well as the processes of social-political reconstruction in coming to terms with the past. In the turbulent period covered by his book, The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia, the newly-installed socialist government  sought to break the power of the Buddhist establishment, and establish Mongolia as the world’s second socialist country, following the Soviet Union itself.

In doing so, the socialists waged a decade and a half long struggle from the early 1920s to the late 1930s to win the hearts and minds of the Mongolian populace, deploying a wide variety of measures, such as propaganda, punitive taxes and eventually mass killings. 

In particular, Kaplonski looks at the execution of approximately 18,000 Buddhist priests and how this dark episode has been absorbed into Mongolia’s history. Most significantly, he complicates the accepted narrative that Joseph Stalin ordered the execution of lamas and that the Mongolian government and the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, as agents of a nation under the thumb of Choibalsan, had no choice but to carry out the directives of a Communist dictator.

The phrase ‘the lama question’ (lam naryn asuudal in Mongolian) is the term the socialist government itself used to signify the struggle between the socialist government and religious establishment of Mongolia.

Buddhism, in the shape of over 700 monasteries populated by some 80,000 lamas, had for centuries exerted an influence that extended deep into politics, economics and everyday life, rather in the same way that Roman Catholicism dominated pre-Reformation Europe. Often seen as backward and corrupt, even by reforming Buddhists, the Buddhist establishment represented an almost insurmountable challenge to the socialists determined to bring their vision of modernity and progress to Mongolia.

“One of the things that intrigued me most, from an academic point of view, was the fact that the violence took so long to erupt. Political violence is often seen as a tool of first resort for totalitarian governments the world over, but in Mongolia, it was a step they avoided taking for over a decade and a half. The book is an attempt to answer this question: why did it take so long,” says Kaplonski.

In the space of just 18 months, between late 1937 and mid-1939, many thousands of lamas were sentenced to death and shot. All but a handful of the monasteries across the country were destroyed – and with them countless numbers of religious artefacts, books and culture were lost to future generations.  It is estimated that a further 18,000 people, many of them Buriads, were also killed during a period which is portrayed in both Mongolian and Western history as an episode sparked by Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’. 

A chance discovery in the Mongolian National Central Archives in Ulaanbaatar of a trial against leading Buddhist monks prompted Kaplonski to begin the painstaking task of piecing together a story that conflicts with the narrative that most Mongolians recount if they are asked about the repressions and mass killings of the 1930s.

Intrigued by what he read, Kaplonski set about improving his grasp of Mongol bichig (the classic Mongolian script in use at the time ) and from 2008 to 2011 he spent months sifting through documents held in the Central Archives in and other archives. He also visited some of the surviving monasteries, since restored, and interviewed a wide range of people, those who had lost relatives, had been monks themselves, or grew up next to the ruins of a monastery.

“Day after day, I sat under a window in the Central Archives and ploughed through piles of government resolutions and reports in what often seemed like a fruitless exercise, occasionally rewarded by the appearance of a document that provided a key piece of the puzzle – such as a letter between top officials wondering what to do with the monasteries now that they were all empty,” says Kaplonski.

“The organisation of the archives is fairly rudimentary – for example, there is no cross-referencing of files. On top of that, the archives of the secret police, which hold the case files themselves, are closed to foreign, and most Mongolian, researchers.”

Kaplonski’s extraordinary determination bore fruit in 2008 when he was given permission to obtain copies of ‘rehabilitation documents’ from the secret police (known as the Dotood Yam) archives. His coup meant that he was able to add a small but important piece to the giant puzzle of the lama question.

A close reading of the ‘rehabilitation’ documents enabled Kaplonski to build a more detailed picture of the process by which people could apply to have their relatives cleared of the charges laid against them in the 1930s. This process, essentially a re-examination of the original case, not only brought closure to those who never knew what happened to their relatives, but the documents also provided key details to the bureaucracy and reasoning behind the mass killings.

The personal stories of the countless lamas who were killed, or fled into the countryside, will never fully be told.  “Monastic records for the 1930s simply do not exist,” says Kaplonski. “Such documents were either destroyed by the state or by the monks themselves as their impending fate became evident.  Few Mongolians at this period wrote letters or kept diaries. Oral histories and reminiscences can give a personal account of a particular experience but not in the detail required to build a more comprehensive understanding of how and why what took place happened.”

Most other scholars have simply portrayed the events of the 1930s as Stalin’s Great Terror spilling over into Mongolia. Kaplonski has taken the inquiry still deeper into uncomfortable territory. His conclusion that the Mongolian secret police and government bureaucracies who carried out the monitoring and eventual killings of lamas, and others, had more agency than has been publically acknowledged will grate with popular Mongolian narratives for a period that, for many older citizens, falls within well living memory.

“Blaming Stalin allows unpleasant and potentially divisive issues of responsibility and guilt to be avoided.  Few Mongolians, or other academics have questioned this view. Difficult questions about the agency of Mongolians in the killings for the most part haven’t really been asked,” he says.

“Indeed, it is reported that the archives of the security services remain closed precisely because to open them up would be devastating in a country where social networks are tightly intertwined and where it would not be a surprising for a descendent of a repressed person to know the descendants of his or her repressors.”

Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity by Franck Billé and The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia by Christopher Kaplonski are both published by University of Hawai’i Press. Both books will be launched at an event at Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge on 3 March 2015, 6.30-8.00pm. Booking not required but please RSVP to david.robinson@blackwells.co.uk.

MIASU was established in 1986 by the distinguished anthropologist Professor Caroline Humphrey. Ever since, it has played a pivotal role in the careers of researchers from all over the world seeking to understand this little known yet strategic region.

MIASU also facilitates visits from Mongolian and Tibetan scholars who typically stay in Cambridge for a few months, giving them the opportunity to access specialist and rare material in Cambridge University Library and discuss their research with colleagues at Cambridge.

Inset images: ger in Ulaanbaatar selling fermented mare's milk and horse meat (Franck Billé), street scene in Ulaanbaatar (Chris Kaplonski), anti-Chinese graffiti: Mongolians let's kill Chinese (Billé), Baruun Hüree, a Mongolian monastery in Övörhangai province, sutra (books) said to have been buried during socialism and later retrieved, two high-ranking lamas (foreground) on trial as counter-revolutionaries, 1937 (all Kaplonski).

There has been a revolution in optical microscopy and it’s been 350 years in the making. Ever since Robert Hooke published his Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies in 1665, the microscope has opened up the world in miniature. But it has also been limited by the wavelength of light.

Anything smaller than the size of a bacterial cell (around 250 nanometres) appears as a blurred blob through an optical microscope, simply because light waves spread when they are focused on a tiny spot. As a result, resolving two tiny spots that lie close together has been tantalisingly out of reach using an optical microscope. Unfortunately, many biological interactions occur at a spatial scale much smaller than this.

But, thanks to recent breakthroughs, a new era of super-resolution microscopy has begun. The developments earned inventors Eric Betzig and William E Moerner (USA) and Stefan Hell (Germany) the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and are based on clever physical tricks that work around the problem of light diffraction.

Professor Clemens Kaminski, whose team in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology designs and builds super-resolution microscopes to study Alzheimer’s disease, explained: “The technology is based on a conceptual change, a different way of thinking about how we resolve tiny structures. By imaging blobs of light at separate points in time, we are able to discriminate them spatially, and thus prevent image blur.”

Imagine taking a photo of a tree lit by the glow of ten thousand tiny lights scattered over its branches. The emission from each light would overlap. At best you would see a fuzzy, glowing shape lacking in detail. But if you were to switch on only a few lights at a time, locate the centre of each glow and take a picture, and then repeat this process thousands of times for different lights, the composite image would resolve into a myriad of distinguishable dots, denoting the exact position of each individual light on the tree.

This is analogous to the techniques developed by the Nobel Prize winners: in one technique, a sample is tagged with light-activated markers called fluorophores that can be switched on and off with pulses of light, like a switchable light bulb; in another, the light at the outer edges of each blob of light is selectively blocked.

Either way, by imaging a sparse subset of lights, they can be localised with nanometre precision. When combined, a picture starts to emerge that features a resolution that is 10 to 100 times better than previously possible.

“It’s been hailed as revolutionary because it means that biologists can validate some of their hypotheses for the first time,” said Dr Kevin O’Holleran who co-leads the Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre (CAIC), which is currently building two super-resolution microscopes. “Although electron microscopy has very high resolution, it can’t be performed on live cells. With super-resolution optical microscopy, scientists can track molecular processes as they happen and in three dimensions.”

Meanwhile, Dr Steven Lee and Professor David Klenerman in the Department of Chemistry have built what they believe is the first 3D super-resolution microscope of its kind in Europe. They are using the machine to watch the organisation of cell-surface proteins at the point when an immune cell is triggered into action. Before super-resolution, they needed to artificially reduce the number of proteins on the cell surface to make visualisation easier; now, they can work with normal levels of up to 10,000 proteins at a time on the cell surface. 

“These exciting discoveries have emerged through years of painstaking  research by physical scientists trying to better understand how light interacts with matter at a fundamental level,” explained Lee. “This work has enabled us to gain insight into biological processes by simply ‘looking’ at dynamic events at spatial scales that much better approximate the physical dimension that biomolecules interact on.”

Kaminski’s team has been visualising the ultrastructure of the clumps of misfolded proteins that cause Alzheimer’s disease. “We’d like to study what causes proteins to become toxic when they aggregate, and visualise them as they move from cell to cell to see whether there are opportunities early in the process to halt their progression.”

Like any fast-moving and transformative technology, super-resolution microscopy has required researchers to drive forward the capabilities of the lenses and light sources, as well as the chemistry of the fluorophores and the mathematical algorithms for image analysis. As a result, designing and building their own microscopes, rather than waiting for commercial devices to become available, has been the best option.

“The field is dynamic and no instrument is exactly right for the questions you want to answer. We have to build the instrument around the science,” explained Dr George Sirinakis, who works with Professor Daniel St Johnston in the Gurdon Institute. His machines will be used to understand cell polarity and visualise the movement of thousands of tiny sacs called vesicles as they transport their cargo within cells. This process has never been seen before because the vesicles are so small and move fast.

No longer are these benchtop machines. Super-resolution microscopes resemble an army of lenses and mirrors marching across a table top, each minutely turning, concentrating and shaping the light beam that falls onto the sample stained with fluorescence markers. Tens of thousands of images are collected from any one sample – creating a deluge of ‘big data’ that requires complex mathematical algorithms to make sense of the information.

Quite simply, super-resolution microscopy is a feat of engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and biology, and it’s therefore out of reach to researchers who lack the necessary expertise or funds to take a step into this field.

CAIC has recently been created to meet super-resolution and other microscopy needs in the biological sciences. “We are a research and development facility. We have state-of-the- art commercial microscopes and we build our own, tailoring them to the needs of the biologists who come to us as a service facility or as a collaborative venture,” explained O’Holleran, who estimates that around 100 researchers will become part of the CAIC community.

“We’re also a hub. We connect researchers who’ve built their own devices and we train PhD students in the cross-disciplinary skills needed for cutting-edge imaging.”

CAIC, Klenerman, Kaminski and others have now been awarded funding as part of the Next Generation Microscopy Initiative Programme led by the Medical Research Council to help establish Cambridge as a national centre of excellence in microscopy. Part of this funding is being used for the two new super-resolution microscopes currently being built in CAIC.

The researchers hope that super-resolution microscopes will one day become the workhorse of biology, allowing ever-deeper probing of living structures. Breaking the diffraction barrier of light had seemed an insurmountable barrier until recent years. With continuing advances, biologists are beginning to look beyond imaging single cells to the possibility of moving through tissues, tracking the movement of molecules in three dimensions and visualising the process of life unfolding.

Inset image: What was once a fuzzy glow (left of image) can now be super-resolved (right) even if, as here, the structures are smaller than the wavelength of light; credit: Laurie Young, Florian Stroehl and Clemens Kaminski

The recent release of the report from the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy attracted significant attention but really only for one of the 26 recommendations. The report contained much that was good, some that was pedestrian, but it has all been swept away because one recommendation was of a different stripe altogether – to have online secure voting as an option in the UK by 2020.

Before getting into the detail of the report we should get one thing out of the way. This is a report that was long overdue, whether it came from the Speaker, a Select Committee or another part of the mangle that is government. With the speed that online has come to dominate our personal and professional interactions, it was a glaring omission that the UK government and the Parliament in particular had not addressed the digital world, their role in it and how it can be used to improve democratic outcomes. Granted the Government Digital Service (GDS) is working hard to improve how government services are accessed, although it is best to not get into an argument about whether gov.uk is an improvement or not (as Chris Cook did with his Christmas wish for 2014). However, anything that starts a stronger debate on how the machinery of government interacts with the public and policymaking is a good thing.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Many of the recommendations are not specifically about digital, they are about democracy. “By 2020, the House of Commons should ensure that everyone can understand what it does.” You would have hoped that this would at least have been as aspiration for some time now. Reducing the amount of jargon, making procedures clearer, having a communications strategy – it is frustrating that we are still at such an early point in the evolution of the House and its relationship to the outside world that these actions are pending.

Efforts to improve public participation in policy making depends on people wishing to be involved, as well as assuming we have a shared model of how representation works. On the first point, our recent survey highlighted an expressed desire to be involved, which we included as part of our submission to the Commission. According to the poll while 7% of the public feel engaged in decision making in Parliament, 53% want to be involved. Now that number may be soft, as it is easy to say you want to be involved but actually being involved is another thing. Assuming half of those who express the desire to be involved would actually get involved, that’s a 19 point difference between the current state of affairs and what people want. If new digital tools, clearer websites and better outreach help in that regard, fantastic.

The concern here is raising expectations that cannot be met. This is the case with recommendation 18 to have a ‘cyber chamber’ for public debate on issues being discussed in Parliament. The desire to be involved has been translated by some as ‘getting my way’. To caricature, when I tell my MP what should be done I expect that to happen. If we promote engagement such as that involved in a ‘cyber chamber’ without clarifying the process of discussion, negotiation and compromise that happens in almost all policy areas, then we’ll be raising expectations that will be dashed, potentially worsening the situation further.

This leads to the second point on representation – how do we think representation works in the UK at the national level? Crudely the options have been characterised as having delegates (MPs who take our views onboard as issues arise), trustees (MPs who can use their judgement on an issue), or party (where the party line is all). Is the approach in the report to tilt towards a delegate model of representation? It’s unclear reading the report. Without discussing how the link between the public and their representatives is construed, the report missed an opportunity to have a more fundamental conversation about the structure of the UK’s democratic system.

And then there is recommendation 26. Once the Commission’s report was released the news picked up on this to the exclusion of pretty much everything else in the report. From the BBC to the newspapers, the response was to acknowledge some of the good things in the report, but to be critical of the need for online voting. Is online voting necessary? Will having online voting improve turnout or improve the connectivity between the public and MPs? The answer to both questions is that we don’t know. The Commission says it is “… confident that there is a substantial appetite for online voting in the UK …” but does not present any evidence to back this statement up. The claim is that voting will become more accessible, but there is no evidence that even if it is more accessible that it will increase the rates of voting, or the subsequent engagement or satisfaction of the public with politics.

Overall the Commission should be regarded as successful in getting a conversation going on the modernisation of Parliament and its procedures. Letting in the sunlight should help increase trust and hopefully improve the speed and quality of policy making. However, this does seem to be an opportunity missed to have a deeper conversation on the nature of representation in the UK, and in a report with too many recommendations a mistake to allow one recommendation to overshadow all of the others.

Finbarr Livesey provided a submission to the Digital Democracy Commission on public engagement with policy making which can be accessed here.

This post was originally published on the blog site for the Cambridge Masters in Public Policy. Read more here. 

In 1999 Mary had a stroke, leaving her permanently paralysed down one side. She was 75. She had worked as a school secretary for most of her life and had seldom been in hospital. Mary’s daughter Alison moved her mother into a private residential home with an outstanding local reputation, where the costs of her 24-hour care were paid for by money raised by the sale of Mary’s small retirement flat. 

Mary lived a further 17 years and was visited by Alison most days. Within ten years, Mary’s assets had fallen below the threshold for self-funding. Alison applied to the local authority which took over the funding of her mother’s care. Because her mother was a long-term resident, the home ‘waived’ the difference (around £400 per week) between its charge and the sum provided by the local authority. The policy of this particular home meant that Mary (unlike many others in similar circumstances) was able to remain in familiar surroundings until she died.

The story of Mary and Alison is the kind of narrative that concerns Dr Brian Sloan, a legal scholar whose background lies mainly within family law and the law of succession. Sloan is currently an Early Career Research Fellow at CRASSH where he is looking at adult social care and property rights within the context of the changes being introduced as the Care Act of 2014 is given effect in England.

“My interest in the topic stems in part from the fact that discussions about social care touch on so many disciplines,” says Sloan. “The questions raised can be looked at from a wide range of viewpoints – historical, cultural and anthropological, and philosophical as well as legal. Society faces a huge challenge in devising a system that’s sustainable and apportions financial burdens in a way that is considered fair.”

Sloan is one of the first legal scholars to be looking at the 2014 Care Act and property rights in relation to the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions as set out in the European Convention on Human Rights. In doing so, he is building on his previous work on ‘informal’ care (provided by family and friends), much of which is contained in his monograph Informal Carers and Private Law (Hart Publishing, 2013).

“The relationship between adult social care and property rights is a largely neglected area of the law despite its implications for millions of people,” says Sloan. “I suppose there is a natural reluctance to address what seems a rather less than jolly subject – and families often confront issues about payment for care and inheritance during a period of crisis, which might weaken their position.”

The population is ageing: it is projected that by 2035 almost a quarter of the UK population will be aged 65 or over. The question of who should pay for the care of the frail and the vulnerable, whether the individual or the state, is being hotly debated.  In terms of practicalities, much of the discussion centres on the relationship between healthcare (broadly free at the point of delivery by the NHS) and social care (which is means-tested).

The difference between the two systems, healthcare and social care, is not widely understood among the population. The blurring of the boundaries between the two can result in decisions that appear arbitrary. As a recent report from the King’s Fund pointed out , ‘people with conditions that can involve very similar burdens – cancer and advanced dementia, for example – end up making very different contributions to the cost of their care’. 

The difference in contributions arises from the distinction made between the two conditions: while cancer is regarded as largely a health problem, dementia is regarded largely as a matter for social care.  The cost of that social care – such as help with dressing and feeding – will be apportioned between the local authority and the individual on the basis of an individual’s assets. These assets can include the individual’s home, depending upon who else is living there.

In essence, the National Health Act 2006 imposes a duty on a clinical commissioning group to provide health care services to patients to such extent as it considers necessary to meet all reasonable requirements.  Before the Care Act, however, the social care system was governed by a confusing patchwork of legislation that, for example, imposed arbitrary distinctions between residential and other types of care.  It also left particular local authorities with a large amount of discretion, much of which was governed by principles contained in mere guidance rather than in legislation.

The 2014 Care Act consolidates, updates and clarifies earlier legislation covering the provision of adult social care, including the matter of financial responsibilities. For example, it will make changes to the criteria used for means-testing in making decisions about the provision of care. At present people with assets over £23,250 are broadly ineligible for state support and will often need to fund their own care. The Care Act will ultimately raise this threshold to £118,000 (where an individual’s home is included in the assessment). The level below which people are entitled to free care is due to be raised from £14,250 to £17,000.

A cap will be introduced which will, for the first time, limit the lifetime care costs that an individual will have to bear. The cap is expected to be £72,000 and will be adjusted annually to account for inflation. This figure will relate to actual care costs only.  ‘General living costs’, either in a domestic or residential setting, will not count towards the cap. For this reason among others, the number of people benefiting from the cap is likely to be less than 20% of the elderly population. “The cap will provide an important element of reassurance,” says Sloan, “but its overall impact will be quite limited.”

Another key change is the introduction of universal deferred payment agreements (DPAs). Hitherto available only on a discretionary basis, a DPA allows payment of social care costs to be deferred (effectively via a secured loan) until a certain point, such as the death of the care recipient or the sale of his/her home. Local authorities will be effectively obliged to offer DPAs to adults whose needs are met in a care home and have no more than £23,250 in assets excluding the value of their home.

Sloan explains: “DPAs are designed to prevent people from having to sell their homes during their own lives in order to pay for their care, and that is laudable.  For a family and succession lawyer like me, however, it is significant that property subject to the charge will probably still be sold after death to pay for the care.  This will affect the putative inheritance of the care recipient’s family members, who may have suffered disadvantages in the course of providing informal care.”

The Care Act has been broadly welcomed. However, as Sloan points out, many aspects of it are shrouded in complexity and controversy. “Its statutory “well-being” principle does not appear to require any particular action to be taken in a specific circumstance and, despite useful clarification of the law, it is not likely to produce a widespread change to practice in a system that characterised by stretched resources. It is also likely that many people will have to pay a considerable sum towards care costs even once the new scheme is implemented,” he says.

For generations, concepts of property and family have been deeply entwined. Familial relationships are often cemented (or fractured) by assumptions (often unspoken) about inheritance of property. In the past, the elderly were typically cared for by an unmarried daughter who forsook other possibilities. The tacit understanding behind the arrangement might have been that the daughter would inherit the family home or at least sufficient funds to keep a roof over her head for her own lifetime.

Today’s societal structures are such that most women work outside the home, families are often geographically dispersed, and old-fashioned notions of ‘duty’ have shifted. The price of paid-for care is so great that many older people find that the costs they incur in being looked after (for example, in a residential home) eat into their assets and, in many instances, mean that (like Mary) they are unable to pass on their properties to their chosen successors.

Assessment for financial accountability for social care costs depends on ownership of assets. So what would have happened if Mary had given her flat to her daughter Alison before she had a stroke?  Would Mary’s care costs have been covered in part by her local authority?  The answer is likely to have been no: the value of the disposed property would have been taken into account at the time of assessment, even if the transfer of assets had occurred several years earlier.

In the course of his research Sloan has been looking at cases in which an individual has disposed of property with the result that his or her assets fell below the threshold for care contributions. In cases where local authorities have contested the figures submitted during assessment, a number of courts have found in favour of the local authority, holding (among other things) that the regulations covered ‘any transfer made at any time’ so long as it was undertaken for the purpose of decreasing the amount an individual might have to pay for his or her care.

The provision of care on a national scale is a balancing act between needs and resources. We are often reminded that human dignity should be at the centre of debates on how best to care for people. The ‘system’, however, often appears to fail in safeguarding that dignity. In considering the provision of adult social care within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights, Sloan also looks beyond property to explore questions related to the right to respect for private life.

In 2011, former ballet dancer Elaine McDonald pursued her fight for home-based community care right through the UK courts to the European Court of Human Rights. McDonald suffered a stroke that severely limited her mobility, meaning that she could access a commode only with help. Her need to urinate several times a night required the provision of a night-time carer. Her local authority proposed that she used incontinence pads in order to save annual costs of about £22,000.  McDonald was not incontinent and her lawyer argued that the proposal was ‘an intolerable affront to her dignity’.

The European Court of Human Rights was prepared to accept the possibility that the proposed reduction in the level of care provided to McDonald did interfere in principle with her right to respect for her private life (under Article 8 of the Convention). At the same time, however, the Court found that the interference was largely justified.  It was ‘satisfied that the national courts adequately balanced the applicant's personal interests against the more general interest of the competent public authority in carrying out its social responsibility of provision of care to the community at large’.

“In a sense, Elaine McDonald’s case highlights the limits of the Care Act,” says Sloan. “While the Act does clarify the legal framework, it is unlikely that a local authority would be prevented from taking a similar decision in the future.  The Act also does more than the previous law to protect the property rights of care recipients, which is beneficial to them and their would-be heirs.  It should be remembered, however, that if this apparent reduction in liability causes the system to be even more under-resourced, this could lead to local authorities treating more of those who cannot afford to fund their own care in the way that McDonald was treated.”

Sloan will be presenting some preliminary conclusions from his research at a number of conferences in the near future.

One of the first studies to map the impact of deforestation on biodiversity across entire regions of the Amazon has found a clear ‘threshold’ for forest cover below which species loss becomes more rapid and widespread.    

By measuring the loss of a core tranche of dominant species of large and medium-sized mammals and birds, and using the results as a bellwether, the researchers found that for every 10% of forest loss, one to two major species are wiped out.

This is until the threshold of 43% of forest cover is reached, beyond which the rate of biodiversity loss jumps from between two to up to eight major species gone per 10% of disappeared forest.

While current Brazilian law requires individual landowners in the Amazon to retain 80% forest cover, this is rarely achieved or enforced. Researchers say that the focus should be shifted to maintaining 50% cover – just half the forest – but over entire landscapes rather than individual farms, in a bid to stop whole regions losing untold biodiversity by slipping below the 43% threshold at which species loss accelerates.

Unless urgent action is taken to stem deforestation in key areas that are heading towards or have just dipped below the forest cover ‘threshold’ – which, according to the research team’s models, amounts to a third of the Amazon – these areas will suffer the loss of between 31-44% of species by just 2030.  

“These results support the need for a major shift in the scale at which environmental legislation is applied in Brazil and the tropics,” said Dr Jose Manuel Ochoa-Quintero, from Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology, who led the study, published recently in the journal Conservation Biology.

“We need to move from thinking in terms of compliance at a farm scale to compliance at a landscape scale if we are to save as many species as we can from extinction."
  
The researchers worked across an area of the North West Amazon over three million hectares in size. They then divided the region into 1,223 squares of 10,000km, and selected 31 squares representative of the spectrum of forest cover across the region (12-90% cover). 27 squares consisted of private land; only four were protected areas (PAs). PAs were only areas in region with almost complete forest cover. 

Within the 31 squares, researchers analysed the presence of 35 key species of mammals and birds for which these regions are natural habitats, such as pumas, giant anteaters and red howler monkeys. This was done through a combination of direct observation and recording evidence such as footprints and faeces, as well as in-depth interviews with landowners and residents, who were quizzed about species presence through photographs, animal noises and local knowledge.  

They found a cut-off, conservatively given as 43% forest cover, below which the squares held “markedly fewer species”, with up to eight key species lost for every 10% of further deforestation beyond this threshold.  

“This is not just a result of overall loss of habitat, but also reduced connectivity between remaining forest fragments, causing species to hunt and mate in ever-decreasing circles,” said Ochoa-Quintero. “This fragmentation may be the key element of the ‘threshold’ tipping point for biodiversity.”

Encroaching agriculture – from beef to soya production – to feed a growing and more affluent human population means that, at the current rates, the number of 10,000km2 landscapes in the Amazon that fall below the species loss threshold of 43% forest cover will almost double by just 2030. At current rates, by 2030 only a mere 22% of landscapes in the region will be able to sustain three quarters of the key species surveyed for the study.        

The expansion of agriculture in recent decades means that around 41% of the original forest in the study region – some two million hectares – has been lost over just the last 40 years. 

Researchers say that while PAs can counter agricultural expansion – and many have increasingly called for PAs to expand across the planet amid dire evidence of rapid species decline – the limits on land that can be set aside for PAs means that biodiversity conservation success depends on protecting native vegetation on private lands.

The highest priority landscapes, some 33% of land in the region, are those that either just dipped below the 43% threshold in 2010, or are expected to in the next 20 years.

“Avoiding deforestation and focusing reforestation in the areas that teeter on the species loss threshold will be the most direct and cost-effective way to prevent further species loss in the Amazon region,” added Ochoa-Quintero.

Inset image: Local farmer with a Scarlet Macaw (Credit: JM Ochoa-Quintero)

Gaudier-Brzeska moved permanently to London in January 1911. He made a significant contribution to the development of modern sculpture as one of the key members of the Vorticist movement and by influencing a later generation of sculptors.

His precocious artistic talent was cut short by his death at the age of 23 while fighting for the French army in Neuville St Vaast, France, in 1915. As Ezra Pound wrote in 1916: ‘A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist is gone’.

The exhibition, NEW RHYTHMS Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Art Dance and Movement in London 1911-1915, is the first to explore the artist’s engagement with dance and movement. New Rhythms brings together sculpture, drawing, photography, film, and archive material, combining the strengths of Kettle’s Yard’s sculpture and drawing collections with important loans from national and international institutions.

The exhibition includes work by Gaudier-Brzeska’s contemporaries David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Percy Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Auguste Rodin, Helen Saunders and others who engaged with the subject of dance.

Kettle’s Yard holds one of the largest collections of sculptures and drawings by Gaudier-Brzeska, acquired by the creator of Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede in 1929. Ede went on to write the first seminal biography of Gaudier- Brzeska ‘Savage Messiah’ in 1930, using the letters that were exchanged between Gaudier-Brzeska and his partner Sophie Brzeska.

New Rhythms takes as its starting point Gaudier‐ Brzeska’s two contrasting sculptures Red Stone Dancer and Dancer. The exhibition looks in detail at the inspirations for the two sculptures of 1913, using them as studies for a wider exploration of the artist’s interests in the subject and the cultural milieu in which he was working.

For example, his engagement with the dynamic performances of the Ballets Russes is brought to the fore through his bronze Firebird (1912). As well as exploring dance, New Rhythms will investigate the artist’s wider fascination with motion, the physical dynamism of bodily movement, and wrestling.

The new dance trends that exploded onto pre‐war London stages and screens such as Apache dance from Paris and Tango, and performances by the Ballets Russes, will be represented through photographs, printed sources and film.

The show culminates by asking how Gaudier‐Brzeska’s dancers can inspire new rhythms now, through a contemporary dance and music commission. The work by Malgorzata Dzierzon, performed to new music commissioned from emerging composer Kate Whitley, will feature in the exhibition through film.

This will be the final exhibition at Kettle’s Yard before closing for a major development of the site and offers a chance for visitors to enjoy the house and an exhibition intimately linked to it and the permanent collection. It closes on June 21, 2015.

For more about the development plans and off site activity visit www.kettlesyard.co.uk. 

The exhibition will tour with selected works to Harewood House, Leeds, from 11 July to 1 November 2015 and is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

The smaller you are, the harder it is not to spin out of control when you jump. Miniscule errors in propulsive force relative to the centre of mass results in most jumping insects – such as fleas, leafhoppers and grasshoppers – spinning uncontrollably when they jump.

Until now, scientists worked under the hypothesis that such insects can’t control this, and spin unpredictably with frequent crash landings.

But new high-speed video analysis of the jumps of wingless, baby praying mantises has revealed a technique which actually harnesses the spinning motion, enabling them to jump with accuracy at the same time as repositioning their body mid-air to match the intended target – all in under a tenth of a second.

Researchers used a thin black rod distant from the platform on which the mantises sat as a target for them to jump at.

During the jumps, the insects rotated their legs and abdomen simultaneously yet in varying directions – shifting clockwise and anti-clockwise rotations between these body parts in mid-air – to control the angular momentum, or ‘spin’. This allowed them to shift their body in the air to align themselves precisely with the target on which they chose to land.

And the mantises did all of this at phenomenal speed. An entire jump, from take-off to landing, lasted around 80 milliseconds – literally faster than the blink of a human eye.

At first, scientists believed the mantis had simply evolved a way to mitigate the natural spin that occurs when such small insects jump at speed.

On closer inspection, however, they realised the mantis is in fact deliberately injecting controlled spin into the jump at the point of take-off, then manipulating this angular momentum while airborne through intricate rotations of its extremities in order to reposition the body in mid-air, so that it grasps the target with extreme precision.

For the study, published today in the journal Current Biology, the researchers analysed a total of 381 slowed-down videos of 58 young mantises jumping to the target, allowing them to work out the intricate mechanics used to land the right way up and on target virtually every time.  

“We had assumed spin was bad, but we were wrong – juvenile mantises deliberately create spin and harness it in mid-air to rotate their bodies to land on a target,” said study author Professor Malcolm Burrows from Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology, who conducted the research with Dr Gregory Sutton from Bristol University.

“As far as we can tell, these insects are controlling every step of the jump. There is no uncontrolled step followed by compensation, which is what we initially thought,” he said.

In fact, when the researchers moved the target closer, the mantises spun themselves twice as fast to ensure they got their bodies parallel with the target when they grasped it. 

For Sutton, the study is similar to accountancy, only with distribution of momentum instead of money. “The mantis gives itself an amount of angular momentum at take-off and then distributes this momentum while in mid-air: a certain amount in the front leg at one point; a certain amount in the abdomen at another – which both stabilise the body and shift its orientation, allowing it to reach the target at the right angle to grab on,” he said.

The researchers tested what would happen if they restricted the ability of the mantis to harness and spread the ‘spin’ to its extremities during a jump. To do this, they glued the segments of the abdomen together, expecting the mantis to spin out of control.

Intriguingly, the accuracy of the jump wasn’t impeded. The mantises still reached the target, but couldn’t rotate their bodies into the correct position – so crashed headlong into it and bounced off again.

The next big question for the researchers is to understand how the mantis achieves its mid-air acrobatics at such extraordinary speeds. “We can see the mantis performs a scanning movement with its head before a jump. Is it predicting everything in advance or does it make corrections at lightning speed as it goes through the jump? We don’t know the answer between these extreme possibilities,” said Burrows.
 
Sutton added: “We now have a good understanding of the physics and biomechanics of these precise aerial acrobatics. But because the movements are so quick, we need to understand the role the brain is playing in their control once the movements are underway.”

Sutton believes that the field of robotics could learn lessons from the juvenile mantis. “For small robots, flying is energetically expensive, and walking is slow. Jumping makes sense – but controlling the spin in jumping robots is an almost intractable problem. The juvenile mantis is a natural example of a mechanical set-up that could solve this,” he said.

Diseases such as bubonic plague, smallpox, or scurvy, killed so many and caused such misery that they are still household names today, even if for most of us they are things of the past. From an historical perspective, they are also fascinating. By studying these illnesses and their impact, we can understand more about the people for whom such horrors were commonplace and real. Moreover, remarkable and inspiring tales of scientific endeavour are often part of the story of how they were controlled, treated, in some cases cured, and, in the case of smallpox, even eradicated from the globe.

Yet the study of these conditions is about more than simply gleaning historical information from a cabinet of increasingly distant medical curiosities. As time goes by, scientific knowledge is not just informing the work of historians; it is being informed by it. Many modern-day historians of medicine are operating more and more like pathologists and epidemiologists in their efforts to understand what caused the most disastrous pandemics of previous centuries, and how and why they spread. Their work is providing vital new information in the fight against modern-day “plagues”, such as cancer and dementia. More worryingly, it has started to highlight cases where millions died for medical reasons that remain obscure, raising some pressing “what-if” scenarios about our future.

In a new book published this week, Murderous Contagion, the historian of medicine Mary Dobson examines 30 of the biggest killers in the history of humankind, from scourges like the Black Death of the 14th century, to modern epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, and the still-developing Ebola crisis. Rather than simply focusing on the gruesome history of disease itself, however, or the often agonising treatments administered to earlier generations of patients, the study also shows how modern science and the history of medicine have come to depend on each other.

For one thing, historians are now able to take advantage of a growing body of scientific knowledge for their research. We know more than we ever have, for example, about how diseases “jumped” the barriers between species and spilled over from bats, birds, wild and domestic animals to humans, often adapting in their hosts as they spread. New techniques for recovering and analysing ancient DNA are also making it easier to identify past pathogens that were previously mysteries.

As we understand more about historical outbreaks, however, we are also learning more about human susceptibility to certain diseases, and how they might be prevented from recurring. History is increasingly capable of providing modern science not just with a record of what happened, but with information about why.

“Historians of medicine are moving closer to modern science as they come to understand more about the origins of disease,” Dobson, who is based at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, explained. “It’s vitally important to get on top of where and how diseases originate before they have a chance to spread, and history can play an important role in this work. Understanding these stories is important for stopping diseases in their tracks, and fundamental to the goals of advancing global health in the present and future.”

Dobson’s book features striking examples of cases in which historical knowledge has, unexpectedly, become relevant to modern medical practice. In the 1950s, for example, two British epidemiologists decided to investigate the cause of a surge in cases of lung cancer that had become apparent during the previous decades. They predicted that this would most likely turn out to be exposure to car exhaust fumes, or possibly the tarring of roads.

As an outside possibility, they also considered smoking as another potential reason for the spike in cases. Some scientists thought this unlikely, but speculations about a link dated back as far as the 17th century, when James I himself had warned that tobacco was “hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain [and] dangerous to the lungs”. As we now know, smoking was indeed discovered to be the main cause of this emerging tragedy, and public health campaigns on the subject have become more plainspoken and forthright ever since.

The potential for BSE, better known as “Mad Cow Disease”, to infect humans as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), might similarly never have become evident without historical knowledge of an obscure condition known as Kuru. This disease, characterised as “the trembling death”, had first been observed in the early 20th century among the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea. Symptoms included involuntary tremors, jerks, uncontrollable outbursts of laughter, loss of co-ordination, wasting and eventually death. The brains of people who had died from the disease were found to be riddled with holes. Extensive research eventually posited a link with ritualistic cannibalism, and thanks to the ending of such rites in the mid-20th century, Kuru all but disappeared, vindicating the theory.

