University of Cambridge

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

In his talk, Professor Kennel will discuss the reasons why we may not be able to avoid 2C warming by 2050, and adaptive management strategy.

This term, CSaP's inaugural Visiting Research Fellow Professor Charlie F Kennel will deliver a series of seminars on adaptation to climate change, hosted by Christ's College Cambridge.

Professor Kennel is Vice-Chancellor and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Christ’s College. He will be spending the next three months as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy.

University of Cambridge

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