Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Great War: the conflict that transformed London

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck.

Front cover of Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War by Professor Jerry White

War is a complicated phenomenon invariably associated with new experiences. It is often accompanied by novel methods of killing, widespread social and economic change, and can be the catalyst for progressive trends as well as death and destruction.

All of these factors were part of the Great War, and they were described in vivid detail at the book launch of Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War by award-winning historian Professor Jerry White.

The lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, on 8 May was the first event in London at War – a month-long series of talks, walks and workshops organised by the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

Positive developments

White, of Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, explained how life in the capital changed for ever, including for the better, because of the war. He referred to the economic boom linked to the war effort, the “unprecedented” demand for labour, “revolutionary opportunities” for women in the labour market, the end of Victorian levels of poverty, and the shift towards manufacturing in the capital’s western suburbs.

White emphasised that the war was an “important transformative moment” for London. Advances made at this time, such as the role of women in the workplace, were never reversed.

He said: “London, almost overnight, became a different place. Its day-to-day life was transformed by entering into the war. Many of these impacts on the Londoners of the First World War were transient, but some of the effects of it, I think, were deep-seated and some of them we are living with still.”

The militarisation of London

The outbreak of war on 4 August 1914 was met, as White described, by enthusiasm on the streets with throngs of people in Whitehall, and outside Buckingham Palace and town halls in the capital.

Although not on the frontline, the war, as White showed,  permeated public consciousness in London. The capital, being both the heart of the British Empire and the centre of an extensive rail network, was “part of the killing machine of war.” Soldiers passed through London en route to, and from, the Western Front, munitions were manufactured in the capital’s factories, and wounded soldiers were treated in its hospitals – both at recognised hospitals and houses of the rich that became officers’ hospitals. Following the outbreak of the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, the number of casualties arriving in London increased markedly.

White read from his new book and shared many captivating accounts about the Great War written by contemporary Londoners, including the nurse and writer Vera Brittain. She wrote:

“Day after day I had to fight the queer, frightening sensation – to which, throughout my years of nursing, I never became accustomed – of seeing the covered stretchers come in, one after another, without knowing, until I ran with pounding heart to look, what fearful sight or sound or stench, what problem of agony or imminent death, each brown blanket contained.”

First air raids

For the first time, during the Great War, London came under attack from Zeppelins (referred to in the book’s title) and German bombers.

The first bombs were dropped on the capital by Zeppelins in May 1915, and by 1917, German aeroplanes, including the Gotha and Giant, were launching destructive raids. The worst disaster to befall London during the war was the bombing of Odhams Printing Press in Long Acre, which led to 38 deaths. Such raids presaged the greater destruction of the Blitz in the Second World War.

White then ended his presentation where he began, with accounts of jubilant people in the streets, but now he was talking about the celebration of the armistice on 11 November 1918 rather than the pro-war feeling of summer 1914.

The Many Uses of Bioinformatics

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

Dame Janet Thornton

Dame Janet Thornton

Every year, Birkbeck hosts a lecture by a distinguished scientist to honour the memory of the founder of its Crystallography Department, J.D. Bernal. “Sage” as he was called by all who worked with him had an enormous range of research interests spanning both science and society; he is widely considered one of the most brilliant scientists never to have won a Nobel Prize. The 2014 Bernal Lecture, held on March 27, was given by Professor Janet Thornton, the director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton near Cambridge.

Introducing the lecture Professor David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck, described it as a unique occasion: the only time he has introduced as a guest lecturer someone who he had interviewed for a job. Thornton includes both Birkbeck and UCL on her CV: appropriately, her last post in London was that of Bernal Professor, held jointly at both colleges. She moved on to “even greater heights” as director of one of Europe’s top bioinformatics institutions in 2003.

Thornton began her lecture with a quote from Bernal: “We [academics] can go on being useless up to a point, with confidence that sooner or later some use will be found for our studies”. That quote is of particular relevance to the subject that she has made her own: bioinformatics. She had already begun her research career in 1977, when Fred Sanger invented the process that was used to obtain the DNA sequence of the human genome. That endeavour, which was completed in 2003, took over ten years and cost billions of dollars. Sequencing a human-sized genome, which has about 3 billion base pairs of DNA, now takes maybe 10 minutes and costs about a thousand dollars. While a decade ago we had one “Human Genome”, we now have lots. Mega-sequencing projects already planned or in progress include projects to sequence about 8,000 Finns, and the entire 50,000 population of the Faeroe Islands; one to sequence paired tumour and normal genomes from 20,000 cancer patients; and the UK10K project, which is investigating the genetic causes of rare diseases.

It is now almost extraordinarily simple and cheap to obtain genomic data, but real challenges remain in interpreting and understanding it so that it can be used in medicine. This is the province of bioinformatics, and Thornton devoted much of her presentation to explaining five ways in which gene (and protein) sequence information is being applied to both basic and clinical medical research:

1)      Understanding the molecular basis of disease

2)      Investigating differences in disease risk caused by human genetic variation

3)      Understanding the genomics of cancer

4)      Developing drugs for infectious diseases, including neglected diseases

5)      Investigating susceptibility to infectious disease

There are rather more than 20,000 genes in the human genome, far fewer than were originally predicted. Tiny differences between individuals in many of these either directly cause a genetic disorder or confer an increased – or in some cases decreased – risk of developing a disease. The genetic causes of some diseases, such as the bleeding disorder haemophilia, were known many years before the “genome era”: others have been discovered more recently. Mapping known mutations onto the structure of the enzyme copper, zinc superoxide dismutase has revealed the cause of the inherited disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neurone disease. And knowing the genome sequence has already made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms of disease development, contributing to improvements in diagnosis and the design of novel drugs.

