Lunch Hour Lectures - Autumn 2009 - Video UCL

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language taught the British how to spell, established Shakespeare as their greatest writer and provided the first and longest lasting map of the English language in all its subtlety and variety. This lecture will tell the extraordinary story of how the first dictionary was made and take you inside what has become the least well known great book in our literature.

This lecture discusses how genuine freedom must include all manner of thought, including the irrational, the bad, and the obscene, and how the recent new offence of possessing extreme pornography has breached this principle.

The study of dinosaur evolution is a growing field – thanks in part to an influx of new information from China, Argentina and other previously neglected parts of the world. New technology is also providing palaeontologists with new ways of extracting data from fossils discovered decades ago. This lecture will provide an update on new insights into dinosaur evolution and set out some of the prospects for future research.

On World Aids Day, this lecture discusses how the AIDS epidemic continues to grow despite our immense knowledge of the virus itself. Professor Pillay will examine some of the failures of the HIV vaccination programme and look at how the roll out of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to the developing world is a priority. Professor Pillay will also discuss how ART is merging with prevention and rapidly becoming the major tool in the fight against HIV.

Dr Armstrong will discuss the potential of ‘metabolic materials’ that possess some of the properties of living systems. By generating such materials it is hoped that our cities will be able to replace the energy they draw from the environment, respond to the needs of their populations and eventually become regarded as ‘alive’ in the same way we think about parks or gardens. Metabolic materials could become a key sustainable technology with the potential to transform the world’s urban environments.

Can we use evidence from the social epidemiology carried out in previous times to help us predict the likely effect of the present recession on public health? Mortality in unemployed men in the 1970s and 80s was around 30% higher than average. However, the 1980s saw a rapid increase in life expectancy in the population as a whole. Professor Bartley argues that we can now use evidence from longitudinal studies to understand the complex impact of recession on public health.