UCL Portico 2015

THE MAGA ZINE OF UCL I S S U E 2 . 2 0 1 5 / 16

Night cap Andrew Davies remembers the pubs, clubs and posh sofas of his student days

Urban life The call of the big smoke Beautiful bacteria In the battle of good versus evil, who will win?

Life, the universe and everything Seeking out the origins of life This radical life Student life in Bloomsbury

Tours for the Intelligent Traveller Travel • Understand • Enjoy www.jonbainestours.co.uk

Medicine and Society in Cuba

Eastern Cuba

Malabar Journey

4 - 15 February 2016

15 - 25 February 2016

28 February - 13 March 2016

An ever-popular tour examining Cuban healthcare alongside its superb music, culture, landscapes and heritage. A cultural tour of Eastern Cuba follows directly after.

This tour visits the older, lesser-known and often quirky side of Cuba - the authentic heart of Cuba, well off the tourist trail.

Travel down the west coast of India via Hampi, Mysore, the Cardamom Hills, Cochin and into the backwaters of Kerala.

Knights of St John

East of Java

North East Turkey and Georgia

15 - 30 April 2016

3 - 17 June 2016

9 - 22 June 2016

Explore how the Knights of St John shaped history and culture throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

Step off the tourist trail and experience lesser-travelled Indonesia. Travel through eastern Java to Bali, Flores and onto the Komodo archipelago.

Explore the history and cultural riches of spectacular northeast Turkey and Georgia with travel writer Jeremy Seal.

History of Medicine Cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean

Burma – The Road to Mandalay

Rajasthan and the Pushkar Camel Fair

5 - 16 September 2016

Our ever popular tour to Burma visits Rangoon, Mandalay, Bagan and Lake Inle by road, rail and river cruise.

Take a journey that encompasses thousands of years of medical history through the Eastern Mediterranean with Dr Simon Chaplin

17 - 29 September 2016

To book or enquire about these and other tours, contact us: Jon Baines Tours, 1A Salcott Road, London, SW11 6DQ Tel: +44 (0) 207 223 9485 / 5618 Email: info@jonbainestours.co.uk

www.jonbainestours.co.uk

2 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

11 - 22 November 2016 Travel through Rajasthan, including the unique and historic Pushkar Camel Fair, staying in palaces and luxury tents.

PORTICO ISSUE 2. 2015/16 FE AT URE S 14 Life, the universe and everything Which came first?

UP FRONT 02 08 11 12

Update Extra Curricular The Strong Room Cloistered

The chicken? The egg? PORTICO delves into the origins of life.

18 This radical life Students have been making the streets of Bloomsbury their own since UCL was founded.

22 Paper chase Professor of Renaissance Studies Lisa Jardine

U C L+ 41 42 45 46 48

Hello London!

South Junction University Matters This Idea Must Die London vs World

and the letter that would not be found.

28 Super bug Bacteria are everywhere, fighting billions of tiny battles for and against each other and us. Who will win?

34 Cities From Chennai to London and from Medellin to Miami, we examine the art of the urban.

48

Front cover: The writer Andrew Davies at The Marlborough Arms in Bloomsbury, a favourite of his from his student days at UCL. Photograph by Julian Anderson.

Editor: Mira Katbamna Commissioning Editor: Steve McGrath Art Director: Zoë Bather Project Manager: Becky Potter

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UCL Portico is produced

by YBM Ltd on behalf of UCL Development & Alumni Relations info@ybm.co.uk www.ybm.co.uk

UCL Development & Alumni Relations Office Gower Street London WC1E 6BT +44 (0)20 3108 3833 alumni@ucl.ac.uk www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

Executive Director of Development and Alumni Relations: Lori Houlihan lori.houlihan@ucl.ac.uk

© UCL. The opinions herein are those of the authors or persons interviewed only and do not necessarily reflect the views of UCL or YBM Ltd. All content correct at the time of going to press.

DECONSTRUCTED New Student Centre

There may be rubble ahead. Work has already begun on the site, an undeveloped area of the campus next to the Bloomsbury Theatre.

Do it your way.

Students will be able to find their own place where they like to work in their own particular way, enriching the more formal teaching and learning.

No excuses.

The new Student Centre, designed in consultation with students, will have 1,000 study spaces when it opens in 2018.

World leaders.

The vision is to make UCL the most exciting university in the world to study and work.

Putting students first.

Other additions to the student-focussed centre will include student enquiry services and IT clusters.

Eat your heart out.

A dazzling new café will ensure students are able to feed their bodies as well as their minds.

NEW VICE-PROVOST

UCL LIFE LEARNING

B E N T H A M H O U S E R E VA M P

Dr Celia Caulcott has been appointed Vice-Provost (Enterprise), leaving her post as Executive Director, Innovation and Skills at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and succeeding Professor David Price.

Dr Caulcott will be responsible for delivering UCL’s Enterprise agenda to create the greatest economic and societal impact, and says she is “looking forward to building on the well-established enterprise and innovation foundations laid at UCL.”

The number of short courses offered by UCL Life learning could soon burst through the 200 mark, as its popularity continues to increase.

Life Learning (www.ucl.ac.uk/ lifelearning) brings together all UCL’s short courses, providing personal learning through things such as intensive summer schools, continuing professional education or executive education. Courses are delivered both face to face – through single-day or intensive blocks – or online.

A new £18.5m project to develop Bentham House is underway, designed to connect UCL’s past with its future.

The new development will include: a large reception area, linking directly to a bright and spacious central café and social hub; cutting-edge teaching and event spaces; and new offices and meeting spaces. It will also incorporate green features including bio-diverse roofs with photovoltaic arrays, in support of UCL’s sustainability agenda.

2 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

UP FRONT

Love it? Hate it?

Email us at alumni@ucl.ac.uk or write to us at Portico Magazine, UCL Development & Alumni Relations Office, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Please mark your letters “for publication”.

Letters may be edited for length.

UCL Alumni www.facebook.com/UCLconnect @UCLAlumni www.twitter.com/uclalumni @uclalumni www.instagram.com/uclalumni Or join the University College London (UCL) Official Alumni Group on LinkedIn

INBOX I read with great interest the short article that highlighted the indisputable problem of the low number of black and ethnic minorities in leading academic positions. I do not agree with Dr. William Ackah that “[...] black life is ... antiintellectual [...]”. I firmly believe in my heart that anyone from any background or ethnicity can become a leading academic in their field.

Studies seem to suggest, in agreement with the article, that we live in a society whose academic system is based upon the castration of members of black and ethnic minorities. It is therefore absolutely necessary that equal opportunities are provided to all young academics, including young black and ethnic graduates, who wish to pursue their career in academia.

It is of pivotal importance that through mentoring schemes, ambitious and capable graduates from any background are given the chance to fulfil their academic dreams.

I believe that due to its historically unique feat of having opened up higher education in England for the first time to students regardless of their race or religion, UCL needs to be at the forefront again this time to make sure that the door to leading academic positions in higher education opens up more widely and stays open to members from black and ethnic backgrounds, so that they can get a foot in the door, persevere and go the distance.

Jayanthiny Kangatharan (UCL Cognitive Neuroscience 2010)

I finally got the chance to properly digest the latest edition of PORTICO and I have nothing but praise for it. Not only were the pieces in it well written and thought provoking, but they also covered such a wide range of subjects and interests.

It felt as though there was something in it for everyone and certainly more than enough for me. In fact, the articles were so interesting I passed the magazine on to a friend of mine to read when I was finished with it. It has made me remember why I loved UCL so much and has certainly made me reach for your donation website.

Keep up the great work!

Anne Eden (UCL Anthropology 2004) I am a UCL alumnus and, as such, I am lucky to receive the magazines you produce.

Over the past few years, I noticed quite a change in the magazines’ design – for the better. The newly designed PORTICO makes wonderful use of colour, layout and type, with a touch of class. Fantastic work!

Ashkan Mashhour (UCL Spacecraft Technology and Satellite Communications 1997)

#UCL GR A DUAT ION Alistair McBay @AMcBay_NSS

Inspiring day at UCL graduation.

Young people of all races, cultures and creeds united in academic achievement.

Dr Effrossyni Gkrania @CambridgeInfectious

Recognising an all-women “dream team” of science and society leaders at UCL graduation day today was truly inspirational.

Christopher Jones @skypecoach82

What an amazing collection of people with the aim [of] social improvement/ good. I feel pretty happy with the human race right now.

Paul Mason @paulmasonnews

Congrats to all PGCE grads today.

Hope you realised Piaget & Peugeot = 2 completely different things.

Andrew Dunn @AndrewDunn10

Fantastic graduation day at UCL – thanks again @UCLHistory for having me, and looking forward to keeping in touch.

Horace Chien @horacechien

Illustration Hanna Melin

Finally my turn to graduate. Thank you mum and dad.

Caroline Ellis @ellis_cari

Proud to be a @UCLAlumni and honoured to speak to new graduates with @DavidPriceUCL. Congrats all and thanks.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 3

UP FRONT

NEURO PRIZE WINNER

A UCL BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO… M AT HINE S S

T

asked with proving God’s existence before the court of Catherine the Great, the mathematician Leonhard Euler is believed to have written a complex algebraic formula on the blackboard, before saying: “Hence, God exists.” Knowing nothing of algebra, his audience was confounded. Economist Paul Romer coined the term “mathiness” to describe a similar process.

A group of economists used rigorous maths but then, posited Romer, they applied a biased interpretation – which may have been politically driven. These were mostly macroeconomists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Edward C. Prescott and Robert Lucas Jr, who tended to use models based on constant and decreasing returns to scale. Reluctant to abandon a valued principle in favour of the

alternative of increasing returns to scale, which lay at the foundation of Romer’s new theory of growth, they interpreted the maths in their own models in a distorted fashion, according to Romer.

The concept is something we must all avoid by not using or interpreting maths to a larger extent than necessary.

Economists must be well trained in maths so they can discern mathiness when they meet it. Of course, as social scientists they also need to understand historical, political and social contexts. And that’s why, in our new introductory course, Core Economics, we give students the formal tools and also the empirical ideas needed for a more integrative analysis.

Professor Antonio Cabrales is Chair of Microeconomics at UCL.

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience is this year’s recipient of the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, recognising scientific work of high social relevance to the development of children and young people.

Behavioural and brain-scanning studies carried out by Professor Blakemore and her team have revealed that the brain develops both structurally and functionally during adolescence, suggesting the need to revise the tendency of attributing adolescent behaviour to hormones and changes in social environment.

The research has helped overturn the previously held belief that no major neurodevelopmental changes occur after early childhood. Her work also has implications for both curriculum design and teaching practice, ensuring that classroom activities make use of “neural plasticity” to make the most of an adolescent’s learning potential.

“It is truly humbling that my lab’s research has been recognised by this highly prestigious award,” says Professor Blakemore. “I am indebted beyond words to my wonderful mentors and to all the brilliant people who have worked at UCL over the past 13 years.”

Alumni have raised more than £45,000 to support the work of the UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) in Nepal following the devastating earthquakes in April.

As well as promoting sustainable, environmentally friendly and earthquakeresistant building methods such as rammed earth and earthbag construction, the IGH has been able to offer public health advice and psychosocial training to the population to help them cope with the effects of the earthquake.

Dr Naomi Saville leads the IGH effort, and says: “Public health advice and sustainable housing is more than an immediate solution to a crisis – it’s a longer term solution that will help save lives in the future. Thanks must go to our alumni for being a part of this solution.”

For more, visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/onlinegiving/support/ucl-nepal-appeal 4 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

© PA Images

ALUMNI SUPPORT REBUILDING IN NEPAL

UP FRONT

FREE RADICAL

Sarah Dhanjal, Institute of Archaeology

Illustration Lucinda Rogers. Source photograph UCL Creative Media Services

I

’m at the dreaded stage of my PhD where I’ve pretty much finished talking to people and I’ve got to write up the results. I’ve been looking at the impact of archaeology in Southall, West London, where I was born, brought up and still live.

Southall is often researched in terms of the migrant story but that’s not its only aspect; I’ve been exploring what people find important and interesting about the place, from its oldest building, the Manor House, which is next door to my old school, to the Grade II-listed, Chinesestyle cinema building. The locals’ relationship with their own space fascinates me. It’s love/hate: people either embrace Southall or they pretend they really come from Ealing. Me? I love it.

Of course lots of people don’t think this type of research is really archaeology, but I do get to do some of the more traditional stuff as well, though the only tent I have been in recently was one at Glastonbury. I’ve been working on map regression with a local park ranger on the site of a mill built by Thomas Gresham, financier to King Edward VI, in a tiny wood right next to the M4. It’s not the sort of thing people associate with Southall.

I have loved my undergraduate teaching this year and was thrilled to get a Provost’s Teaching award. When I step back from the PhD grind and think about what I want to do when it’s all over, I’m probably swaying more towards teaching than research. I get huge personal satisfaction from teaching, because it’s never a one-way exercise. The dialogue and communication in talking to others about their studies has really helped me with my own.

I’ve always enjoyed engaging with the public and now a lot of my time is spent with schoolchildren. My interest in what’s known as community archaeology started with schools excavating playing fields.

Whatever the pupils’ background, they all became interested in what we found, quite often even the most mundane things.

Because it was their area, they could take ownership of it.

Working with the Young Archaeologists’ Club sometimes involves silly clothes – recently we walked the London Walls in medieval costume The teachers can be sceptical at first, but when they find out that archaeology helps us get children into maths and science in a stealthy way they become massively supportive. It’s the same with site developers.

We archaeologists can be a massive pain in the backside, but as they are going to have to work with us anyway there might as well be some good to come out of it.

Outside of the learning environment I spend some of my time fundraising for the Young Archaeologists’ Club that

sometimes involves getting into silly clothes – last year we dressed up as Roman soldiers and recently we walked the London Walls in medieval costume. Next year I’m planning to walk the Capital Ring, 125km round London, in a week – suggestions as to what to wear welcome. No doubt the children will have plenty.

This week I’m at a play scheme with children aged four to 11 from Camden and Islington working on the Romans, which will help them achieve their Discover Arts award. We’ll be sifting through a load of pottery from a partially excavated site by a river, which unearthed a lot of the material dumped by boats coming into London.

And we plan next year to combine theatre and archaeology. There’s a leather boot from the Rose Theatre in the Museum of London Archaeological Archive whose story we want to explore, as leather boots imply a long journey. It’ll be another excuse for me to dress up.

Sarah Dhanjal is an archaeologist and PhD candidate.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 5

UP FRONT

764:

Number of donors to the Postgraduate Scholarships scheme, raising more than £500,000.

UCL BME ALUMNI NETWORK LAUNCH The Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Alumni Network has gone from strength to strength throughout 2015, following its launch in January at the Grant Museum.

At the packed launch event, Olympic gold medallist Christine Ohuruogu was the keynote speaker, underlining the importance of a network, established

by UCL graduates, to offer a supportive community of alumni who self-define as BME. This includes, but is not limited to, people of African, Asian, Arab and Caribbean heritage.

As well as holding a successful networking event in the summer, the group will facilitate further networking opportunities and will help alumni to develop long-term relationships and share practical advice.

It will also offer UCL’s BME students the opportunity to engage with positive and inspirational role models.

For more information on the BME Alumni Network visit www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni/groups/ bmealumninetwork.

DEMENTIA WORK IN THE BAG Retailers pledge funds to support UCL dementia research

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Illustration Angus Greig

A

new Dementia Research Institute will be established with the support of funds pledged by leading UK retailers – Iceland, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose – from the levy on single-use carrier bags.

The £350m centre will bring together researchers from across UCL and UCLH to lead national and international efforts to find effective treatments and improve the lives of those with dementia.

Professor Alan Thompson, Dean of the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences, said: “UCL, through its translational neuroscience at Queen Square, can bring the breadth and depth of expertise required to deliver therapeutic advances to this devastating condition.

“Philanthropy has made a huge difference in tackling global diseases such as cancer and malaria and this unprecedented initiative sees UK retailers acting collaboratively to tackle the tragedy that is dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.”

UP FRONT

JEREMY BENTHAM SPEAKS:

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

Sylvie Delacroix, Reader in Legal Theory and Ethics, says there’s more to our decisionmaking process than simple human impulses.

Illustration Hanna Melin

W

hy should sensations as subjective as pain and pleasure ever be relied upon to determine what we ought to do? What about our capacity to ignore pain or to restrict pleasure instead? The human ability to surmount natural impulses and desires in the name of some moral or political aspirations has long been hailed as the source of both our freedom and our capacity to make laws for ourselves, whether as an individual or as a society.

To take a naturalist stand against this long intellectual tradition is a brave move: it is much easier to talk in lofty terms about abstract ideals that human nature is supposed to live up to than to articulate what it is about us that calls for doing things

in a particular way. Details will be needed.

We’ll also want some sort of narrative that takes us from human beings with certain needs and desires to a variety of societies governed by a variety of norms, some more conscious of their fallibility than others.

Today one could argue that we’ve made progress on the details front.

Behavioural psychologists highlight the myriad factors shaping our ethical sensitivity. Social neuroscientists peek at colourful brain images in a bid to functionally decompose the processes leading to moral judgment. Overall, the story that emerges isn’t revolutionary: intuitions and automated responses play a significant part in shaping our moral judgments. What is novel is our insistence

on scientifically proving the incidence of emotions on our judgments about what we ought to do.

This scientific impulse brings a methodological hazard in its stead, for it becomes tempting to reduce morality to what science can tell us about it. And while it might tell us riveting tales (helped in no small measure by mesmerising pictures of our brains), there are things it can’t capture.

Understanding what conditions our capacity to challenge widely accepted societal norms and adopt the kind of reforming spirit for which Bentham is deservedly famous is, I believe, one such thing.

To find out more about Jeremy Bentham, visit www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 7

EXTRA CURRICULAR

Andrew Davies (UCL English, 1957) returns to an old haunt Words Kate Hilpern Portrait Julian Anderson

8 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

T

he Marlborough Arms in Bloomsbury was the place to be on Friday nights when I was a student.

It was the nearest pub to Foster Court, where the English department was, and that meant it was frequented by Professor Smith and his cronies. Smith was an Old Norse man, and ran the scene like the mead hall in Beowulf, emptying his pockets of all his money and putting it in a heap on this long table. A man named Dodgeson (you only ever used surnames in those days), who was the lowest member

of the academic staff, was sent to the bar to get the rounds in and nobody paid for drinks until all the money was all gone.

It was great, although daunting.

Smith, who was always head of the table, spent much of the time boasting about things like receiving the Order of the Elephant, and you were always expected to get stuck into some fierce debates.

For a boy from a little village in Wales – where the only place to meet girls was the local chapel – it was a fantastic eye-opener.

I wanted to get out into the big, wide world

UP FRONT

HONORARY DEGREES

Left Andrew Davies finds The Marlborough Arms in Bloomsbury a little quieter now than it was in his day.

and, as a Dylan Thomas devotee, there was part of me that wanted a life like his, but perhaps not so self-destructive and fatal.

So London seemed the place to be. I did, in fact, get into Oxford, but they said I had to do my National Service first and I thought, “Bugger that, I want to get started now.”

Once in London, I started to sample all the pleasures on offer in the mid1950s – pubs, jazz clubs and coffee shops – and had a good social life from the off.

I didn’t have much money, though, and can remember having the option to have half a bitter every day or save it all for a big Saturday night. I went for the latter.

It’s funny to think how fashionable the coffee shops were back then. One favourite Spanish place had a guy playing the flamenco guitar, while another, called Macabre, had the 1950s equivalents of goths hanging out. There was also a “stagey” one called Act One Scene One in Soho, opposite the 2i’s Coffee Bar where fledgling popstars like Cliff Richard were discovered.

Professor Smith was an Old Norse man, and ran the scene like the mead hall in Beowulf, emptying his pockets and putting the money in a heap on the table Then there was the college bar, down in the basement – a shabby place with green leatherette seats that were stained and torn. That’s where I met my wife, Diana. I was in the second year by now, and she was in the first year, sat on Tom Courtenay’s knee. She went out with him briefly, although I think she was secretly waiting for me.

I was a clever student, but not very conscientious. You had to have Latin A-level to do the English degree and because I only had O-level, I did an extra

exam, for which I was taught by a strange old lady in a tiny office in one of the university’s front yards. I can remember hanging out in the basement of Bentham Hall, where I lived for the first two years, playing snooker on my own, knowing I should be doing my Latin. But she must have had a soft spot for me, because one day in her hermit grotto she told me I’d just squeezed a pass.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a career. I wrote plenty of poetry, but I could never seem to write any short stories that satisfied me at all. At one time, I thought I might be an actor, but when I played the juvenile lead in a first term play, my friends all told me I was so terrible that I vowed never go back on stage. One girl, Elizabeth Savage, who I had a terrific crush on, said she thought I was good “because you just played yourself”, which I thought was terribly sweet. That was a very chaste relationship. We’d go to Heals together and sit on the posh sofas, talking about our hopes and dreams.

David Lodge was in the third year when I was in the first year and later wrote How Far Can You Go? based on those university days. When I read it, I wondered how on earth we were both at the same university at the same time, having such completely different experiences. There was he, clearly destined for a glittering academic career, whereas I was just a pretty cocky young thing chasing the girls. He was such an earnest student and I was not. But despite them being such carefree days, I got a good second class degree and the confidence to go into teaching and later writing.

The funny thing is that the pub hasn’t really changed much – dark but spacious and split into different rooms. Sometimes you’d get invited for a sherry in one of the literature student’s rooms, but it was never the same as being here in the pub with old Professor Smith and the gang.

Andrew Davies is a writer of screenplays and novels, notably A Very Peculiar Practice and House of Cards. His latest project, an adaption of War and Peace, airs this winter.

This year, UCL awarded honorary degrees to: Dr Denis Gillings CBE, Executive Chairman of Quintiles; American biologist and Nobel Prize winner Dr Linda Buck; Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Lesley Regan; historian Professor Norman Davies; artist, painter and former politician and diplomat Mr Ibrahim El-Salahi; environmental researcher Ms Fran Moore; former British diplomat and Permanent Representative to the European Union Sir Stephen Wall; international lawyer Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf; and former director of the Nuffield Foundation Ms Sharon Witherspoon MBE. UCL awarded honorary fellowships to: GP and former Chair of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners Dr Clare Gerada MBE; Chief Executive of the Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence Mr Bill Williams; Founder and Chairman of GSP Real Estate Mr George Farha; Director of the Grosvenor Group and Chairman of the Environment Agency Sir Philip Dilley; and Founder, Investor and Chairman of The Clean Gas Company and Co-Managing Director of Good Film Productions Limited Mr Martin Rushton-Turner.

IN NUMBERS

Philanthropy Day *

153 300 number of people taking part in the Jeremy Bentham mask record attempt

number of students and staff taking part in Philanthropy Day activities

number of masks distributed on Philanthropy Day

number of student societies involved in Philanthropy Day

350 17

* an attempt to set the record for the largest number of people wearing jeremy bentham masks in one place U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 9

UP FRONT THE STRONG ROOM

THIS PROJECT ROCKS

Karin Ruggaber, artist and lecturer, talks geology, anatomy – and taxidermied heads.

Interview Kate Hilpern Photograph Alun Callender

Rocks. And anatomy. As an artist, I like to explore what it means to introduce things into a new context, confusing or upsetting established categories and crossing boundaries, which is what my Rock Room project is about. By inserting specimens from the Grant Museum into the geology collection in the UCL Rock Room, we no longer have the same obligations to these objects that a historian, scientist or geologist might have, and I love that.

Certainly, in exhibition terms, this arrangement is something a museum wouldn’t normally do. The three animal heads from the 1950s – pangolin, dog and sloth – would, in museological terms, be treated as a material because they’ve been objectified. But when you introduce them into a room full of rocks, something happens – they almost become part of the audience, spectators looking back at you.

They are ultimately taxidermied heads, but to me they retain a quiet contemplative sense of focus and self-containment. The very act of replacing rocks with animals is interesting because it is so political.

The geological environment is critical.

Geology itself is bigger than us and has a key role in defining our ideas of value and materiality, and it is with this in mind that I chose specific rocks representing the visceral (malachite), expressive (flourite), figurative (concretions) as well as the elemental and conceptual (gold). The UCL Rock Room as a setting is ideal because it is a cross between a teaching space for geology and a museum, containing a huge collection of geological specimens in drawers.

I love the way that this is all about the audience bringing their own imagination towards the objects and how they are juxtaposed. For me, the questions that arise are about not taking things – or indeed the relationships between existing subjects – for granted. I’m interested in how different times treat different things in different ways.

This selection is all about various histories coming together and how we look at them today. But it would be missing the point to think there is a clear message about what anyone else should think, and this appeals to me hugely as an artist.”

Karin is part of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art. The Slade Rock Room Project involves a number of objects and actions being inserted, tested and tried out within the geology collection of UCL’s Rock Room.

The collaboration runs annually in May. U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 11

UP FRONT CLOISTER ED

PAR TNERS IN TIME

One examines cells, the other examines patients.

Together they are working to fight dementia.

Words Anne Wollenberg Photograph Alun Callender

I

f you carried a faulty gene that caused dementia, would you want to know?

This is the tough question faced by patients who participate in research at the UCL Institute of Neurology and Dementia Research Centre at Queen Square, where Dr Selina Wray and Dr Jonathan Rohrer are part of a large and prolific team working on frontotemporal dementia, or FTD, one of the most common causes of dementia in under 65s.

But what makes someone develop dementia symptoms? Why can we carry problem genes for years before showing outward signs of disease? And can we slow this down or even stop it altogether?

“Younger-onset dementias are hugely under-recognised,” says Rohrer, MRC Clinician Scientist and Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. “For these patients, symptoms often appear during their 40s, 50s or 60s. Many are still working and they may have young children.”

Rohrer is following a group of people in their 20s and 30s whose parents developed FTD. Each has a 50 per cent chance of inheriting mutations in genes such as tau, which leads to the disease.

They undergo a range of tests including MRI scans, blood and spinal fluid tests, and psychological tests to check for problems with language and social cognition.

Tau is an important protein in the brain. In cases of dementia, however, it forms harmful build-ups and cells eventually react by dying off. Dr Wray, Senior Research Associate, Molecular Neuroscience, is examining this process in the lab, seeing how pluripotent (genetically reprogrammed) stem cells react to build-ups of tau protein.

“Our work relies on collaborating with clinicians to access cells from 12 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

patients,” she explains. “A lot of traditional modelling was done with animal cells or human cells that are not neuronal, because it wasn’t possible for us to access and grow human brain cells in the laboratory.

“In the last seven years, we’ve used a new technique that lets us take a piece of skin from a patient’s arm and use this to create brain cells. This has completely revolutionised the way we model diseases.”

As a result, she says, “the cells I use in the lab come from the same patients who give blood and have MRI scans. We can grow cells in a dish, see the differences between patients who do or do not have dementia and use them to understand what is going wrong in diseased cells.”

If you’re in your 50s and your spouse starts acting strangely, you wonder if there’s a problem in your marriage Some participants wish to know if they carry the mutation, but most do not. Wray believes this would change if treatment was available. “If you knew you could take a drug to slow down the disease, it would change the implications of knowing you carry the gene,” she points out.

“FTD really gets to the core of who you are and changes how you act around other people,” explains Rohrer. “This can include loss of empathy, saying ruder things, being more obsessive and hoarding.

It can be hard for people to recognise that these symptoms are part of a brain

problem. For example, some of the people we see have been through relationship counselling. If you’re in your 50s and your spouse starts acting strangely, you wonder if there’s a problem in your marriage.”

It is harder for people to recognise that a brain problem may be the cause.

Wray points out that diagnosing FTD can also be challenging for GPs, “who are not specialists in all sub-types of dementia”.

These are genetic conditions that you are born with, says Rohrer, “meaning we don’t know a lot about what the triggers are and why, if you have this genetic

problem all your life, it takes until your 40s, 50s or 60s to develop. It isn’t the case that nothing is happening in the years before people develop FTD. The disease is already happening, but your brain is able to compensate up to a point”. This indicates a window of opportunity, says Wray, “in which we can intervene to either stop the disease altogether or simply slow it down.

Either would be an incredible leap forward”.

A recent paper detailed some of the early changes that can be seen with tau protein. “Our next step is to use those cells to develop a drug trial.”

Work that Rohrer has recently performed shows that psychological changes tend to appear around five years before the onset of FTD symptoms.

Changes in brain imaging can be seen 10-15 years before.

“If we want to be successful in developing treatments, we need ones that will intervene in these very early stages,” says Wray. “It is essential that the basic science and clinical research go very much hand in hand.”

“A key goal is for us to move closer together,” agrees Rohrer. “We are now

at the stage where we can develop and screen drugs with the aim of testing them in patients – moving them from one part of Queen Square to another. In previous years, I’ve told people that they will be helping future generations. Now I am able to tell participants that I think they will be in the very first drug trial.”

Dr Rohrer and Dr Wray, pictured above at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, have set up www.ftdtalk.org to provide clear, accessible information about frontotemporal dementia.

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LIFE

THE U NI V ERSE

AND The origins of life have long fascinated philosophers and biologists, but amid all the theory, are we any nearer to finding a definitive answer?

Words Rachel Bra il / Lucy Jolin Illustrations James Graham

EVERY

Y

O

nce upon a time, 3.5 billion years ago, the Earth’s plates shifted slightly as it cooled.

Somewhere in the depth of an ocean, a fissure opened up in the Earth’s crust, venting jets of hot water. The smorgasbord of chemical reactions that resulted created something new on a planet whose surface had previously been too hot for anything to arise.

This is one of the current theories about how life on Earth began. Over the years, there have been plenty of others: as simple as a lightning strike into what Darwin described as “warm ponds”; or the now widely discredited “panspermia” theory which suggests life came from outer space; or going back to Aristotle, the “spontaneous generation theory” in which life just sort of “happened”.

The question of the origins of life on Earth has been vexing researchers at UCL for many years. “I couldn’t find a bigger question than ‘Why does life exist on Earth?’” says Dr Matt Powner, Reader of Organic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry. “It may take some time to solve all aspects of the transition from chemistry to biology, but the biggest driver for me has always been to play some part in understanding this huge question of why is life here. Why specifically here and why specifically the biochemistry we observe in all life?”

The search for the origins of life is a challenge, to say the least. But we have some clues. We know that the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and that for the first several hundred thousand years it was too hot for any carbon-based life form. And we know that all living organisms today descended from a single living cell arising some 3.5 billion years ago. “The window for life beginning is quite small in geological terms – somewhere between a quarter and half a million years,” says Powner.

The “where” may also prove important. Some believe those fissures or “hydrothermal vents” at the bottom of the oceans (the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, for example, lies in the mid-Atlantic ocean, 2,600ft under the ocean’s surface) hold the key.

According to Dr Nick Lane, leader of the UCL Research Frontiers Origins of Life programme, certain warm alkaline vents, rich in hydrogen and other minerals, are naturally electrically charged, and this could explain how cells began to generate energy. They do this through creating charged membranes that drive the chemical reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “All cells, from bacteria to human, have membranes which are charged,” explains Lane, author of The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way it Is?. “It’s amazingly strong. If you look at the electrical charge you would experience if you were the size of a molecule, it’s equivalent to a bolt of lightning.” Clues exist, but Lane, whose work on Chemiosmosis and the Foundations of Complex Life is funded by a UCL Provost’s Venture Research Fellowship award, admits the search for the origins of life is “the black hole at the heart of biology”.

Back in the 1970s, a new kind of simple celled organism was discovered, known as archaea. Many inhabit extreme environments such as ocean vents,

LIFE ON EARTH ISN’T A BATTLEFIELD

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but they can also be found in dental plaque.

It is now clear that all complex cells, like those of animals, plants and fungi, originated from an archaeon engulfing a bacterium around one billion years ago. The echoes of this event are still present in our DNA. The bacteria eventually became mitochondria, the cellular powerplant. The search is on for the archaea from which all complex life evolved and a recent candidate is looking good – an organism called Lokiarchaeota has genes that make many of the important proteins found in our cells.

“It looks really like our sister group,” says Professor Buzz Baum, Professor of Cell Biology at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL. From an evolutionary standpoint, we think of life as “survival of the fittest”. But recent research suggests that actually a spirit of co-operation may be at the heart of the first complex cell. Baum recently published a paper on just how archaea and bacteria could have come together – the archaea, he says, rather than engulfing the bacteria, began co-operating, eventually merging into one cell with a new membrane. “Darwinian evolution is about survival of the fittest – two deer fight, the strongest gets the mate,” he says. “But the biggest transitions in life on Earth came from different cells working together. You shouldn’t see life as a battlefield – it’s many things living together.”

It’s a comforting thought that our cells might have evolved through co-operation, not conflict.

To better understand the origins of this co-operation, researchers at UCL are reconstructing the conditions under which modern archaea – close relatives of our distant ancestors – can grow. “We’re trying to image cells dividing at temperatures as high as 76°C with a super-resolution microscope,” says Baum of this particular piece of radical thinking. It can be difficult though, he says, as microscopes are not made to withstand these conditions. “But it’s really fun, because nobody else in the world has seen these cells changing shape and dividing. We hope to be the first.”

Given the sheer diversity of life on Earth it is amazing that everything stems from the same source. “Life has adapted to the most insane conditions and the way that these different organisms look is also extremely diverse. Yet the stuff they are made of – the amino acids and the nucleotides and the carbohydrates and the lipids – are near identical,” says Professor Finn Werner, Wellcome Trust investigator and team leader of the UCL RNA polymerase laboratory.

You can try an experiment: get a microscope and place a mushroom cell and a human cell next to each other. It’s actually very hard to tell the difference – the cells are basically the same size and shape and have many similar elements.

Werner says: “It’s not the components that create the huge diversity of life, but rather the biological information encoding them, the big blueprint of life and its realisation by the precise execution of a genetic programme.” Understanding the origins of life means also understanding how these processes developed.

COMPLEXITY DERIVES FROM A VERY FEW CORE SMALL MOLECULES

Werner is also studying archaea to understand how basic cellular processes might have developed, such as how genetic information is interpreted by the cell in a process called gene expression. Important to that process is the molecule RNA – a simpler version of DNA, now responsible for making proteins, and probably the first self-replicating molecule on the planet before cells. “Without time machines we can’t go back and investigate what it really looked like, but we can study the enzymes that synthesise RNA in organisms that are alive today,’’ says Werner. He is comparing the different structures and functions of complicated molecular machines, called RNA polymerases, which make RNA itself, to gain an understanding of how genetic information was processed. “Archaea are the absolute key to this research,” he says.

Where is this quest for the origins of life likely to lead us? The answer is limitless but, importantly, there could be many positive effects from the work being done. Baum’s work on cell shape and division is funded by Cancer Research UK, and it could well have implications for our knowledge of what damages cells during the division process – which in turn could help us understand cancer better. As Werner says: “Without this type of fundamental research there will be no way to translate our knowledge into the development of new treatments and practices in the future.”

But Werner also argues that research into the origins of life is not primarily about improving human health. “It’s more than that, it’s fundamentally about understanding where we came from.” We are slowly reassembling the jigsaw puzzle of life but, as Nick Lane says, “we are a long, long way from building the puzzle at the moment – we are still dealing with jigsaw pieces and we don’t even know if all the pieces are from the same puzzle”.

Lane says we may not ever really know exactly how life arose billions of years ago, but this doesn’t matter. “That’s not actually what we are trying to do.” He says what is important is understanding how it could have started. “We can understand the principles that convert a sterile planet with rock, water, carbon dioxide and an atmosphere into the living world around us.”

Werner says this requires a concerted and particularly interdisciplinary effort, such as that demonstrated at the Institute for the Physics of Living Systems. “In the RNAP lab we use biophysics, structural, molecular and systems biology as well as computational tools. In order to create plausible theories on the origins of life many aspects have to be rationalised: energy, metabolism, information and cell partition are all equally critical. Scientists from a broad range of disciplines have been researching the individual components for decades, but they have looked at these problems in isolation. I think the biggest task is to reconcile all these independent theories in a unified theory of the origins of life. This is possibly the greatest challenge of science ever – but it is within reach, and coming closer with every experiment we conclude successfully.”

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FE ATUR ES THIS R A DIC A L LIFE

THIS RADICAL LIFE Students have been making the streets of Bloomsbury their own since UCL was founded.

Alumni from across the decades share their memories of what makes UCL so special.

Words Wiliam Ham Bevan

D

oodlebugs. Lyons Corner House. The Union.

Bedford Square. The Academical Bar. The Small Gym. And of course, countless parties in Ramsey. Students have been making the streets of Bloomsbury their own since UCL was founded. But while every generation sits on the steps of the Portico and revises in Bedford Square, UCL’s students have been witness to huge change to Bloomsbury – and to student life.

Attending UCL during the Second World War was an uncertain business. Suffering greater bomb damage than any other British university, UCL’s Great Hall and the library’s dome were destroyed. Libraries, lecture theatres and laboratories were razed. Consequently, for their first term in autumn 1944, Tom Whiskerd (UCL Special Physics 1947) and Sylvia Whiskerd (née Jones, UCL Mathematics and Physics 1947) found themselves evacuated to the University College of North Wales, now Bangor University.

When their departments returned to Bloomsbury in January 1945, the Nazi threat had not entirely passed. London had already taken a beating from V-1 “doodlebugs”, but was now under assault from V-2 rockets, as Tom Whiskerd remembers: “If you were in the lecture room and you heard the bang, it had missed you,” says Tom. “Flying bombs you could hear, but not the rockets.

There was no warning. You just had to accept they were on the way.”

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There were a couple of lunchtime haunts in bomb-scarred Bloomsbury that were popular with students. Sylvia says: “There was an Express Dairy coffee shop and a Lyons Corner House at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Those were the only two places we could afford on our grant.

But as far as drinking was concerned, that was confined to half a pint in the Union bar.”

“If you weren’t going there, you could go to the lunchtime hop at the Slade and practise dancing,” says Tom. And this was where he was introduced to Sylvia in January 1945. Five years later, after National Service, the couple were married.

UCL still bore obvious war damage on the arrival of John Gregory (UCL Chemistry 1959).

“The quad, dome and so on had all been rebuilt, but there was much evidence of temporary buildings: huts around the place which housed things like the refectory. Some of these remained for many years, although I think they were originally only erected as temporary structures.”

Despite these disfigurements, Gregory remembers the Wilkins Building as once again presenting an imposing frontage to the world.

“You’d see people walking down Gower Street, looking through the (now removed) gates and wondering, ‘What is this place?’” he remembers.

For the majority of students social life in UCL centred on the College Union and the nearby University of London Union. Like Tom Whiskerd, Gregory met his future wife – recently graduated from Royal Holloway College – at a UCL dance.

“We often used to sit in the UCL basement bar and it was a very congenial place,” says Gregory. “I remember bridge players who would sometimes be there all night: I’d see a game going on in the evening, and if I popped in before lectures the next morning they were still there.”

For entertainment in the West End beyond Bloomsbury, there was a ready supply of free tickets for plays and concerts, thanks to the shady practice among theatre promoters of “papering the house”. “If a play wasn’t doing very well, the theatre would send out these free tickets for students, just to fill the seats,” he says. “I got to see some pretty awful plays. Most were on their last legs and about to close, but at least you got them for free.”

A half-decade later, Alan Roberts (UCL Economics 1966) was discouraged from applying to UCL by a careers master who warned him that London was “a wicked city” – but he found Bloomsbury to be a magical place.

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School, which became part of UCL in 1987. As director of the present-day Medical School, she has noticed profound changes in the site – not least in the transformation of the old University College Hospital into the Cruciform Building, the result of substantial grants from funding bodies such as the Wolfson Foundation – and its wider surroundings.

“Bloomsbury has become much more wealthy,” she says. “It was quite seedy, especially on the other side of Tottenham Court Road. That could be a dangerous place. But of course staff and students can’t afford to live here now. When I was a student, I lived on New Cavendish Street.”

Local hang-outs in the 1980s included Gigs for fish and chips, the King and Queen pub and the nearby Agra Indian restaurant, just over the putative border between Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia. However, on every night other than Wednesday, when ULU hosted its weekly cocktail bash, the Union remained the focus of medical students’ life.

“It was an absolute dive – really unpleasant, dirty and smelly,” says Gill, jealously comparing it to today’s vibrant and sparkling new Richard

Previous page Students from UCL and the Middlesex School of Medicine on a fundraising mission in aid of adolescent cancer in the late 1980s.

Above in March 1900, the news of the relief of Ladysmith, one of the most famous incidents in the Boer War in South Africa, caused a mass celebration in UCL’s Quad and the surrounding areas.

Previous page Deborah Gill. This page UCL Library Services, Special Collections

“Coming from a Northern industrial background, I thought the architecture around the squares was glorious,” he says. “My brother, who was at UCL four years earlier, arranged accommodation for my first year just around the corner from the Union, in Taviton Street.”

Economics students would frequent the Duke of Wellington – since renamed the Jeremy Bentham – on University Street, but for the most part UCL was a city within a city. “I don’t think I interacted with anyone outside the University, to be honest,” he says. “And there was certainly no ‘town and gown’ type situation that you might get in a place like Durham. UCL was quite selfcontained so I tended to stay within the bounds.”

For students in the early 1960s, the Union fulfilled both a social and academic role. “It was the centre of all activity,” says Roberts. “There was a shop where you bought all your stationery, there were quiet rooms where you could work, they had a bar, TV room, snack bar where we’d go for lunch... Then there were spaces where they’d have the hops and dances. I got into trouble for giving my Union card to someone else to get into a dance, and somehow got caught!”

Nonetheless, though comprehensive, Union facilities could be somewhat basic. Diana Cox (UCL Biochemistry 1974) remembers a shortage of seats in the main bar, obliging most people to sit on the sticky floor to eat their lunch. “But there would always be a jukebox playing in the corner, and on Sunday nights we had the free disco run by the Ents committee – the highlight of my life for three years, really. There weren’t student nights at nightclubs or anything like that.”

There was a more salubrious option. On another floor of the Union building was the Academical Bar, so named because some lecturing staff used to drink there as well, but the smarter surroundings came at a price: two pence on each pint of beer. “As for drinking in local bars, I just didn’t have the funds to do that very much,” says Rosemary Gale (UCL Biochemistry 1974), now Professor of Haematology at UCL’s Cancer Institute. “Entertainment was generally home-grown and cost-limited.”

Renewal and development plans were under way and were much needed; by the 1970s, parts of the Bloomsbury campus were becoming threadbare and dilapidated. “There was a building in the engineering block called the Small Gym, and we did exams there,” says Cox. “There was a hole in the roof so they’d bring in buckets to catch the rain. But it didn’t stand out; in the early Seventies a lot of inner London was very run down.”

Deborah Gill (UCL Medicine 1990) began her studies at Middlesex Hospital Medical

This page left Sha

A id, top right Jun Hao Chan, bottom right Markos olikas

Above A selection of contributions to UCL’s #loveucl instagram competition.

Mully Basement Bar and George Farha Café Bar, the results of generous donations. “Back then it smelt of beer, cigarettes and sweat from the sports facilities below. It was bizarre that we went there, except that snakebite was £1.05 a pint!”

For David Appleton (UCL Bartlett 1993), the 1990s was a time of warehouse parties in King’s Cross, refurbishment programmes at UCL – “All white paint and designer furniture in the Union bar, which soon fell apart due to student antics” – and profound change in London’s built environment. “We saw the pyramid lowered into place on the Canary Wharf tower – it was still just a building site,” he says.

As an architecture student, he would often have to work through the weekend. He says: “Bloomsbury would become very quiet. To get food, we’d go to the [Indian] YMCA just the other side of Tottenham Court Road, which was very cheap. Also, there was a weekly student paper that would have coupons for one of the UCL refectories. We had a term’s worth of those piled up in our studio.”

James Eades (UCL Bartlett 1997), who arrived later in the decade to start his architectural

studies, says: “I have this sense of Bloomsbury around then that revolves around the Bartlett, the Union opposite and the Bloomsbury Theatre.

It felt like the rear of UCL rather than the front, and that you were always fighting to get through a rear warren of spaces; very different to arriving in Bloomsbury from the Gower Street side. It felt like we were on the edge of the campus.”

This is set to change. Today, Eades is the partner at Nicholas Hare Architects, with responsibility for the New Student Centre that will open on Gordon Street in 2018 – part of the blueprint for the 21st-century university.

Eighty years after bombs destroyed parts of UCL, and reduced the Gordon Street site to such a state of rubble and shingle that it became known as the “beach site”, the process of fulfilling UCL’s objective to represent a truly welcoming and inclusive environment goes on.

“This, along with what’s planned for Wates House [the new Bartlett, opening in 2016], will allow the sense of student ownership to grow and flourish, and make the campus feel more publicly accessible,” says Eades. “It represents a redefining of UCL’s presence in Bloomsbury.”

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PA P E R In an edited excerpt from her last book, Professor of Renaissance Studies Lisa Jardine tells the story of a letter that would not be found.

Illustrations Roderick Mills

T

his is the story of a paper chase – a seemingly fruitless search in the archives, which eventually yielded a 17th-century letter I had been trying to find for several years. It is a cautionary tale about the trust we historians place in documents and records,

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and how badly we want each precious piece of evidence to add to the historical picture. And it is a story that illustrates in a number of ways the essential uncertainty that underlies, and ultimately gives purpose to, archival research in the humanities – in spite of the reassuring materiality of the hundreds-of-years-old piece of paper we hold in our hand.

In 2009, at the end of a period working on 17th-century Holland for my book Going Dutch, I was delighted to take up a Fellowship at the Royal Library in The Hague, working on their large holding of the correspondence of the Dutch polymath Sir Constantijn Huygens.

CHASE While researching his early career, I came across a sequence of almost illegible letters in French, exchanged in the 1620s between Huygens and someone he addressed – with some familiarity – as “Mademoiselle Croft” (or occasionally just “Croft”).

The letters piqued my curiosity – not least because the assiduous editor of Huygens’ correspondence, J. A. Worp, had chosen not to transcribe them in full in his ‘complete’ edition. As for Margaret Croft, nobody of that name had figured anywhere in any of the Huygens materials I had read until then.

Digital resources yield a richer haul of relevant documents than ever recovered by writing formal letters

of inquiry to the custodians of local archives. Yet I could find nothing about Croft beyond the fact that she had been a maid of honour to Elizabeth of Bohemia, wife of Frederick, Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia.

The first of Constantijn Huygens surviving notes to Croft is dated (in Huygens’ hand, in the margin of the draft) 5 August 1627, outside Grolle. Its tone is flirtatious and conspiratorial – perhaps surprisingly, considering that Constantijn had been married for little more than four months at the time. Huygens suggests that he has been encouraged to write because the Count of Hanau – by insinuation, Margaret’s lover or protector – has taken him into his confidence.

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FE ATUR ES PA PER CH ASE

The tone of these letters is teasing and familiar.

It suggests that the court circles of the King and Queen of Bohemia in which Croft moved, were worlds away from the decorous, middle-class salons of Huygens and his literary friends, such as P. C. Hooft, whose exchanges of letters with educated artistic Dutch women have been closely studied by historians like myself.

This, then, was the context in which I encountered and became intrigued by Madge Croft. To be honest, she remained a puzzle to me, and I continued to worry that the scribbled notes I had transcribed did not contain enough of substance to allow me to understand the circumstances under which they were written, nor to do justice to the relationship between Margaret and Constantijn.

Having so far drawn a blank, it was natural that I should consult the acknowledged expert on Elizabeth of Bohemia, Dr Nadine Akkerman, who pointed me in the direction of an obscure 1909 biography of the Queen of Bohemia in which Margaret Croft’s name does occur a number of times: Mary Anne Everett Green’s Elizabeth Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia (an expanded reissue of a brief biographical essay Green had first published in 1855).

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Croft appears several times in Green’s book, which has what to us feels like a slightly saccharine, sentimental tone to its conscientious excavation of the lives of prominent ladies from the historical archives. Croft attracts Green’s attention both because of her amorous adventures at court and because she was deemed to be the author of a significant letter, written in French in summer 1625 and intercepted on its way to her cousin in England.

The letter is an eyewitness account, chronicling events on a celebratory tour of North Holland, taken by the leading ladies of the courts at The Hague – Elizabeth of Bohemia and Amalia von Solms, the new wife of the Dutch Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik Prince of Orange – and their entourages. As far as I am aware, this is the only eyewitness account of a “triumphal tour” by the Dutch Stadtholder and his wife, together with Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia. Green’s selective quotations from this letter are tantalisingly vivid.

It has to be said, however, that in her biography of the Queen of Bohemia, Green sounds a little reluctant about having to rely on this particular document: As the record of [Elizabeth of Bohemia and Amalia von Solms’] excursion, though minute, was written by a young lady of the Court

[Margaret Croft], whose only thought was amusement, we must be content with such details as are afforded in her sprightly narrative, from which all serious subjects are banished.

It is a pity (reading between the lines, we can hear Green saying) that this eyewitness account of an important otherwise-unrecorded journey is written in such a frivolous fashion, thereby detracting from the fundamental seriousness of the occasion.

So I set off to decide about the contents of Croft’s letter for myself. In late 2010, with Green’s State Papers Holland reference number in The National Archives (TNA) in Kew, my colleague at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Dr Robyn Adams, and I went in search of the letter. We spent a long, frustrating and fruitless day there, in spite of the fact that we were ably assisted by TNA’s ever-helpful staff, and failed to find any trace of the letter we were looking for. Yet all of us were convinced that it must be there somewhere. All of us were confident that Green must have seen the document, and equally sure that a document once in the TNA would never have been destroyed – it will simply have been misplaced.

I began to suspect it had been misplaced deliberately.

Green had clearly been disconcerted by the contents of the

letter, and its “sprightly” tone – unseemly perhaps, coming from a lady of Elizabeth’s court. Perhaps she had cannily lodged it out of place in the archive, where it was safe, but where the curious could only find it again with difficulty.

Then, in August 2012, Nadine Akkerman emailed me to say she had come across a published transcription of the Croft letter, quite by chance. It was included as an appendix to Martin Royalton-Kisch’s 1988 facsimile edition of Adriaen van der Venne’s 1620s watercolour picture album.

Royalton-Kisch made nothing at all of the letter, but gave the correct State Papers reference – one whole volume away from the one on which Robyn Adams and I had based our search. Instead of being in State Papers Holland, Margaret Croft’s letter was in State Papers German.

Within days, Nadine had retrieved scans of the letter and emailed them to me – oh! the joys of the State Papers online – and I had translated it. You can imagine our excitement. Were we finally going to be able to unravel the mystery of the strikingly active, manipulative role Margaret Croft appeared to play in the lives of several influential men at the courts of England and the Netherlands? Would the letter explain the innuendo in Constantijn Huygens’ notes to Margaret Croft?

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FE ATUR ES PA PER CH ASE

The letter Nadine Akkerman and I triumphantly ‘found’ frankly failed to live up to its promise – or rather, our expectations. The letter, which is full of intrigue, gossip and sexual innuendo, reveals that the court circles of the Queen of Bohemia and the Dutch Stadtholder really were as full of intrigue and saucy behaviour as that correspondence I came across between Sir Constantijn Huygens and Margaret Croft had suggested.

But unfortunately it does not seem to add much to our understanding of these powerful circles, led by formidable, ambitious, 17th-century women. Indeed, its indecorousness seems to undercut the story scholars have recently begun to tell of how significant as major players on the political stage figures like Elizabeth of Bohemia actually were.

I cannot, of course, really end by throwing my hands up in the air and, after all that effort and anticipation, simply discard Margaret Croft’s intercepted letter.

When I began writing this essay I intended it in part as a cautionary tale to remind us that not everything we scholars undertake in good faith will turn out to yield fruit. Yet in fact another figure has presided in ghostly form over my search – Mary Anne Everett Green, whose

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tireless efforts cataloguing 41 volumes of State Papers Domestic in the second half of the 19th century made all historians’ subsequent research in this period possible.

Green was one of a band of Victorian women historians who worked assiduously in the archives, retrieving the buried traces of women’s writing from under the mountains of correspondence exchanged through official and unofficial channels by prominent men.

Her reputation for accuracy was legendary. When I had suggested that Green might have deliberately misplaced the Croft letter among the State Papers, I was encouraged in this surmise by Dr Katy Mair, the early modern records specialist at the TNA (and a Centre for Editing Lives and Letters graduate). She had told me that in all her time checking Green’s calendars against the original State Papers she had never found her to have made a mistake in her cataloguing.

During her long professional life, Green moved within a circle of distinguished Victorian men and women of letters. One of those to whom Green became particularly close was the influential novelist, writer and reviewer Geraldine Jewsbury – a name to conjure with in her day, but now mostly remembered only for

her passionate friendship, extending over a period of more than 20 years, with Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane Welsh Carlyle.

In 1880, during her final illness (she had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer some time earlier), Geraldine turned to State Papers archivist Mary Anne Everett Green for help in putting in order the voluminous body of papers and correspondence she had accumulated during her long and active literary life.

Prominent among the items she had treasured over the years was a bundle of intimate letters sent to her by Jane Carlyle. Jane and Geraldine’s long-running relationship had been an intense one. Early in their correspondence Geraldine had written to Jane Carlyle: “Oh, my dear, if you and I are drowned, or die, what would become of us if any ‘superior person’ were to go and write our ‘ life and errors’? What a precious mess a ‘truthful person’ would go and make of us, and how very different to what we really are or were!”

Shortly before her death, on Mary Anne Everett Green’s advice, she destroyed the entire bundle of scandalously personal letters from Jane Carlyle. It was, for Green the archival scholar, a matter of propriety,

which transcended any responsibilities towards important documents she might feel she had as an archival historian.

The very same women who presided over the painstaking retrieval of the voices of women in the archives for the historical record stood equally vigilant and ready to defend their reputations from the disapproval of posterity. There was decorum to be observed, in the interests of which even the most scrupulous of archivists might be persuaded to tamper with the evidence.

Scholars like myself are bound to acknowledge that Green is the puppet mistress who pulls the strings on our excursions into the State Papers. It is her calendars that inevitably guide our searches, and her omissions and elisions, not to mention the compelling running narrative with which she animates the records, which determine where we venture and where we pass by.

Professsor Lisa Jardine (1944–2015) was a luminary of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. Her book, Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture, is the first Open Access output from UCL Press, the UK’s first fully Open Access University Press.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 27

Bacteria surround us, all day, every day.

Fighting billions of tiny battles for and against each other and us. But in the epic struggle between good and evil, who will come out on top?

Words Lucy Jolin

FE ATUR ES BE AUTIFUL BACTER I A

30 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

home – and send the swab back to Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Microbial Diseases at the Eastman.

He grows the bacteria from that swab on an agar plate in his lab, then tries to identify it. A light ring around one kind of bacteria – a yellow stain, a splattering of white dots, a greenish tint – shows that it has managed to gain the upper hand over its neighbours as they all fight for a share of the nutrient-rich media on which they’re growing.

This might not sound like cutting-edge science – indeed, it’s more or less the same method that led Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin – but the project is actually on the front line in the global war against antibiotic resistance. One of those samples might, just might, contain an as-yet-unidentified bacteriam that could produce an antibiotic and save countless lives.

Bacteria surround us, all day, every day, fighting billions of tiny battles against each other

Above Coloured transmission electron micrograph of a deadly cluster of MRSA Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, resistant to most antibiotic drug agents.

Previous page & this spread © Science Photo Library

I

n his busy laboratory, somewhere in the maze of corridors within the Eastman Dental Institute on Gray’s Inn Road, Dr Adam Roberts is analysing a petri dish full of bacteria that were, until a few weeks ago, lurking under someone’s fridge.

On the bench next to him are piled more dishes, bursting with a dizzying range of cultures.

“That’s nice, that yellow one. And that tall one and the gloopy one – those are off the bottom of my shoe,” he observes. He produces a dish full of what looks like tiny white towers. It’s both fascinating and deeply creepy, as he cheerfully reveals: “Those are off the rim of a 10-year-old’s water bottle.”

This is Roberts’ Swab and Send project, now in its second phase. It’s a simple idea: email Roberts, pledge a small amount of cash and he’ll send you a swab. You rub it on anything in your environment – from banknotes, reptile vivaria, the terrifying world in the dark recesses of your

Previous page Photograph of the original culture plate of the fungus Penicillium notatum, made by the Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. One of Alexander Fleming’s petri dishes containing a sample of the mould Penicillium notatum sold for £11,163 at Christie’s.

Above A strain of the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the cause of TB in humans. The bacteria is spread by coughing or sneezing and inhaled into the lungs where they proliferate to form lesions called tubercles.

and us. They’re in our guts, in our food, and they teem on everything we use – our phones, our computer keyboards, our fridges. Much of the time, we don’t even know they are there. Sometimes those bacteria have names – E.coli, C.difficile, MRSA – and they can make us very ill indeed. So we treat them with antibiotics, which are naturally produced by bacteria themselves.

And because we’re using antibiotics more and more to fight infections, they’re becoming less effective. Fleming was one of the first to point out this danger. “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body,” he said in his 1945 Nobel lecture. “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself

and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”

The consequences of increased antibiotic resistance are frightening. “No antibiotics means that patients will die of trivial infections,” says Dr Paul Stapleton, Senior Teaching Fellow at the UCL School of Pharmacy. “And some people – those who undergo transplants, cancer patients, our ageing population, diabetics and so on – will succumb to infections relating to those conditions.

