Investigation and Discovery

Investigation and Discovery 7th March
This event has become so popular that the BFWI Education and Current Affairs Sub- committee has had to admit that it has outgrown the Gateway at AVDC, Aylesbury and is looking for a larger venue to avoid having to ballot the members for tickets.
The first speaker was Dr Mark Spencer who worked at the Natural History Museum for many years: he is an expert in the use of natural history collections in the study of climate change and forensic biology. Mark began by telling us about the work of Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, who started to name and paint every plant including some which he more or less sponsored Capt. Cook to bring back from his voyages of exploration during the 1700s.By comparing modern specimens with those in his collections it is possible to study climate change on crops, ferns, coral and seaweeds .Plant growth gets out of sync.as the atmosphere heats eg. aphids are not available when needed by blue tits and things such as ragged robin are in decline. The botanical collections provide a source of DNA in research in pharmaceuticals and agriculture. He concluded by advising members to save any pressed flower albums in their possession and offer them to local museums as they are of value.
The second speaker Professor Elizabeth Tunbridge had started out in molecular and cellular biology at Bath University but then had moved to Oxford and specialised in neuroscience. She is presently the lead in a research group in psychiatry working out how genetic and environmental factors impact on the function of dopamine. I must admit that at the beginning of this talk I quaked thinking how is it that this young girl can use so many words whose meaning I cannot understand. However after a few minutes I realised that she was very skilfully leading the audience into an understanding of what she was doing ie. trying to treat the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses where the brain function is affected by genes and proteins bearing electrical activity. Gently she introduced us to RNAs (ribonucleic acid which codes and de-codes genes), to COMT which blocks Dopamine and to MINION (the DNA sequencer). At the end I felt enlightened about the human genome and could imagine some of what is happening in the human brain and how difficult it is to plot why things go wrong and how to repair the damage with drugs yet stop them from interfering with other organs. Neuroscientists always work with post mortem tissue so Elizabeth stressed the need for the Brain Bank and the UK’s biobank.
After lunch another slip of a girl Louise Hall who has been working on flood defence schemes in East Anglia gave a presentation: she described with slides her successful delivery of the £20m replacement of tidal defences in Great Yarmouth and recovery schemes in Essex following the East Coast Surge in 2013.She is also Commercial Services Manager for the £300m Thames Estuary Asset Management 2100 programme. We looked at her technical drawings for calculating the flow and weight of water and engineering budgets; we saw her team manoeuvring huge cranes along esplanades and doing bolstering work below the water in winched cabins. She concluded by asking the audience to encourage their family members to study engineering and she stood there a living advertisement for females at the top of the engineering ladder.
The final speaker was another female engineer and leader. Naomi Climer had studied chemistry then moved into engineering but obviously her real forte was in broadcasting and communications for the technology industry via the BBC and ITV in Europe and USA. Naomi talked about the Internet of Things: the ether is not overflowing with communications between people on social media, it is heaving with conversations between things--- 50 billion machines talking to each other: remote controls for heating , soon driverless cars advising each other, Satnavs and robots to name but a few. It is going to be perpetual connectivity between everyone and everything. Naomi finished with a cartoon of what she imagines our lives will look like in 50 years’ time---but it isn’t a cartoon, it is already happening. Again, what a wonderful explanation of the technical future and of course, she wants more scientists and technicians to come forward to STEM education.
Talk about food for thought we certainly were provided with excellent speakers and will not need to be encouraged to attend next year’s event. The questions were good throughout and it was obvious that the members appreciated being talked to at a steady pace and did not feel they were expected to receive dumbed down information. All the speakers seemed to value our attention.
 
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