We now understand that cancer is a genetic disease: it arises when mutations in a group of cells cause them to grow and divide excessively. A cancer is no longer classified just by its location (for example, a breast or lung cancer) but by the particular spectrum of genetic variations in its cells. About 500 different genes are known to be mutated in cancer, some much more often than others. For example, about 60% of cases of melanoma, a type of skin cancer, contain one specific mutation in the gene BRAF. This codes for a protein that can direct cells to grow and divide, and the cancer-causing mutation sticks this protein into the ON position, so this signal is always sent. Scientists in a company called Plexxicon used their knowledge of this mutation and the structure of the protein to design a drug, vemurafenib, which prevents the BRAF protein from signalling. This can cause a dramatic, if short-term improvement in melanoma patients, but, crucially, it only works in patients whose cancers carry this mutation. It is one of the first developed examples of a “personalised medicine” that is only used alongside a diagnostic test for a genetic variation. There will soon be many more.

Genomics is also proving very useful in the fight against infectious disease. Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest emerging threats to human health, and scientists have to use all the tools at their disposal, including genomics and bioinformatics, as they try to stay one step ahead of rapidly mutating pathogens. Sequencing is widely used to track the sources of outbreaks of infection and of resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in hospitals, and it is the only way of determining the exact nature of an infection.  One of the most dramatic examples of the use of genomics in infectious disease control occurred in 2011, when a novel strain of E. coli O104 caused about 4,000 cases of serious food-borne illness and 50 deaths in Germany. This was originally linked to cucumbers imported from Spain but a global effort to trace its specific sequence variants proved that the source of the infection was beansprouts grown on a farm near Hamburg.

There was much more to Thornton’s wide-ranging lecture than simply bioinformatics and medicine: more, indeed, than it is possible to do justice to in a single blog post. She went on to describe some of the benefits of genomics for agriculture and food security. These included designing new strategies for controlling pests and diseases, maximising the efficiency of biomass processing, and even managing biodiversity. It is necessary to measure biodiversity in order to manage it properly; it is now possible to define a short stretch of DNA sequence that fully identifies a species or sub-species (a so-called “DNA barcode”) and these are beginning to be used to track some very diverse organisms, including the 400,000 known species of beetle.

The lecture ended with a short discussion of some of the challenges facing bioinformatics and genomics in the second decade of this century, largely relating to difficulties with storing, manipulating and understanding the enormous quantity of data that is being generated. Mining this data mountain for the benefit of mankind is a task that is beyond either the academic community or the biotech industry alone. It will require novel ways of doing science that involve governments and charities as well as academia and industry. The new Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation, launched at Hinxton on the same day as Thornton’s Bernal Lecture, is a pioneering example of such a partnership. It has been set up by the EBI, the Sanger Institute where a third of the original human genome sequence was obtained, and pharmaceutical giant GSK, and its scientists aim to use the whole range of available genomic data to select and evaluate new targets for novel drugs.

A podcast of the 2014 Bernal Lecture is available now.

This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck.

Professor Mark Mazower, of Columbia University, and Marlene Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm's widow, at the reception following Mazower's lecture at the History after Hobsbawm conference.

Professor Mark Mazower, of Columbia University, and Marlene Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm’s widow, at the reception following Mazower’s lecture at the History after Hobsbawm conference.

If evidence were needed of Eric Hobsbawm’s widespread and profound impact upon the study of history, the speakers assembled at the History after Hobsbawm conference provided cast-iron proof.

The gathering of such high-profile historians was testament to Hobsbawm’s influence upon the discipline, particularly his emphasis on the importance of social and economic history. It reiterated his ability to broaden horizons, inspire individuals, and, in some cases, generate dissent.

Familiar to students and scholars because of their seminal works, high-profile speakers at the three-day event included :

Mazower – one of Hobsbawm’s former colleagues at Birkbeck – delivered the opening lecture at the conference organised by Birkbeck in association with Past & Present. He described Hobsbawm (1917-2012) as an “inspirational figure” who “loved” Birkbeck  – an institution committed to adult education without the class snobbery that retarded the development of social history elsewhere.

Transforming history

Mazower charted the progression of Hobsbawm’s career and the simultaneous, and often related, transformation of the discipline of history. He explained how Hobsbawm was one of only four historians when he joined Birkbeck’s History Department in 1947, decades before the discipline became the professionalised and globalised profession it is today.

The audience on 29 April at Senate House heard how Hobsbawm’s participation in the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Paris in 1950 led to long-standing ties with French intellectuals, and subsequent cooperation between two prominent social history journals: Annales, and Past & Present. (Hobsbawm was one of the founder members of Past & Present in 1952). Mazower quoted the leader of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, writing about Hobsbawm in 1968: “In my opinion he is one of the most important historians in the present world.”

Hobsbawm’s emphasis on social and economic history, and his internationalism were mirrored by the expansion of History departments, the increase in social history, and the emergence of world history and area studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Mazower added: “Hobsbawm was, in many ways, at the very centre of some of the critical intellectual and institutional developments of the discipline for several decades.”

The future of history

Professor John Arnold, Head of Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, encouraged the audience to think about current trends in the study of History, and, in Hobsbawm’s words, “dream forward.” He referred to “Eric’s extraordinary impact on the study of history” and encouraged argument, discussion and debate over the next two days of the conference. The conference speakers and delegates certainly rose to the challenge. Read more about the conference online on the History after Hobsbawm blog: