Arts Week 2013

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By Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Arts

 

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Arts Week 2013 promises to be our best yet. For the first time we are able to make full use of the dedicated new exhibition and performance spaces completed this year, thanks to the generosity of our alumni, to showcase the exciting research and teaching carried out by the School of Arts. This year our focus is on theatre, as we celebrate the launch of our state-of-the-art practice and performance space with a series of public performances featuring work by students and teachers on our theatre and creative writing programmes and Research Fellows associated with Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Highlights include artist Tom Lyall’s one-man science fiction epic DEFRAG_, and Andrew McKinnon’s staging of Martin Lewton’s Handel’s Cross, fresh from its world première in Dublin. Audiences are invited to participate in panel discussions on the sensory world of Renaissance theatre (with colleagues from the Globe, with whom Birkbeck offers an innovative MA), on voluntary labour in the arts, and on adaptations of film texts for the theatre.

Birkbeck’s long-standing reputation for field-defining research and teaching in film has been given a new platform with the launch of the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI), under the Directorship of Laura Mulvey, earlier this year. Our award-winning cinema is the venue for a varied programme of screenings and discussions with practitioners, including experimental film-makers John Smith, Mark Lewis and Birkbeck alumna Emma-Louise Williams, and writers David Campany and Michael Rosen. Films shown encompass locations and cultures as different as Hackney and Brazil, reflecting our diverse expertise in screen studies, from local London-based film to world cinema. The visual arts are also celebrated in a talk by Tate Britain curator Martin Myrone, who will discuss the Sublime as spectacle in relation to recent exhibitions on the Gothic and on John Martin.

The School’s new arts space, the Peltz Room, is the setting for a number of readings, discussions, performances and exhibitions that take place throughout the week, show-casing how Birkbeck leads the field in practice-based research in the arts. And our other beautifully restored heritage room, the Keynes Library, plays host to a series of literary panels and discussions. Visitors will have an opportunity to find out about our programmes in dance and music, and also to learn about creative writing at Birkbeck, through the Writers’ Hub Hubbub event, and a panel on ‘Getting Published in the Digital Age’. Birkbeck lecturer in creative writing, Richard Hamblyn, author of The Art of Science (2011), will chair a symposium on science and writing, and two guided tours, one of Bloomsbury’s Squares and the other themed around urban media, offer a literal take on our sense of the School as a constellation of the arts at the heart of a vibrant city with which it is always connected. Arts Week will end, like many an evening at Birkbeck after classes, in the pub, with a pre-match panel on literature and football at the College Arms. All in all, it promises to be a wonderful week for the arts. And who will win this year’s competition, on Bloomsbury Squares?

Hilary Fraser
Dean of Arts

Science Week: Structures of sodium channels

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

The structures of sodium channels and what they can teach us about human health, particularly rare neurological diseases, were explained during Science Week.

Professor Bonnie Wallace, of Birkbeck’s Department of Biological Sciences, delivered the fascinating and accessible lecture on 18 April. She has been at Birkbeck for about twenty years and now directs the department’s impressive research work on the structural biology of membrane ion channels.  Membrane proteins are ubiquitous, are responsible for the transport of both chemicals and signals into and out of cells, and form some of the most important drug targets. They are also, as Professor Wallace made very clear in her talk, some of the most challenging of all proteins for structural biologists to examine.

All cell membranes are semi-permeable, which means that some substances can pass across them easily while others are excluded. Ions, which are charged, are generally excluded by the hydrophobic (“water hating”) membranes. This could be something of a problem, as ion transport into and out of cells is an essential physiological process. Ion channels are evolution’s solution to this problem: proteins embedded in membranes that allow ions to selectively enter and leave cells.

Much of Professor Wallace’s work over the last 10 years has focused on the structures of voltage gated sodium channels. These open to allow sodium ions to enter cells, and close to prevent them from doing so, in response to changes in potential across the membrane, and they are found throughout nature. Small molecules can bind to these channels, holding them either open or closed; some of these are severely toxic, but others are important drugs for cardiac arrhythmias, epilepsy, and pain.

It took over ten years for Professor Wallace and her group to isolate the gene, clone and purify the protein, obtain crystals and finally solve the structure of the channel pore. The structure was finally solved using the powerful X-rays generated at Diamond, the UK’s only synchrotron radiation source located near Harwell in Oxfordshire.

Different structural forms
These channels exist in three different structural forms: “open”, “closed” and “inactivated”. Many years before the detailed structures were solved Professor Wallace and her group had used a biophysical technique, circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, to examine the conformational changes that occurred when mammalian and bacterial channels switched from one state to the other. As always, however, the full atomic-crystal structures yielded very much more information.

Professor Wallace and her group were the first to solve the structure of an open form of the channel which showed the “top” part of this structure, towards the extracellular membrane surface, has a hydrophobic surface, and an internal selectivity filter which allows sodium ions in while keeping others, including potassium and calcium ions, out.  The lower part, on the extracellular surface, is where the ions exit. This open structure could be compared with the published structure of closed form of the channel, and showed that the upper portion containing the selectivity filter was virtually unchanged The conformational change associated with opening and closing the channel occurs at the internal or cytoplasmic side of the protein. When the pore closes, a small turning motion of the “bottom” part of the helical bundle causes the bottom ends of the pore to come together and the diameter of the pore to shrink; the resulting channel is too small for sodium ions to pass through, so any inside the pore become trapped there.

Two subunits of the bacterial sodium channel pore in the “open” conformation, shown as a ribbon structure

Two subunits of the bacterial sodium channel pore in the “open” conformation, shown as a ribbon structure

Bacterial  voltage gated sodium channels have a domain at the C-terminal end of the molecule that is necessary for channel activity but that was not visible in any of the crystal structures. Professor Wallace and her group looked at this part of the molecule using a particularly powerful form of CD spectroscopy called synchrotron radiation CD spectroscopy that she had pioneered, and showed that each subunit had an extremely flexible protein chain separating the pore from a C-terminal helix. Using this information, the group have proposed a novel mechanism for channel opening in which the conformational change in the pore is enabled by these helices oscillating up and down.

Two subunits of the bacterial sodium channel pore in the “open” conformation, shown as a ribbon structure

Two subunits of the bacterial sodium channel pore in the “open” conformation, shown as a ribbon structure

Implications for health
The final part of Professor Wallace’s talk was devoted to the role of sodium channels in health and disease, and as a drug target. A few unfortunate individuals have mutations in a type of channel that is involved in the response to painful stimuli. If this channel is jammed open, patients experience a constant, burning pain termed erythromelalgia, most commonly in their hands and feet. Professor Wallace showed that an equivalent mutation from phenylalanine to valine at the base of one of the protein subunits could cause the channel to open just enough for ions to pass through. There are also people in whom these channels are jammed in the closed position or are missing altogether, and they feel no pain, even if they walk on hot coals. It may one day be possible for drugs based on our knowledge of these structures to be designed to ease both these conditions.

After “Beyond the Fragments”?

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This post was contributed by Ceren Yalcin, an intern at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

A book that brings together over three hundred people on a Friday evening, 34 years after it was first published has truly passed the test of time. Either because its authors have written an extraordinary piece of work, or that our times yearn for alternative forms of political organisation. In the case of Beyond the Fragments, I’d say, it is both.

The publication of a new edition of Beyond the Fragments was hosted by Birkbeck Institute for Social Research. The book’s authors Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright came together to speak about the ‘after’ and the ‘beyond’ of four-decades of feminist scholarship and political activism. Chaired by Melissa Benn, the authors addressed the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open, democratic Left coalitions.

As Professor Sheila Rowbotham explained: “When we wrote Beyond the Fragments we were preoccupied with the process of organising for change. We took a whole of things for granted then that we can no longer take for granted now.” Surely, times have changed since the ’70s – both for the better and the worse. Today, we encounter deepening recession, environmental pollution, growing inequality between women, falling real wages, rising unemployment, continuing sell-off of the NHS, and savage welfare cuts. And, as Lynne Segal pointed out, the politics of austerity are also reflected on an individual level. Living under corporate capitalism gives rise to all sorts of fears and hostilities: fear of economic decline, fear of foreigners, hostility towards those on benefits, fear of weakness and dependency and a sense that we have to be stronger and more competitive if we want to succeed. However, the protests of the last couple of years have shown that there is opposition to the politics of austerity.

And feminism, according to Professor Segal, is on the rise again as austerity hits women first. If the Left wants to succeed, Dr Wainwright emphasized, activism needs to saturate all spheres of political life from grassroots movement to state politics (as recently demonstrated by Syriza in Greece who take legislation and government as a resource to bring about social change).

There was certainly no room for pessimism last Friday evening. On the contrary, the speaker and the participants agreed that new forms of resistance are possible to build stronger bonds of solidarity across class, race, gender and sexuality. Pragna Patel from the Southall Black Sisters (SBS), an organisation struggling for women’s human rights and against gender related violence, stressed that her activism within the SBS was always driven by a desire to be part of a wider left, democratic, emancipatory project. Rosie Rogers’ lively response set the mood for the rest of the evening. She reminded us all of the new exciting ways of engaging in protest, such as UK-wide Stop the Cuts Coalition movement, that require people to work together and to “put their barriers away and stop tribalism”. At the end of the evening, the answer to the question of what is to be done, seemed less complicated than one might have supposed in the first place. All agreed: Come together, mobilize resistance and enjoy the protest.

Science Week: Making sense of medical genetics

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

Professor Nick Keep (left) and Professor Jonathan Smith (right)

Professor Nick Keep (left) and Professor Jonathan Smith (right). Photo: Harish Patel

Genomics is still quite a young science. It is scarcely a decade since the first human genome sequence was decoded, at a cost of $3 billion, and we are already discussing the implications of the $1,000 or even $100 genome. Accurate genetic testing is now available for a wide range of diseases and conditions. And it is perhaps not surprising that we find it difficult to deal with this barrage of information, particularly when it comes to how it affects our own health.In the last of the 2013 Science Week lectures, Professor Jonathan A Smith, from Birkbeck’s Department of Psychological Sciences, described how people at risk of genetic disorders made decisions about testing, and how they responded to test results: thus, how they made sense of the personal implications of the complex discipline of medical genetics. His approach to his discipline is qualitative rather than quantitative: the case studies he reported involved in-depth discussions with a small number of participants rather than questionnaire evidence from large cohorts. Using this, he has been able to gain considerable insights into the thought processes involved in complex, personal and ethical decision making. Furthermore, he stressed, his is a two-way approach: he as the researcher is in some sense in a similar position to his participants in attempting to make sense of their genetic stories. At the same time, he is also in a different position from the participants as his sense-making is always of an account that they provide.

Genetic testing
In his lecture on 18 April, Professor Smith began by explaining the process that is involved in clinical genetic testing. Generally, an individual with a family history that indicates that he or she may be at risk for a condition will approach a clinic directly to be tested. There, the specialist will take a complete family history and explain the genetics of the condition, the possible spectrum of risks involved and what the results may mean. Whether the test goes ahead will be the client’s (or patient’s) own decision and that decision is very rarely a straightforward one. Test results will move the individual tested from a broad risk category into a narrower one and, in a few cases, that narrow risk category will be a 0 per cent  or 100 per cent risk of the disease. That individual risk, however, may not be the only result; very often, a test result for one individual will mean changes in risk category for some of his or her blood relatives. These relatives may not want to take the test, or they may lack the capacity to decide for themselves (if, for example, they are children). And once a test is taken, the knowledge obtained cannot be un-learned: there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. 

Huntington’s disease
Huntington’s disease is one of the most devastating of all genetic conditions. It is a fatal, progressive neurological disorder with an onset at any age between the 30s and the 60s, so many  patients will already have children before they are diagnosed. All people who inherit one copy of the faulty gene will eventually develop the condition, although it is impossible to tell when, and a child with one parent with the disease is at 50 per cent risk of developing it. A genetic test is available that will either reduce that risk to zero or increase it to 100 per cent.

Professor Smith presented the results of a study of decision-making in people at risk of Huntington’s disease using a technique known, in the jargon, as interpretative phenomenological analysis. The investigators spoke in depth to a small number of participants, used no fixed questions, and aimed to let the participants tell their own stories. In this particular case, all these had one parent diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and so were at 50 per cent risk of the disease before testing; and each of them already had children of their own. He described the very different thought processes and reasons that three of these individuals brought to their decisions – two were in favour of taking the test, and one was inclined to not take the test.

One thing united these three individuals (and by implication the other participants whom they in some sense represented): the desire to “do the right thing by their children”. Professor Smith presented this as a case of a classic moral dilemma, where no one strategy should be seen as right or wrong, and suggested that the case studies would help genetic counsellors to understand the range of emotions and responses that is likely to be experienced by their clients.