Science spin 30

ISSUE 30 September 08 €3 including VAT £2 NI and UK

SCIENCE

SPIN

IRELAND’S SCIENCE NATURE AND DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

Boy or girl brain?

Geoscience

works in four dimensions

Clare Island A century of surveying

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13-15 NOV

2008

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INDUSTRIES HALL

Be the f irs t to preview th e l ates t ad van ces res u l ti n g from the ¤ 8 Bi ll ion i nves tmen t i n Research & Devel op men t u n d er th e N ati on al Development Plan Fos ter commercial research p artn ers h i p s , p u rch as e l i cen ces , and i nvest i n the latest tech nologi es Acces s a on e- s top -s hop wi th d ozen s of Irel an d ’s l ead i n g u n ivers i ti es an d res earch in s titutes Get u p to speed with the l ates t res earch , u n d ers tan d wh o i s doin g wh at, an d network with li kemin d ed p rofes s i on al s Tap an amaz i n g pool of th e Irel an d ’s g reates t mi n d s rep res en ti ng a un iqu e op portu ni ty f or recru itmen t an d i d eas Su p port th e nati on al ef fort to b u i l d a k n owl ed g e econ omy Sou rce the l ates t tech nol og y i n l ab orator y, i n s tru men tati on , tes t and an al yti cal eq uip men t

EXHIBIT or SPEAK Organisation involved in R&D projects are invited to submit papers for inclusion in the learning programme – see www.isofexpo.ie/learning Information pod and fully fitted stands are available from under ¤1,000 plus VAT Contact deirdre@sdlexpo.com or Tel 01-405-5547 To Visit – Pre-register for FREE admission on www.isofexpo.ie ISOF invites Ireland’s Centres of Innovation, Research and Development to show our knowledge based manufacturing industries the facilities which they can offer and the skills which are available to enhance product development in all sectors.

Exhibitors Include:

• • • • •

GOVERNMEN T AGENCIES COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES R& D MANUFACT URERS RES EARCH UNIT S EQUIPMEN T S UPPLIERS

ISOF is part of Science Week 2008 and will provide a forum where R&D professional, scientists and support agencies can meet and collaborate on current and future projects.

Organisers SDL Exhibitions Ltd. 18 Main Street, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14 Tel: +353 1 490 0600

For FREE admission register on

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SPIN

W H E R E S C I E N C E , R E S E A R C H A N D I N N OVAT I O N M E E T

SCIENCE

SPIN

Gender differences go a lot deeper than most of us think.

UPFRONT Publisher Duke Kennedy Sweetman Ltd 5 Serpentine Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. www.sciencespin.com Email: tom@sciencespin.com Editors Tom Kennedy tom@sciencespin.com Seán Duke sean@sciencespin.com Business Development Manager Alan Doherty alan@sciencespin.com Design and Production Albertine Kennedy Publishing Cloonlara, Swinford, Co Mayo Proofing and web diary Marie-Claire Cleary marieclaire@sciencespin.com Picture research Source Photographic Archive www.iol.ie/~source.foxford/ Printing Turner Group, Longford Contributors in this issue: Anthony King, Veronica Miller, Marie Catherine Mousseau, Niamh Mullooly, Ray Sleator.

Articles published in Science SPIN may reflect the views of the contributors and not the official views of the publication, its editorial staff, its ownership, or its sponsors.

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Understanding the ‘Arms Race’ Seán Duke reports on world leading research.

Wider options

Niamh Mullooly argues against taking the narrow path through education.

27

Solid foundations

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Tom Kennedy reports that geology is the all in one science.

The BOGFOR project

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Bogs for forestry.

Clare Island

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Fifty years of genetics

Trinity College Dublin has a distinguished record.

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Anthony King describes a century of surveying.

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How to beat the bugs

Ray Sleator writes about his research

Green radio

Aiming to make radio more efficient.

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Sex in the brain

Veronica Miller writes that gender is not easy to define.

Glial cells

19

Reviews

The Time Traveller and Molecules that Changed the World.

35

Marie Catherine Mousseau explains how they make the human brain different.

22

Geological Survey of Ireland Suirbhéireacht Gheolaíochia Éireann

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 1

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UPFRONT

Support for life sciences by SFI is now being directed by Dr Stephen Simpson.

Dr Simpson has extensive experience as a researcher in the areas of biomedicine, immunology, genetics, molecular cell biology, cancer and HIV. Before joining SFI, Dr Simpson was a senior editor with the international journal Science.

Frontiers

More than 180 scientists are to benefit from funding under the SFI Reseasrch Frontiers Programme.

The â‚Ź23m budget covers 143 research projects spread across 13 different areas such as engineering, medicine, and mathematics.

Competition for the funds was strong, and SFI reports that over 750 submissions were received.

Among the projects being funded is one under Prof Han Vos at DCU on hydrogen generation using solar energy. Another project, under Dr Carmel Breslin at NUI Maynooth involves replacing metallic wrappers with more environmentally friendly coatings.

New leaf

GrowING crops for energy is not very efficient. According to Eva Mari Aro, speaking at a recent European Science Foundation conference held in Spain, less than one per cent of the solar energy is converted. Prof Aro, from the University of Turku, made the point that it would be far better to use cynobacteria, which are capable of converting ten per cent of the solar gain into useful energy. Almost 4 billion years ago, photosynthesis began with the cynobacteria, when they began stripping electrons from water to act as energy carriers. As Prof Aro noted, this is a very efficient system, and it provides great potential for production of energy. Progress, she said, could be made in two ways, through genetic engineering of cynobacteria, or by developing artificial photosynthesis. As our understanding of how a protein complex, known as photosystem II breaks down the hydrogen into its constituents, protons and electrons increases, we are moving towards the possibility of mimicing that reaction. Within the next 10 to 20 years, she said, it might become possible to create an artificial leaf.

INVESTING IN RESEARCH; INVESTING IN PEOPLE. Established ten years ago, the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) is the most significant Government investment ever in research. Contributing in a strategic way to developing Ireland’s reputation as a global centre for new thinking and ideas, it has also helped establish career paths for researchers.

In the past decade, the number of PhD graduates annually in Ireland has doubled while we have significantly increased our patent numbers and our publications record. PRTLI has provided the infrastructure that underpins this activity. The thirty Centres of Excellence established under the Programme include - Geary Institute (Social Sciences), (UCD); Institute of Neuroscience, (TCD); Boole Postgraduate Library, (UCC); National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology, (DCU); Environmental Change Institute (NUIG); Centre for Sustainability (IT Sligo).

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UPFRONT

Out of work

Elephants in Thailand are out of work. A ban on the logging trade means that over 2,000 elephants and their mahout trainers are no longer required. According to Prof Rosaleen Duffy and Dr Lorraine Moore from the University of Manchester many of the redendant elephants are ending up on the streets.

Walking the streets, said Prof Duffey, is a sad end both for elephants and their trainers.

Tourism represents one option to keep mahouts and their elephants employed, but as the scientists from Manchester observe, the animals are sensitive, so they should not be abused. Being made to stand on concrete

X-ray laser

Queen’s University is about to unveil one of the world’s most powerful laser devices. Estimated to have the capacity to pack in the equivalent of four hundred times the entire UK electricity grid, this will be Ireland’s first x-ray laser. The laser, named after the Celtic god of thunder and lightening, Taranis, is to be powered by another powerful optical laser at Queen’s which is already one of the most powerful among university labs.

Ship-based training and research for students Considering a career in marine science and technology?

for long periods, for example, can be painful, and elaphants can be scared of lights. The scientists aim to reduce that problem by producing an elephant care guide for tourist companies.

In another project, the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre has started a training scheme for captive elephants, so that they can return to the wild. The wild population, according to some estimates, is down to just 1,000, so liberated elephants could top up a declining genetic pool.

Prof Ciaran Lewis from the Queen’s Centre for Plasma Physics said it is likely to have a number of applications including research into fusion power. Although the new xray laser will be capable of delivering one terawatt of power, the pulses will be extremely short, down to a femtosecond, 10-15 seconds, but that’s but long enough to track the movement of an electron around a molecule.

Marine Institute

Foras na Mara

The Marine Institute’s Integrated Marine Exploration Programme (IMEP) is now offering practical ship-based training programmes to undergraduate and post-graduate students of marine related sciences onboard the national research vessels, the Celtic Explorer and Celtic Voyager.

The funded two day training programmes will take place between October and December 2008 and will allow students to participate in multidisciplinary scientific surveys covering a wide range of marine disciplines including oceanography, geosciences, benthic ecology and fisheries science. This is a unique opportunity for students to experience life onboard a research vessel and learn the practical skills necessary to conduct scientific surveys at sea including: • Design, planning and execution of scientific surveys • Deployment and operation of equipment and instrumentation • Sample acquisition and processing • Data acquisition, quality control and analysis There will also be an opportunity in October of this year for transition year students to work alongside scientists onboard the R.V. Celtic Voyager and learn more about potential careers in marine science and technology.

www.marine.ie

To apply for a place on the programme please see www.marine.ie/imep or contact imep@marine.ie.

Marine Institute Rinville Oranmore Co. Galway

The closing date for applications is 4 pm Friday 26th September 2008.

telephone 353 91 387 200 facsimile 353 91 387 201 email institute.mail@marine.ie

This training is recognised by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) as contributing towards continuous professional development of marine scientists.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 3

Foras na Mara

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UPFRONT

Silurian biversity

MOST of the fossils we find are are of hard shells or bones, so we can get a false impression of ancient life. Dr Mark Purnell, a geologist at the University of Leicester, commented that if all we had to see were seashells, we would have little idea of what the marine environment is like. “All the variety of worms that crawl over and into the sand would be unknown, as would all the shrimpy things that scurry over the surface.”

Recently, Dr Purnell, working with colleagues from Canada, discovered fossils in Ontario that will help correct that impression. A complete 450 million year old fish, shrimps, and velvet worms were found in Silurian rocks.

According to Dr Purnell, only one other complete fish from this era is known.

The velvet worms, he said are also remarkable because they are so well preserved. Within days of death, the worms had become mineralised with calcium phosphate. “This preserved them as beautifully petrified fossils,” he said, “showing the wonderful details of their bodies, including coloured stripes.

Another significant feature is that these soft creatures were found together with the more usual type of shelly fossils, and as Dr Purnell remarked, this gives us a more complete picture of what a seashore was like during the Silurian era.

Stars

This summer 37 secondary teachers spent eight weeks back at university working with SFI supported researchers. Under the Secondary Teacher Assist Researchers (STARS) programme they were able gain first hand experience in conducting research across a range of topics. The link up between teachers and researchers under the STARS programme began in 2004 and it continues to be popular and a big success for everyone involved. Many of the researchers are keen to become involved in education, and teachers who have worked in research bring valuable experience back into the classroom.

At a special ceremony in August, the Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Jimmy Devins, awarded certificates to this year’s STAR teachers.

Frank Gannon, SFI, Cian O”Mahony, teacher from Douglas Community School, Cork, and Dr Jimmy Devlins, Minister for Science Technology and Innovation.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 4

Dr Chris Williams. Photo: Aengus McMahon

Western wasp

FOLLOWING some field work at Ardkill Turlogh, Co Mayo, Dr Chris Williams from the Environmental Change Institute at NUI Galway kept two marsh fly puparia in a jar to see what would hatch. He expected to see marsh flies, but was surprised when two different species of parasitic wasp emerged. Certain species of wasp lay their eggs inside fly larvae, and when these hatch, they feast on the host, eventually killing it.

The wasps belonged to the genus Mesoleptus, but Chris could not identify the species. After a number of international experts examined the find, they concluded that this is a species new to science.

As finder, Chris was entitles to give the species a name, but, as he thought it best not to make this too personal, he settled for Mesoleptus hibernica, the Irish species. As he remarked: “Who really wants to be named after a prasite?”

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UPFRONT

Preparing diamonds for X-ray examination at the Daresbury Laboratory.

Revealing diamonds

Eventually the hard rocky crust we stand on now is likely to be drawn back down into the depths. The Earth is recycling on a grand scale, but we are barely aware of this because the process is so slow. As new rock wells up from the hot interior, the old crust is pushed down.

Branching

Plants use chemical messenger hormones to interact with the environment and control growth . Recently a new group of plant hormones was discovered, the strigolactones. These have a role in supporting the mutually beneficial relationship between plants and soil fungi, and recently, a group of researchers from France, Australia and the Netherlands, found that strigolactones are also involved in the control of branching.

The confirmation that strigolactones were involved in branching came about through examination of a mutant pea plant. Instead of growing in the normal way, the mutant plant kept branching without restraint. By

Finding out what happens in the depths of the Earth is not easy, but scientists from the University of Bristol, working with the Synchroton Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory, have developed a way to extract information from diamonds.

Diamonds are formed at great depths, and as the scientists have found, they often carry up some tell-tale passengers in the form of trapped minerals. giving the plant a small dose of strigolactones, the branching stopped.

Repeating the experiment on thale cress produced similar results, and the resesearchers believe this could have significance in agriculture. For the Dutch researchers at Wageningen University, this is a welcome development, for horticulture is a major industry in the Netherlands. Less branching might, for example, suit greenhouse growers, and potted plants with more branching might command higher prices.

The normal plant with restrained branching, and right, lack of strigolactones and loss of control. (University of Wegeningen Plant Sciences).

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Diamonds from the Juina area of Brazil are distinctive because of their inclusions, and the researchers have been paying particular attention to their make up. Using intense X ray beams they have been looking at the mineral perovskite. This mineral does not occur at the Earth’s surface, but it is locked into the Brazilian diamonds.

The scientists believe that this mineral could only have been included at greath depth, perhaps 700 kilometres below. Perovskite, they report, is only stable at a depth of several hundred kilometres.

Subduction of the crust is thought to go down to about 3000 kilometres, and during this immensely long cycle, sub-oceanic carbonate rocks, such as limestone, is pulled down, and as it melts it is thought to ‘flavour’ the upwelling magma with minerals.

It is, of course, impossible to drill down to such depths, but the diamonds give the scientists some idea of what’s going on, not just in Brazil, but all around the world.

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UPFRONT Poisonous plants

Almonds and quite a few fruit seeds are high in prussic acid, a deadly poison.

50 to 200 mg is enough to kill to person.

Manioc, which is one of the main food plants of Africa, is also high in prussic acid, and while this is rendered harmless by cooking, many people are chronically poisoned because preparation is rushed or inadequate.

Dr Markus Piotrowski and Prof Birger L Moller at the Veterninary University in Copenhagen wondered how plants can produce such poisons while remaining immune to those that should be toxic to themselves.

Many of the poisons are stored as precursers, and they only become converted into their toxic form when released through injury. Prussic acid, in the form of cyanogenous glycosides, if often contained in cell vacuoles, and following injury, the sugar parts of the molecules are split off by an enzyme, and the poison become active.

Apart from reacting defensively, many plants produce prussic acid as a

by-product of their own metabolism.

However, they have a way of rendering it harmless. In the first step, the prussic acid is coupled up to an amino acid, cysteine, to form beta-cyanoalanine.

Beta-cyanoalanine is still toxic, but an enzyme, nitrilase, converts it into two useful plant building products, asparagine, and aspartic acid. The researchers reported that no one knew how this reaction occurred in grasses until they discovered that two nitrilase enzymes were involved, and they had to work together as a complex. “This phenomenon has never been described by anyone else before us,” said Dr Piotrowski.

Island populations

One of the ‘rules’ in biology, is that animals adapt to island conditions by changing size. The ‘island rule’ holds that big animals become smaller, and small animals become bigger.

However, the ‘island rule’ appears to be a myth. Dr Shai Meiri from the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, London, said that. “if the island rule was correct, then most large mammals living on islands would be smaller than their continental

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While they were at this, the scientists discovered a further refinement, a third nitrilase enzyme, which helps plants, such as millet, to conserve precious nitrogen. As Dr Piotrowski explained, young millet plants store large quantities of the cyanogenous glycoside, dhurrin. If insects bite the plant, prussic acid is released. Older plants, however, are not so susceptable to insect attack, so they have less need to store dhurrin. So instead of locking up nitrogen, which could be used elsewhere, the precurser of prussic acid, 4-hydroxyphenylacetonitrile, is split by an enzyme, releasing nitrogen for use by the plant. relatives, and most small island mammals would be larger than those living on continents.” A trawl through the college’s extensive database on animal sizes shows that this is not the case.

Dr Meri, who worked with Andy Purvis and Natalie Cooper on the research concluded that, although there are dwarf and giant populations on islands, the relationship between size and evolutionary pressure is not straightforward.

k Science Wee Watch out for ce nationwide la 2008 taking p ovember 2008.

N from 9 to 16 e cienceweek.i .s w w w t u o k Chec ils and for event deta competitions.

National Ploughing Championships 2008 in Kilkenny on 23 to 25 September and check out the

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City of science 2012 in an island of enterprise

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n 2012 Dublin aims to put the spotlight on European science.

Ireland’s bid to host Europe’s premier Euroscience event, backed by the government, and a group of over 50 science and industry leaders, is generally regarded as the one most likely to succeed.

At a recent meeting in the TCD Science Gallery, the bid group met to sign off the plans for a whole series of events centred around the new docklands Conference Centre. As Prof Patrick Cunningham, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government explained, the futuristic glass-fronted Conference Centre not alone provides an ideal venue for an event of this scale, but it also helps put Dublin in the lead because few other cities have such purpose built facilities on offer.

The Euroscience ESOF event is held every two years, the most recent being at Barcelona, and it has become firmly established as the showcase for the best in European science and research. In some ways it could be thought of as the Olympics of European science, and, as in the Olympics, cities must compete for selection. Aidan Gilligan, who came from the European Joint Research Centre to work with the Chief Scientific Adviser as bid co-ordinator, said that being able to demonstrate that Dublin has the capacity to host thousands of delegates can be just as important as showing that the Irish science community can come up with a winning programme. The fact that so many of the most prominent people from industry, science, and the

media came together to work out a programme, he said, is quite amazing.

Many of these influential people may have known about each other, but until now they had never worked on a collaborative programme. That diversity meant that the bid programme covers a broad spectrum, extending far beyond the specialised sciences. For example, science will don fancy dress and take to the streets, venues such as the Dublin Zoo and the Exploration Station will become involved as event partners, and delegates will be invited to go on a fabulous food trail. Naturally, solid science will be at the core, but with thousands of delegates converging on the city the bid group is determined to make the most of the event.

Prof Cunningham is in no doubt that hosting City of Science will have an enormous impact both at home and abroad. As he observed, the event will help everyone recognise the real value of what has happened in science over the past few years, and it will send out

a signal that Ireland now provides the right kind of environment to foster research.

Preparing the bid already has had an impact. Rarely, if ever, has such a diverse group of people come together as collaborators, and as Prof Cunningham observed, the high quality of input to the bid process, shows what can be achieved when the barriers come down. Prof Cunningham said that he is keen on the idea of keeping such a group in existence as it would mean extending the benefits well beyond a one off event. Furthermore, he sees an opportunity to use the City of Science event as a draw for Irish scientists living and working abroad.

As a returned ‘ex pat’, Aidan Gilligan is also enthuiastic about the idea of extending the network to Irish researchers around the world. As he found, on leaving Ireland he was far from alone in places such as Brussels.

Scores of Irish scientists, he said, now work in European institutions, and the same is true of the US. The City of Science event, he said, will give all these ex pats something they can relate to.

To keep up to date on progress visit the bid web site:

www.esof2012dublin.eu

Ireland’s bid document will be going before the Euroscience selection board soon, and they will announce the final decision early in 2009.

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Better start with wider options

Researcher Niamn Mullooly argues against taking a narrow path through education.

decline. This disparity has profound implications for Irelands future economic growth.

It is my opinion that the blame he Irish government’s deadline to for this decrease can be put on the “make Ireland a highly attractive structure of our third level science environment for high quality research education system. The past ten careers and R&D industry” by 2010 is years has seen the introduction of quickly looming. The introduction of more specialised science courses in a revised R&D tax credit system, better universities. Nautical science, herbal infrastructure and a commitment to science, theoretical physics, wood investing 3 per cent of GDP in science science or freshwater biology are and technology innovation bring us just some of the new degree options closer towards to achieving available to students on the this goal. However, when Surely the whole CAO form. it comes to attracting more point of a science At a young age, students investment in science, degree is to enable are being asked to choose low tax breaks and new a speciality before having the student to think any kind of introduction motorways just won’t cut it. The one key determinant like a scientist. to the subject. For a 17 of R&D investment is the year old that prospect quality and quantity of is just too daunting, so science and engineering graduates they are opting out of science and and it is this crucial factor that we are engineering and instead choose more falling short on. broadly based subjects. Even in general The reality is that Ireland’s economic science, there is pressure on students future is dependant upon attracting to focus without delay on a particular multinational research companies discipline. High drop-out rates suggest with a tempting pool of highly skilled that this approach is not working. science graduates. The current decline It seems that we are unwilling to in science graduate numbers means let students test the water, we are that Ireland might fall far short of throwing them into the deep end to developing an advanced ‘knowledge sink or swim. Furthermore, by pigeoneconomy.’ holing our scientists into scientific While there has been a steady niches we are also making them less increase in students applying to third flexible when they take up positions level education for the fifth year in industry. The companies that are in succession the number of CAO prepared to invest in innovation need applicants for third level science scientists with a range of skills, and and engineering courses is on the this brings us back to the purpose of

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education. Surely the whole point of a science degree is to enable the student to think like a scientist. The focus should be on undertstanding scientific concepts from a broad range of fields and diciplines, not to focus on theory limited to one core subject. This is the way that the American university system works, an educaton system arguably the best in the world. Science students in the States get the option to sample and experience a diverse range of subjects, with the option to take up to 18 credit hours in non-scientific humanaties subjects. Science students in Ireland, on the other hand, are unable to look ouside their small field.

As Carl Sangon, perhaps the most famous astronomer of the 20th century said; “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

If we want to achieve a “knowledge based economy” I think there will have to be a radical rehaul of our science education system. Carl Sangon’s remark suggests that a more interdisciplinary approach would give Ireland a better chance of achieving the government’s stated goals.

Niamh Mullooly studied science at NUI Galway where she graduated with a first in Physiology. She is currently working as a researcher at UCD.

EXPLORING EARTH AROUND THE WORLD

International competition sponsored by the American Geological Institute

Closing date 17th October 08 Details at www.earthsciweek.org/contests/ One of the previous winners, looking at Petra,

by Josh Edelson.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 8

SPIN

Calling all Students for Science Week 2008 Competitions Great prizes to be won Laptops, DS Lites, Digital Cameras, iPod Nanos…

Science Week Essay Competition

Entrants are invited to submit a 700-900 word essay that can be either fiction or non-fiction and the title of which is the Science Week theme: ‘Science - Shaping Our World’. Entrants are asked to convey the excitement of science in plain English.

Science Snaps Competition

Science Snaps is a photography competition where students are asked to take a snap of the science, engineering and technology around us. The aim of the competition is to capture this year’s Science Week theme ‘Science - Shaping Our World’.

Category A: 1st, 2nd & 3rd year junior cycle students Category B: 4th, 5th & 6th year senior cycle students Log on to www.scienceweek.ie for full details of the competitions.

Winners to be announced during Science Week November 9th -16th

Sci week spin ad 08 half page.indd 1

25/08/2008 15:07:03

Fuel from the sea

Seaweeds have the potential to outperform land plants in production of biuofuel. Prof Michael Borowitzka from Murdoch University, Australia, speaking at a conference at NUI Galway, said that seaweeds have an additional advantage in that they grow in saline water. There is no necessity to displace food crops on land.

Prof Borowitzka said that for seaweeds to be viable, there would have to be year round productivity, and this is something that scientists at NUIG, such as Dr Stefan Kraan, Manager of the Irish Seaweed Centre at NUIG, are looking into. “Algae do not have the negative image of terrestrial biomass resources,” he said. The Centre, he added, “is going to examine the economic and social aspects of using brown seaweeds for bioethanol production.”

Seaweeds represent an underdeveloped natural resource, but even so, they are already being harvested for a variety of uses in food, fertilizers, soil conditioners, and medical preparations. Sixteen commercially useful species of seaweed grow around Ireland’s coast.

Prof Michael Guiry, Director of the Martin Ryan Marine Institute at NUIG. The Seaweed Centre is part of the Martin Ryan Institute.

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The afforestation of the Bord na Móna cutaway bogs

The BOGFOR Project ince the late 1940s, Bord na Móna has been responsible for harvesting vast quantities of peat from our bogs for fuel. The peat has fuelled power stations and heated homes all over Ireland. While large peat resources still exist in these bogs, one by one they are becoming exhausted for fuel production. They remain a valuable resource, however, whether as wetlands, wild woodlands, or for grassland or production forestry.

The BOGFOR research project began in 1998 with the objective of investigating the forestry potential of the cutaway bogs and developing techniques for establishing forests on them. BOGFOR is a cooperative project, involving Coillte, Bord na Móna and UCD. It is led by Professor Ted Farrell, of UCD. The project has been funded by the Forest Service, COFORD, Coillte and Bord na Móna. One of the great strengths of the project has been the merging of managerial and research expertise to address the particular problems of cutaway peatland forestry.

Ireland has long experience of peatland afforestation, most of it on blanket peatland in the West and on our mountain ranges. Industrial cutaway peatlands, however, are very different in character from these peatlands and present a series of unique, challenging problems. The peat remaining after harvesting has been buried for several thousand years under the enormous weight of the overlying bog. It has been compacted and its physical properties are radically altered by this overlay.

At first glance, cutaway bog appears to offer a uniform and relatively easy medium for afforestation. For some years after harvesting has ceased it remains vegetation free, the surface is quite level, there are no steep slopes and a drainage system, installed for peat harvesting, is present. This benign appearance, however, is quite misleading. Far from being uniform, the peat properties are highly variable and the depth of residual peat can range from zero to more than a metre. Vegetation establishes quickly, especially following the application of fertilizer necessary for tree growth and it often competes aggressively with the trees in the early years.

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Cutaway peatlands in production showing drains every 15 m and, below, ‘peat exhausted’ bays beside peat field still in production (Noggus).

Five-year-old Norway spruce demonstration area (Blackwater).

Despite the drainage system and the relatively level terrain, depressions in the surface result in wet areas and tree failure. In addition, aeration is limited in these peats, as a result of millennia of compaction. Spring frost, which damages emerging buds, is an additional, serious hazard, in this lowlying terrain.

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These are the problems addressed in the BOGFOR project. Over 200 ha of experimental and demonstration plantations have been established.

A large number of tree species have been tested under the unique conditions of the cutaway peatlands.

Coniferous species are the first choice for production forestry, but native SPIN

project, this work was overseen and managed by the project manager, Dr Florence Renou, of UCD. It is estimated that 16,000 to 20,000 ha of the cutaway bogs may be suitable for afforestation. The BOGFOR project has made great progress in tackling the difficult challenges these sites present. We have the knowledge now to begin the process of commercial development of this great resource.

However, a headlong rush into largescale afforestation, at this stage would be unwise. Forestry research is, by its nature, long term. We must proceed broadleaved trees also have their place. Trials were set up to determine the fertilizer requirements of the trees and to investigate the environmental implications of afforestation.

Equipment for vegetation control and soil cultivation was modified and tested. For most of the life of the

Left: Five-year-old pedunculate oak under birch (Tumduff).

Right: Ten-year-old common alder (Tumduff).

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 11

cautiously, developing and growing our expertise, as we go.

For further information, contact: Dr Florence Renou-Wilson or Professor E.P. Farrell School of Biology and Environmental Science Agriculture and Food Centre University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4 E-mail: Florence.Renou@ucd.ie E-mail: ted.farrell@ucd.ie

At the Institute of Technology Carlow, every effort has been made to combine a stress-free location with toplevel tuition and facilities that are the leading edge in a number of key disciplines, including Science.

Science programmes include: • Level 6 Certificate programmes in Physiology and Health Science, Pharmacy Technician Studies, Applied Biology and Applied Chemistry • Level 7 Degree programmes in Analytical Science, Biosciences, Sports and Exercise (Rugby) • Level 8 Honours Degree Programmes in Sports and Exercise Rehabilitation, Industrial Environmental Science, Bioinformatics, Industrial Biology, Biosciences with Biopharmaceuticals and Biosciences with Bioforensics

All programmes are provided by experienced staff, all of whom are active in research or curriculum development.

Our Science graduates are employed in a wide range of areas as Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical, Environmental, Education, Analytical, Fitness, Managerial, Sports Rehabilitation and Healthcare professionals. The Institute also has an, international record of MSc and PhD research and development in a range of areas including Biotechnology & Molecular Environmental Science (BMES), Rehabilitative Sciences Research (RSR), Molecular Ecology & Nematodes, Inflammation and Disease, Mens Health and Biocatalyst Technology research groups.

For further information or to reserve a place at the Institutes Open Day, please visit www.itcarlow.ie

www.itcarlow.ie SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 12

SPIN

Clare Island from the air (Con Brogan, DEHLG)

Clare

Island Anthony King reports that for a century field scientists have been keeping watch on Clare Island. hose who travel to Clare Island by ferry cannot fail to notice the castle by the pier. The small ruin is Grace O’Malley’s castle, named for the highspirited Pirate Queen of the sixteenth century. It’s not certain whether the famed seafarer ever lived in the castle or hauled booty ashore. But this island four miles off Mayo has another claim to fame.

One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1909, a remarkable scientific expedition began to this island. Sixty years had passed since Charles Darwin had travelled the world as a young naturalist; the Clare Island expedition was an altogether different but nonetheless remarkable adventure for Victorian, and Irish, science. From 1909 to 1911, Clare Island was scrutinised by one hundred expert naturalists, many of them leaders in their field. This intense activity was marshalled by Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger.

As Praeger later wrote, “There was no month in any of the twelve in which one of our collectors might not have been found investigating seaweeds or earth-worms or mosses.”

On the Origin of the Species had been published 50 years earlier. Praeger was seeking support for Darwin’s idea of natural selection by looking for subtle

T

Original survey: Robert Lloyd Praeger (back row, first from left after inset) and other Survey members seated in and around a pookawn. (Praeger Collection, RIA) There were papers on beetles, sponges, differences between species on the algae and butterflies, botany, birds mainland and the island, explains Dr and archaeology: 67 in total. They Matthew Jebb, Keeper at the National appeared in three volumes, almost Botanic Gardens. Along with plants 2,500 pages; looking at them on the and animals, the project took in book shelf brings a sense of awe, says geology, archaeology, meteorology and Jebb. And it offers a point of reference agriculture.

What was extraordinary about for future studies to compare Ireland it was that it was the first intensive past and present. The Royal Irish Academy has sought to capitalise on survey of a small piece of Europe, says the resource by rerunning surveys Jebb. “Fifty years earlier, people like toward the close of the 20th century.

Darwin were touring the world and Six volumes of the New Survey of collecting plants and animals in places like the Galapagos Islands, but nobody Clare Island have been published, with four in progress. had thought to earmark a small island “There is no doubt that going in Europe and survey it intensely.” back 100 years we have got the most The Royal Irish Academy says the fantastic benchmark of what a piece 1909-11 survey was the most ambitious natural history project ever undertaken of Ireland looked like 100 years ago, in Ireland and the first ever major which nobody else recorded,” says Jebb. It means that we can now revisit biological survey of a specific area Clare Island and see that a large carried out. Experts came from Britain, number of plants have vanished, for Switzerland, Denmark and Germany. instance. The flora has become poorer There’s been nothing like it since.

The results appeared in print from by at least twenty percent, says Jebb, 1911 to 1914, revealing 1,253 species but lots of new species have also arrived. “So one of the first inklings new to Ireland and 109 new to science.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 13

SPIN

of the importance of Praeger’s work was when people revisited Clare Island many years later and realised that all these islands have a turnover of plants and animals.”

The fauna and flora of an island are determined by its size, says Dr Tom Kelly of University College Cork. Kelly, who has studied the birds on the island for a future volume, says this allows scientists to predict the number of species on an island.

“Breeding birds are one metric by which you measure species diversity on an island,” he notes. But island diversity has a great deal to say about conservation and even national parks.

If you total up the number of species on an island, it is always less than an equivalent area on the mainland. Jebb explains that this “island effect” is very important because it teaches us the size you would have to make a national park or reserve if you want to preserve plants and animals. “How big should you make your reserve?

And what islands teach us is the bigger the better,” he says. As an island gets smaller, you get fewer species.

It also means Clare Island acts like the proverbial canary. “It will tell us which species of plants are more susceptible to becoming extinct due to modern farming practices,” says Jebb.

Intensive agriculture can squeeze out wild plants and animals. The shoulder high heather which confronted the early naturalists on the island is no more, extinguished by grazing and fertilisation of the soils. But remarkably much of the island remains as it was in 1909.

There’s not a huge difference in terms of bird species on the island in the early part of the 20th century and 21st century, says Kelly. Red grouse disappeared along with the heather, but ground nesting birds such as skylarks and wheatears are still very abundant on the island. Meadow pipits are common; you can watch them abseiling down a stiff breeze, all the time piping out repetitive ‘zee’ notes. A three mile by five mile rock in the Atlantic, the island is unusual in having a remarkable 1,500 foot mountain and being cliff bound on all sides. The north side of the island has sheer cliffs where you can watch the wild relatives of the overfed street pigeon. “The purebred rock dove is quite rare now,” says Kelly. “The doves are absolutely magnificent looking, not like the feral doves you

Aerial photo of the signal tower at the western end of the island, looking east across the summit of the large rocky knoll that it crowns. The tops of the western sea cliffs are visible in the foreground. (Con Brogan, DEHLG) see on the mainland.” These flint coloured acrobats share the island with their natural predator, the peregrine falcon, which Praeger deemed Ireland’s “master of the air.”

The island also has an impressive seabird colony, with large numbers of guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, petrels and kittiwakes. The garden warbler and chaffinch have gone extinct from the island, but Kelly is none too worried. “Populations are so small on an island that they have a high chance of becoming extinct.

Colonies never become very large and some by chance go extinct. You get new species arriving and new species disappearing.”

But Kelly is fascinated by the absence of the rook. Offshore islands will have jackdaw, chough, hooded crow and raven, but not rooks. “It’s a widespread terrestrial bird in Ireland and yet it is absent from all of our islands as a breeding species.” Kelly suspects two factors are involved: they need quite a large area to forage and they are a highly social species, breeding in large rookeries. If an area isn’t large enough, there’s no colony.

The island has species rare elsewhere in Europe. The bright red legs and beak of the chough distinguish this crow, a species of special conservation concern in Europe. Writing in his book The Way

Excavation in progress on the stone scatter in the interior (foreground) and on the outer bank in the background.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 14

That I Went, Praeger describes the chough as a welcome sight with “its beautiful flight” and “the delight it seems to take in playing in the air.”

It remains common on Clare Island, where Kelly has watched it joisting with peregrines.

Compared to the mainland, Clare Island is still fairly pristine, with intensive agriculture absent. John Breen, entomologist at Limerick University, says this is good news for the ants, bees and wasps. “You will come across four or five species of ants very quickly if you turn over stones.

You won’t do that on the mainland.

And you will come across six or seven species of bumblebee and three species of wasp without having to look too hard.” As long as you know what you’re looking for, that is. This would have been the experience in many rural parts of Ireland two or three decades ago, before silage and monocultures on the mainland reduced foraging for these insects. Common bumblebee species include the white-tailed, redtailed, and garden bumblebee and the common carder bee.

The original survey for insects would have involved lots of collecting and mounting of specimens on pins; lists of species were a specialty of Victorian science. Today’s studies are more focused. A PhD student working with Breen is looking at the chemical and biological properties of the soil of ant nests, for example.

The high cliffs still support a remarkable alpine flora, species that are rare in the rest of Ireland. One example is Oyzeria digyna, a plant with kidney-shaped leaves and pink flowers. A gannet colony is sometimes visible on a small sea stack below the great cliffs. But be careful walking in this area, as the cliff edge can disappear in a shroud in mist and you can be battered by wind on the steep slopes, even on a seemingly calm day.

Praeger was the ultimate field naturalist and spent every summer for five years walking and botanising around Ireland, but he also travelled abroad. “If you only live in Ireland you won’t understand what is special about its flora,” says Jebb. “When you bring European botanists to the west of Ireland, they are surprised to see so many woodland plants growing out in the fields. Ireland is wet enough for the fields to be humid enough.

Plants and animals behave differently in Ireland than in the rest of Europe.”

Aerial photo looking south along the isthmus labelled ‘Doon’ on the southern coast of the island.

Western Ireland also has a strange collection of plants with an affinity to northern Spain. Jebb says Praeger was able to put Ireland into a European context.

The new survey produced a volume on freshwater and terrestrial habitats that looked at algae and phytoplankton; it found the island has an exceptionally high algal diversity of about 800 species. Another volume looked at marine inter-tidal habitats, including some extremely exposed shores that proved a challenge to study. One of the more accessible of these shores was sampled by researchers using security ropes, safety helmets and life jackets. It offered insights into limpets, mussels, whelks

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 15

and barnacles.

Two ferry companies serve the island today. On the trip over, I watched common dolphins chase under the bow; the large disc-shaped sunfish is sometimes spotted by ferry passengers. The sea itself was dredged and netted during the first survey and a future survey will examine marine fauna.

Clare Island’s geology is complex.

And it is complex because the island comprises rocks formed on an ancient ocean floor, sediments formed on the northern margin of an ancient continent north of this ocean and subsequent tectonic squashing of this continent by another. Rocks also

formed from the eroded remains of this collision, which were themselves covered by tropical seas during the Carboniferous. Because of this history, Clare Island occupies a position of international geological importance.

There is still debate over the precise age of the island’s rocks, but none are younger than 300 million years.

The island is, however, blanketed in a covering of more recent glacial material from the last Ice Age. Pete Coxon says the island has been intensively glaciated. “The ice swept across it from east to west and shaped the whole southern coast and large parts of the north east coast,” he explains. During the glacial maximum, around 20,000 years ago, the ice would have been 400 metres thick. Coxon says the ice retreated about 15,000 years ago and left behind a lot of glacial till. The island is thought to even have had its own glacier.

Juniper and hazel were early colonisers after the ice melted. When man arrived 7,000 years ago or so, the island would have been completely wooded, with oak, birch and pine trees. Later Bronze Age settlement on the island is thought to have been significant.

Today the island’s landscape is a mix of stony heath, bare peat bog, moss-covered bog, marshy areas, bare rock and steep cliffs. If you hike to the highest point of the island, Croaghmore, you’ll have spongy bog and heath underfoot; but all this was once forested.

It wouldn’t have taken a lot of people to deforest Clare Island, says

Coxon; wood was scarce by around 2,000 BC, he says. This would have been around the heyday of the fulachtai fia, mysterious mounds of burnt stone. They are the most plentiful archaeological monuments on the island but mystery shrouds their purpose. In the next issue, we will explore these prehistoric remains and also a medieval abbey with Gaelic wall paintings that may be of international importance.

Roisin Jones of the Royal Irish Academy describes the first survey as a major achievement of world significance. “This is a great body of information across two centuries,” she says “and it’s our ambition to make it available to the general public.”

The academy sees the new survey as an invaluable source for future environmental monitoring. After one hundred years of excellent study, the academy has history on its side.

Ireland’s greatest botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865–1953) trained as an engineer and worked as a librarian, but his lifelong passion was natural history. Praeger learnt his geology, zoology, botany and archaeology at the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club from like-minded amateur enthusiasts. His scientific life began in the field and continued there.

When he moved to Dublin to work in the National Library, Praeger put together a plan for a thorough study of Ireland’s wildflowers. He set out each weekend to different parts of Ireland during the summers of 1896 through 1900, travelling 5,000 miles, most of it cross country. He favoured using the

train for rapid transit to a desired spot, followed by vigorous cross country hiking, up to fifty miles a day.

In 1905, Praeger organised a survey to the small island of Lambay off Dublin at the request of its new owner.

The project discovered 90 species new to Ireland and encouraged Praeger and the Royal Irish Academy to undertake the most ambitious natural history venture in Ireland. He knew Ireland as well as anybody alive by the time he planned and organised the Clare Island survey. It was just as well, since he was so involved in editing the mass of findings. “Materials piled up beyond expectation,” he wrote.

Praeger co-founded the Irish Naturalist, served as president of the Royal Irish Academy, and was the first president of An Taisce; after he retired from the National Library as director in 1923, he set off on botanical trips to the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Balkans and the Alps. His book The Way That I Went is a celebration of the joy of walking the countryside with an enquiring mind. He sets out his philosophy in chapter one: “Who does not wish on a fine day to escape from the town into the country? And when you get there, it adds enormously to your interest and enjoyment if you understand something about the architecture of the hills and plains, and about their teeming population of birds and butterflies and trees.”

Anthony King studied science at TCD and has a Masters in Communication from DCU.

Distinctive profile of Clare Island seen from the mainland.

Tom Kennedy, Source archive collection.

onan Farrell is a lecturer in the Department of Electronic Engineering and is the Director of the Institute for Microelectronics and Wireless Systems at NUI Maynooth.

Ronan has always been interested in engineering: the art of solving problems and making things. Computers and electronics always held a fascination for Ronan, opening and examining computers and devices and seeing how they worked, though he admits he was not always able to put things back together again. This interest led Ronan to undertake a degree in Electronic Engineering at UCD in 1989. While at UCD, Ronan won a scholarship with ICI, the chemicals company, and spent his summers working on the chemical factories and oil refineries in England.

His role there was to develop and maintain the control systems that ensured the quality of the product being made but also to ensure that it was done safely and without harm to the environment. Upon graduation in 1993, he took a job with ICI and worked in Louisiana and England.

In 1995, Ronan returned to UCD to study for a PhD with Dr Orla Feely in the nonlinear dynamics of sigmadelta modulators, a key component in many of our high performance electronics today such as in CD players. Graduating in 1998, Ronan joined Parthus Technologies, an Irish company that specialised in analog and digital silicon chip design for wireless applications. Having previously worked in factories that were over a

Getting radio to go green

R

Ronan Farrell, Director of the Institute for Microelectronics and Wireless Systems, NUIM. mile wide and using megawatts of power, he now was working with circuits that used microwatts and were smaller than the width of a human hair. To Ronan, microelectronics are an absolutely amazing achievement of human ingenuity, a modern chip has the complexity of a massive city but compressed to the size of the tip of your finger, and for it to work, every bit must work perfectly. As chips get smaller, the challenge in designing these systems gets ever harder and it remains astonishing that we can actually construct ever smaller devices.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 17

In 2000, Ronan joined the newly formed Department of Electronic Engineering and focussed his research on wireless systems and the enabling technologies. While at Parthus, Ronan had become interested in the use of electronics in wireless communications and the impact of the Moore’s Law on wireless systems. Modern wireless devices are the combination of electronics and radios and have become a fundamental part of our modern society. It would be hard to imagine the world without television, mobile phones, WiFi or even the ubiquitous baby monitors. Some of the most fashionable products in the market, for example the Apple iPhone, demonstrate the impact a good design may have. Though many people assume that mobile phones work and nothing more needs to be done, wireless technologies are one of the fastest changing technologies.

We are now seeing wireless devices are being developed so that cars can communicate with each other and the road itself to avoid collisions; wireless devices are being implanted in the body to monitor pacemakers that can automatically call for help in case of emergencies. All this requires continued improvement in the design of these systems. Ronan’s particular interest is in the area are of softwaredefined radios where through the use of software we can morph a wireless device from being a 2G phone to a WiFi device to any other wireless system. This will allow users to use SPIN

a WiFi hotspot in a café to download a movie while chatting on a mobile phone network to friends. This concept was first proposed nearly twenty years ago and much progress has been made but these wireless devices remain very difficult to build.

Ronan’s research is focussed on the key remaining bottlenecks, the hardware or electronics that must be flexible enough to support the existing flexible software programmes. As part of this research, they have developed, in partnership with TCD, a fully adaptable wireless system. This is one of only a few such systems in the world and has led to new research projects in the area of next generation TETRA radio systems as well as WiMAX and 4G mobile telephony. In addition to his work on reconfigurable wireless systems, Ronan is also very interested in green radio – radios that consume substantially less power.

With billions of mobile phones, the energy consumed in those phones, and the supporting networks, is very large, some estimates put it over 50 GWh per year in Ireland (or 22,000 tons of CO2).

Ronan and his team have been looking at technologies that could minimise the amount of energy required to achieve the same performance. This problem needs to be approached from two directions: the technology used; and the way wireless systems operate in the presence of other wireless systems.

One of the most exciting avenues is the area of power amplifiers, critical devices in all radio systems as they take our radio signal and amplify it for transmission from our antennas.

Every wireless device needs one and they consume the most power.

Ronan is working in an international collaboration to develop amplifiers that are three times more efficient than anything currently available and with major companies such as Bell Labs and Alcatel Lucent. As a result of this research, Ronan has filed for two patents but there are many research challenges still to be addressed.

Since joining NUI Maynooth, Ronan has been successful in securing a number of research grants from Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, totalling approximately €6.3

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For Ronan, electronic engineering and wireless systems offers a wide range of exciting opportunities for future research and for any student considering physics ore engineering as a career.

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Does the sex of your brain matter?

Veronica Miller reports that gender differences go deeper than most of us think. lzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are two of the most common neurodegenerative disorders which affect older people. Their incidence is ever increasing as our population ages, and they cost the Irish economy €350 million euro per year. But although the diseases were discovered over 100 years ago, their causes remain elusive.

Yet several risk factors have been found to be associated with the disease. And while old age is an obvious contender, gender is actually one of the biggest risk factors for both diseases. Old men have 1.5 times the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease and old women have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

You could argue that men are simply more physical, and women simply more thoughtful. Therefore with age older men get movement disorders and women get cognitive disorders. But gender differences are apparent across a wide variety of brain diseases.

Not only are men more likely to develop Parkinson’s, but boys are 3-6 times more likely to develop Autism and ADHD, and women are more likely to be hit with mental illness and depression. Yet the role of gender in brain disease is hotly disputed.

A

In the early 1900s studies in England by proponents of eugenics, such as Francis Galton on gender differences in the brain, claimed that women had smaller heads and ergo lower IQs. A small head circumference was used later that century to discriminate against non-white immigrants landing at Ellis Island and prevented their entry to schools and better jobs. Recently, in 2007, the celebrated scientist, James Watson, was widely criticized for his comments linking brain size, gender, race and low IQ and he was forced to resign from his position in Cold Spring Harbour in the US. However, despite the colourful history associated with studies on gender differences in the brain, several studies have found physiological and functional differences in male and female brains.

A brain of two halves

Developmental neuroscientists have suggested that map reading and verbal skills are hotwired into our heads early on. In the womb male brains develop better spatial and visual processing connections, but females develop better connected temporal lobes which regulate speech. Thus as the joke would go; while a woman is more likely to stop the car to ask

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 19

for directions, a man is more likely to understand them.

On a more detailed level, women have better connections between their left and right hemispheres, while men are left hemisphere dominant.

Evidence for this connectivity stems from studying people’s recovery after an injury. Aphasia; a loss of language, is nearly 4 times more common in males after left hemisphere damage (48% in males vs 13% in females), whereas right side damage produces no sex differences because men are less reliant on their right hemisphere for language processing. Thus better connectivity between the hemispheres allows women to recover from damage.

The dominance of the left hemisphere in men and use of both hemispheres would suggest it is simple to define the sex of a brain simply in terms of which hemisphere a person uses.

But in June this year researchers from the Stockholm Brain institute in Sweden suggested that gender differences in the brain are not that simple. Their imaging study found that the brains of homosexual men resembled those of heterosexual women, and that lesbians’ brains showed similarities with those of straight men. This suggests differences between men and women may be more complicated.

SPIN

Defining the gender of a person’s brain is complicated because gender isn’t simply a matter of knowing whether a person has XX or XY chromosomes.

Instead you need to know how that person represents themselves and this may be shaped by their environment and experience rather than genes only.

Thus gender differences may be less easy to define biologically.

Sex differences are easy to define however. Sex differences are defined simply by the presence or absence of the SRY gene which is found on the Y chromosome and is responsible for the male sex. In the absence of this gene, embryos, even those with both X and Y chromosomes will develop ovaries rather than testes.

But in the developing brain, sex differentiation is actually regulated by estrogen rather than testosterone.

In the male brain testosterone is converted to estrogen by an enzyme named aromatase. Exposure to high levels of estrogen results in the masculinisation of the developing brain, while ironically lack of exposure to estrogen encourages feminisation of the brain. Thus while SRY produces gonadal differences, estrogen actually produces sex differences in the brain.

If the conversion of testosterone to estrogen masculinises the brain, this may make you wonder what a masculine brain is.

A manly brain

Physiologists define the masculine brain in terms of its ability to behave in a masculine way. In simple terms this means masculinised rats are more likely to be attracted to and attempt to mate with female rats.

Interestingly last year Harvard researchers described in Nature Neuroscience how they could chemically engineer female mice to behave like males by changing the pheromone sensors in their brains.

The research team led by Catherine Dulac genetically engineered female mice to lack a gene TRPC2 which allows females to sense pheremones in an organ in the nose called the vomeronasal gland.

Without the gene, the female mice behaved exactly like male mice, with the same attempted mating behaviour and calls that males use to attract their mate. Thus while the sex of your brain may be controlled early on by gonadal hormones and your X and

If men’s are from Mars and women’s from Venus how do you know which planet your brain is from?

Y chromosomes, how feminised or masculinised your brain is can be altered throughout adult life by the use of hormones, pheromones and pharmaceuticals.

Gender balance in brain studies

Gender differences in the prevalence of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ADHD and Autism are well known. But these gender differences rarely translate to research practices aimed to understand why these differences exist.

Technically at the bench-top cell biologists tend to work in a “gender” neutral environment. Apart from commercially available immortal cell lines such as the HeLa line, so named after a woman named Henrietta Lacks who donated her cells to research, very few cell biologists would be able to tell you the sex of their cells.

Assessing the gender of cells may be a bit over the top, but animal studies should offer better opportunity to examine gender differences in diseases.

Yet, animal studies rarely take gender into the equation. For the most part, researchers tend to only use male animals in their experiments.

Most researchers suggest that the female menstrual cycle “complicates things”, therefore they prefer to work with male rodents.

The National Institute for Health (NIH) is one of the largest funding bodies in the US. In order to address gender imbalance in research they advocate that gender differences in study populations both in clinical and laboratory experiments need to be considered. However the NIH guidelines are a suggestion rather than requirement in grant funding applications. Until gender balance is required to meet the bottom line

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 20

of funding applications it is unlikely to become a routine part of research protocols.

In Ireland, neither Science Foundation Ireland, nor the Health Education Authority require that gender differences be addressed in study designs or funding applications.

This may mean we generate drugs that have only been tested as safe for use for half of the population.

Attempts to address gender imbalance in medical studies have been made with the Women’s Health Initiative in the US. Advocates for the involvement of women in research pushed in 1991 for the studies specifically focussed on promoting women’s health.

One such trial involved 27,347 women and was designed to measure the health benefits of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Unfortunately the trial had to be suspended in July 2002 due to unexpected side effects of the HRT. The treatment actually increased the risk of strokes and heart attacks in some women, although it was also associated with decreased risk of hip fracture and colorectal cancer in others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the original studies on the safety and side-effects of the female contraceptive pill were conducted using only male animals.

Risky business of gender

Not only do brain diseases affect men and women disproportionately, there are also differences in the types of risk factors associated with these diseases in men and women.

Drinking coffee decreases the risk of Parkinson’s disease in men. But in women the story is slightly more complicated. One study on 77,000 nurses found while coffee made the women 65% less likely to get Parkinson’s disease, if the women were also on hormone replacement therapy they were actually 1.5 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s.

There are also sex differences in the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease.

Obesity at middle age is a risk factor for the disease in men, but for women depression is a greater risk factor.

Men and women also differ in terms of their brain’s immune responses to diseases. Women have a greater incidence of auto-immune diseases such as Lupus and arthritis than men, but men have a greater incidence

of asthma prior to puberty. Both testosterone and estrogen are involved in the immune system and may be associated with autoimmune diseases that affect men and women.

For women estrogen is particularly important and has key antiinflammatory properties. Older women have greater inflammation than older men and younger women.

And this is thought to be associated with a lack of estrogen production after the menopause.

Interestingly heightened immune response in women led to controversial speculation in the US in the 1990s that the AIDs epidemic particularly affected homosexual men because they had “feminised” immune systems.

This speculation led to outcry that the researchers were attempting to link homosexuality with a dysfunctional immune system. People felt that suggesting homosexual men had a dysfunctional immune system that made them more likely to develop AIDs was the same as suggesting homosexuality caused by a dysfunctional immune responses.

Gender specific treatments

In general it is well known that men and women have different immune systems. And immunosuppressant drugs work differently in men and

Gender specific drugs are rarely prescribed women. Tumour Necrosis Factor alpha blockers are immunosuppressant drugs which decrease the risk of arthritis in older men but not in older women. And the use of Aspirin is reported to decrease the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease in women but not men.

Yet when it comes to prescribing drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases, gender specific drugs are rarely prescribed.

The advent of gender specific drugs may seem like a pharmaceutical goldmine. Drugs may be repackaged into male and female varieties, and adverse effects for one gender may turn out to be opportunities for another. But it is not all about rebranding diseases.

Dr Marianne Legato is an advocate of Gender Specific Medicine and based at Columbia University in New York.

But she writes that studying gender is “an intellectual imperative, that women’s health is more than a political

or feminist issue or a marketing tool for hospitals.”

Dr Legato has also written a book “Why men die faster” and suggests that all kinds of differences between men and women, including speed of their digestive system which alters how well drugs enter the bloodstream, differences in the ability of the liver to detoxify compounds and faster heart rates which alter how effectively blood is pumped around the body necessitate gender specific drugs.

So while we know there are differences in the prevalence of risk factors and efficacy of drugs associated with brain diseases, the jury is still out as to why these gender differences exist.

And most likely the jury will remain out, until brain researchers focus not only on grey and white matter but also the differences in the blue and pink bits in between.

Dr Veronica Miller, a researcher and science writer, is currently working at the New York Wadsworth Centre .

Veronica Miller’s book, All about the brain, is due for publication soon as the third in Science Spin’s Discovery Series.

Rock around Ireland Peadar McArdle explains about Ireland’s geology. A popular but comprehensive guide to Irish geology describing how Irish rocks and the landscape around us were formed.

Lavishly illustrated. The author Dr McArdle, is Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland. For everyone with an interest in rocks, and useful to students.

Casebound €20 A5 landscape, 112 pg, full colour. Paperback €15

From bookshops, or order on line from

www.sciencespin.com

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 21

Blood vessel

Fibrous astrocyte

Glial cells making our brain different

Marie Catherine Mousseau writes that the numerous glial partner cells could help explain why the human brain is so special. ost people see the brain as a gelatinous mass made of neurons, i.e. particular cells with the specific properties of communicating with each other via electrical signals. This is not totally wrong – the brain is gelatinous and contains as many as 100 billion neurons – a number of the same magnitude as the number of stars in our galaxy, or the number of galaxies in the universe. Many people, however, may not be aware it also contains close to ten times more of another cell type, not neurons. And the evidence increasingly shows that these other brain cells are at least as important as neurons in giving our brain the amazing properties it has.

These are called glial cells. “For every neuron in the brain there are 8 to 10 glial cells that are around each neuron,” says neuroscientist and glial cell expert Dr Susanna Lyons.

“Neurons represent only 10 to15 percent of the cellular space in the brain; glial cells, by contrast, represent 70 to 80 percent,” she adds.

So why is it that all of us know about neurons, but very few have heard about glial cells?

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The immune role

Dr Lyons, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, USA, came to Dublin to attend the International Neuroimmunology Symposium held at UCD in March this

year. With more than 250 participants from Ireland and around the world, this symposium on neuroimmunology was a first in Ireland. Its success is partly due to PhD students from the UCD Marie Curie Programme in Molecular Immunology who organised it under the supervision of UCD lecturers Dr Clare O’Connor and Dr Antonio Campos-Torres.

Neuroimmunology is an emerging field combining neuroscience and immunology (study of the immune system), and this new field has very much to do with glial cells. Indeed, while neurons are the messengers taking care of the rapid transfer of information, glial cells are the soldiers posted all around, ensuring the transfer goes smoothly and fighting in case of aggression – that is their immune role.

“Glial cells have been in the background because the neuronal connections were what people focused on,” Susanna explains. “But if you look at the synapses between two neurons where the communication is

DiFFeReNT TYPes

*Microglial cells are one of the three types of glial cells. The other types are astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.

Microglial cells are also the ones that are better known to be involved in the immune regulation of the brain (their embryonic origin is actually different from that of neurons, and similar to that of other immune cells in the body).

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 22

taking place, you’ll see a glial cell right around that synapse listening and responding to that communication,” she continues. “Part of that glial cell is connected to that circulatory system in the brain, and is also connected to other glial cells. This means one glial cell is talking to neurons, to the circulatory system and to the rest of the brain. Therefore if something goes wrong, if there is an injury, or an attack or a disease, glial cells are the first ones to respond.”

She then adds: “We feel, scientists who specialise in glial cells feel, that there can be no thought process without glial support; there can be no disease without glial participation.”

Speaking at the Symposium, Prof Helmut Kettenmann, Professor of Cellular Neuroscience at the MaxDelbruck-Centrum, Berlin, Germany, and who has specialised in glial cells for almost 30 years, also acknowledges the critical importance of glial cells in brain functioning, inflammation and disease – an importance that he was among the first to recognise.

“The classic neuroscientists and immunologists have been from originally completely different worlds.

Classic neuroscience was looking at neuronal transmission and memory, and these immune-competent cells in the brain didn’t get much attention for many years,” he says. But now we know, as he put it, that “there is no disease where microglial cells* are not activated.”

Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, all seem to involve, at one stage or another, the participation of glial cells.

SPIN

Good and Bad l STROKE — First of all, as Prof Kettenmann explained in his talk, microglial cells are essential elements for neuronal reorganization. In case of injury or lesion for instance – such as those following a stroke – microglial cells get activated and migrate to the ischemic area. Once there, they might act as house keepers, removing some neuronal inputs when they are no longer functional.

Prof Kettenmann has a hypothesis of how the system might work. In a normal brain there is a high level of neurotransmitters (signalling molecules involved in neuronal communication). Some of these would signal to glial cells that normal activity is going on and tell them to calm down. If there is an attack or an injury following a stroke, where there is neuron degeneration, less neurotransmitters would be produced; it would then become much easier for glial cells to get activated and play their cleaning role. This would explain why neurotransmitters in the brain seem to downregulate, rather than stimulate the activity of glial cells. “It is only a hypothesis but it would make a lot of sense,” Prof Kettenmann says. l TUMOURS — But he also pointed out that glial cells are not always good. They may also have negative effects, for instance by facilitating brain tumour development.

Prof Kettenmann indicated that in gliomas (brain tumours), near to one third of tumour mass is represented by microglial cells (note that we talk about gliomas, not neuromas – no wonder neurons can’t make tumours as they cannot divide themselves) “When microglial cells are present we observe more migration of glioma in the brain”, Prof Kettenmann said. He explained that microglial cells seem to release an enzyme that instruct tumour cells to get in a particular state which help them invade the brain.

Does it mean that a better understanding of glial cell involvement in brain tumour might lead to a potential cure?

Not only that. Unfolding the immune role of glial cells might lead to new therapeutic approach for all disorders involving brain

Astrocytes, one type of glial cell, greatly outnumbering neurons. inflammation. The fact is, many brain diseases may be associated at the start with some glial cell dysfunction.

Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease

This could be the case for Alzheimer’s.

Prof Kettelmann published a review in Nature Neuroscience last December summarising the current understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of the condition. “What came out is that there may be an early phase of Alzheimer’s

Astrocytes (in green) covering neurons (in red) following nerve injury.

disease, prior to large deposits, where something immunological goes wrong which may start the whole cascade,” he explained.

Schizophrenia is another candidate for the immune dysfunction hypothesis. Also speaking at the symposium, Bartlomiej Lukasz, PhD student from the UCD Marie Curie Molecular Immunology programme, explained how his research based on animal models of schizophrenia showed the involvement of a few genes associated with the body’s immune defence system. It seems that in the case of schizophrenia these ‘immune-related genes’ are not expressed to the same level. “Our findings suggest that disruption of specific immune response systems can play an important role during schizophrenia development,” Bartlomiej concluded.

In the development of Parkinson’s disease also, immune processes and glial cell functioning might play an important role. Presenting her results at the symposium, Catriona Long, PhD student at UCC, pointed out that activated microglial cells are observed in Parkinson’s models, in particular in the area rich in dopamine neurons (Substantia Nigra) – which is the one that is destroyed in the disease process. At the same time, high levels of cytokines (immune molecules) were found in the same area of Parkinson’s patients. Are these immune molecules a cause or a consequence of the disease?

Their finding rather points towards a cause. When they used a toxin to trigger the release of one of the immune factors involved, the result was more dopamine neurones destroyed! So it appears that they identified some immune molecule which acts as a death mediator on dopamine neurons – that is a potential trigger or accelerator of Parkinson’s disease.

Trigger

However, as Prof Kettelmann put it, we cannot jump to conclusions.

“This research just looks at one aspect of the disease by only studying cultures of brain cells,” he said. One thing we know for sure is that microglial cells are activated in the region where neurons

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degenerate, but the question is – is it an initial trigger? “What’s happening in the whole brain of a Parkinson’s patient that triggers the condition is still very much a mystery,” Prof Kettelmann commented.

This is also true for Alzheimer’s disease, where the role of glial cells is not all that clear.

According to Helmut Kettelmann, while some glial cell dysfunction might start the development of the disease, it becomes obvious that later on microglial cells help to fight it because they increase their phagocytic activity on plaques (i.e. engulf deposits that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s).

The same uncertainty also applies for multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease characterised by an inflammation of the brain. “In Multiple Sclerosis we know that microglial cells are activated and produce a lot of inflammatory molecules, but we don’t know if it causes the disease or if it is a consequence,” Prof Kettenmann said. “What is the trigger of the inflammation?”

Taking a more general stance he concluded: “for each brain disease – i.e. schizophrenia, depression, MS, Alzheimer’s – essentially we do not know what starts it from the very beginning. While for all brain diseases microglial cells are activated, the question remains – is it just a response, or is it part of the ongoing pathological process?”

So it looks like that there is still a long way to go to understand why things go wrong, especially as we first need to understand what’s happening when the brain does function properly.

On the bright side, our understanding seems to improve at an accelerated pace. “The advances in the last 10 years have been amazing; with all the new technologies such as in-vivo (cellular) imaging, we’re getting much closer to good animal models and no longer only rely on cell lines and cell cultures,” said Prof Helmut Kettelmann. Not to mention techniques such as brain scans – “the big imaging” as he called it – which allow us to look directly into the brain and watch how cells interact.

Combined together, these new techniques have the potential to unfold the mysterious role of those neglected components that make up most of our brain. The answer to this puzzle is even more critical since we realised that glial cells seem to play a key part in the evolution of the brain. Indeed, evidence shows that they increased in proportion as vertebrates evolved. “While there is the same amount of glial cells and neurons in lower vertebrate, in humans there are many, many more glial cells than neurons,” says Dr Campos-Torres.

“In fact, the evolution of brain function matches with the increased number of glial cells – not so much with the increased number of neurons,” he continues. And interestingly, Einstein’s brain was found to have much more glial cells than the average brain! “This actually supports the idea that glial cells might play a fundamental role in modulating higher cognitive function,” Antonio comments.

So perhaps understanding glial cell functioning may well shed some light on what’s so special in our brain that makes us human.

The happy marriage of neuroscience and immunology

How it all started here used to be Neuroscience on one hand and Immunology on the other. From their union an offspring was born: Neuroimmunology. Or more precisely the first Neuroimmunology post-graduate programme in Ireland.

So here is the story of how a new field in science was formed.

Dr Clare O’Connor is an immunologist. This means she studies the way the immune system works in the body, including allergies, resistance to disease, and acceptance or rejection of foreign tissue. She also had research ideas involving the immune system and the brain including the development of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. However, investigating the brain comes under a totally different discipline with its own set of rules and expertise that is neuroscience. And there was a time Clare had no neuroscientist to help her deal with the brain aspects.

Things all changed when the Conway Institute in UCD was formed.

“Very early on when the Conway was

T

up, new people were coming from different areas, one neuroscience and one immunology,” she explains. And like her, some people were thinking of research that they would love to do involving both disciplines – this would come under the appellation of Neuroimmunology.

The idea was born. “The concept we had of neuroimmunology was not just the immunology of neurodegenerative disease; it was how the immune and the nervous systems interact in the brain and also in the rest of the body,” Clare explains. According to her, a lot of people were interested, but the focus wasn’t there yet.

Neuroimmunology programme

Then this opportunity came up to set up a Neuroimmunology programme as part of an EU programme for the training of PhD students. “Clare’s idea was to go for it. She felt it was a very good area, a good topic, a research that

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is very favoured at the moment, very topical,” says John O’Connor, Head of the UCD Undergraduate Neuroscience Programme, representing the neuroscience side. “So Clare and I got together with neuroscientists and immunologists at the Conway Institute to discuss the possibility of submitting a grant.”

The chances of getting it, however, were very low. “It’s quite prestigious to get one. Of all the applicants coming in, only 5 percent would get funded by the European Union,” John points out. But they got it, and he explains the reasons for their success: “the science is only one part, the proposal had a very strong component of what we would do with the students, how we would train them,” he says. “The EU saw it as exactly what they wanted for a training site,” Students seemed to find it attractive as well – “we had lots of applicants, so our problem was to pull it down,” Clare comments.

To date one of the great achievements of the PhD students

who were accepted in the Marie Curie Programme was to organise the International Neuroimmunology Symposium — a first in Ireland. This achievement was made possible thanks to the close supervision of Dr Clare O’Connor who became head of the programme and Dr Antonio CamposTorres, lecturer at UCD and course coordinator of the programme.

Antonio had just arrived to work at UCD, when the programme was being put in place. “Clare gave me the great opportunity to be part of its organisation and together we created the post-graduate molecular neuroimmunology course,” he says.

“I was very enthusiastic to participate in this new programme. In my case to become a neuroimmunologist I had to train in neuroscience in France and then go to the USA to be trained in immunology,” he explains. “At UCD the students have all in one.”

A bright idea

Participants at the Symposium all welcomed the idea of a Neuroimmunology programme and acknowledged its success. “Putting neuro and immuno together is very good for the students – stimulates new ideas, people interaction,”, says Prof Helmut Kettelmann. Another speaker, Dr. Esther Sternberg of the NIH, Bethesda, USA, leading scientist in the area of mind-body interactions, comments: “I think the Neuroimmunology programme is an excellent, excellent idea and very important. One of the difficulties in academy is that there are sidewalls of different departments in different fields; so if you are a neuroscientist you are in the Department of Neuroscience, and if you are an immunologist you are in the Department of Immunology. This means students don’t get trained in interdisciplinary research; they learn the language of neuroscience or immunology and when they come out at the other end they can’t necessarily collaborate with the researchers of the other disciplines.”

She continues: “That’s why I think it’s a wonderful thing to have a formal degree in neuroimmunology. From what Clare described there is a real interdisciplinary training between neuroscience and immunology and the conference certainly reflects that – the levels of the abstracts and posters were really outstanding.”

Students’ experience in organising the European Neuroimmunology Symposium John: “The students who applied to the Neuroimmunology Programme were fantastic, really bright kids from Brazil to Germany to France, Hungary, and Italy. A lot of them had Masters. We monitored them very strictly — a lot of meetings, a lot of progress reports”.

Antonio: “The students not only organised the Neuroimmunology Symposium, but they were also involved in presenting their work via oral presentations or posters, and introducing world-known speakers.”

Claire: “The students are the key elements to make it work. They are the prime movers, they’re the ones who are looking for things, they’re the ones who find the people they with whom they want to interact – they are involved and very good support to one another as well.”

John: “They all mix very well together as a group, not only PhD students but other students. I think it was a very big success for them as well. I think they learned an awful lot other than science results.”

Claire: “What actually has been great over the last couple of days is to see how proud they are of it.”

What the students have to say Danielle a student from Brazil: “It was a great experience, I learned so much out of it – how to organise an event, how to analyse somebody’s work and select abstracts for the oral presentations, what questions to ask, and I also learned about the politics of science,” she says. “But the main thing I learned is to work in a team, putting a lot of effort together for a common goal; this was a great experience!”

She added that another great experience for her was to meet the speakers, be there with them and ask them questions.

Laure from Italy enjoyed the preparation, which according to her was ‘smooth and fine’. “Talking in front of people was much more difficult, but I’m happy I’ve done it; I’ll do better next time!”

Yann from France found that the preparation took much more time than he would have thought. “I learned a lot on the material and organisational side though and next time it will be quicker.” And like Danielle, he enjoyed mixing with the speakers. “What I found the most impressive was to speak in front of international experts,” he admitted.

CONWAY INSTITUTE

UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research is a major new research enterprise at UCD founded in 1999 thanks to funding from the Higher Education Authority and private donors. Its research programme focuses on biological molecules, examining how individual molecules contribute to the normal operation of our cells and organs, and how this is disrupted by disease. The knowledge gained contributes to an ever more detailed understanding of the causes and effects of disease, leading to simpler and more reliable diagnostic tests, and new and more effective treatments for human and animal disorders.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 25

Society of Neuroimmunology,” Dr John O’Connor points out. Prof Kettelmann mentions that last year their ‘Students in Berlin Brain Days’, organised by all PhD students in Berlin had neuroimmunology as the main topic. Dr Esther Sternberg also states that the NIH started a similar kind of programme — of which she is director. “But it s not a training programme and more a research programme,” she notes. “In fact there hasn’t been a training site like this put forward by the EU,” John comments.

Dr Antonio Campos-Torres, course coordinator of the programme commented that at UCD students have it all in one.

The concept however is not totally new; it has been in the air for a while. “There have been groups such as the International Society of Neuroimmunology, the European

will increase in terms of the number of people involved and the amount of research going on.”.

So they planted the seeds, let’s hope now Clare’s wish will be fulfilled and the field of Neuroimmunology will blossom.

Way to go

According to Dr Clare O’Connor, the next couple of years are going to be crucial: “We’re half way through the programme. The next challenge is to build from what we have to ensure that in two years time it will continue.

What I would like to see in the next two years: that the structure which we created now using the EU as a base

Microglial cells (in green) covering neurons (in orange) following nerve injury

Marie-Catherine Mousseau has a PhD in neuroscience from Pierre det Marie Curie University, Paris, and an MSc in Science Communications from DCU/Queen’s.

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Immunology

Understanding

the

‘arms race’ On the attack, macrophages destroying cancer cells.

Ireland is one of the world-leaders in immunology, and support for an immunology cluster based primarily at TCD should help to keep it that way, writes Seán Duke. or millions of years there has been an ‘arms race’ in our body. Viruses, bacteria and parasites are constantly evolving new ways to gain admittance to the body, while sophisticated cells of our immune system are continually developing ways to find and destroy the intruders. The name of the game for the intruders is to sneak into the body under the radar, avoid detection, and to go about causing infection and disease.

As they evolve they get better at this over time, but the defenders too are evolving all the time.

Researchers at the Immunology Research Centre, or IRC, based mainly at TCD, are aiming to give the body’s defenders an edge, by understanding more about how unwanted intruders can be identified and destroyed before they cause a serious illness, or infection.

The key area is the early responding defender cells of the innate immune system, that rush to the site of infection, tackle the intruders, and call for ‘back up’ from other cells.

The lead PI on the project is Professor Kingston Mills at TCD. Prof Mills said that the cluster brings together the best immunology talent in Ireland. The IRC is a Strategic Research Centre has support of €2 million from SFI over five years. Aside from Professor Mills there are nine other Principal Investigators (PIs) involved in the IRC, including some true world-

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class names, such as Professor Luke O’Neill, and Professor Seamus Martin, both TCD. There is a strong industry connection too, with links established with Schering Plough, an important multi-national based in Ireland. There is also a TCD spin-out company, called Opsona Therapeutics, which was set up by Professor Mills, Professor O’Neill, and Mark Heffernan. The company states that it is involved with regulation of the immune system.

The link with Schering Plough is regarded as a major plus for the IRC

Professor Kingston Mills leads a world class team of researchers.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 27

as Schering has a high profile in the immunology field, with a prestigious research institute, the Dynax Institute located in Palo Alto California. Opsona meanwhile is primarily focused on the development of anti-inflammatories, and is based at St James’s Hospital in Dublin.

Goals

The IRC aims to discover new activators or inhibitors of innate immunity, said Professor Mills. Innate immunity is critical, he explained, since it is the first line of defence against infection. This system, unlike the adaptive immune system, doesn’t need to be mobilised and responds very rapidly, with cells arriving at the infection site an hour or two after the infection is picked up. These important cells are called macrophages or dendritic cells.

The cells of the innate immune system are crucial and act like an early emergency response team. In addition, they also act to direct the response of the adaptive immune system. So, everything that happens in the immune system has to go through the innate response. This led the IRC researchers to consider how to active the innate response.

An agivant is something that activates the innate immune system, and generally it is a part of a virus or a bacteria, or even a piece of a host cell. In the old days, said Prof Mills, whole viruses or bacteria were used to activate the immune system in SPIN

experiments, but by using agivants that is no longer necessary. It’s a far more targeted approach than before.

Patterns

DAMPS (danger associated molecular patterns) and PAMPS (pathogen associated molecular patterns) were terms coined by the late Charles Janeway of Yale University, explained Professor Mills. The idea here is that the body doesn’t necessarily respond to something that’s foreign, but rather it responds to something that it considers dangerous. Danger to the body can come in the form of viruses or bacteria, but it can also come in the form of dead or dying cells — the latter indicating that there is something wrong. One of the lead PIs in the IRC, Professor Seamus Martin, is an expert in the area of cell death, or apoptosis, and one of his remits is to discover new DAMPS. These are essentially the products of dead or dying cells that release molecules that activate the immune system.

It is important to understand that the immune system responds to its own dying cells, not just viruses, bacteria and parasites. This is important, for example, when trying to find new therapies for cancer. In cancer, the gaol would be to upregulate the immune response, so there is a stronger response. The response in this case would be to the body’s own cells that have become cancer cells.

The agivant that is sought in this case would be the component of the cancer cells that indicate that these cells have become cancerous.

Inhibition

The other part of the IRC’s work is to discovery inhibitory molecules.

