Darwin College Lecture Series 2014 – Plagues

Mankind is subject to plagues which affect population health including major demographic changes on a time scale which is unique.

Human reactions to plagues have been many and varied and are dependent upon the prevalent biomedical concept of disease, and a community centred response. Historically this results in measures which can significantly constrain the rights of individuals for the wider community benefit. Increasingly, control measures rely on individual action which in turn raises significant opposition, some of which is often held to be irrational by much of expert opinion.

As we look to future threats this dependence on individual participation will be even more important yet opposition, rational and irrational, can be given disproportionate weighting through modern means of communication. However, the balance of benefit, risk and individual freedom is one that transcends the biomedical and must ultimately have society’s approval if future means of control are to remain effective.

Biography

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz was installed as the 345th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge on 1 October 2010. The Vice-Chancellor is the principal academic and administrative officer of the University.

Sir Leszek was previously Chief Executive of the UK’s Medical Research Council (2007-10). From 2001 to 2007 he was at Imperial College London, as Principal of the Faculty of Medicine and later as Deputy Rector, responsible for the overall academic and scientific direction of the institution. He led the development of inter-disciplinary research between engineering, physical sciences and biomedicine.

In 1988 he was a Lecturer in Medicine at Cambridge. He went on to be Professor of Medicine at the University of Wales in Cardiff, where he led a research team that carried out pioneering work on vaccines. In particular, his unit in Cardiff conducted clinical trials for a therapeutic vaccine for human papillomavirus (a cause of cervical cancer) – the first in Europe. He was knighted in 2001 for services to medical research and education.

He was a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1996 and a member of its Council from 1997 until 2002; and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008. 

Plagues & Medicine

Plagues have changed history, stopped armies in their tracks and altered the fate of nations. Mary and Christopher Dobson will outline the impact of plagues on human history and reflect on related challenges that will be faced by future generations. Taking a broad chronological perspective, their talk will range from the plagues of antiquity and the medieval period, including the Black Death of the mid-14th century, to the major infectious diseases of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the 1918-19 Spanish flu and the recent pandemic of HIV /AIDS. They will also highlight the continuing importance of addressing the ‘silent’ killers, such as the many diseases that afflict children and the poor in low-income countries, as well as discussing the increasingly prevalent afflictions of ageing and affluent societies, including dementia and diabetes. Tremendous advances have been made over the centuries in our understanding, prevention, and treatment of disease, with triumphs such as the eradication of smallpox and a substantial rise in life expectancy in many parts of the world. Major challenges now are to find ways of preventing modern ‘plagues’, such as those facing our ageing populations, and this talk will conclude by looking at scientific research that offers hope for current and future generations.

Biographies

Mary Dobson is an historian of medicine with wide ranging interests in the plagues of the past. She has held a number of Research Fellowships, including a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard University, and was formerly Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Green Templeton College. She is author of a variety of publications including a groundbreaking monograph, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and, most recently, two books for general audiences: Disease: the Extraordinary Stories Behind History’s Deadliest Killers (Quercus, 2007) and The Story of Medicine: From Bloodletting to Biotechnology (Quercus, 2013). Her next book, Murderous Contagion, will be published in October 2014.

Christopher Dobson is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology at the University of Cambridge and Master of St. John’s College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has received numerous awards, including both the Davy and Royal Medals of the Royal Society, and achieved international recognition for his research on the nature of protein misfolding and its links to disease. His work provides a fundamentally new view of the origins and means of progression of many of the most debilitating and increasingly prevalent ‘plagues’ of the modern era, ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to Type II diabetes.

Plagues & History

The real world isn’t like the online world.

In the real world, you only have to worry about the criminals who live in your city. But in the online world, you have to worry about criminals who could be on the other side of the planet. Online crime is always international because the Internet has no borders.

Today computer viruses and other malicious software are no longer written by hobbyist hackers seeking fame and glory among their peers. Most of them are written by professional criminals who are making millions with their attacks. These criminals want access to your computer, your passwords, and your credit card numbers.

National police forces and legal systems are finding it extremely difficult to keep up with the rapid growth of online crime. They have limited resources and expertise to investigate online criminal activity. The victims, police, prosecutors, and judges rarely uncover the full scope of the crimes that often take place across international boundaries. Action against the criminals is too slow, the arrests are few and far between, and too often the penalties are very light, especially compared with those attached to real-world crimes.

Because of the low prioritization for prosecuting cybercriminals and the delays in launching effective cybercrime penalties, we are thereby sending the wrong message to the criminals and that’s why online crime is growing so fast. Right now would-be online criminals can see that the likelihood of their getting caught and punished is vanishingly small, yet the profits are great.

Computer security has gone several distinct eras. Attacks morph and change every few years. However, the biggest changes we’ve seen have not been technical. They’ve been social. It’s all about the attackers and their motives.

If we want to be able to stop the attacks, we have to understand who the attackers are.

Biography

Mikko Hypponen is the Chief Research Officer of F-Secure in Finland. He has been working with computer security for over 20 years and has fought the biggest virus outbreaks in the net, including Loveletter, Conficker and Stuxnet. His TED Talk on computer security has been seen by almost a million people and has been translated to over 35 languages. He has addressed the EU Parliament and his columns have been published in the New York Times, Wired, CNN and BBC . Mr. Hypponen was selected among the 50 most important people on the web in by the PC World magazine. The Foreign Policy magazine included him on the list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. Mr. Hypponen sits in the advisory boards of the ISF and the Lifeboat foundation.

Silicon Plagues

The spread of an infection is an ecological event, with the infected hosts acting like prey and the infectious agents like predators – albeit rather tiny ones. This metaphor can help us understand the spread of emerging infections, the control of existing infections and the spread of infections inside individual people. Using examples from infectious diseases that pose problems right now this lecture will illustrate how taking an ecological view of plagues helps us to understand them and, sometimes, control them.

Biography

Professor Angela McLean FRS studied mathematics at Oxford but soon after decided to become a biologist. After a brief spell in the City she joined the Mathematical Biology Group at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill then returned to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 1994 she went on secondment to the Institut Pasteur in Paris to work on the population dynamics of murine lymphocytes in the immunology department there. In 1998 she became Head of Mathematical Biology at the BBSRC ’s Institute for Animal Health. Since 2008 she has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. She was elected to the Royal Society in 2009, and was awarded the Royal Society’s Gabor Medal in 2011.

The Nature of Plagues

The gold rush of whole genome sequences spurred by the human genome project, is heralding a new way to study the previously unanswerable from pre-history; allowing us to now mine the genomic footprints of ancient defining events of humankind and other mammals. As early paleontologists conjured up extinct forms based on fossil remains, genetic archaeologists reconstruct the origins of genomic patterns derived from ancient demographic episodes. Modern scourges that clog the world’s hospitals represent a major challenge to human health and a historic selective regulator. Past interactions between constantly adapting pathogens and finely-tuned, ever-evolving immune defenses represent a biological puzzlement that is only beginning to be deciphered. In my presentation I will illustrate how we learn hidden lessons of survival, adaptation and genome evolution referred from current views of natural history with new insights from genomes of wildlife species and ourselves. I will provide an early glimpse of the coming discipline of genomic archaeology giving illustrative examples (from the plague, SARS , HIV -AIDS), and will describe how scientists track the emergence and progression of deadly outbreaks revealing unfathomed threats to their very existence. How these non-traditional approaches can ablate extinctions and unlock medical secrets will be the lessons learned from this presentation.

Biography

Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien is a world leading molecular biologist and dedicated conservationist whom uses the tools of molecular biology to help protect endangered species and understand devastating diseases such as cancer and AIDS . He received his PhD in Genetics from Cornell University, USA in 1971. He then joined the prestigious National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health as a post-doc in 1971 and there, served as Founder and Chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity from 1986-2011. In December 2011, he joined the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University as Chief Scientific Officer. Convinced of the utility of exploring diverse species to advance our understanding of the human genome, Dr. O’Brien and his team have assembled over 62,000 animal and 424,000 human tissue/DNA specimens, facilitating wide-ranging studies of disease gene associations, species adaptation and natural history. His research interests and expertise span human and comparative genomics, genetic epidemiology, HIV /AIDS, retro-virology, bioinformatics biodiversity and species conservation. Dr. O’Brien is best known for documenting the remarkable genetic uniformity of African cheetahs, resolving the mammalian tree of life, describing heretofore unrecognized species of orangutans, African forest elephants and Bornean clouded leopards. He is credited with the discovery of CCR5 delta 32, the first of 20 human AIDS restriction genes, which imparts natural immunity to HIV . He is the one of the founders of the Genome 10K initiative, has published over 750 leading research papers, written multiple books and is adjunct professor in over 12 international leading universities. He is considered a ‘National Treasure’ by man

Plagues, Populations & Survival

Between the 1330s and the 1360s, the Black Death killed between a third and a half of all the people in Europe, China, and the Middle East. To many contemporaries, it seemed like the end of the world; but in the last thirty years, economists have suggested that its consequences were anything but catastrophic. Instead of leading to economic collapse, they argue, the plague launched Europe’s takeoff by improving its land: labor ratio, doubling ordinary people’s incomes by 1450. In this talk I want to put Europe into perspective, comparing its experience of plague and economics between 1350 and 1750 not what happened in China and the Middle East in the same years and also with the economic consequences of plagues in the 2nd and 6th centuries. I try to show why some plagues lead to collapse while others do not, and ask what that tells us about the likely consequences of plagues in the 21st century.

Biography

Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Archaeology at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1986 and taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Stanford. His most recent books are Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (Profile, 2010), The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Profile, 2013), and War! What is it Good For? Violence and the Progress of Civilization, from Primates to Robots (Profile, 2014). He has directed archaeological excavations in Italy and Greece and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Plagues & Economic Collapse

Earth is home to millions of species, yet just one dominates it: Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are the drivers of almost every global problem we face, and as we continue to grow, every one of these problems is set to grow. We are in trouble, are heading into deeper trouble, and are doing little about it. In this talk, I shall aim to set out some of the problems that we look set to face as a consequence.

Biography

Stephen Emmott is Head of Computational Science, Microsoft. He leads an inter-disciplinary research programme, centred around Microsoft’s Computational Science Laboratory, based in Cambridge. Stephen completed a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences (Psych) at the University of York, and a PhD. in computational neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience, University of Stirling.

The Human Plague

Language about ‘plague’ rather than – say – ‘epidemic’ introduces elements of moral and theological interpretation into our view of a situation: plague is something ‘inflicted’, and is conceived against the background of certain kinds of biblical and classical narratives (the plagues of Egypt, Oedipus at Thebes, etc.). While this is by no means defunct (with some very unpleasant recent applications) the overall climate has changed. But it is still possible to reach for this language as a metaphorical structure – Camus, Garcia Marquez – which highlights aspects of the moral urgencies and ambiguities of a situation. The lecture will look at both the background usage and its modern transformations so as to draw out some thoughts on the nature of human limits and human responsibilities.

Biography

Dr Williams is Master of Magdalene College. He was educated at Dynevor Secondary Grammar School in Swansea, he came up to Christ’s College in 1968. He studied for his doctorate at Christ Church and Wadham College Oxford, working on the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. His career began as a lecturer at Mirfield (1975-1977). He returned to Cambridge as Tutor and Director of Studies at Westcott House. After ordination in Ely Cathedral, and serving as Honorary Assistant Priest at St George’s Chesterton, he was appointed to a University lectureship in Divinity. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow and Dean of Clare College. During his time at Clare he was arrested and fined for singing psalms as part of the CND protest at Lakenheath air-base. Then, still only 36, it was back to Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for six years, before becoming Bishop of Monmouth, and, from 2000, Archbishop of Wales. He was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003. He was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989, and an honorary DCL degree in 2005; Cambridge followed in 2006 with an honorary DD. He holds honorary doctorates from considerably more than a dozen other universities, from Durham to K U Leuven, Toronto to Bonn. In 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Dr Williams is a noted poet and translator of poetry, and, apart from Welsh, speaks or reads nine other languages. He learnt Russian in-order to read the works of Dostoevsky in the original. This led to a book; he has also published studies of Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov, together with writings on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes.