Two of the most famous duels in English literature take place at the beginning and end of that giant among novels, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.

In the first encounter, Robert Lovelace, Clarissa’s would-be suitor, is challenged to a duel by her brother, James Harlowe. Their antipathy dates back to a “College-begun” tiff and has been inflamed by Lovelace’s interest in Clarissa and her sisters. During their bout, Lovelace has the chance to kill Harlowe but “gives him his life”.  The incident helps to establish Lovelace, “a finished libertine”, as a man who lives his life as a sort of extended duel, continually challenging fate itself.

As the book draws to a close, Clarissa’s cousin William Morden seeks to avenge her death in a duel with Lovelace. In doing so, Morden ignores Clarissa’s pleas that “vengeance is God’s province” and that her good-natured cousin should not risk losing his life to a guilty man. Letters are exchanged as the details of the duel are fixed; rapiers are chosen over pistols. When Morden kills Lovelace, the villain perishes but the victor risks carrying a moral burden that will never leave him.  The lack of a winner is one of the great paradoxes of the duel.

In Touché: The Duel in Literature, Dr John Leigh (Medieval and Modern Languages) explores expositions of duelling in three centuries of writing. The first ever book devoted exclusively to the depiction of duelling in fiction, drama and poetry, Touché is pan-European in its scope and scholarly in its unpacking of contests that range from the comic stand-offs between Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Captain Jack Absolute in Sheridan’s The Rivals to the elegantly orchestrated cut and thrust of Dumas’s musketeers.

When Richardson wrote Clarissa, in the mid-1700s, duelling had long been illegal in Britain. With beautiful irony, laws renewed over the centuries made it a practice punishable by death. Arguments against duelling shifted over the centuries: framed in the 17th century as a theological wrong, it was condemned as barbarous (and non-classical) in the 18th century, and, finally, in the 19th century as an unseemly display of primitive urges. In his famous 1841 study of fashionable delusions, Charles Mackay likened duellists to “two dogs who tear each other for a bone, or two bantams fighting on a dunghill for the love of some beautiful hen”.

But its appeal endured, in literature as in life. Duels feature in the works of dozens of British writers: Tobias Smollett was prodigiously fond of duels (his sword-happy characters include the wonderfully named Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle) as were Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray and GK Chesterton. Among the many French writers intrigued by duelling are Molière, Hugo and Maupassant. In Russian literature, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Pushkin (the latter an inveterate duellist) are masters in the telling of stories in which the duel plays a pivotal part.

The sheer theatricality of the duel makes it an irresistible literary device, whether to demonstrate a gentleman’s valour in facing down a rogue or to mock the posturing of a foolish buck. The richness of the drama lies in the stage directions: the count-down to the allotted hour, the scene at dawn or dusk, the pacing out of the exact distance between opponents, the checking of weapons, and the sobbing of bystanders. The deeper fascination, for the reader, is with the process by which words become deeds and the freedom of the nobleman is enmeshed in an utterly inexorable, irrevocable process.

Duelling is a posh pursuit, imbued with notions of privilege and sportsmanship. Fencing and swordsmanship, like dancing and riding, were accomplishments that defined the wellborn young man. Likewise, many of the most celebrated bouts in fiction depict noble combatants seeking to uphold or defend family honour against slur or slight. As Leigh writes, the duellist is the “antithesis of the bourgeois, because he fights not for gain from his adversary but to declare who or what he is”.

But there are notable exceptions. Charles Dickens, most of whose characters are working or middle class, incorporates duels in several of his novels. In Pickwick Papers, duels generally assume the form of a comic set piece. “A duel in Ipswich!... Nothing of the kind can be contemplated in this town,” says the magistrate, summoned to halt plans for a confrontation between Samuel Pickwick and Peter Magnus. In Nicholas Nickleby, the protagonists are highborn but the message to the reader is that all life hangs on a thread. The tragedy of Lord Frederick Verisopht’s death, at the hand of Sir Mulberry Hawk, is set against the majesty of the rising sun and the running river - and the “twenty tiny lives” present on every blade of grass.

Leigh divides his text into themes, slotting duels into categories of ‘comical’, ‘poignant’, ‘judicial’, ‘romantic’ and ‘grotesque’. In a chapter devoted to the ‘paradoxes of the duel’, he explores the incompatibility of a pursuit steeped in style and swagger with the seriousness of its likely outcome – the finality of death. The elegant language of duelling, sometimes couched in French, and its insistence on carefully regulated protocol, seemingly elevates it from the notion of brutal murder. But, in the end, the calculated nature of duelling is perhaps even more chilling.

The noblest of duelling weapons is the sword. Firearms bring a certain sense of anonymity; sometimes they gain an identity all of their own. In his poem Eugene Onegin, Pushkin describes in steely detail the mechanisms of the pistols loaded by Onegin and Lenski. “The weapon,” writes Leigh, “acquires a sinister life of its own, as one action leads mechanistically and remorselessly to another, before the final, fateful event is triggered.” In stark contrast, as Lenski’s life ebbs away, the poet turns to nature to describe the slow fall of snow and the sudden grip of cold.

The slaughter that took place in the muddy trenches of the First World War eclipsed the aristocratic notion of duelling as a test of nerve and a clean way of settling scores. But single combat remained, for some, an idealised form of warfare. Leigh writes that the Australian Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary recounts in his book The Last Enemy that: “In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed.”

Duels have been considered anachronistic for some four hundred years – but we remain fascinated by those who could take lives after taking exception.

Touché: The Duel in Literature is published by Harvard University Press. John Leigh is a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.

Inset image: French cased duelling pistols by Nicolas Noel Boutet. Single shot, percussion, rifled, .58 caliber, blued steel, Versailles, 1794-1797. Exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Public companies should appoint a ‘Contrarian Director’ who systematically challenges management recommendations to the board and suggests a range of alternative outcomes, argues a Cambridge graduate student in recently published research.

A Contrarian Director (CD) would help prevent rubber-stamping of management decisions by too-collegial boards whose supposedly “independent” directors are anything but, according to MBA student Siobhan Sweeney. Her paper cites last year’s comment by Warren Buffett that companies recruiting such directors often “do not look for Dobermans. They look for Cocker Spaniels and then they make sure their tails are wagging.”

According to Sweeney, there have been “significant failings of boards,” as shown by the recent financial crisis and other corporate failings.

Currently, “social and psychological incentives propel directors towards collegial consensus,” and acting as a devil’s advocate in the boardroom is “currently a dangerous career path.” So appointing a CD to every public company board is an “innovative solution that is simple yet has the ability to significantly increase the board’s ability to discharge their corporate governance and risk oversight.”

The CD concept was inspired by the Catholic Church’s ‘Devil’s Advocate,’ introduced in 1587 to argue against a candidate’s canonisation in order to uncover any character flaws, but modelled more on the Advocate General of the European Union, who delivers impartial recommendations to the full EU Court of Justice.

The CD’s role would be more impartial than that of the church’s Devil’s Advocate: while both present a negative hypothesis, the CD’s proposed role is then to “assess the strength of the negative hypothesis to assist the board to form a balanced opinion.”

The CD’s name derives from the literal Greek translation of ‘contrarian,’ who “habitually opposes or rejects prevailing opinion or established practice” – and in the context of the CD provides significant recommendations to the board.

Under the paper’s proposal, companies would adopt their charters to state that a CD appointed to their board “has a duty in respect of every recommendation to the board of substance to give careful consideration to the possible case, if any, against the recommendation. The CD must then prepare for the Board a written report, which outlines the case or possible case against the recommendation. The written opinion of the CD would be non-binding on the board and CEO.”

To help companies choose CDs, a new Institute of Contrarian Directors would be established in order to maintain a list of qualified CDs – people with analytical skills and experience, but who have not previously served as public company directors except as a CD. If a company asks the Institute to suggest a CD, and the company does not make the appointment, the Institute would not make a further CD suggestion to that company for five years to prevent the company “shopping for an amenable CD.”

“The introduction of the CD institutionalises the ability to stand outside the tide of Groupthink and effectively warn and caution the board,” said Sweeney, who was a corporate lawyer in Australia before beginning the Cambridge MBA programme last year.

Sweeney’s paper, ‘The creation of the Contrarian Director and their role in achieving workable board independence and better risk oversight’, was recently named the winner of the 2015 Cambridge-McKinsey Risk Prize at the Centre for Risk Studies at University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

The award, in conjunction with consulting firm McKinsey & Company, was announced at the recent 6th annual Risk Summit of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge. The award is open to current students at Cambridge Judge.

“The judges were particularly impressed by the originality and spark of Siobhan Sweeney’s proposal on contrarian directors, which speaks directly and practically to corporate governance,” said Danny Ralph, Professor of Operations Research and Academic Director of the Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge. The judges, who consulted with other risk professionals and academics, were Professor Ralph and Dr Sven Heiligtag, a principal at McKinsey’s global risk practice based in Hamburg.

Adapted from an article originally published on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

On the 5th July the Gonville and Caius College student, who is doing a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, won the RTTC 100 mile time trial championship in Wales, but the race that got everyone talking happened on the 25th June, when she produced a superb ride to become British Cycling National Road Time Trial Champion 2015.

In the race Hayley, who moved from rowing in 2009, took the lead from early pacesetter Ciara Horne over the 33.6-kilometre course, and no one could come close to her winning time of 51:39:89. Liv Plantur's Molly Weaver finished in 52:58:18 to win the Silver medal, and multiple Paralympic champion Dame Sarah Storey stopped the clock at 53:00:61 for the Bronze, meaning Hayley finished more than a minute ahead of her nearest rival.

Both this and the 100 mile time trial are the latest in a long line of wins for Hayley, who was the 2014 10-mile and 50-mile time-trial champion, and is CUCC’s most successful female cyclist in the club’s history. Hayley has also been President of the Women’s Blues during her time at the University, and won an astonishing 8 gold and 2 silver medals during the 2014/15 BUCS season.