“Unfortunately, resistance is unavoidable, because many antibiotics are from bacteria and these organisms need a means to protect themselves from the agents they produce. Furthermore, they can also become antibiotic resistant through mutation, and resistance can be transferred from one bacterium to another. When you use an antibiotic, the susceptible bacteria population is wiped out. The resistant population then U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 31

Below ne o the first scientists to observe that mould could have germ-killing properties was French doctor Ernest Duchesne in the 1890s.

The first recorded cure using penicillin was b he field pathologist Cecil George Paine on 25 November 1930, who used it to treat a child with an eye infection.

Š grebcha/Shutterstock.com

FE ATUR ES BE AUTIFUL BACTER I A

32 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

predominates, and is then able to take over that particular environment – in this case, within the patient, sometimes with devastating consequences.”

This is because antibiotics harness what bacteria do best: they fight. They work by binding to a particular protein target in the bacteriam, which prevents that bacteriam from defending itself by, for example, making its cell wall strong. Consequently, the cell wall weakens and the bacteriam dies.

But then the bacteria fights back, explains Dr Jess Healy, Excellence Fellow in Pharmaceutical Chemical Biology. “It evolves a related enzyme that binds to the antibiotic and breaks it down.

So penicillin, for example, is broken down before it gets a chance to work, giving the bacteria the chance to proliferate and make you more sick.”

Bacteria will always adapt. When we are long gone as a species, they will still be here Then there are the bacteria that have evolved their own anti-antibiotic “pumps”. The drug goes into the bacteriam, which pumps it right back out again. Substances called porins in a bacteriam’s outer membrane can also provide a handy doorway for antibiotics to get in, but the bacteriam can then change its tactics and adapt to stop that happening – to do this it will simply reduce the number of porins, making the cells less porous, so antibiotics can’t get in. Time is on the bacteria’s side, too: while our abilities take generations to evolve, bacteria can whip through a hundred generations in 24 hours or so. “They’re tricky little buggers,” Dr Healy sums up.

Fighting them on the surfaces Luckily, so are humans. Swab and Send is just one of the projects at UCL searching for the solution to the resistance problem. Dr Healy and her team, for example, are currently researching how bacteria protect themselves from enemies such as antibiotics and the human immune system. The bacteria use special enzymes to fight these stresses.

Finding out more about how these enzymes work could, one day, help us find new drugs that could disarm a bacterial pathogen’s defences.

However, this search is hugely costly and timeconsuming. A drug discovered tomorrow is likely to take at least another decade and billions of pounds before it reaches a single patient. So Ivan Parkin, Professor of Materials and Inorganic Chemistry, and his team are opening up a new front in the war against bacteria: fighting them on the surfaces.

His project originated in the work of Professor Mike Wilson of the Eastman Dental Institute,

who invented a procedure to treat gum disease (incidentally, humanity’s most common disease) using an antimicrobial dye mouthwash which is activated by a hand-held laser. It’s now in use worldwide and 100,000 people have benefited from treatment. Wilson and Parkin met and discussed coating everyday surfaces in a similar antimicrobial material. This led to a long-term collaboration over 10 years. Recently Parkin and his team – Sacha Noimark and Dr Elaine Allan – have developed the world’s first light-activated antimicrobial surface that also works well in the dark.

Again, it’s a simple idea – surfaces are covered in a silicone coating with a thin layer of dye. When that coating is exposed to light, the dye creates chemicals that are very toxic to bacteria, but significantly less toxic to human and animal cells.

Tests found that even when a surface was coated with a billion or more bacteria per square centimetre – in a contaminated hospital, you’d expect 1,000 bacteria per square centimetre – they were all dead within a few hours. The surface continued to kill bacteria, albeit at a slower rate, when the light was turned off. And it was even effective against hardy bacteria like C.difficile, which can live for thousands of years if undisturbed, and is estimated to affect 50 per cent of patients with hospital stays longer than four weeks.

Living in a microbial world Parkin, honoured by the Royal Society with the prestigious Armourers and Brasiers’ Prize in 2014, hopes that the technology will be used to coat surfaces in healthcare environments – one of the main sources of infection. “Every person who goes into hospital has a 10 per cent chance of picking up a hospital-acquired infection,” he explains. “Bacteria are mainly transferred within the healthcare environment through touch. A contaminated person touches a surface; someone else will then come along and touch that surface again. So that surface is a reservoir for transmitting bacteria from one patient to another. Those surfaces include buttons in lifts, computer keyboards, bed rails, telephone, computer keyboards – any surface where multiple people are touching the same thing.

Our treatment augments the cleaning regime – our surfaces will actually eliminate any contaminating bacteria on the surface, quickly.”

Back in the lab, Roberts admits that sometimes it feels like a losing battle. “Bacteria will always adapt,” he says. “When we are long gone as a species, they will still be here. It’s a microbial world – we’re just passing through.

But something could be out there. At the moment, we only have about 50 antibiotics and there’s resistance to all of them.

“Imagine if, in 10 years time, a clinician could choose from 1,000 antibiotics. You never know what we could achieve if we make a concerted, global effort.”

Visit https://ucl.hubbub.net/p/swab-and-send-II to find out more about the Swab and Send project.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 33

CITIES Urban life runs on adrenalin. On unpredictability.

And on eternal compromise. From Chennai to London and from Medellin to Miami, PORTICO examines the art of the urban.

Words Lucy Jolin Photographs ick Turpin

Right Matthew eaumont in ilburn igh Road.

“It’s shambolic and dirty. It’s a grimy, warm, multicultural mess that’s often completely dysfunctional. But somehow there is nothing more glorious on a sunny day than masses of people on Kilburn High Road.”

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FE ATUR ES CITIES

T

he urban life: love it or loathe it, it’s the future of our civilisation. Already, 3.9 billion people live in cities, and by 2050 that number, according to the UN, is likely to increase by another 2.5 billion – nearly two thirds of the global population. Mega-cities of more than 10 million inhabitants, like Delhi (25 million) and Tokyo (13.5 million inhabitants) are becoming increasingly common.

But what kind of urban should we be aiming for? Clean, green, safe? Edgy, exciting, unpredictable?

Or a mixture of the two? As cities evolve, fracture points appear. How should spaces be used? Whose rights are more important?

A case in point is developing on the beaches of Chennai in India. Conflicts arise when established practices, such as fishermen drying their nets on the beach, are suddenly regulated by the authorities – with the rise of a bourgeois code of aesthetics, they are considered to be an eyesore by the leisure-driven, middle-class families.

But when consultants come to Chennai with PowerPoint presentations filled with images of irrelevant references such as Miami Beach, they’re simply not applicable, says Dr Pushpa Arabindoo, lecturer in the Department of Geography and a co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. “A great city is not an identikit city,” she says. “It’s so much more than the ‘clean and green’ models frequently cited by urban practitioners as the ideal.

“You start subscribing to a Western sense of imagination that does not work socially or culturally in the context of Indian cities. In India, public spaces have become very contentious.

Different social groups and classes are making claims based on a single, homogenised understanding of what the public spaces should be. So to me, a great city should have a sense of public consciousness, but we should be tolerant to allow these different imaginations of the city to prevail.”

This is a hard thing to plan for, points out Dr Matthew Beaumont, senior lecturer in English and author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. Streets, he says, are the veins through which the urban life-blood of commerce, companionship and chaos run. But engineering a good street is an almost paradoxical enterprise, he points out. “The best streets, invariably, aren’t planned. The ideal model, whether you’re planning it or simply trying to make an existing one work, is ideally a street in a city with a long history.

And I think attempts to impose a culture on a particular area which doesn’t respect an organic history is doomed to failure.”

Big state, big business Different cities will have different – and very individual – solutions. In 2004, the Colombian city of Medellín faced huge problems; national policy removing protection of the city’s industries resulted in high unemployment and a disenchanted younger population ripe for exploitation by cocaine barons. In 1991, Medellín witnessed 6,349 killings – 381 deaths per 100,000

36 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

In India, public spaces have become very contentious. Different social groups and classes are making claims about how these spaces should be

Below Richard Dennis in Westminster piazza.

“The piazza of Westminster Catholic Cathedral is used a lot b o fice wor ers cathedral visitors and school groups. It’s a space which combines modern, commercial capital with a cultural and religious space, and I think it works very well.”

inhabitants – the highest murder rate in the world. In 2004, the city authorities decided to build a cable car that connected the poorest areas to the rest of the city, at the top of steep hills.

It transformed an hour’s tough uphill walk to a 15-minute ride. Other infrastructure projects such as “library parks” – a combination of public library, park, and community centre – followed.

These days, Medellín is still a “difficult city,” says Professor Julio Dávila, Professor of Urban Policy and International Development, and director of the Development Planning Unit at UCL. But it is also a city transformed; the murder rate has fallen, the city is attracting new visitors and is no longer a byword for urban chaos.

For Dávila, Medellín is a prime example of how thinking about creating great cities needs to change. The city’s success is a powerful argument, he says, against the Reaganite narrative that holds big state interference to be corrupt and inefficient.

This approach might be relevant in places where the state has long had a presence, but in Latin America, Dávila argues, the state barely existed in the first place. “So for me, the political imperative was to show a local government that is enlightened, powerful and can do relatively simple things.

Here was a state saying, ‘No, we are not going to privatise, we are not going to let the market just take over, that the market is the best leveller – when we know it’s not true’.”

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 37

38 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

FE ATUR ES CITIES

Left ulio Davila at the Olympic Par .

“I knew the Olympic Park very well when it was not an entirely nice place. It was fantastically well located, but not many jobs existed – and yet it has been regenerated in the most amazing way.”

Below David Price in Russell S uare.

“Bloomsbury was very intellectually driven, but it was very cut off from the West End. That’s what led to so many innovations there and it’s why so many educational institutes – like UCL – started in Bloomsbury.”