These unusual symptoms were also apparent in some animal diseases, such as scrapie in sheep and in BSE in cows. In each case, the brain was found to have become “spongiform”, or Swiss-cheesed with holes. Scientists eventually linked these conditions to a new agent of infection; rather than a virus or bacterium, Kuru, scrapie and BSE were caused by an aberrant protein called a prion.

The cannibalistic connection that had led to these symptoms emerging in Kuru opened up the disturbing possibility that BSE had emerged due to “high-tech” cannibalism, in the form of cattle feed made of proteins derived from sheep and cattle. By the 1980s, it was not just clear that this had happened, but that scrapie may have made an inter-species jump to become BSE in cows. If that was true, then it was equally possible that a similar leap could occur between cows and humans, particularly when cases of ‘new variant’ CJD started to emerge in young people.

This realisation formed the basis of the mid-1990s scare over BSE and vCJD in Britain. The feared large-scale epidemic of vCJD has not materialised, however, partly because offal had already been removed from cattle feed and tight controls put in place to keep infected meat out of the food chain. The link to Kuru, and subsequent discovery of prions, was critical: “What had begun as a mysterious disease in Papua New Guinea and an esoteric discussion in scientific circles about the cause of a rare class of animal and human neurological disorders has led to the revolutionary discovery of a new biological principle of infection in the form of prions,” Dobson writes.

In recent times, the story has taken a fascinating new twist as this research has begun to be linked to modern work on neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Although these diseases are not infectious, they are, it has emerged, like the Kuru-vCJD family, associated with the “misfolding” and malfunctioning of proteins. There is also growing evidence that the mechanisms by which these diseases progress could indeed be very similar. Even the recent upsurge in cases of type 2 diabetes appears to be linked to this “misfolding” phenomenon.

Elsewhere, the book highlights cases where the identity of the historical causes of a disease could prevent similar disasters occurring. Following the recent outbreaks of avian flu and swine flu, the mystery that surrounds historical pandemics of influenza is of especial concern. In particular, the cause of Spanish Influenza, which killed at least 50 million people between 1918 and 1920 – the highest death toll of any pandemic in human history – was unknown at the time.

Despite being one of the most deadly diseases of all time, Spanish Flu was until recently so little-studied it was sometimes characterised as a “forgotten” pandemic. Now scientists and historians are joining forces to understand how it began, how it spread, and why it was so lethal, especially in young adults. The traditional theory that it was disseminated by troop movements during and after World War I fails to explain why some of the worst-affected countries, such as India and Samoa, were far from the main theatres of conflict.

To date, there has been no subsequent global influenza pandemic of such lethality. H5N1 (bird flu), while potentially dangerous, has displayed limited capacity to “jump” the species barrier as initially feared, thereby, hopefully, eliminating any possibility of widespread human-to-human infection. H1N1 (swine flu) in 2009 was a more worrying example of “reassortment”, a process by which different types of flu combine into new strains, but was probably effectively contained through careful screening, quarantine programmes and efficient drug delivery – although not until it had claimed perhaps as many as 200,000 lives.

Both cases, however, demonstrate the urgency with which historians need to understand what caused the far more devastating Spanish flu pandemic. Researchers are now investigating the subject in the hope of finding more answers, and have even gone so far as to exhume the remains of victims from the permafrost to comprehend its cause, with the latest findings suggesting that it might, indeed, have been a novel form of bird flu.

Nonetheless, there are still questions to be asked and solved: “We still don’t know why and how Spanish Flu went global,” Dobson said. “But if we want to stop virulent flu pandemics from happening again, we really need to know more about why they happened in the past.”

Murderous Contagion: A Human History Of Disease by Mary Dobson is published by Quercus on March 6th, 2015.

Lower image shows soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish influenza at a hospital ward at Camp Funston. Credit, Wikimedia Commons.

A prototype “green bus shelter” that could eventually generate enough electricity to light itself, has been built by a collaboration of University of Cambridge researchers and eco-companies.

The ongoing living experiment, hosted by the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and open to the visiting public, is incorporated in a distinct wooden hub, designed by architects MCMM to resemble a structure like a bus shelter. Eight vertical green wall units – created by green wall specialists, Scotscape – are housed along with four semi-transparent solar panels and two flexible solar panels provided by Polysolar.

The hub has specially adapted vertical green walls that harvest electrons naturally produced as a by-product of photosynthesis and metabolic activity, and convert them into electrical current. It is the brainchild of Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Paolo Bombelli of the Department of Biochemistry. Their previous experiments resulted in a device able to power a radio using the current generated by moss.

The thin-film solar panels turn light into electricity by using mainly the blue and green radiation of the solar spectrum. Plants grow behind the solar glass, ‘sharing the light’ by utilising the red spectrum radiation needed for photosynthesis, while avoiding the scorching effect of UV light. The plants generate electrical currents as a consequence of photosynthesis and metabolic activity during the day and night.

“Ideally you can have the solar panels generating during the day, and the biological system at night. To address the world’s energy needs, we need a portfolio of many different technologies, and it’s even better if these technologies can operate in synergy,” said Bombelli.

The structure of the hub allows different combinations of the photovoltaic and biological systems to be tested. On the north east aspect of the hub, plants receive light directly, without being exposed to too much direct sun. On the south west orientation, a green wall panel is housed behind a semi-transparent solar panel so that the effect on the plants and their ability to generate current can be monitored. Next to that, in the same orientation, a single solar panel stands alone, and two further panels are also mounted on the roof.

“The combination of horticulture with renewable energy production constitutes a powerful solution to food and resource shortages on an increasingly populated planet,” explained Joanna Slota-Newson from Polysolar. “We build our semi-transparent solar panels into greenhouses, producing electrical energy from the sun which can in turn be used to power irrigation pumps or artificial lighting, while offering a controlled environment to improve agricultural yields. In this collaboration with Cambridge University, the public can experience the plants’ healthy growth behind Polysolar panels.”

The green wall panels in the hub are made from a synthetic material containing pockets, each holding a litre of soil and several plants. The pockets are fitted with a lining of carbon fibre on the back, which acts as an anode to receive electrons from the metabolism of plants and bacteria in the soil, and a carbon/catalyst plate on the front which acts as a cathode. 

When a plant photosynthesises, energy from the sun is used to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds that the plant needs to grow. Some of the compounds – such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids – are leached into the soil where they are broken down by bacteria, which in turn release by-products, including electrons, as part of the process.