"It's completely overwhelming - I've worked really hard for this," she said. "I hoped it was going to be really close and I just went out and did the ride that I thought I could, did the effort I thought I could and obviously it paid off.”

"I was just trying to focus on getting out the ride that I was capable of and not necessarily concentrating on the other big names that were starting after me."

"After I finished and I was half collapsing over my bike I could just hear the commentator say my time and then say 'will anyone go under 50 minutes'. Dame Sarah and Katie Archibald are both capable of going under 50 and at that point I wasn't even sure that I was in the lead, let alone that I was going to win by a minute."

The win has vindicated the massive amount of work that Hayley has put in, as well as the hard work of her coach Mark Holt, who Hayley credits with helping her and Edmund achieve their many cycling successes.

"Cycling has just changed my life to be honest," she said. "I'm so glad that I'm good at it! It's completely changed my life - I've lost loads of weight and I've pushed really hard to drop those extra few kilos, ready for this, ready for that climb on the course and the climb on here.

"It's really paid off - it's been a really hard road but it's paid off."

When in May 2014 the Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, witnessed the signing of an agreement between Cambridge and the consortium of French research institutions known as Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL Research University), he celebrated an opportunity for Cambridge “to enhance its well-established connections to some of France’s elite institutions, its most interesting scholars, and its brightest students.”

Just over a year on from the formalisation of Cambridge’s partnership with PSL, many joint projects have emerged that continue to enhance research links and lay the foundation for new collaborations.

These projects have ranged from a summer placement at Chimie ParisTech for students in the Department of Chemistry, to a joint postgraduate research seminar on Ancient Philosophy held in Cambridge, and a doctoral retreat involving the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Institut Curie.

PSL is an undergraduate and postgraduate education and research consortium formally established in 2011 as one of the French government’s Initiatives d’Excellence (IdEx).

It comprises 24 universities and research institutions, including the École Normale Supérieure, the Collège de France, ESPCI ParisTech, Chimie ParisTech, Mines ParisTech, the Observatoire de Paris, the Université Paris-Dauphine, the Institut Curie, the École Française d'Extrême-Orient, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts.

The agreement signed in May 2014, with the support of the French Embassy, aims to facilitate exchange for students and researchers, and seed collaborations between Cambridge and PSL.

A specific purpose of the partnership is to boost existing and prospective collaborative projects, enhancing researchers’ capacity to apply successfully for external funding .

As part of the student mobility element of the agreement, three PSL students were awarded scholarships by PSL to undertake Master’s degrees in Mathematics and Advanced Chemical Engineering.

In the coming  academic year  two PSL students will receive a PSL-Cambridge scholarship from the Cambridge Trust to carry out Master’s degrees in Public Policy and Advanced Chemical Engineering.

Collaborative projects in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have been funded by PSL and by the Schools of Arts and Humanities, and of Humanities and Social Sciences, through a matched funding mechanism.

Additional funding for projects in the Arts and Humanities has been provided by the French Embassy’s cultural arm, the Institut Français du Royaume Uni.

Meanwhile, the French Embassy’s Science and Technology Division has provided seed funding for collaborative projects with PSL in the Physical, Biological and Clinical sciences, and in Technology.

To date, ten projects have been awarded funding under the Cambridge-PSL agreement, in disciplines as diverse as biochemistry, chemistry, classics, clinical medicine, French, history, philosophy and theoretical mathematics.

Thierry Coulhon, President of PSL Research University, said: “Thanks to the long-standing relations forged between researchers at the University of Cambridge and at the institutions comprising PSL Research University, our partnership has all the necessary elements to enable great joint achievements both in research and in training.

“This partnership, which has the full support of the Embassy of France in the UK, is one of PSL's priorities in the area of its international development policy.”

Dr David Savage, of the Department of Clinical Biochemistry, explained why the support of the Cambridge-PSL-French Embassy Fund has been helpful: “The funding we received as a result of Cambridge-PSL agreement enabled Dr Abdou Rachid Tiam, an emulsion physicist from the École Normale Supérieure, to visit my lab earlier this year for a week. During this time, we undertook several joint experiments. This facilitated an invaluable exchange of practical expertise, as well as lengthy discussions on our collaborative project. As Dr Thiam and I come from very different scientific backgrounds, this face to face meeting time has been particularly valuable.”

Their project aims to understand how a particular protein (Fsp27) facilitates the transfer of lipids between growing fat droplets in fat cells, or adipocytes. Without this protein, fat cells fail to optimally store excess lipid, which then accumulates in other organs such as the liver, where it causes insulin resistance and diabetes.

“Our collaboration has progressed well. We are currently applying for a Human Frontier Science Programme (HFSP) project grant which also includes an American lab at Harvard.”

Last month the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) and the Institut Curie hosted a joint three-day retreat for young scientists at the University of Kent. It was organised by the student and postdoc committees of the two institutes using Cambridge-PSL-French Embassy Funds in addition to support provided by CIMR, the Institut Curie, the Gurdon Institute, the MRC Cognition and Brain Science unit, GSK’s Experimental Medicine Imagining unit, and the ERC. The retreat brought together 60 young researchers from the two institutes to discuss their research through speaker presentations, poster sessions and additional skill building sessions.

“This retreat provided a unique training experience for the students and postdocs,” said Alison Schuldt, Research Project Manager at CIMR. “It served to foster new interactions, and to partner fundamental understanding of cell biology with clinical research.

“It will be of particular benefit given the closely aligned research strategies of the two institutes.”

According to Dr Nicholas White of the Department of French, the Cambridge-PSL connection has not only forged closer links to PSL but “has allowed the University to underline its commitment to the study of French culture itself”.

Later this summer, he and his collaborator at the ENS, Professor Alain Pagès, will be hosting twin conferences in Paris and Cambridge on the work of Émile Zola, bringing together early and mid-career scholars for a critical reappraisal of the French writer’s work.

Among the expected outcomes is a special issue of Les cahiers naturalistes the world-leading French journal in the field of Zola studies.

The conferences, held under the title “Zola au pluriel”, will be partly funded through the Cambridge-PSL matched-funding mechanism.

 “Bridging the gap in scientific cooperation across the channel, and strengthening partnerships between French and UK universities, are the two priorities of the Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in the United Kingdom,” said Cyrille van Effenterre, Science and Technology Counsellor at the French Embassy.

 “We therefore fully support this partnership between the University of Cambridge and Paris Sciences et Lettres, flagships for the best science in our two countries. We strongly hope this agreement will continue to foster relationships among academics, and will be the corner stone for institutional and strategic partnerships.”

Speaking about the projects supported by the Institut Français under the Cambridge-PSL agreement, Dr Catherine Robert, the French Embassy’s Higher Education Attaché added: “This agreement will also help build and strengthen Franco-British networks involving the best young researchers in the arts and humanities in both countries, as they will be the leaders of the future.”

Picture: Doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from CIMR and the Institut Curie meet during a three-day retreat at the University of Kent, co-funded by the French Embassy, Cambridge and PSL”

Photo Credit: Sudarshan Gadadhar

A new report co-authored by Cambridge researchers warns that without technological innovation over the next decade, healthcare costs in the UK could be significantly higher than currently projected by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). Without productivity improvements, health spending in 2063-64 might need to be 5.0% of GDP higher than is currently projected.

The report, Opportunity Knocks, has been published today by London-based think tank International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC-UK), in conjunction with the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge.

It points out that predictions for the growth in healthcare productivity are optimistic given historic trends, and that technological innovation will be vital to fill the gap. The authors argue that there is significant potential for responding to the challenges of ageing through new developments in wearable technologies, big data, 3D printing, cloud computing, the internet of things, and smart cities.

“Technological innovation is vital to help individuals and society as a whole adapt to ageing,” said Mike Bradley of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, which pioneered the Inclusive Design approach: designing products to be useful to as many people as possible. “But there are still many barriers to be overcome.”

The report suggests that a design response to ageing can also benefit the UK economy: Those over 65 spend around £2.2 billion per week and they could be spending over £6 billion per week (£312 billion per year) by 2037.

However, one in three 85-89 year olds has difficulty shopping for groceries and more than one in ten in this age group has difficulty managing money. More than half of those aged 90 and over have difficulty shopping for groceries and a quarter of this age group have difficulty managing money. Four in ten individuals over 75 and three quarters of individuals over 85 do not have internet access.

The report highlights a range of ideas for new technology which emerged from a workshop organised by ILC-UK, IET and The Engineering Design Centre at The University of Cambridge. The ideas are designed not as ‘solutions to ageing’ but to highlight the potential for innovation in focusing on this consumer group.

• A kettle which monitors blood pressure
• TV ‘buddies’ to allow people to remotely share the experience of watching a programme
• A ‘cuddle cushion’ which would allow relatives being able to send each other cuddles
• A smart water bottle which would prompt people to drink more to prevent dehydration
• Accessible and modern ‘Boris Scooters’ (or Segways) in towns and cities to help people with mild mobility impairments get around
• The development of national ‘trusted information’ systems for online and telephone transactions to reduce the risk of scams

“This report champions the positive impact that technology and design will play in helping us all to live longer, healthier, independent lives. However, we acknowledge that the potential of technology has not been fully realised. We also have to dispel the myth that this is simply a matter of niche solutions for an ageing society,” said Gordon Attenborough, the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Head of Sectors.

“There’s so much more that we should achieve through the widespread application of existing and emerging technologies. It’s vital that we design and innovate with a broad range of users in mind, wholly inclusive and accessible to all. Achieve that and technology will mitigate the impending costs of an ageing society and deliver the promise it has failed to so far.

David Sinclair, Director of the International Longevity Centre – UK added: “Technology undoubtedly offers significant potential to help respond to the challenges of ageing. But the opportunity of technological innovation in this area has historically been over egged and under realised. For us to maximise the potential of new technologies however we need more evidence on what really works and whether it will save money. We need regulation which protects consumers while not preventing technological innovation. And we need industry to recognise the potential of the older consumer and design for all. Finally, we need a public debate on the challenges and opportunities of using big data to improve the lives of older people.”

Professor John Clarkson, Director of the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge: “This report highlights that there is a huge commercial opportunity for companies to design inclusively, driving increased customer satisfaction and boosting their market share by delivering more competitive products and services.”

The report also highlights some ideas to maximise the potential of the sharing economy to support our ageing society.

Cooking buddies

A barcode scanner in the home could be used to upload the contents of your fridge to an interface which would share the information with your neighbours. Taking a peek in to each other’s fridges, seeing what people had a surplus of or what was about to go out of date, could encourage neighbours to cook together making meal times more sociable.

Integrated leisure and transport

Leisure activities, such as a trip to the theatre or to a restaurant, could come with transport included. When you book a ticket there could be the option to also book transport. If a large number of people were also booking transport to an event a mini-bus could then be sent to collect them all at a much lower costs than them all booking taxis separately.

Adapted from a ILC-UK press release. 

Many of us frequently take pain killers to relieve our headaches, to soften joint pains or to reduce the symptoms of a cold. Some of these drugs – for example, ibuprofen, but not paracetamol – are from a class of drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). These medicines are very commonly used – in fact, they are amongst the top-twenty most frequently prescribed medications in UK primary care. Non-prescription use is also widespread, with many products available off the shelf in supermarkets and without oversight from a pharmacist.

Antidepressants medication use is also commonplace, although in the UK these are prescription only medicines. Importantly, depression and chronic pain frequently co-exist: roughly a third of those with a painful condition also experience depression, and over a quarter of those suffering depression also complain of pain.

A paper out this week in the BMJ has identified an increased risk of brain haemorrhage from the combined use antidepressants and NSAIDS. This will understandably raise concerns amongst both doctors and the public. But is it that straightforward?

There is already an established risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, for example in the lining of the stomach, with this combination of drugs – probably greater than the newly identified risk of brain haemorrhage. Yet it is likely many GPs (and probably other doctors) remain unaware of this problem, and it does not influence the majority of prescribing behaviour anyway. So does this new found problem matter, or will it be interpreted by many as simply relatively unfounded scaremongering?

We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the risk of brain haemorrhage is still low: over a period of 30 days taking both antidepressants and NSAIDS, only one person in every 2,000 would be affected. And given the absolute benefits of antidepressants and NSAIDs are generally not easily quantified, and need to be interpreted in the context of the individual’s personal psychological and social circumstances, the balance of harm and benefit remains uncertain.

Doctors will also understandably ask what the alternatives are: there are limited options for chronic pain relief, and NHS access to psychological treatments for depression (for example cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT), is generally poor. Patients’ quality of life will often be significantly diminished by stopping these medicines.

And there are several important unanswered questions remaining. What are the longer-term risks, beyond the first month examined by the current study? What is the risk of the drugs when used separately? And can these findings from an East-Asian population be generalized to the rest of the world, given what we know that people of different ethnic backgrounds often respond to medicines differently? There is a need for further research to answer these uncertainties.

Overall, this new paper identifies a potential small risk of adverse consequences of combining two common drugs, but unresolved queries remain. For now, if people are worried about the medications they are taking, they should discuss their concerns with their doctor, even if doctors then find themselves in the difficult position of trying to explain the uncertain balance of risks and benefits to patients.

But these issues are also important and very relevant to the safe and rational use of medicines more generally. It is not uncommon for patients to be affected by more than one condition – depression, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, for example – and hence taking a mixture of drugs. We need further research to better understand the challenges associated with using combinations of medicines in people with multiple health conditions.

Reference
Risk of intracranial haemorrhage linked to co-treatment with antidepressants and NSAIDs. BMJ; 15 July 2015

The fabulous architecture of King’s College Chapel is not just about piety. Its gravity-defying fan vaulting, decorative sculpture and stunning windows are an assertion of legitimacy by a royal family under pressure. The Tudors faced many threats – from other claimants to the throne (both dynastic rivals and pretenders) as well as from disease and infertility. 

The chapel was constructed over a period of 70 years (1446-1515) under the instructions of four English kings: Henry VI, Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII. All four were obsessed by questions of succession; the provision of a healthy male heir was vital to carrying the family line forward.

Henry VII (the first Tudor king) was responsible for the phase of building which saw the creation of the interior that today draws thousands of visitors. Henry VII’s master mason John Wastell and chief carver Thomas Stockton were tasked with creating a chapel ablaze with the emblems of royal dynasties that were sometimes warring, sometimes united.

In Carving in King’s Chapel, a booklet published in 1970, the historian John Saltmarsh wrote that the antechapel at King’s represented “the most lavish display of worldly pomp to be found anywhere in English Gothic”. One of the most eye-catching features of the stone ornamentation of the antechapel is its imposing Tudor armorials – great stone badges.

Saltmarsh described how “over and over again the arms of Henry VII are repeated with his dragon and his greyhound, the crowned Tudor rose, the crowned portcullis which was the badge of his mother’s house of Beaufort, and the crowned fleur de lis for his titular kingship of France”.

Each shield (or escutcheon) is flanked by heraldic ‘supporters’: a dragon on the left and a greyhound on the right. Carved from pale limestone, the slender greyhounds have collars set with jewels, marking them out as favoured members of a wealthy household.  All the shields have holes in their left-hand corners. This is a reference to jousting: a knight would pass his lance through the hole in the shield in order to defend himself while tilting at his opponent.

“The Renaissance sculptor skilfully reveals the physical characteristics of the greyhounds which stand on their long thin legs and with their front legs both against, and in front of, the vertical architectural framework structuring the walls, thus placing the animal both inside, and in front of, the three- dimensional space of the heraldic devices,” says Professor Jean Michel Massing, Fellow in History of Art at King’s and co-author of a recent book about King’s Chapel.

“The elongated bodies of the slim-built animals are elegant, with their broad chests, while their alertness is emphasised by their heads which are turned to catch the gaze of the viewers, with ears pricked and elongated muzzles.“

The greyhound is the symbol of the Beaufort family; the dragon is the emblem of the Tudors. Henry VII’s mother was Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and his father Edmund Tudor. Margaret was just 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry. Edmund died before his son was born. Margaret, who went on to marry a further three times, founded two Cambridge colleges: St John’s and Christ’s.

As a symbol of celebrity and loyalty, the greyhound is etched into the visual identity of not just one but several powerful families, making its presence in King’s Chapel even more potent. The animal was the emblem of the Richmond family as well as the Beaufort family. Edmund Tudor, First Earl of Richmond and father of Henry VII, was granted a white greyhound as a heraldic supporter by his half-brother Henry VI.

“The greyhound is both a Lancastrian emblem and a Tudor one – and thus very handy as a heraldic expression of the dynastic right of the Tudors to the English throne,” says Peter Jones, the librarian at King’s College. “In this way the dynastic badges in the Chapel are all about legitimacy, a right to rule inherited from the Chapel’s founder, Henry VI, by the Tudors.”

The lean forms of dragon and greyhound can also be spotted in carving on the wooden rood screen that divides the antechapel from the choir stalls and altar. The carvings are in the Renaissance manner and made by foreign craftsman. “The carvings feature the linked initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who was executed that year,” says Professor Paul Binski, Professor of Medieval Art and author of Gothic Wonder. “The screen and stalls at King’s display some of the earliest Renaissance detailing in England and show how influential courts were in changing taste.”

Built for hunting, coursing and lolling beside open fires, greyhounds feature in art as far back as 5,000 years. Considered one of the world’s oldest breeds, greyhounds are the world’s second fastest mammals (cheetahs are marginally faster) and their large ribcages contain big hearts and lungs. The animals achieve their famously high speeds by arching and then contracting their spines like an arching spring.

When it became apparent to vets that greyhounds suffer markedly more than other breeds from bone cancer (osteosarcoma), it was suggested that the disease may result from the stress they experience when they are raced competitively. But preliminary investigation soon showed that greyhounds which never race, and are simply kept as pets, also have a high incidence of the disease with the likelihood of bone cancer increasing as the dogs grow older. 

Professor Matthew Allen and his colleagues at the Department of Veterinary Medicine are developing new ways to diagnose and treat bone cancer in dogs. “Greyhounds and other larger breeds, including the Rottweiler, are significantly more likely to develop bone cancer than small dogs,” says Allen. “Environmental factors may make a contribution but it’s clear from the data that genetics play a key role in the development of osteosarcoma.  Our research has recently identified five genes that are associated with spread (metastasis) of osteosarcoma in dogs, opening up possibilities for better diagnosis and treatment.”

The dog is an excellent translational model which will help scientists to diagnose and treat humans with bone cancer. Osteosarcoma eats away healthy bone tissue, leaving weaker, damaged bone which can break easily, even with normal activity. In dogs, the disease typically first develops between the ages of five and seven, a stage of life that is ‘middle age’ for dogs. The treatment most commonly offered by vets is amputation followed by chemotherapy and perhaps radiation therapy.

“Amputation seems drastic but dogs manage well with three legs – even greyhounds. But removing the affected leg doesn’t cure the animal. In combination with chemotherapy, it can provide good quality of life for an average of 14 months,” says Allen. “Our work into gene expression in canine osteosarcoma will enable us to better predict which dogs are most at risk of developing metastasis, and should allow us to design better therapies for these patients. Perhaps most importantly, given the close similarities between canine and human osteosarcoma, the work should have direct and tangible benefits to the diagnosis and treatment of humans with this disease.”

Humans are some ten times less likely to develop bone cancer than dogs. But osteosarcoma is notoriously hard to treat in people. It often develops during the late teen years and progresses fast, spreading to other parts of the body with devastating results. “In humans, physicians do everything they can do to save the limb that is affected using therapeutic treatments and implants to replace the damaged bone,” says Allen. “But, especially if the cancer has spread beyond the bone, the long term prognosis can be poor, with five-year survival rates hovering around 50%.”

In addition to collaborating with physicians who treat human osteosarcoma, Allen and colleagues will be working with a network of veterinary practices to reach owners of greyhounds and other large breeds throughout the country. The goal of this programme will be to collect samples of tumours from dogs with primary and metastatic osteosarcoma and to determine whether the genes identified in the research to date can be used to discriminate between tumours with different levels of aggressive behaviour.

“In our experience, the general public is keen to help,” says Allen. “Owners have an opportunity to transform a terrible situation – a diagnosis of osteosarcoma in their dog – into hope for the future by contributing to research that will help to understand and treat the disease in dogs and, ultimately, in humans.”

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: H is for an animal whose model teeth can be found in the Whipple Museum, which dominate the frieze adorning the Parthenon, and which played a central role in the rise of many great civilisations.

Inset images: Greyhounds on King's College Chapel (Mike Dixon © 2011 King's College, Cambridge); Osteosarcoma in the dog, showing the significant bone destruction that is typical of this tumour (top). In this dog, the tumour was successfully removed and the bone replaced with a metal implant (lower panel), in a procedure known as limb-sparing surgery (Matthew Allen).

The main contractor, Willmott Dixon welcomed guests from the School, the University and the development team to the site of the new school building.  The topping-out event marked the installation of the roof light located on the highest point of the building. 

Those in attendance included: the School’s Headteacher, James Biddulph; Chair of the School Governors, Professor John Rallison; the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Affairs, Professor Jeremy Sanders; Registrary, Dr Jonathan Nicholls; and the Deputy Project Director, Heather Topel, and Construction Director, Gavin Heaphy for the North West Cambridge Development alongside Managing Director of Willmott Dixon, Chris Tredget.

Work on the iconic circular design of the school started in November 2014 and will be completed in two phases.  The first phase of the building is due to be handed over in August 2015 for the start of the academic year in September 2015.  The second phase of the building is expected to be handed over in December 2015.

James Biddulph, Headteacher of the school said: “Seeing the building take its incredible form this year has been very inspirational - the circular shape, open spaces and teaching rooms will make for a fantastic learning environment for the school community and we are grateful to the team for the remarkable progress that has been made to date. Our teachers can’t wait to start the new term in the new facility with our new pupils.”

The University of Cambridge Primary School will provide education for children aged four – 11. The school will be a mixed-ability co-educational school. It will not have a specific religious character, nor a particular faith ethos. In addition to providing an inclusive and high-quality primary education for local children, the University of Cambridge Primary School will also offer unique training and research opportunities through its close relationship with the Faculties and Departments of the University of Cambridge.

The design of the building by Marks Barfield Architects, creators of the London Eye, has been informed by discussions with the Faculty of Education and leading educational experts to create a unique learning environment that will fulfil its commitments to being an inclusive school and to being a University Training School.  

View the construction of the school building in time-lapsed footage here

Heather Topel, Deputy Project Director of the North West Cambridge Development said: “Delivering the primary school is a demonstrable commitment that the University has made to providing community facilities from the outset. It is a great milestone not just for the school but also the wider development and local communities, and we look forward to welcoming children and their families as the first users of the buildings in the very near future.”

The University of Cambridge Primary School will open in September 2015 for its first intake of children, with up to 120 pupils across the Reception class and Years 1 and 2. Further details about the University of Cambridge Primary School, visit www.universityprimaryschool.org.uk

Access to the school will be along the new road off Huntingdon Road, called Eddington Avenue, and restricted initially to parents and users of the school due to on-going construction works for the first phase of the North West Cambridge Development. The school will be the first building in operation as part of the 150-hectare North West Cambridge Development. 

The North West Cambridge Development is the largest single capital project that the University of Cambridge has undertaken in its 800-year history. Outline planning permission was granted in February 2013 for the scheme, subject to approval of site-wide legal conditions and Reserved Matters Applications, on the 150-hectare site of University farmland situated in between Huntingdon Road, Madingley Road and the M11.

The masterplan includes 3,000 homes (50% ‘key worker’ housing, available for qualifying University and Colleges employees), 2,000 post-graduate student spaces, 100,000 sqm of research space, a local centre and community facilities including a primary school, nursery, doctors’ surgery, supermarket and retail units, as well as all of the site-infrastructure and landscaping for the scheme. The development has been designed as an extension to the city, with an urban rather than suburban grain and will be of the highest design quality as well as being an exemplar of sustainable living. 

Pictured Front row: (L-R) Gavin Heaphy, Jeremy Sanders, James Biddulph, Jonathan Nicholls, Chris Tredget. 

A new approach to self-assemble and tailor complex structures at the nanoscale, developed by an international collaboration led by the University of Cambridge and IBM, opens opportunities to tailor properties and functionalities of materials for a wide range of semiconductor device applications.

The researchers have developed a method for growing combinations of different materials in a needle-shaped crystal called a nanowire. Nanowires are small structures, only a few billionths of a metre in diameter. Semiconductors can be grown into nanowires, and the result is a useful building block for electrical, optical, and energy harvesting devices. The researchers have found out how to grow smaller crystals within the nanowire, forming a structure like a crystal rod with an embedded array of gems. Details of the new method are published in the journal Nature Materials.

“The key to building functional nanoscale devices is to control materials and their interfaces at the atomic level,” said Dr Stephan Hofmann of the Department of Engineering, one of the paper’s senior authors. “We’ve developed a method of engineering inclusions of different materials so that we can make complex structures in a very precise way.”

Nanowires are often grown through a process called Vapour-Liquid-Solid (VLS) synthesis, where a tiny catalytic droplet is used to seed and feed the nanowire, so that it self-assembles one atomic layer at a time. VLS allows a high degree of control over the resulting nanowire: composition, diameter, growth direction, branching, kinking and crystal structure can be controlled by tuning the self-assembly conditions. As nanowires become better controlled, new applications become possible.

The technique that Hofmann and his colleagues from Cambridge and IBM developed can be thought of as an expansion of the concept that underlies conventional VLS growth. The researchers use the catalytic droplet not only to grow the nanowire, but also to form new materials within it. These tiny crystals form in the liquid, but later attach to the nanowire and then become embedded as the nanowire is grown further. This catalyst mediated docking process can ‘self-optimise’ to create highly perfect interfaces for the embedded crystals.

To unravel the complexities of this process, the research team used two customised electron microscopes, one at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center and a second at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This allowed them to record high-speed movies of the nanowire growth as it happens atom-by-atom. The researchers found that using the catalyst as a ‘mixing bowl’, with the order and amount of each ingredient programmed into a desired recipe, resulted in complex structures consisting of nanowires with embedded nanoscale crystals, or quantum dots, of controlled size and position.

“The technique allows two different materials to be incorporated into the same nanowire, even if the lattice structures of the two crystals don’t perfectly match,” said Hofmann. “It’s a flexible platform that can be used for different technologies.”

Possible applications for this technique range from atomically perfect buried interconnects to single-electron transistors, high-density memories, light emission, semiconductor lasers, and tunnel diodes, along with the capability to engineer three-dimensional device structures.

“This process has enabled us to understand the behaviour of nanoscale materials in unprecedented detail, and that knowledge can now be applied to other processes,” said Hofmann. 

Historians need to pursue parallel lines of enquiry to add an extra dimension to their research.  Tillmann Taape, a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science, is much more interested in early printed books than in clothes. He never thought he’d be immersing himself in the fine details of 15th century men’s fashion as means of understanding the makings of early modern science.

Taape is studying medical manuals compiled by a surgeon-apothecary around the turn of the 16th century. Hieronymus Brunschwig’s works were published by Johann Grüninger who commissioned a highly skilled artist (name unknown) to produce dozens of detailed woodcuts to illustrate some of the earliest books printed in Germany. Brunschwig’s were the first books on surgery and medical distillation to be published in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

The focus of Taape’s research is Brunschwig’s surgery manual, plague treatise and two books on distillation, all published in Brunschwig’s home town, Strasbourg. His scholarship will add to an understanding of medicine in the context of a world in which printing was just beginning to revolutionise the transmission of practical knowledge and thus to raise questions about who should have access to what kind of knowledge.

A big question for historians working on early medical books is: who did the author and publisher think would be likely to read and benefit from items that would have been costly to produce and correspondingly expensive to purchase? In the case of Bruschwig’s collections, the clues to unravelling this puzzle lie not just in the text – which he often addresses to the ‘common man’ – but also in the illustrations used to give the reader a quick idea of the topics covered in the book.

As Taape shifted his gaze from the books’ written content to the woodcuts, a succession of smaller but equally compelling questions crept into his mind: why are so many of the men depicted in the images wearing bold and vertical stripes, and what was the artist’s intention in dressing some men in stripes and others in plain garments?

At a time when people’s outer appearance was thought to reflect their inner character in a much more direct way than today, artists could use clothing as a visual ‘label’ for the different kinds of people they wanted to depict. Anyone with the proverbial feather in their cap, for example, would have been recognised as well-to-do, masculine and energetic.

The striped garments in the woodcuts used in Grüninger’s books are a striking label, calculated to stand out. While the background and other sartorial details are captured in fine lines and delicate hatching, the stripes appear as unbroken, solid black or white shapes. The difference in clothes is underlined by an apparent division of labour in the images: striped people are often shown doing manual work, such as stitching up wounds, while figures in monochrome fur-trimmed robes stand well back.

Stripes clearly marked out a particular kind of person, so the next step was to find out what it meant to be stripy in the early modern period.“The whole topic of stripes, and the messages they convey, set me off on a tangent that took me into the realms of art, fashion and social satire. To embrace stripes as a complex narrative of symbols, you have to look at cultural and political history, the ways in which social structures were perceived and conveyed in forms of dress as well as figures of speech,” says Taape.

A book called The Devil’s Cloth discusses stripes in Biblical references and medieval fiction right through to stripes in prison uniform, pyjamas and toothpaste. Its author, Michel Pastoureau, argues that stripes stood out because they were inherently offensive to the medieval eye which was used to decoding images layer by layer. “Pastoureau suggests that stripes defied this hierarchical gaze because they resist being distinguished into background and foreground. Instead, their contrasting colours appear in the same visual plane,” says Taape.

“Stripy clothes, moreover, were often literally cobbled together from different pieces of material, which could make them somewhat second-rate not only with respect to visual sensibilities, but also because they could be seen to go against the Bible. Stripes were in stark contrast with Jesus’s garment, woven in one piece, and laughed in the face of the decrees against wearing garments made from different materials, found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.”

But visual symbolism is rarely one-sided and, by the early modern period, stripes had acquired another set of connotations. Precisely because of their conspicuous or even unsavoury nature, striped clothes became a sign of courtly extravaganza, giving rise to a new fashion of elaborately tailored striped or slashed doublets and hose – perhaps rather in the way that more than four centuries later,  punk, with its rebellious rips and subversive safety pins, was reimagined by couture.

Historians think that the 16th century fashion for stripes first appeared at the North Italian courts, and was brought to the streets of prosperous Germany by the Emperor's new infantry, the so-called lansquenets, who combined short doublets, often striped, with tight-fitting striped or mi-parti hose.

“Stripy clothes became particularly popular among the middling sort of citizens of free imperial towns, artisans and even wealthy farmers and landowners,” says Taape. “These people constituted a growing and increasingly self-aware middle layer of society, sandwiched between poorer day-labourers, who did not own any property, and the wealthy urban patriciate or landed gentry.”

Like checks and other bold geometric patterns, stripes are attention-seeking: “look at me!” In the setting of burgeoning European towns and cities, where artisans and merchants often formed part of the governing council, the new middle class of ‘stripy people’ represented a force to be reckoned with. As arrivistes they were, inevitably, satirised for their uppity, in-your-face presumption in treading on the toes of those higher up the social scale.

“The literature of the late 15th century, notably social satire in the tradition of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, associates this newly significant social group  with striped clothes. In a sermon inspired by Brant’s satirical work, the Strasbourg preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg coined a new term for this kind of person –  ‘striped laymen’ or gestreyflet leygen in the original German,” says Taape.

“The phrase stuck, and so the 'striped layman' became a rhetorical statement as well as a visual one. His striped clothing identified him as being ‘half and half’, or in between, not just in terms of wealth and status but also in terms of education.”

Taape continues: “The striped layman is literate in his local language but not in Latin – and, as he becomes more powerful, he emerges as a central figure in the visual rhetoric of Protestant pamphlets during the Reformation. Martin Luther wrote for an audience of precisely this kind of person. Although not a Latinate scholar of theology, the striped layman sought salvation in his own reading of Scripture in the vernacular without learned clergy as an intermediate.”

Brunschwig was more concerned with the common man’s health than the salvation of his soul. Each of his books contains a number of different woodcuts – but one particular illustration appears in all of them. It shows a teacher addressing a group of students who stand in front of him. The teacher, who is seated at a lectern, wears a fur-lined scholar’s robe. He is lecturing from a book positioned so that only he can see its contents, thus demonstrating his exclusive access to the text.

“Among his students, we see a young man dressed in stripes. While his fellow student listens demurely, cap in hand, this striped chap gesticulates as if he’s arguing a point with the teacher. What’s more, he’s holding a roll of paper, which could be a sheet of notes or a medical recipe. The picture suggests that this striped layman is literate and familiar with some of medicine’s written forms,” says Taape.

It was a nifty sales ploy on the part of Brunschwig and his publisher to put the striped layman centre stage. The customer, perhaps not yet always right, was often striped. “In the chapter of my PhD thesis that explores the dress depicted in the woodcuts, I argue that the middling man – the striped man – neatly symbolises the intended reader of Brunschwig’s works, although Brunschwig himself never explicitly comments on the depicted figures and their stripes,” says Taape.

“Just a few years later, however, the physician Lorenz Fries from Colmar, not far from Strasbourg, dedicated his Mirror of Medicine specifically to gestreiffelten leyen, ‘striped laypeople,’ who want to learn about medicine. Styling himself as something of a Luther of medicine, Fries makes explicit a trend which we already see developing in Brunschwig: the middling, half-educated layman as a reader of medical books which can help him to treat himself and his household.”

As a digression from his meticulous analysis of Brunschwig’s texts, Taape’s foray into the world of stripes was undoubtedly a lot of fun. But it also showed him that the visual culture of early modern print can still tell us new things if we can figure out how to decode images and read them alongside contemporary texts.

This article is based on a blog that appeared on the Recipes Project website http://recipes.hypotheses.org/5551

Inset images: Master (surgeon?) lecturing from a chair to four standing students, from Die hantwirkung der wund Artzeny by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London); A man sits in a chair apparently with his abdomen opened surgically. Kneeling before him is the surgeon with a bowl collecting the abdominal contents, watching are three figures, one with spectacles. Could show an early surgical procedure or portray treatment of a severe abdominal injury, from Das Buch der Cirurgia des Hieronymus Brunschwig by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London).

For the first time, researchers from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, used stem cells to grow fully functional three-dimensional bile ducts in the lab. Bile ducts act as the liver’s waste disposal system, and malfunctioning bile ducts are behind a third of adult and 70 per cent of children’s liver transplantations.

The researchers used their ‘miniature bile ducts’  to test new drugs for biliary disease, leading to the discovery that VX809 – an experimental compound originally designed to treat the effects of cystic fibrosis in the lungs – could be the first treatment to prevent the damage cystic fibrosis causes to the liver and bile duct.

Dr Fotios Sampaziotis, lead author and an MRC-Sparks clinical research fellow in hepatology at the Department of Surgery, said: “Treating liver complications caused by bile duct disorders constitutes a major challenge – with the only treatment option often being liver transplantation. Identifying a new experimental drug that could prevent patients with cystic fibrosis from undergoing a liver transplantation, a major and life changing operation, could have huge implications for our patients. But, this treatment will need to be tested in clinical trials before it can be recommended to patients.”

Until now there has been no way of generating large numbers of fully functional bile ducts that mimic disease in the lab, which has limited our understanding of biliary disorders and restricted the development of new drugs. Using their ‘bile duct replicas’ the researchers reproduced key features of two more bile duct diseases – polycystic liver disease and Alagille syndrome – and tested the effects of additional drugs, such as octreotide.

Professor Ludovic Vallier, Principal Investigator from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: “The pharmaceutical applications of our system are particularly important as we don’t have many human samples of this type of tissue to work on. This system could provide a unique resource for identifying new treatments.”

Dr Nicholas Hannan, a senior author from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, said: “The bile duct cells we have generated represent an invaluable tool to understand not only how healthy bile ducts develop and function, but also how diseased bile ducts behave and how they may respond to treatment. This opens up the possibility of modelling complex liver diseases and will certainly progress our understanding of biliary disease in the future.”

To demonstrate that the cells they had grown were in fact forming bile ducts the researchers looked for characteristic markers and functions of the cells. They then compared these with samples from human donors and found that they were almost identical.

Dr Paul Colville-Nash, programme manager for stem cell, developmental biology and regenerative medicine at the MRC, said: “The approach developed in this work will enable a vast range of work, from understanding how organs grow and develop to a greater understanding of disease and testing new drugs. This work could also one day open the way to researchers building new bile ducts that will replace damaged segments of the liver.”

The study was funded by a joint MRC-Sparks clinical research training fellowship, the European Research Council and the European fp7 grant TissuGEN, the Cambridge University Hospitals National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre, Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust and the Wellcome Trust

Reference
Sampaziotis, F et al. Cholangiocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells for disease modeling and drug validation. Nature Bioetch; 13 July 2015

Adapted from a press release from the Medical Research Council.

They are among 42 highly distinguished UK academics from 18 universities welcomed as Fellows by the Academy, taking the total number of living Fellows to over one thousand for the first time.

The Fellows elected from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor Cyprian Broodbank– John Disney Professor of Archaeology, Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Garth Fowden– Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse.

Professor Robert Gordon– Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Sanjeev Goyal– Professor of Economics and Fellow of Christ’s College.

Professor Peter Mandler– Professor of Modern Cultural History and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Joachim Whaley– Professor of German History and Thought and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Also receiving a fellowship is Professor Michael Mann, Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, said: “This year we have the honour of once again welcoming the finest researchers and scholars into our Fellowship. Elected from across the UK and world for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences, they represent an unrivalled resource of expertise and knowledge.

“Our Fellows play a vital role in the work of the Academy; encouraging younger researchers, engaging in public discussion of the great issues and ideas of our time, and contributing to policy reports. Their collective work and expertise are testament to why research in the humanities and social sciences is vital for our understanding of the world and humanity.”

The British Academy is the UK's expert body that supports and speaks for the humanities and social sciences. It funds research across the UK and in other parts of the world, in disciplines ranging from archaeology to economics, from psychology to history, and from literature to law.

View the full list of British Academy Fellows.

The Experimental Medicine Initiative to Explore New Therapies (EMINENT) network will be coordinated by University College London (UCL) and will bring together teams of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow, Newcastle, Imperial College London and UCL, with GSK researchers to study the fundamental biological mechanisms responsible for a range of inflammatory diseases. It is hoped that combining the disease biology expertise of these academic scientists with GSK’s drug development expertise and resources will ultimately lead to breakthroughs in understanding that could accelerate the development of innovative treatments for patients.

Drug development is a lengthy, costly and risky process, with the majority of promising treatments failing in clinical trials and hence never reaching patients as medicines. This is because the biological processes that underlie many diseases are still not fully understood.

By gaining a better understanding of the inflammatory process in diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and fibrosis, the collaboration aims to improve the success rate for discovering new potential treatments for these and other diseases.

Through the unique EMINENT network, MRC funding of up to £8m over five years will support academic costs. This will be matched with GSK in-kind contributions, including access to a portfolio of currently available medicines, experimental compounds, screening facilities and the company’s drug discovery and development in-house expertise. While GSK will retain ownership of the intellectual property covering these medicines and compounds, joint project teams of GSK and academic researchers will be able to use these as investigational tools to help answer scientific questions about human disease – which in turn could provide starting points for the development of next generation treatments for patients.

The initiative aims to support up to ten experimental medicine projects over the five year period. The academic research teams that are awarded funding by the MRC will work alongside their industry colleagues at both GSK and university facilities, with a view to building a legacy of expertise in translational and experimental human research across academia and industry. It is anticipated that the network will grow beyond the first five academic partners.

Information and new discoveries will be readily communicated across the network, and beyond, in a spirit of open innovation. This will help enable breakthroughs in understanding to be applied across a spectrum of diseases, maximising the potential of the initiative to bring real benefits to patients.

Minister for Life Sciences George Freeman said “Networks of biomedical researchers from hospitals, industry and universities are key to unlocking the biomedical breakthroughs that are transforming our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and developing new diagnostics and treatments for patients.”

Professor Sir John Savill, Chief Executive at the Medical Research Council, said: “Despite major progress made over the last 20 years in many disease areas, some hard-to-treat conditions still carry high morbidity and mortality.  Addressing these challenges successfully requires close, flexible, collaboration across a range of disciplines with complementary methodological expertise and disease understanding which is why initiatives such as this are so important to the MRC. We believe this innovative approach could be applied in other areas to combine the work of academia and industry.”

GSK’s president of pharmaceuticals R&D, Patrick Vallance, said: “At GSK, we believe that alongside the cutting-edge research our own scientists are leading, we also have much to learn from researchers outside our walls. We believe that by sharing our resources and research during the early stages of research we can stimulate innovation within the scientific community, strengthen our understanding of human disease and accelerate the development of new treatments for patients. We need to embrace opportunities to work together and share information about our successes and failures.

“The MRC’s EMINENT initiative is a great way for us to do precisely this, allowing us to work alongside scientists from five top UK universities to drive forward our collective understanding of inflammatory disease, and we’re confident this unique approach will make us better able to develop innovative new treatments in the future.”

An independent panel of experts will assess the applications submitted by EMINENT collaborators. Projects will be assessed against the same criteria as any other MRC-funded research, based on the quality of the science.   An oversight group, the Joint Steering Committee (JSC), reporting to the MRC, will ensure robust governance and alignment with MRC’s strategic priorities.

The collaboration will also be supported by the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres at Cambridge, Newcastle, Imperial and UCL.

An international team of researchers, with the assistance of amateur astronomers, have discovered a unique binary star system: the first known such system where one star completely eclipses the other. It is a type of two-star system known as a Cataclysmic Variable, where one super dense white dwarf star is stealing gas from its companion star, effectively ‘cannibalising’ it.

The system could also be an important laboratory for studying ultra-bright supernova explosions, which are a vital tool for measuring the expansion of the Universe. Details of the new research will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The system, named Gaia14aae, is located about 730 light years away in the Draco constellation. It was discovered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite in August 2014 when it suddenly became five times brighter over the course of a single day.

Astronomers led by the University of Cambridge analysed the information from Gaia and determined that the sudden outburst was due to the fact that the white dwarf – which is so dense that a teaspoonful of material from it would weigh as much as an elephant – is devouring its larger companion.

Additional observations of the system made by the Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA), a collaboration of amateur and professional astronomers, found that the system is a rare eclipsing binary, where one star passes directly in front of the other, completely blocking it out when viewed from Earth. The two stars are tightly orbiting each other, so a total eclipse occurs roughly every 50 minutes.

“It’s rare to see a binary system so well-aligned” said Dr Heather Campbell of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the follow-up campaign for Gaia14aae. “Because of this, we can measure the system with great precision in order to figure out what these systems are made of and how they evolved. It’s a fascinating system – there’s a lot to be learned from it.”

Using spectroscopy from the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands, Campbell and her colleagues found that Gaia14aae contains large amounts of helium, but no hydrogen, which is highly unusual as hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe. The lack of hydrogen allowed them to classify Gaia14aae as a very rare type of system known as an AM Canum Venaticorum (AM CVn), a type of Cataclysmic Variable system where both stars have lost all of their hydrogen. This is the first known AM CVn system where one star totally eclipses the other.

“It’s really cool that the first time that one of these systems was discovered to have one star completely eclipsing the other, that it was amateur astronomers who made the discovery and alerted us,” said Campbell. “This really highlights the vital contribution that amateur astronomers make to cutting edge scientific research.”

AM CVn systems consist of a small and hot white dwarf star which is devouring its larger companion. The gravitational effects from the hot and superdense white dwarf are so strong that it has forced the companion star to swell up like a massive balloon and move towards it.

The companion star is about 125 times the volume of our sun, and towers over the tiny white dwarf, which is about the size of the Earth – this is similar to comparing a hot air balloon and a marble. However, the companion star is lightweight, weighing in at only one percent of the white dwarf’s mass.

AM CVn systems are prized by astronomers, as they could hold the key to one of the greatest mysteries in modern astrophysics: what causes Ia supernova explosions? This type of supernova, which occurs in binary systems, is important in astrophysics as their extreme brightness makes them an important tool to measure the expansion of the Universe.

In the case of Gaia14aae, it’s not known whether the two stars will collide and cause a supernova explosion, or whether the white dwarf will completely devour its companion first.

“Every now and then, these sorts of binary systems may explode as supernovae, so studying Gaia14aae helps us understand the brightest explosions in the Universe,” said Dr Morgan Fraser of the Institute of Astronomy.

“This is an exquisite system: a very rare type of binary system in which the component stars complete orbits faster than the minute hand of a clock, oriented so that one eclipses the other,” said Professor Tom Marsh of the University of Warwick. “We will be able to measure their sizes and masses to a higher accuracy than any similar system; it whets the appetite for the many new discoveries I expect from the Gaia satellite.”

“This is an awesome first catch for Gaia, but we want it to be the first of many,” said the Institute of Astronomy’s Dr Simon Hodgkin, who is leading the search for more transients in Gaia data. “Gaia has already found hundreds of transients in its first few months of operation, and we know there are many more out there for us to find.”

Gaia’s mission, funded by the European Space Agency and involving scientists from across Europe, is to make the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever attempted. During its five-year mission, which began in late 2013, Gaia’s billion-pixel camera will detect and very accurately measure the motion of stars in their orbit around the centre of the galaxy. It will observe each of the billion stars about a hundred times, helping us to understand the origin and evolution of the Milky Way.

The research was supported by ESA Gaia, DPAC, and the DPAC Photometric Science Alerts Team. The DPAC is funded by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

The follow-up campaign used several professional telescopes, including those located in the Canary Islands, where observing time was made available through the International Time Program.

Reference 
Campbell, HC et al, Total eclipse of the heart: The AM CVn Gaia14aae / ASSASN-14cn, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2015). 

The efforts we make to shape our bodies to meet ideals border on the extreme. Earlier this summer advertisers of weight loss products enraged thousands of London tube-goers by asking: Are you body beach ready? The accompanying image showed a pitifully thin model in a tiny bikini. A recent survey points to a six-fold upsurge in the number of men using anabolic steroids, widely known to have damaging effects, to boost their muscles in the quest for a body of a Greek god.  

Where do ideas about beautiful bodies come from? In her recent book, Dr Kate Nichols, a researcher at CRASSH, explores the connections between beauty and morality, nudity and nakedness through the prism of public responses to the classical sculpture brought to the masses by the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. In 1854 these plaster cast representations of gods and heroes, many of them without a scrap of clothing, ignited fierce arguments that continue to trickle into contemporary discussions about bodies and perfection, what’s appropriate and what’s not. 

Nichols also looks at the debate about obscenity that arose specifically from displays of naked male sculpture at the Crystal Palace. To modern eyes, classical sculpture is the height of respectability, embodying tradition and (as the British Museum titled its recent blockbuster show) ‘defining beauty’. But this wasn’t always the case.

“Nude male sculptures had been on display in the British Museum since the early 1800s, with no complaints. The Crystal Palace attracted more than twice as many visitors as the British Museum – some 2 million each year, and from a truly mass audience of all social classes. For many, the idea of nudity being displayed to such mass audiences was profoundly shocking,” says Nichols.

On 8 May 1854, the Times published a letter addressed to the directors of the Crystal Palace. Designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the palace had been moved from Hyde Park to the south London suburb of Sydenham. Here, the building had been reassembled to house an exhibition which aimed to bring art and culture to the masses. The objects on display were arranged, in a series of giant ‘courts’, to tell the story of civilisation through art and architecture.

Signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and several bishops, the petition asked that the plaster casts of nude male statues on show in the Greek Court be fitted with the ‘usual leaf’ to reflect the way in which certain parts of the body are covered in daily life. The ‘usual leaf’ is a rather endearing reference to the fig leaves which are frequently employed to preserve the modesty of artistic representations of the male human figure.  

“From the 16th century onwards, various Popes had insisted on deploying fig leaves to cover the genitals of male sculptures on display in public spaces in Italy. In 16th-century Florence, Michelangelo’s David was a particular point of contention,” says Nichols.

Reactions to the letter in the Times were mixed. The newspaper itself scoffed at the need to recreate the “earliest fashions of paradise” – but the bishops got their way. A specialist company was commissioned to make plaster fig leaves to cover the genitals of a number of male statues.

The Greek gods and heroes who found their genitals disappearing beneath pieces of foliage included the bulgingly muscular Farnese Hercules, the contorted figures of Laocoon and his sons, and the svelte Apollo Belvedere. “The casts of all three had been made from celebrated sculptures housed in Italy and were key points of reference for the educated elite taking the Grand Tour in order to broaden their aesthetic horizons,” says Nichols.

"The request from the Archbishop and his supporters was a thinly veiled way of saying that working-class visitors, and those untutored in classical art, would be unable to appreciate on a suitably cerebral level, the purity and beauty of classical sculpture. It’s an admission that you need to absorb a set of cultural techniques in order to look at art works – it’s not innate.”

The heated discussion about what we might today call the ‘appropriateness’ of nude sculpture was embedded in questions that provoked passionate feelings in Victorian society. The Victorian public was not familiar with art works showing undressed bodies. The Crystal Palace’s exhibition of the human form in plaster to a mass audience coincided with a growing concern with sexual morality.

“In the 1850s, activists were raising awareness of the problems associated with prostitution and discussing methods to control it. The year 1857 saw the passing of acts on marriage, divorce, and obscene publications, as state regulation of sexual conduct increased,” says Nichols. ”The tensions between what was beautiful, and should be admired, and what was obscene, and should be hidden from family viewing, threw up divides – especially when it came to male nudes.”

Victorian Britain was entrenched in biblical teaching. The presence at Sydenham of nude statues, accessible to all classes and all ages, provoked a flurry of vociferous pamphlets from some religious groups. Sensational stories (true and fabricated) were recorded: in 1862 Susan Flood, a young member of the Plymouth Brethren, was apparently so affronted by the nude ‘pagans’ displayed in the Crystal Palace that she smashed several plaster casts with her parasol.

It would be wrong, however, to presume that Victorian society was universally stuffy and prudish. “The Crystal Palace was, in some ways, a kind of theme park where people could have fun – there are fabulous photographs of Victorian women on water flumes in its grounds – but it was also the product of a mission to educate the masses," says Nichols.

"I’m fascinated by the ways in which unclothed Greek and Roman sculpture gave rise to two opposing viewpoints – on one hand, as a threat to morality and, on the other hand, as a vehicle for improving and uplifting the minds of visitors.”

The designer Owen Jones was responsible for selecting the classical sculpture for the Greek and Roman Courts. According to the Times, Jones reacted with ‘horror’ when the Palace directorate capitulated to the demands of the bishops and peers. He had even suggested that money spent at Sydenham "would save many thousands more from being spent on building gaols".

Jones was backed up by other commentators who saw the Crystal Palace contributing to the well-established association between viewing art and elevated moral conduct.

“These dialogues show how art was considered to be a powerful force for good. Belief in the improving power of art was the impetus for the foundation of many galleries in industrial cities. The Museums Act of 1845 enabled towns to levy local taxes to fund museums, on the grounds that culture was morally enhancing, and it was on this basis that galleries were founded in towns like Manchester, Birmingham, Blackburn and Leeds,” says Nichols.

Nichols’ exploration of responses to representations of the human figure touches on deep-seated notions about the body beautiful – and how idealised body shapes took root in public consciousness with Greek statues in particular setting the parameters for (impossible) perfection.

She reveals that the later 19th-century cult of body building, promoted by Eugen Sandow, took its inspiration from the athletic perfection of Greek figures with their honed-and-toned limbs and impressive six-packs, and the intellectual and moral prowess associated with ancient Greece. It was at the Crystal Palace that Sandow opened his first suburban ‘School of Physical Culture’ for men, women and children in 1899.

“The classically-inspired notion of beauty is emphatically one of idealised white European bodies. The Crystal Palace had a ‘natural history department’, featuring tableaux of models of indigenous peoples from all over the world – some of which were plaster casts of living people,” says Nichols.

“Europeans were notably absent from these displays, and several commentators claimed that Europeans were already represented by the Greek sculptures on show as objects of ‘fine art’, rather than ‘natural history’. This reinforced the racist hierarchy in which white Europeans epitomised beauty and ‘civilisation’, while non-Europeans represented savagery and ‘aesthetic under development’.”

Many were troubled, however, by the fact that both sets of sculptures were undressed. Much of the anxiety felt by the educated elite, on behalf of the uneducated masses who were untutored in art appreciation, turned on the fine distinction between dangerous naked and respectable nude – a boundary which is in many ways artificial, but required – and indeed still requires – constant policing.

“I’m interested in the ways in which the unclothed body in art gained respectability and also in ways that gender differences are played out in responses to male and female bodies in art. Campaigners at the Crystal Palace focused primarily on unclothed male bodies. The sculptures of, for example, Venus, were already deemed ‘nude’ and respectable. This disparity continues today – an exhibition of male nudes in Vienna in 2012 caused an outrage – whereas female nudes are ubiquitous and generally unquestioned, safely subsumed into the art historical category of the nude,” says Nichols.

”The idea that female bodies are acceptable objects for public scrutiny whereas male ones are dangerous and disruptive says a great deal about the relative power of men and women. The Crystal Palace debate shows that classical sculpture remained on the borders of respectability in the 1850s, when the public was less familiar with the nude-as-art. The Palace’s contribution to the history of the category ‘nude’ lies in its dissemination of the unclothed male form, exhibited as ‘art’, to a wide range of people. But with varying degrees of success as the letter from the Bishops suggests.”

The link between bodily beauty and classical sculpture is remarkably enduring. In its June 2015 issue, the glossy magazine Tatler asks: How posh is your body? Its satirical answers in relation to the upper-class female body (feet should be gracefully small, limbs honed but not muscled) decree that the neck should be “long, straight and alabaster” – a reference to the gleaming white materials of classical statuary. The feet of posh men should be long and elegant, speaking “of authority, and ruling, and staking out the boundaries of the Empire”.

“Ideas and ideals surrounding ‘the body beautiful’ based on classical sculpture are constantly repeated and reinforced in our culture. But there’s often little thought about where such ideas may have their origins. Art historical and archaeological discussions about the beauty of classical statuary developed in the contexts of imperialism, ‘scientific’ racism, and eugenics, and often made active contributions to these discourses. The split between the supposedly ‘European’ bodies of Greek sculpture in the ‘fine arts’ courts, and the non-European bodies in the ‘natural history department’ at the Crystal Palace is just one example” says Nichols.

Tatler connects looking classical with ‘the Empire’ and the upper classes – and perhaps implicitly with ‘good breeding’ or at least good social standing. Its feature is tongue-in-cheek and pokes fun at the ruddy faces of toffs who’ve overdone the great outdoors. But, as Nichols adds: “It’s important to think about who’s excluded from these normative and frankly racist definitions of beauty, given credence by their connections to ‘the classical’.”

Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936 by Kate Nichols is published by Oxford University Press.

Inset images: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham c.1910 (Wikimedia Commons); Farnese Hercules, Roman marble version (early 3rd century CE) of a Greek sculpture (4th century CE) (Wikimedia Commons); Souvenir photograph of body building entrepreneur Eugen Sandow posing as 'Farnese Hercules' (with fig leaf) c.1893 (Wikimedia Commons).

One hundred and seventy years ago, the French state commissioned a physician called Louis Auzoux to make models of horse’s teeth as examples of healthy and unhealthy equine dentition. At a time when cadavers were in short supply, Auzoux had pioneered a method of making realistic models of human and animal bodies to use as teaching aids.

As horses mature, and then grow older, their teeth change. People familiar with horses can gauge a horse’s age by looking in its mouth. This practice is the origin of the saying, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” In fact, this was a very good idea if you were buying a horse; in order to make an animal appear younger, and demand a higher price, dishonest dealers sometimes filed down horses’ teeth.

Malformed teeth, which prevent a horse from eating properly and affect its performance, are another problem to look out for – as are signs of ‘vices’ such as crib-biting and wind-sucking.

The Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge has a set of horse teeth models made by a factory set up by Auzoux. Dated 1890, and still housed in the sturdy case made to transport them, this ‘box set’ of smiling and grimacing equine teeth is one of the best-loved objects in the museum and takes prime position in its twitter feed.

Less than half a mile from the Whipple Museum is the Museum of Classical Archaeology, home to 35 plaster casts of horses, taken from the originals. Cantering, trotting, rearing and frolicking, these horses are the stars of the procession which winds its way around the famous frieze adorning the Parthenon, the showpiece temple atop the Akropolis in Athens.

The Parthenon was erected when Athens was a flourishing city-state. Construction began in 447 BCE and was finally finished in 432. The temple celebrated the city’s patron goddess, Athena. The horses on the frieze were part of a procession honouring her during the Great Panathenaea. A festival which took place every four years, it featured athletic games including wrestling, javelin throwing and chariot racing.

The frieze shows representatives of the city – city elders and officials, soldiers, young men and unmarried maidens, and even resident aliens, known as ‘metics’ – coming together to process from the city walls to the top of the Akropolis and the temple itself. “These human figures represented the city, or polis, in microcosm,” says Dr Susanne Turner, curator of the Museum of Classical Archaeology.

It is the horses, though, which dominate the frieze. Powerful and compact, with manes and tails flowing and small holes in the marble indicating that they originally wore bronze bridles, the horses are well attuned to the easy grace of the athletic youths on their backs and at their sides. Some of the riders wear flowing cloaks which fan out behind them, as if caught by a breeze. Many wear no other clothes.

“Their nudity is a sort of costume in itself,” says Turner. “There’s something inherently Greek about their nakedness. It connotes strength, beauty and idealised youthful masculinity, but it also carries a wider sense of cultural belonging.”

The rhythm of repeated and overlapping diagonals, made by the limbs of horses and riders, leads the eye across what was originally a frieze 160m in length, made up by 115 blocks. On the Parthenon the frieze would have soared 12m above floor level. “Viewers approaching the temple saw first the horses and their riders preparing to join the procession,” says Turner.

“As they turned the corner to walk along the long sides of the temple, so too did the horses, now with riders and chariots. Layered side by side in small groups, they form a cavalcade whose forward motion draws the viewer onwards until they reach the doors of the temple – where the goddess herself was revealed inside, some 10m tall and sculpted from bright white ivory and shining gold.”

Much ancient sculpture was brightly painted and the Parthenon frieze was probably no exception. Surviving evidence for colour is, however, scant. “Ancient colour combinations, where they can be reconstructed, often look harsh and garish to modern eyes. We tend to prefer our classical sculpture white,” says Turner. “The Parthenon horses probably galloped across a bright blue background, their riders’ clothing and hair picked out in primary colours, perhaps with some gold leaf, too.”

The casts were purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1884, when the Museum of Classical Archaeology was first founded. Produced by a London workshop run by the Brucciani family, the casts are direct copies of the originals, taken from moulds produced by permission of the British Museum. They preserve the three-dimensional presence of the originals in a way which photographs cannot – breathing life into the horses as they high-step joyfully along the length of the frieze as only horses can.

Horses played a central role in the rise of many great civilisations. Archaeological evidence suggests that they were first domesticated during the Neolithic around 5,000 years ago somewhere in the vast grassy pastures of central Asia. “Botai in Kazakhstan has been identified as one of the earliest sites with domestic horses. Botai horses show tooth wear patterns characteristic of the use of harness, and horse milk lipids on pottery fragments show that horse milk was being used,” says Dr Mim Bower, an expert in ancient DNA at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

“Horse husbandry dispersed from the steppe, westward into Europe, via the grasslands of Eastern Europe or via Iberia, accompanying Bell Beaker cultures, and eastward into China and India. This was concurrent with the spread of chariots and fabulous material culture that comprised the ‘chariot complex’ of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC – for example, the chariot burials at Sintashta and Southern Urals and cylinder seal impressions, depicting horses and chariots, from Kültepe in Turkey.”

The development of pastoral nomadism in central Eurasia between 1000 and 800 BC secured the role of the horse as a source of speed over ground and as an iconic symbol. The archaeological finds associated with this period include exquisitely decorated horse harness and adornments from 4th -3rd century BC sites, such as Pazyryk and Ak-Alakha, Altai and 7th – 4th century BC Arzhan, Tuva.

“Where written records exist for these early periods, for example in China, they highlight the importance of the horse as a symbol of strength and power. Throughout the dynastic eras, horses gained an increasingly important military role. In the Western Zhou period, the raising of horses is recorded as a task that is overseen by kings. In later periods, the military power of the state was measured by the number of horse-chariots,” says Bower.

“These changes are concurrent with, and may have influenced, the intensification of long distance trade routes that connected the far reaches of Eurasia. Tradition states that trade routes, associated with the exchange of silk and spices, between China and Europe, began in the 2nd century BC, instigated by Han Emperor Wu. However, these long distance exchange networks have a deeper past. By 1000 BC, Chinese silk is found in Egypt and by 700 BC in Europe. Horses were almost certainly an integral part of these developments.”

Arab horses were famed for their speed and beauty. It was from the Middle East that three Arab stallions were imported to Britain at the turn of the 18th century. The Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk were crossed with some 70 British mares to produce horses for racing. All British Thoroughbreds trace their lineage back to these world famous ‘foundation stallions’.

The skeleton of a famous British racehorse called Polymelus was given to Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology in the 1930s and until recently stood sentinel in the museum entrance. Polymelus was the sire (father) of a string of leading racehorses foaled (born) between 1914 and 1921. His son Phalaris was a champion racehorse who went on to sire many winners. Among Polymelus’s other descendants are the racehorses Secretariat and Northern Dancer who also became legends in their time.

In a study carried out in 2012, tiny samples of DNA were taken from one of the teeth of the skeleton of Polymelus. They were analysed at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research as part of an inter-disciplinary project tracing the genes for speed and stamina found in modern thoroughbreds backwards in time to discover their origins. The DNA of 12 historic horse skeletons was screened, including that of Eclipse, the most famous of all.

The work showed just how rapidly the genetic make-up of a breed can be shaped by humans and will help throw light on common health problems experienced by thoroughbreds. Interestingly, the speed gene which gives horses their sprinting ability was traced back to one of the British mares (including a Shetland pony) used at the early stages of the development of the British Thoroughbred line. 

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: I is for a creature inside which investors, men of science and a notable sculptor dined in style on New Year's Eve 1853.

Inset images: Horses on the Parthenon frieze (Museum of Classical Archaeology); skeleton of Polymelus (Musuem of Zoology).

The Royal Society, the UK’s independent academy for science, has announced the recipients of its 2015 Awards, Medals and Prize Lectures. The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research. The recipients from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor George Efstathiou FRS (Institute of Astronomy) receives the Hughes Medal for many outstanding contributions to our understanding of the early Universe, in particular his pioneering computer simulations, observations of galaxy clustering and studies of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

Professor Benjamin Simons (Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Cavendish Laboratory) receives the Gabor Medal for his work analysing stem cell lineages in development, tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising our understanding of stem cell behaviour in vivo.

Professor Russell Cowburn FRS (Department of Physics) receives the Clifford Paterson Medal and Lecture for his remarkable academic, technical and commercial achievements in nano-magnetics.

Dr Madan Babu Mohan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) receives the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture for his major and widespread contributions to computational biology.

View the full list of recipients.

The ‘Cytosponge’ sits within a pill which, when swallowed, dissolves to reveal a sponge that scrapes off cells when withdrawn up the gullet. It allows doctors to collect cells from all along the gullet, whereas standard biopsies take individual point samples.

Oesophageal cancer is often preceded by Barrett’s oesophagus, a condition in which cells within the lining of the oesophagus begin to change shape and can grow abnormally. The cellular changes are cause by acid and bile reflux – when the stomach juices come back up the gullet. Between one and five people in every 100 with Barrett's oesophagus go on to develop oesophageal cancer in their life-time, a form of cancer that can be difficult to treat, particularly if not caught early enough.

At present, Barrett's oesophagus and oesophageal cancer are diagnosed using biopsies, which look for signs of dysplasia, the proliferation of abnormal cancer cells. This is a subjective process, requiring a trained scientist to identify abnormalities. Understanding how oesophageal cancer develops and the genetic mutations involved could help doctors catch the disease earlier, offering better treatment options for the patient.

An alternative way of spotting very early signs of oesophageal cancer would be to look for important genetic changes. However, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that variations in mutations across the oesophagus mean that standard biopsies may miss cells with important mutations. A sample was more likely to pick up key mutations if taken using the Cytosponge, developed by Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald at the Medical Research Council Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge.

“The trouble with Barrett’s oesophagus is that it looks bland and might span over 10cm,” explains Professor Fitzgerald. “We created a map of mutations in a patient with the condition and found that within this stretch, there is a great deal of variation amongst cells. Some might carry an important mutation, but many will not. If you’re taking a biopsy, this relies on your hitting the right spot. Using the Cytosponge appears to remove some of this game of chance.”

Professor Fitzgerald and colleagues carried out whole genome sequencing to analyse paired Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer samples taken at one point in time from 23 patients, as well as 73 samples taken over a three-year period from one patient with Barrett’s oesophagus.

The researchers found patterns of mutations in the genome – where one ‘letter’ of DNA might change to another, for example from a C to a T – that provided a ‘fingerprint’ of the causes of the cancer. Similar work has been done previously in lung cancer, where it was shown that cigarettes leave fingerprints in an individual’s DNA. The Cambridge team found fingerprints which they believe are likely to be due to the damage caused to the lining of the oesophagus by stomach acid splashing onto its walls; the same fingerprints could be seen in both Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer, suggest that these changes occur very early on the process.

Even in areas of Barrett’s oesophagus without cancer, the researchers found a large number of mutations in their tissue – on average 12,000 per person (compared to an average of 18,000 mutations within the cancer). Many of these are likely to have been ‘bystanders’, genetic mutations that occurred along the way but that were not actually implicated in cancer.

The researchers found that there appeared to be a tipping point, where a patient would go from having lots of individual mutations, but no cancer, to a situation where large pieces of genetic information were being transferred not just between genes but between chromosomes.

Co-author Dr Caryn Ross-Innes adds: “We know very little about how you go from pre-cancer to cancer – and this is particularly the case in oesophageal cancer. Barrett’s oesophagus and the cancer share many mutations, but we are now a step closer to understanding which are the important mutations that tip the condition over into a potentially deadly form of cancer.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.

Reference
Ross-Innes, CS et al. Whole-genome sequencing provides new insights into the clonal architecture of Barrett's esophagus and esophageal adenocarcinoma. Nature Genetics; 20 July 2015

An international team of researchers led by the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge set out to assess whether or not habitual consumption of sugar sweetened drinks, artificially sweetened drinks, or fruit juice was associated with the incidence of type 2 diabetes – and to estimate the 10-year risk attributable to sugar sweetened drinks in the USA and UK.

The researchers analysed the results of 17 observational studies and found that habitual consumption of sugar sweetened drinks was positively associated with incidence of type 2 diabetes, independently of obesity status.

The association between artificially sweetened drinks or fruit juice and type 2 diabetes was less evident. Yet, the researchers found little evidence for benefits of these beverages, and therefore concluded these drinks are unlikely to be healthy alternatives to sugar sweetened drinks for preventing type 2 diabetes.

The researchers point out that the studies analysed were observational, so no definitive conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. However, assuming a causal association, they estimate that two million new-onset type 2 diabetes events in the USA and 80,000 in the UK from 2010 to 2020 would be related to consumption of sugar sweetened beverages.

This latest review builds on ongoing research into the health impact of sugar sweetened drinks, including recent findings from the EPIC-InterAct study in eight European countries as well as work in the EPIC-Norfolk study in the UK, which found that drinking water or unsweetened tea or coffee in place of one sugary drink per day can help to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Dr Fumiaki Imamura, lead author of the study at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “These findings together indicate that substituting sugar sweetened drinks with artificially sweetened drinks or fruit juice is unlikely to be the best strategy in reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes: water or other unsweetened beverages are better options.”

Dr Nita Forouhi, senior author of the study at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “Our new findings provide further evidence to support the recent UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) recommendation that minimising the consumption of sugary drinks presents a clear opportunity towards the goal of free sugars contributing to no more than 5% of daily energy intake and to improve health.”

The study was supported by the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Imamura, F et al. Consumption of sugar sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened beverages, and fruit juice and incidence of type 2 diabetes: systematic review, meta-analysis, and estimation of population attributable fraction. The BMJ 21 July 2015.

Adapted from a press release from The BMJ.