Monthly Archives: May 2013

From structural biology of neglected diseases to Brazilian science

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This post was contributed by Dr Clare Sansom, of Birkbeck’s Department of Biological Sciences.

The prestigious Bernal Lecture is given annually at Birkbeck to honour the legacy of Professor J.D. Bernal, the first head of the Department of Crystallography (now part of Biological Sciences). In 2013 this lecture was given by a distinguished alumnus of the College, Professor Glaucius Oliva of the Institute of Physics of São Carlos, University of São Paulo, Brazil.  Introducing Professor Oliva, the Master of the College, Professor David Latchman, said that in the over forty years since the lecture series started, there had rarely been a better fit between Bernal’s interests in science and society and the chosen topic.

Professor Oliva spent four years at Birkbeck in the 1980s, studying for a PhD under Professor (now Sir) Tom Blundell. He started his lecture with a tribute to his colleagues from those days – many of whom were in the audience – mentioning in particular their passionate interest in their subject, hard work and desire that the knowledge they were gaining would be exploited for the good of society as a whole. His time in the Blundell lab at Birkbeck had, he said, changed his life. The main part of his lecture focused on two linked topics: the development of science in his native Brazil, and his research there into the structures of proteins that are linked to some of the world’s least studied infectious diseases.

There was very little science in Latin America until the early years of the twentieth century. Bernal described something of a “scientific renaissance” in the Spanish-speaking parts of the continent in his book The Social Function of Science (1939), but said very little there about Brazil. That country did, however, make its first serious investment in science and technology at about the same time, and continued to make slow progress throughout most of the last century, admittedly from a very low base. This growth has accelerated in the last decade, and the country now has a respectable place in the international tables: about 3% of all publications in peer reviewed journals include at least one Brazilian co-author. Even more encouragingly, there has been an enormous increase in enrolments into higher education since 2000. Significant challenges remain, however, particularly in encouraging private industry to invest in research and technology.  Brazil is a member of the increasingly influential BRIC group of large rapidly developing countries along with Russia, India and China, which, with other East Asian countries, is well ahead of the others in the group in patent numbers and similar metrics.

Links between the Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck and Brazil go back to the late 1970s and have made a significant contribution to the development of structural biology there. Professor Oliva was one of several young scientists to study here during the 1970s and 1980s. He returned to São Paulo in 1988 to set up his own crystallography lab. And he had to start small; his first major piece of equipment, an X-ray detector, arrived two years later.

Tackling infectious diseases
Since then, the research in Professor Oliva’s laboratory has focused on a group of infectious diseases that are common in tropical countries. Infectious diseases are still responsible for about a quarter of all deaths worldwide, and that proportion is far higher in low- and middle-income countries and in children. The effect of disease is often measured as a loss of “Disability Adjusted Life Years” (or DALYs) and these diseases, which are generally grouped together under the title of “neglected tropical diseases”, are estimated to cause about 90 million lost DALYs each year.

Professor Oliva described his group’s efforts to obtain information about the structures of proteins from the parasitic organisms that cause several of these diseases. Chagas’ disease is caused by a protozoan, Trypanosomacruzi, and is endemic in Central and South America. It is rarely fatal but chronic infection can cause debilitating and long-lasting disability. Professor Oliva’s group was the first to solve the structure of the enzyme glyceraldehyde-3-phosphatase from T. cruzi. This enzyme is essential for the parasite’s metabolism and its structure is distinctly different enough from that of the human enzyme for its inhibitors to show promise as anti-parasitic drugs. Developing such a drug, however, was always going to be difficult in a country with essentially no research pharmaceutical industry. The strategy pursued by Professor Oliva and his co-workers has been to exploit Brazil’s natural biodiversity, screening plant extracts against the structure to extract and purify compounds that are potent inhibitors of the enzyme. Some variants of the compounds originally identified in these screens are now undergoing pre-clinical testing as candidate drugs for Chagas’ disease. The group has also solved structures of an enzyme, purine nucleoside phosphorylase, from the parasitic flatworm Schistosomamansoni. This is one of the causative agents of schistosomiasis, a chronic, debilitating disease that can take a variety of forms; S. mansoni mainly causes hepatomegaly (enlarged liver) and other immune reactions.

Science without Borders
Professor Oliva returned to science policy towards the end of the lecture, in discussing the new Brazilian Science without Borders initiative, which he directs. This ambitious scheme aims to place at least 100,000 students and young scientists from Brazil in laboratories outside the country within four years.  Thanks to generous sponsorship – not least from the banking sector – 101,000 fellowships had been agreed and 41,000 awarded by May 2013.  So far, the UK is proving the second most popular destination country among Fellows appointed through this scheme. One of the first three to come to the UK, Dr.Jose Luiz Lopes from the University of São Paulo, spent a year working in Professor Bonnie Wallace’s lab in Biological Sciences. He is now back in Brazil as a postdoc, working in a collaborative project involving Birkbeck and the University of São Paulo that has joint financial support from BBSRC and Brazil’s CNPq. Birkbeck’s scientific links with Brazil are at least as strong as they were when Professor Oliva arrived here as a raw PhD student almost thirty years ago.

Victorian Dolls and Material Play

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This post was contributed by Emma Curry, a a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Birkbeck’s annual Arts Week joined forces with the Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies on Tuesday night to host a fascinating and visually-splendiferous talk by Eugenia Gonzalez, on the thought-provoking theme of ‘Victorian Dolls and Material Play’.

Although Gonzalez opened her paper with a quotation from George Dodd, who wrote in Household Words in 1853, ‘dolls are trifles’, Gonzalez’s subsequent presentation went on to show us that in nineteenth-century culture, they were anything but. She began by uncovering the fascinating relationship between many notable Victorian women and their dolls, discussing the collections of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even the young Queen Victoria, whose extensive assemblage included a number of dolls that she had made and dressed herself. Gonzalez also highlighted the persistent presence of the doll in adult-authored texts, in which writers frequently attempted to theorize the various benefits a woman could acquire from playing with dolls as a child; from the cultivation of more conservative attributes such as nurture, decoration, and the ‘art of pleasing’, to more progressive ideas such as the development of imagination, and even, as Otto Ernst described in a narrative of his daughter’s doll-play, the ‘godlike’ powers of creation and dominion.

In the second part of her talk, Gonzalez moved on to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, discussing the prominence Dickens gives in this novel to the character of Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker. Gonzalez highlighted here the connection between doll-play and writerly-play, linking Jenny’s powers to fashion form and imaginatively construct narrative for her dolls with Dickens’s own creative processes, in which characters are similarly constructed materially and experienced as if they are real: indeed, Dickens’s description of having to go and ‘extricate’ Mr and Mrs Boffin from the carriage after the Staplehurst rail crash was a particularly fascinating and pertinent addition here. Through such a focus on Jenny’s imaginative and interpretive power, Gonzalez suggested a reading of the novel as one concerned with materiality, manipulation, and (self-)fashioning, which I found wonderfully revealing and convincing.

The talk was followed by some lively discussion and a very wide-ranging selection of questions, testament to the fascinating and far-reaching nature of the topic. I’ll certainly be returning to Our Mutual Friend with fresh eyes now, and I definitely won’t look at my old Barbie doll collection in the same way again! I’d like to thank Eugenia for providing us with such fascinating and stimulating subject matter, and look forward to reading the completed project!

Moving Images: Mark Lewis and David Campany in Conversation

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This post was contributed by Carrie Mcalinden and Meg Hanna,  both students on Birkbeck’s MA Film, Television and Screen Media.

It is only recently that Mark Lewis has begun to embrace the label of filmmaker. The screening of three of his works in the Birkbeck Cinema last week provided a seemingly appropriate context for his discussion with David Campany, writer and curator, though we were quickly instructed to “imagine what this would be like in a picture gallery.”

As the intended exhibition space for Lewis’s films, the gallery is referenced directly by both Black Mirror at the National Gallery (2011) and Outside the National Gallery (2011). Both films exhibit the defining characteristics of most of his work – the long shot and silence – and for Lewis it is these elements of the ‘pictorial’ that deem the gallery a fitting environment for this display of his moving images.

However, now that he has come into the title of ‘filmmaker,’ he seems to be more open to letting the spectator experience his work as films and not as pictures. He used to say when installing his work in a gallery, “we should pretend that they’re not films,” and now he is setting up benches and encouraging a more relaxed environment. Still opposed to the rigidness of the cinema, he would rather his films be experienced in something more akin to the avant-garde’s dream of the ‘smokers cinema.’

In his early work, Lewis relied on the four minute film reel to make the choice of duration and has carried on this limitation into his current digital work. Keeping the context of the gallery as well the spectator in mind, he is not interested in projects of endurance, and keeps each of his current films under eight minutes. Such explanations are emblematic of Lewis’s attempts to distance/efface himself from his work. Outside the National Gallery in particular suggests the absence of the filmmaker, despite his assertion that what looks like one long take is actually several takes edited together. As such, his films evoke the actuality films of the Lumiere brothers, yet also embrace elements of artifice in the tradition of Melies.

This distancing of the filmmaker from his work brought up questions of the ‘location of consciousness’ in his films. In the third film screened, Beirut (2011), the camera, on a crane, moves up and over buildings, slowly investigating the world and embodying a ghost-like perspective. Here we see illustrated one of many examples of the “consciousness of the camera” – an idea explored in much of Lewis’ work. Given its limitations, “what would a camera do if it had consciousness?”, he asks.

But perhaps he puts too much emphasis on the camera doing all of the work and not enough on his own ingenuity. “Anyone can make a film,” he proclaimed, provoking a prompt objection from the programmer of the evening, Laura Mulvey. Speaking directly to the ambitious mechanical engineering that went into the filming of both Beirut and Black Mirror at the National Gallery, Mulvey pointed out that “some of Mark’s films are completely crazy.” He is not in fact just some guy with a camera, but rather often finds himself doing something which is “excessive and makes no sense and is irrational, but actually seems to work.”

Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures

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This post was contributed by Linda Grant, a Birkbeck PhD student working on the Renaissance reception of Latin love elegy, and jointly supervised in English and Classics by Professors Sue Wiseman and Catharine Edwards.

On Thursday May 232013 as part of Arts Week, Birkbeck was delighted to host a lecture by Leonard Barkan, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, on the ‘deliciously ambiguous’ relationship between words and pictures, poetry and painting. Leonard, with typical verve, energy, humour and keen insight drew on his recent book, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton University Press, 2012), but also took the opportunity to explore some of the questions that, as he put it, weren’t in the book but should have been.

The concept and literary practice of ecphrasis, the textual description of a visual work of art, has a long history going back at least as far as Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. But what happens when an art object is created out of words within a literary text, or when a painting turns on the mimetic representation of written language? Moving with enviable ease between classical antiquity and the European Renaissance, Leonard offered rich and perceptive analyses of some key cultural moments when poetry and image come together: Ovid’s Metamorphoses which insistently probes the relationship between name and physical form; Caravaggio’s 1602 painting St Matthew and the Angel with its central focus on the physical writing of the gospel; Desdemona’s vividly-described handkerchief in Othello.

Erudite and yet wonderfully relaxed and generous, Leonard gave us a stimulating talk which prompted many questions and much discussion afterwards.

Caravaggio_MatthewAndTheAngel_byMikeyAngels

Caravaggio – Matthew and the Angel