That is molecules that inhibit, or tone down, the response of the body’s immune system. This is very important in auto-immune diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes. “These are diseases where the immune system is out of control,” said Prof Mills. The immune system is responding to its own cells, and this is not desirable.

So, another major objective of the IRC is to discovery ‘suppressor molecules’ that can turn off the immune system. It turns out, not

Dendritic cells help other immune cells respond to attack. Image: Kristi Brzoza. surprisingly, that viruses, bacteria and parasites are very good sources for these suppressor molecules. Over millions of years, these organisms have developed ways of turning off the immune system of the body.

“They have done all the hard work for us,” said Prof Mills. “You find the mechanism that the virus or bacteria is using to turn off the immune system, because it wants to evade the immune system or subvert it. We discovered molecules that were taken out of the context of the virus or bacteria and used them as therapeutic drugs, or targets for developing new drugs against auto-immunity.”

Cancer

A new immunological approach is being developed for cancer, and for other situations, such as chronic Hepatitis C infection, where the patient is very immuno-compromised. The problem in these cases is that it is very hard to activate an immune response in what is a very immuno suppressed environment. The approach here, therefore, is to take cells out of the stressful environment, activate them, and put them back into the body.

In the case of cancer, this would involve removing some of the tumour surgically. There is evidence that this approach has worked in animals, said Prof Mills, and it is likely to become more important with companies moving into clinical trials in the USA.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 28

Future

The work of the IRC will ultimately lead to new products, new immunotherapies, but this is unlikely to happen during the five-year lifetime of the project. At the end of the project, however, it is likely that the researchers will have identified interesting molecules with the potential to be developed as drugs.

These could be agivants for vaccines, or immune boosters for cancer, or immune suppressors for autoimmune disease. The researchers are particularly focused on efforts to find new treatments for TB, malaria and inflammatory bowel disease, and new vaccines, and there is a lot of talent involved in these efforts.

“We have some very high profile individual PIs,” said Prof Mills. “The evidence is based on citation impact analysis for papers. Based on the size of the country we are ranked two in the world. We are planning a new building which has started, on Pearse Street, opposite Westland Row. What we are building there is a Bio Sciences institute which will include all the Immunology initiative in the College (TCD), and hopefully this will be a major boost to our immunology programme and the idea is the SRC would be housed mainly in that building.”

Solid foundations As geologists across Europe are beginning to find strength in unity, Tom Kennedy reports that Stormont in Belfast recently provided a fitting venue for an all-Ireland geoscience conference.

Above: Precambrian rocks with later granite intrusions in west of Ireland. Photo GSI. Left: Lively discussions at the Stormont conference.

Below: One of the wonders of Europe, the Chunnel during construction.

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he real pillars of our economy are not to be found in finance or marketing, but in natural resources said Dr Patrice Christmann, director of Euro Geo Surveys. Without natural resources, he explained, we would have no economy at all. From the time when someone found that they could strike one stone against another and make a spark, humanity has been building on these resources. “Without these resources,” he commented, “life would be a misery.”

Dr Christmann, explained that the European body represents the profession all the way from Ireland to Vladivostok. Although 26 national survey organisations are in the Federation, he said, their influence is diluted because they are so fragmented. “There is great difficulty in delivering harmonised data at the European level,” he said, and he gave ground water as a prime example.

Nineteen major European ground water resources of high economic value, he said, are cross border. Energy is also a cross border issue of huge

A

Geology, observed Dr Christmann, has lots of end users, including architects, engineers, planners, to name just a few. Geologists, he said, are capable of seeing the big picture, yet they do not always realise that end users might not know what they are talking about.

“The town mayor,” he said, “does not want a map with eighty colours; no, he wants just three, green for no risk, organge for medium risk, and red for high risk.” importance, and Dr Christmann made the point that not alone do we have to demonstrate the importance of geology, but geologists have to become much better at co-ordinating their own resources.

“Comparing data from different countries,” he remarked, “can be a real nightmare,” and he gave the Chunnel as an example of how this jacks up costs. “When the Chunnel was being built both sides had excellent data,” he said, “but they were based on totally Garth Earls, Director of the the NI Geolological Survey, remarked that far too many geologists stay in geology. “They need to get into management positions, as happens in other professions.”

Ben Kennedy, former head of Geology at UCD, said that it would be useful for students to acquire some employable skills, and pooling of resources between departments would also help.

Ireland’s geology departments, he noted, are small, but collectively they can offer a great range of expertise.

bout half a million geologists are at work around the world, and Europe alone can lay claim to 140,000 of these. Many of these, said Prof Manuel Regueiro y GonzaiezBarros, belong to the 40,000 strong European Federation of Geologists.

After a long and distinguished career with the Spanish Geological Survey and elsewhere, Prof Regueiro was recently elected president of the Federation. “Geologists,” he said, should stop being humble, they should assert themselves. Other professionals have a far higher profile, so, as he put it, “they are taking our business.”

The demand for geologists, he said, is on the rise, unemployment is almost unheard of, yet not enough people are going into the science. Geologists, he remarked face professional extinction.

“When that happens,” said Prof Regueiro, “others are ready to step in,” and the unsuitability of these professionals it not just an issue of

qualifications. Geologists, he said, see things differently. They don’t just think of distance and scale, they consider time. “No other scientists,” said Prof Regueito “work in four dimensions,” and the importance of this becomes painfully obvious in planning. A geologist, he noted, would never endorse a development scheme for

“People like me.” observed hydrologist David Ball, “don’t write papers, we talk to farmers.”

As a hand-on scientist, David, said he has no problem capturing

the interest of people, and he believes there is a lesson here for geologists.

Being hands-on does not make a geologist less of a scientist, yet, as he observed, “the people who are most

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 30

different models, so a lot of time had to be spent translating this data into a common form.” It is not that one set of data is better than the other, he added, just different, and that makes it difficult to initiate and run crossborder projects.

By comparison, he noted, these problems do not exist with support and interpretation of satellite data, and there are a number of European projects, such as the marine observation data network, and disaster risk assessment, that involve geology.

However, geology is not in the lead, and as Dr Christmann observed; “The demand for geology at a European level is growing quite rapidly, but even so, geological surveys do not have a clear remit to meet this demand.”

In spite of the problems, diversity has been good for geology. National survey organisations have developed a range of different strengths, and as Dr Christmann pointed out, with unity of purpose, those skills would be available to all, and “there would be no need to reinvent the wheel.”

housing in a flood plain, yet after ever disaster, people ask “why did no one tell us that this would happen?” The only answer they are likely to get from a geologist is that “we did, but you did not listen.” The same has proved to be true for earthquake zones where developers, time after time, make the same mistakes.

Geologists, commented Prof Regueiro, are pushed out into the cold because they do not assert themselves.

“Geologists have not been trained to be leaders,” he said, and this is different in other professions. Architects, engineers, lawyers and doctors, he noted, are expected to take decisions and take charge.

Another way in which this has an impact, he said, is in the ongoing debate about the environment.

“Everybody talks about the environment in a biological sort of way,” he said. “You can see a flower, but how many understand the role of the sub-soil?” likely to get people interested in the sciences are not those who are being honoured in public by the science community.”

Investing in future

G

eology adds abut €3.3 billion a year to the Irish economy, said Peadar McArdle, director of the Irish Geological Survey. “If indirect benefits are added,” he said, “we are looking at over €4 billion, and that’s three per cent of our gross national product.

Mineral resources, he said, are just part of the overall picture, and geology is one of the essential supports for Ireland’s growing “knowledge economy.” The government’s National Development Plan recognised this by backing projects such as the INFOMAR programme, a joint venture between GSI and the Marine Institute. In another move, described by Peadar as “an enabling action” the government made the decision to free up access to geological data.

Geology based activities are on the rise, and Peadar said that they have only to think of mining, energy, and construction materials to see its relevance. Over 12,000 people work in mining, he said. “These are well paid jobs and rurally based,” he said, and on a more widespread scale this is true of construction materials. Exploration for gas and minerals is on the increase, yet the profile of the sector, said Peadar, is still too low. Many people, he said, in spite of its importance to the economy, do not even realise that it is a sector, and the knock-on effect of this is that students do not consider

Roadstone quarry operation at Huntstown. Extraction of building material is a big income earner with down stream benefits. geology. “Ireland produces about 60 geology graduates a year,” said Peadar, “and this is not enough to meet future needs.” Of 1,100 graduates produced over the past thirty years, he added,

only 300 still practice in this part of the world, and fifty per cent of these are due to retire within the next decade.

One of Peadar’s concerns is not so much decline in numbers, as loss of knowledge, just at a time when it is badly needed. Water resources, he observed, need to managed. “Ground water is so important in Ireland, yet we don’t have post-graduate courses in this subject,” he said. His point is that Ireland needs to make up for this weakness by investing in the future.

The increased investment in research, he noted, is very welcome, but at the same time, geosciences still only attract five per cent of the national R&D funds.

No shortage of work for geologists and demand is rising. Sampling soils for the GSNI Tellus project.

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SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 31

Celebrating

50 Years of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin

enetics is the fundamental science of life, the study of how organisms replicate, how characteristics are inherited, and how they evolve. From a slow start in the first half of the 20th century, genetics now occupies a key position in the study of biology. Medicine, agriculture, industry and forensic science have been revolutionised by modern biotechnology, a method of manipulating genes, which emerged from key discoveries made by geneticists in the period 1960-1980.

Ireland has made significant contributions to the science of genetics.

Desmond Bernal, born in Tipperary, developed new physical methods in the 1930s at Cambridge which ultimately allowed others to obtain the structure

G

of large molecules – genes are made of very large molecules of DNA. At about the same time, the great Austrian physicist and Nobel prizewinner, Erwin Schroedinger, was persuaded to come to the new Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, set up by Eamonn de Valera. In 1944 he gave three lectures in Trinity on “What is life?” and these were published in a book that influenced many scientists to take an interest in genetics. One of these was Maurice Wilkins, born in New Zealand, the son of Irish parents, who was a student of Bernal at Cambridge.

Later in London, he led the team that used Bernal’s tricks to get images of DNA, and these were vital evidence used by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 to propose that DNA was

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 32

a double helix, what Crick called “the secret of life”.

Genetics began to accelerate. The Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1958

by George Dawson (1927-2004) with a grant of £15,000 from General Costello, the head of The Irish Sugar Company.

Dawson and his students, including Peter Smith Keary, John Atkins and Shahla Thompson, focussed on the extraordinarily important field of bacterial genetics, much funded by the Medical Research Council. Dawson built a close relationship with the Agricultural Institute (now Teagasc) and Patrick Cunningham and Vincent Connolly from the Institute began to give courses in animal and plant genetics. Cunningham retains his SPIN

50 years of genetics at TCD personal chair in Trinity and is now the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government.

Dawson and Smith Keary introduced methods of teaching and examining, emphasising the importance of evidence, and these methods have been followed closely ever since. He ensured that the department paid attention to the two pillars of genetics, the mathematical and the molecular. He saw talent in all students and encouraged them to develop and use their abilities to the utmost, opening doors for them at every turn. He exemplified Richard Feynman’s idea of “The pleasure of finding things out”. From 1975 William Vincent has generously provided scholarships to encourage Trinity genetics students to spend summers at US research laboratories.

The Department moved into the state-of-the-art Smurfit Institute of Genetics in 1998 with wonderful support from Dr Michael Smurfit, Dr Martin Naughton, Atlantic Philanthropies and the Wellcome Trust.

In the second half of the 20th century, as genetics became the most influential of the biological sciences, the department extended research in Trinity into molecular genetics (the isolation of single genes, genetic engineering, genetic control networks

Prof David McConnell, Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin. and genome sequencing) and medical genetics (the genetics of blindness, cancer and psychiatric disorders), then into molecular evolution (the evolution of HIV, yeast, cattle) and plant genetics (the genetic regulation of flower shape and size), and most recently into neurogenetics (the genetic control of the structure and function of the nervous system). Today the Department has an international reputation for teaching and research.

The Smurfit Institute is currently in receipt of over €7 million in annual

research funding and hosts 15 research groups with over 100 members of postgraduate staff from 30 countries.

Science Foundation Ireland has played a major role in funding research in biotechnology and genetics, enabling Trinity last year to be ranked seventh among world universities in genetics and molecular biology on the basis of citations per paper.

510 students have graduated with BA in Genetics (TR071) or BA in Human Genetics (TR073) and more than 100 have obtained MSc or PhD degrees. The graduates have gone on to fine careers all over the world in many walks of life “providing some evidence” that geneticists can do anything.

The Smurfit Institute of Genetics will celebrate 50 years of Trinity genetics with a symposium 17-20th September, and all are welcome. The Public Symposium “The Secret of Life: Genetics in the 21st Century” on Saturday 20th September should be especially interesting to nonspecialists and to students who are considering studies in any branch of science and technology.

For more information please visit

http://www.genetics50.org

The Secret of Life: Genetics in the 21st Century Public symposium, Ballsbridge Inn, 20th September. www.genetics50.org/programme.php?d=4

St Vincent’s Hospital, Fairview

An illustrated history by Aidan Collins detailing how the hospital, started with money handed over to an informer, provided a safe haven for the mentally ill over the course of 150 years, while shaping the way nurses are trained. The hospital, small by modern standards, looms large in the development of Fairview, and among the well known figures associated with it are James Joyce, and the antiquarian Francis Grose. The original Grose home, Richmond House still stands in good order, and is just one of the architectural features described by Aidan Collins in this unusual book.

Available in large format softback and de-luxe hardback. Softback €20.

Hardback €35. (144pp) Order on line from Science Spin and post is included in the price.

www.sciencespin.com SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 33

How to beat the bugs Roy Sleator reports on how we can defeat the superbugs.

As we reach the 80th anniversary of Fleming’s discovery of penicillin; the wonder drug which heralded a new era in the fight against infection, the medical establishment is now faced with a new challenge in the form of antibiotic resistance – the bugs are fighting back! Moreover, the superbugs, such as MRSA (meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and C. diff (Clostridium difficile) appear to be winning.

With life-cycles measured in minutes rather than years, bacteria have an extraordinary ability to evolve and adapt rapidly to changes in their environment. Thus, in a world where only the fittest survive those bacteria which have developed resistance to antibiotics will predominate. This is particularly apparent in hospital environments where bacteria are constantly exposed to different antibiotics; such repeated exposure has facilitated to the development of multiple antibiotic resistance and what we now refer to as hospital acquired or nosocomial infections.

Faced with an emerging pandemic of antibiotic resistance, clinicians and scientists alike are now struggling to find viable therapeutic alternatives to our failing antibiotic wonder drugs.

One such alternative may be provided by the bacteria themselves.

This “fighting fire with fire” approach involves what is known as probiotic therapy – the application of so called “good bugs” for therapeutic effect.

Many disease causing bacteria, the pathogens, exploit oligosaccharides occurring on the surface of host cells.

These are carbohydrates made up of sugars, and they serve as receptors for toxins that enable the pathogen to enter the host cell.

Blocking the adherence of the oligosaccharide receptors prevents infection because it makes it more difficult for the pathogen to take up residence. The pathogen can then be overcome by the immune system.

‘Designer probiotics’ have been engineered to express receptor-mimic structures on their surface. These ‘fool’ the pathogen by attracting it to the wrong target. When administered orally, these engineered probiotics bind to and neutralize toxins in the gut lumen and interfere with pathogen

adherence to the intestinal epithelium – thus essentially “mopping up” the infection.

In addition to infection control, probiotics are also being engineered to function as novel vaccine delivery vehicles. These have the advantage of stimulating the immune system without the danger of toxicity which can be a problem with vaccines based on live attenuated pathogens.

Probiotic vaccine carriers administered orally, or by nasal spray, enter the body through the mucose membranes. This mimics natural infections, and leads to longer lasting response.

Mucosal vaccine delivery has a lot of other advantages. It reduces the pain and possibility of cross contamination associated with intramuscular injections, and medically trained personnel are not required to administer the vaccine.

This is a big consideration for large scale vaccination projects in less well developed countries.

When the rock band, The Verve, gave us the immortal words “Now the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse,” they may have been thinking about antibiotic resistant “super bugs”.

It could well be that engineered “good bugs” can be our allies in winning that war.

Dr Roy Sleator is a Health Research Board (HRB) and Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) principal investigator.

The Exemption

Vera Hajnal’s gripping account of survival through the horrors of World War II and the Soviet take over of Hungary. Vera’s story tells how nothing can defeat hope and faith in the better side of people.

Case bound €25 Select bookshops or order on line from: www.sciencespin.com SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 34

SPIN

was not just fatherless, he was poor, he was black, and even at that young age, he was starting to realise that his obsession with time travel might not go down too well in scientific circles.

Even so, as he recalls here, this is the obsession that eventually led to him on to becoming a distinguished professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut.

Mallett’s interest in time has not diminished, only deepened, and it was with great personal satisfaction that he was able to patent what might best be described as a space twister device. Based firmly on good scientific research, the device, he suggests,

REVIEWS brings us one step nearer to breaking the time barrier.

Mallett’s personal journey is high on human interest, and the writer, Bruce Henderson, did a great job on packaging quite a lot of science into a great story.

Tom Kennedy The Time Traveller Ronald Mallet with Bruce Henderson Corgi, paperback.

The time traveller The phrase ‘once upon a time’ is often the opening line to a fairy story. We enter a world where everything is possible, and its much the same with dreams. Dreams, at least my ones, seem to lack the usual dimensional constraints. Size, distance and time all merge into some kind of ‘oneness’, and perhaps that impression is a lot closer to reality than we think. We now know that matter does not always behave according to the old familiar rules, and, as the author of this book, Ronald Mallet, explains, the idea that we might just be able to play around with time is not quite so bizarre as it used to be.

Mallets own journey into time began when his own father was suddenly struck down by a massive heart attack.

Ronald describes how he, as a young boy, would have done almost anything to bring his father back. Like most young boys, he could escape into fantasy, and after reading the H G Wells classic “The Time Machine” he became obsessed with the idea that if only science could turn fiction into fact, he could be re-united with his father.

This was the spark that ignited his decision to delve deep into fundamental physics, and his singlemined determination to master the subject is a remarkable story of how willpower can overcome almost impossible odds. Ron, at ten years old,

Molecules that changed the world The discovery in 1828 that urea could be chemically synthesised marked the end of vitalism. As the chemist, Friedrich Woehler, remarked at the time, he needed no kidneys to produce urea, and so the way had been opened for chemists to manipulate and synthesise bioactive molecules. As we can read in “Molecules that changed the world,” the most peculiar and unusual chemicals in nature are no longer out of our reach. Once the structure is understood, chemists have a good chance of coming up with a synthetic version, and often they can even come up with improvements.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 35

“Molecules that changed the world” is a wonderful book, and not just because it looks so good in a coffee table sort of way. The authors, K C Nicolon, and Tamsyn Montagnon, both distinguished chemists, have managed to encapsulate a fairly detailed, blow by blow account of how about forty of the world’s leading pharmaceutical drugs came into existence. In many cases chemists step in to give a new, and more powerful twist to an old story. Opium was already around for a long time when chemists discovered how to purify the white crystalline morphine extract, and from this, in 1832 the much safer, but less potent Codeine was developed. Codeine, produced by methylation of morphine, remains one of the most popular over the SPIN

counter drugs, but the following development, acetylation, proved to be a very mixed blessing. When C R Alder Wright in 1874 found that he could combine the base, morphine, with acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine, another chemist, Felix Hoffman, who had just hit the big time by synthesising asprin, thought this could be the next successful product. His employees, self-testing the product, reported back that it was dangerously pleasing, and ‘heroic’. Hoffman probably had no idea of just how heroic heroin could turn out to be. As the authors explain, diacetylmorphine is extremely powerful because, being lipid solouble, it can cross the blood brain barrier. Amazingly, it was thought to safe and addiction was not an issue.

Up to the early 1900s heroin and asprin were often sold from the same shelf.

We often read about synthetics, but we seldom, if ever, get the whole story on how much work goes into their development. An enormous amount of team work can be involved. Vitamin B12 would be just one example, where the progression started with isolation of

the source, liver. Liver capsules became very popular, but at the same time, no one really knew much about B12, until Ed Rickes, a chemist at Merck, isolated and crystallised the pure vitamin. Dorothy Crowfort Hodgkin at Oxford was then able to determine its structure using x-ray crystallography.

With this knowledge, chemists began a long process of building components, step by step, eventually solving the problem of how to join the parts into a single molecule.

Chemists, as the authors explain, like a challenge, and one, Yoshito Kishi, having solved the problem of synthesising the Puffer Fish toxin, tetradoxin in 1972, wanted find a new challenge. He choose Palytoxin, one of the most powerful toxins known. The toxin itself is an oddity, produced by tiny dinoflagellates living symbiotically within a coelenterate inhabiting a seaweed known as Lima.

Known only from local lore, the toxin was first described by scientists visiting Honolulu in 1961.

The molecule, with a molecular weight of 3,300, is a huge linear chain interspersed with pyran rings, and finding out how to go about constructing this giant involved a lot

of number crunching. Palytoxin has 72 stereochemical components, comprising of 64 asymmetric carbon atoms. Hard enough to grasp that, but apparently these can be assembled in 2,361,183,241,434,833, 606,848 different ways. Undaunted, Yoshito Kishi set about breaking that code, and fifteen years later in 1994 he, and his team, announced that they had managed to synthesis the largest natural product to date.

While much of the text might be heavy going for someone with little familiarity with chemistry, the authors have cleverly led into each section with a broad readable account. The book is packed with fascinating details, and it certainly shows that chemistry is not just alive and kicking but is going to keep on delivering results far into the future.

A lot has happened since Felix Hoffmann succeed in acetylating salicylic acid and this book brings us bang up to date.

Tom Kennedy Molecules that changed the world K C Nicolaou and T Montagnon Wiley. Hardback 366pp.

ERROR Due to a production error, the author’s name for Wexford, a town and its landscape was incorrect in our last issue. The book, by author Billy Colfer, published by Cork University Press is available from all good bookshops and on line from www.sciencespin.com

Colour The art and science In a lavishly illustrated paperback, Margaret Franklin and Tom Kennedy explain how we live in a colourful world. The physics, the chemistry and the art, all is revealed. €15 (112pp) Order on line from www.sciencespin.com and price includes post and packing to Ireland or UK SCIENCE SPIN Issue 30 Page 36

Bewleys

Hugh Oram A reissue of the original paperback in which Hugh Oram recalls many of the characters that made Bewley’s their home.

Paperback €12

Du Noyer

photographic competitioN

Granite along the shore photographed by David Kirk, one of the entries from last year.

Entries are invited for the 10th Du Noyer Geological Photography Competition

George Victor Du Noyer, who served as a geologist with the Geological Survey of Ireland from 1847 to 1869, was a skilled field artist whose numerous sketches and pictures, with their combination of artistic skill and technical accuracy, were the “field photographs” of their day. This competition seeks to encourage the same blend of artistic and scientific skills through the medium of photography.

Total prize money of €800 will be awarded in two categories, Irish and Foreign.

There will be 3 prizes in the Irish category – 1st Prize €300, 2nd Prize €200 and 3rd Prize €100. The Foreign Category Winner will receive a prize of €200.

All photographs entered must be clearly labelled with the following information: • Name • Address • Telephone number • Email of entrant/photographer • Short description of geological content • Place and Date when taken Please write on a label and stick it onto the back of the photographs, or include

a note with each entry. DO NOT WRITE ON THE PHOTOGRAPH. Entrants may submit a maximum of 4 photographs, illustrating any aspect of field geology or scenic landscapes.

Images must be prints of not less than 6 x 4 inches. These prints may be accompanied by a digital image, if available.

Both successful and unsuccessful entrants will be notified by e-mail.

The competition will be judged by a panel including representatives of the IGA, the GSI and external nominees and their decision will be final. Entries will be exhibited and prizes awarded at a GSI Cunningham Awards ceremony in early December.

We are not in a position to return

entry material. GSI reserves the right to reproduce entries in its publications and promotional activity with due acknowledgement.

Entries should be posted in an envelope marked “Du Noyer Competition” to: Cartography Unit, Geological Survey of Ireland, Beggars Bush, Haddington Rd, Dublin 4.

Evaluation Criteria • Creativity (25 marks) • Technical Skill of the Photographer (25 marks) • Geological Content of Photograph (50 marks)

The closing date for entries is: Friday, 12th October 2008 SPIN

Science Week Ireland will run this year from 9 – 16 November, with over 400 events taking place nationwide.

The theme for Science Week Ireland

To find out what events are taking place in your

2008 is ‘Science – Shaping Our World.’

area and how to get involved please visit the

Celebrating the International Year of Planet

Science Week website www.scienceweek.ie

Earth, Science Week Ireland 2008 will examine emerging technologies, the latest movements in science & engineering and also predict how science may influence the way we shape the future of our planet.

Making a Difference To celebrate the International Year of Planet Earth, the Science Week Guide will not be published this year, thus reducing Science Week Ireland’s carbon footprint and helping to shape our future.

So make sure to log on regularly to www.scienceweek.ie which will be updated on a regular basis with news, competitions and new events taking place in your region.