Electrons have a negative charge so, when they are generated, protons (with a positive charge) are also created. When the anode and cathode are connected to each other by a wire acting as an external circuit, the negative charges migrate between those two electrodes. Simultaneously, the positive charges migrate from the anodic region to the cathode through a wet system, in this case the soil. The cathode contains a catalyst that enables the electrons, protons and atmospheric oxygen to recombine to form water, thus completing the circuit and permitting an electrical current to be generated in the external circuit.

The P2P hub therfore generates electrical current from the combination of biological and physical elements. Each element of the hub is monitored separately, and members of the public can track the findings in real time, at a dedicated website and on a computer embedded in the hub itself.

Margherita Cesca, Senior Architect and Director of MCMM Architettura, the hub’s designer, is pleased that it has garnered so much interest. “This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies. The challenging design incorporates and showcases green wall and solar panels as well as glass, creating an interesting element which sits beautifully within Cambridge University Botanic Garden,” she said.

Bombelli added: “The long-term aim of the P2P solar hub research is to develop a range of self-powered sustainable buildings for multi-purpose use all over the world, from bus stops to refugee shelters.”

P2P is an outreach activity developed under the umbrella of the BPV (BioPhotoVoltaic) project working in collaboration with green technology companies including MCMM, Polysolar and Scotscape. The BPV project includes scientists from the Departments of Biochemistry, Plant Sciences, Physics and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, together with the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and the University of Cape Town.

The innovative prototype solar hub will be unveiled at the Botanic Garden during an event at the Cambridge Science Festival, Trap the light fantastic: plant to power, on Tuesday 10 March.

How ‘old’ is your brain? Put another way, how ‘aged’ is your brain? The standard, scientific answer, suggests that the older you get, the greater the changes in the activity of your neurons. In fact, my colleagues and I have found out that this isn’t necessarily the case: older brains may be more similar to younger brains than we’d previously thought.

In our study, published recently in the journal Human Brain Mapping, we’ve shown that changes in the ageing brain previously observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – one of the standard ways of measuring brain activity – may be due to changes in our blood vessels, rather than changes in the activity of our nerve cells, our neurons. Given the large number of fMRI studies used to assess the ageing brain, this has important consequences for understanding how the brain changes with age and it challenges current theories of ageing.

The fundamental problem of fMRI is that it measures the activity of our neurons indirectly through changes in regional blood flow. Without careful correction for age differences in how the blood vessels respond, differences in fMRI signals may be erroneously regarded as differences in our neurons.

An important line of research focuses on controlling for noise in fMRI signals using additional baseline measures of vascular (blood vessel) function, for example involving experimental manipulations of carbon dioxide levels in blood. However, such methods have not been widely used, possibly because they are impractical to implement in studies of ageing.

An alternative way of correcting makes use of the resting state, ’task-free’, fMRI measurement, which is easy to acquire and available in most fMRI experiments. While this method has been difficult to validate in the past, the unique combination of an impressively detailed data set across 335 healthy volunteers over the lifespan, as part of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (CamCAN) project, has allowed us to probe the true nature of the effects of ageing on resting state fMRI signal amplitude. This showed that age differences in signal amplitude at rest – in other words, while volunteers perform no task during the scan – originate from our blood vessels, not our nerve cells. We believe we can use this as a robust correction factor to control for vascular differences in fMRI studies of ageing.

A number of research studies have previously found reduced brain activity in the areas of the brain related to our senses and movement during tasks that study these aspects. Using conventional methods, we replicated these findings, but, after correction, we found that it is more likely to be vascular health, not brain function, that accounts for most age-related differences in fMRI signals in sensory areas. In other words, neuroscientists may have been overestimating age differences in brain activity in previous fMRI studies.

Why is this important? We’re an ageing society, with more and more people living into old age, so it’s crucial that we understand how age affects how the brain functions.  We clearly need to refine our fMRI experiments, otherwise we risk creating a misleading picture of activity in the brain as we age. Without refinement, such fMRI studies may misinterpret the effect of age as a cognitive phenomenon, when really it has more to do with our blood vessels.

Dr Tsvetanov is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference
Tsvetanov, KA et al. The effect of ageing on fMRI: correction for the confounding effects of vascular reactivity evaluated by joint fMRI and MEG in 335 adults. Human Brain Mapping;  27 February 2015

In a study funded by Cancer Research UK, scientists compared tiny variations in the genetic make-up of more than 120,000 women of European ancestry, with and without breast cancer, and identified 15 new variations – called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – that are linked to a higher risk of the disease. This new discovery means that a total of more than 90 SNPs associated with breast cancer have now been revealed through research.

On average, one in every eight women in the UK will develop breast cancer at some stage in their lives. The researchers estimate that about one in twenty women have enough genetic variations to double their risk of developing breast cancer – giving them a risk of approximately one in four.  A much smaller group of women, less than one in a hundred (0.7 per cent), have genetic variations that make them three times more likely to develop breast cancer, giving them a risk of around one in three. It’s hoped that these genetic markers can be used to help identify high-risk women and could lead to improved cancer screening and prevention.

Study author Professor Doug Easton, from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our study is another step towards untangling the breast cancer puzzle. As well as giving us more information about how and why a higher breast cancer risk can be inherited, the genetic markers we found can help us to target screening and cancer prevention measures at those women who need them the most.

“The next bit of solving the puzzle involves research to understand more about how genetic variations work to increase a woman’s risk. And we’re sure there are more of these variations still to be discovered.”

The study was carried out by dozens of scientists across the world working together in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium, part of the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study.  Each of the genetic variations, identified through this study and other research, is known to raise a woman’s risk of breast cancer by a small amount - but some people have lots of these variations which add up to a more significantly increased risk.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in the UK, with almost 50,000 women diagnosed every year. Death rates are falling as we learn more about the disease and how to diagnose and treat it, and around 78 per cent of people now live for at least 10 years after diagnosis.

Nell Barrie, senior science communications manager at Cancer Research UK, one of the funders of the study, said: “We’re gradually uncovering breast cancer’s secrets at a genetic level and learning how best to tackle this disease which still claims far too many lives.  This latest study adds more detail to our genetic map of breast cancer risk and could help to develop new ways to identify women most at risk so we can spot breast cancer earlier in the future.”

Reference
Michailidou, K et al. Genome-wide association analysis of more than 120,000 individuals identifies 15 new susceptibility loci for breast cancer. Nat Gen; 9 March 2015

Adapted from a press release from Cancer Research UK