UCL – part of the fabric of London for almost 200 years – will soon have a chance to shape London over the next two centuries. The UCL East project will create a major new campus for UCL at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where the new buildings will be a centre for cross-disciplinary activity, focused on creative intersections of experiment, arts, society and technology. Proposals for several new activities are being developed in discussion with local communities, including a legal advice centre and social history learning centre.

The project echoes one of London’s most successful city-building initiatives. “The analogy is with what happened after the Great Exhibition of 1851,” says Professor David Price, UCL ViceProvost (Research). “The profits of that went to build the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and what is now Imperial College. That was called ‘Albertopolis’ after Prince Albert, so what we’re planning is being referred to as ‘Olympicopolis’.

We want UCL East to offer a new kind of university environment, focused on the facilitation of collaboration, connection and open innovation with local and global communities.”

Diversity within density But a great city isn’t just diverse in its solutions: it’s also diverse in population, economic activity and built environment – “diversity within density”, as Professor Emeritus Richard Dennis observes, which is simply “lots of different kinds of people in a very small area”. That diversity drives it; change within a city is often feared, he points out, especially change that might impact negatively on the value of the property we own. “But it’s change that is intrinsic to capitalism – constantly making new stuff, having new ideas, creating new things, creating new places and re-creating old places – which inevitably means that places can’t stay the same.” What is good for the city may challenge us as much as it delights us.

And strangers are nothing to fear, says Matthew Beaumont, citing writer and activist Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. They’re a vital piece in the jigsaw of the great city. “One has to be wary of both extremes – both a nostalgia for the dystopian city and an affirmation of the sanitised, privatised, unaffordable city,” he says. “But the key, for me, is this idea that streets should be open to strangers.

“There’s a sense of collective responsibility and shared enterprise which actually exceeds and is more positive than that of a closed, provincial, socially homogenous neighbourhood. Real safety, paradoxically, comes from the presence of strangers who aren’t regarded as alien, other or threatening, but are seen as absolutely integral to the organic functioning of the streets. There’s a collective sense of vigilance and openness to new experiences. A great city is all about people watching one another, not about the Neighbourhood Watch.”

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 39

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41 Hello London!

42 South Junction 45 University Matters 46 This Idea Must Die 48 London vs World

Hello London!

Tina Liu (UCL Centre for Transport Studies 2010) People often assume that moving from Beijing to London, aged 22, would make this capital a home-from-home for me – they are both big, bustling cities. But coming to UCL felt a very long way from China, where I was born and raised.

The first weeks were the toughest.

Each day I’d count down to 2pm, which was the time in China that my parents would be home from work, and

I’d cry down the phone to them. I am very close to my family and had never really been away from them, but I’ve always been curious and I relish new challenges – in this sense UCL was absolutely the right choice. I felt I had the whole world on my doorstep and that excited me; London feels like the beating heart of the country.

I loved the people too. Sitting on

Below A typically overladen tricycle in Shanghai, the largest Chinese city by population.

the bus, I remember being surprised to hear all kinds of languages, and often no English at all. British people who live in London are clearly comfortable with diversity, and for international students that is very important.

Today, I work in Shanghai, analysing the world’s ports and logistics industries for Drewry, a maritime adviser. Without my London experiences, I wonder how I’d have coped with the culture shock of arriving in China’s biggest and most prosperous city. After all, Shanghai may be in the same country as Beijing, but that’s about all these rival cities have in common.

Shanghai is all about business, something that weaves itself into the very nature of the people. It’s a place with a very clear demographic split, with a huge ex-pat community living very separately to the Chinese. Yet I am in the fortunate position of being able to crossover both, and I have UCL to thank for that.

I also owe the confidence I now have to my time in London. In China, lectures mean sitting and listening to the teacher, but at UCL PhD students are seen as experts in their field, constantly expected to come up with original ideas.

Meanwhile, joining the Enterprise Society helped me bridge the gap between university and work. It was a great way to interact with international students and we organised a lot of events; it brought me a step closer to the “real world”. In fact, dealing with colleagues internally and clients externally in my job now really is pretty much the same as it was in the Society.

I used to have a burning need to return to live in London, but now I feel its vibrancy, energy and diversity from afar. So for now at least I’m just happy enough to visit, but I certainly wouldn’t rule out settling back there again – one day!

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 41

UCL + SOUTH JU NCTION

Lessons for life Becoming an inspirational teacher takes time,

practice and a lot of hard work. Here, three alumni of the Institute of Education recall the learning curve.

Words Kate Hilpern Illustration Lee Woodgate

42 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

Sarah Seery is Head of the School of Horticulture and Landscaping, Capel Manor College. She studied a PGCE at the UCL IoE in 2009-2011.

By my early 40s, I’d reached saturation point with the desk jobs I’d had and decided to turn to a passion of mine: horticulture. I did a diploma, and after I joined a big commercial nursery, the college I’d studied at asked if I’d consider teaching horticulture myself.

I chose IoE to do my PGCE because of its reputation. If I was going to spend two years studying I wanted an outstanding course – and that’s

what I got. The highlight for me was our teacher, [Dr Ian] Wilky. He brought teaching alive because he looked at it from a very organic perspective. We learned through peer discussion, using resources to support that – and the resources available at the Institute were amazing.

The students were a great bunch.

The youngest were in their 20s and the oldest in their 50s, all from very different backgrounds and teaching completely different subjects. It meant our learning was diverse and rich, with a broad range of thinking and ideas.

We had a lot of laughs and supportive discussions in the student bar, and now we’ve left we try and keep in touch through things like LinkedIn, but our jobs and families make it hard to do more than that.

It was tough managing my workload of teaching full-time, attending the course on Wednesday evenings and writing long assignments at the weekend. But it was very worthwhile and I’ve since learned that our teaching was far more in-depth than at other colleges. As such, I think it’s made me a much better teacher.

It was all so inspiring and developed me so holistically. I think that intrinsic love of teaching is the greatest thing I owe to that time at the IoE

Mark Hartley is Headteacher at Barnes Primary School. He did an MA in Educational Management and Administration in 1993-1995.

Having returned from a bout of travelling looking for work, I wound up with a job in a Hackney primary school.

It was a baptism by fire and although I did a couple of courses to help, it just made me realise how much more there was to know, so I signed up to the twoyear, part-time MA course.

Particularly memorable was the two weeks I spent in New York schools.

I saw a range of teaching practices – from the grossly unfair to the truly outstanding – but it was a fantastic experience. I loved the way the course gave a picture of how schools in more challenging situations can still be successful.

Quite soon after I’d finished the course, I secured a deputy headship and within a year after that I became acting headteacher. And because I’d got a taste for learning, I did an MBA,

as well as a diploma in dyslexia and specific learning difficulties. In fact, it was the teaching around continuous improvement that probably stayed with me the most – that idea that you never really reach your destination and even as a leader, you are on a journey.

Recently I saw Peter Mortimer, who was director of the Institute when I did my course, dropping off his grandchild, who goes to my school. I stopped him to talk and we’ve since become friends. I always remember what he said that day: “Make sure they have fun.”

Tessa Augustyniak is Music Director at Berkeley International School. She did a PGCE in 2004-2005 and an MA in Music Education in 2011.

As a musician, you always know teaching will be part of your career.

For me, that meant wanting a really thorough understanding of the teaching process, and that’s why I chose IoE both for my PGCE and my Master’s in Music Education.

I remember being initially surprised about how much teaching theory I had to get my head round.

There was a big emphasis on the theory to back up everything you do in the classroom, as well as understanding the development of music education – that’s a lot to take on board. But I loved the social life, too. We developed close bonds and being musicians, we had some great jam sessions. Music was so alive.

It was all so inspiring, and developed me so holistically, that performing no longer felt like the be-all and end-all.

Instead, I just felt really excited about the idea of teaching. I’m now at an international school in Bangkok, but I think that intrinsic love of teaching is the greatest thing I owe to that time at IoE. I loved the way that the course really challenged us to analyse our motivations and practices. If you’re not careful it’s too easy to become stagnant, and the fact that the course encouraged the reflective practitioner model has had a direct impact on my teaching.

The Institute of Education joined UCL in January 2014 – DARO warmly welcomes its alumni to the UCL family.

U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 43

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T ho m a s Ta l l is

by Jessica Swale

Or ph e us Music by Luigi Rossi

T h e O Dy sse y : Mis s in g P r e s um e d D e a d

by Simon Armitage

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by Derek Walcott

Ell e n T er r y Wit h Eil ee n At k in s Ja m e s J o y ce ’s T h e De a d Read by Aidan Gillen

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UCL + U NIV ERSIT Y M AT TERS

In Bentham’s footsteps Your philanthropy plays a vital role in UCL’s research, teaching and development.

F

rom my office in the southern end of the Wilkins Building’s South Cloisters, my nearest and most constant neighbour is Jeremy Bentham, sitting in his auto-icon. I admit I don’t always remember to wish him good morning or good evening, but I do often find myself wondering what he would make of the daily UCL life playing out before him (for a Jeremy’s-eye view of UCL, have a look at the PanoptiCam on our website).

Whether it was the meetings of our Internal Campaign Steering Group, my meetings with donors or our annual Scholarships and Bursaries reception, Jeremy has witnessed a lot of goingson this year concerning philanthropy, as we move ever closer to launching our next fundraising campaign for UCL. He was a prolific neologiser – an inventor of new words. Many of those he coined or popularised are relevant to our scholarships fundraising: alleviating (1789) hardship, minimising (1802) financial pressure, and ensuring that study is not unaffordable (1825).

I wonder what new words he might have coined to describe the successes of this last year, one in which collective giving achieved a huge amount.

For example, in late January we accepted an offer from the Higher Education Funding Council for England – to provide 50 per cent of funding for scholarships for disadvantaged Master’s students. All universities were invited to take part and find the other 50 per cent, but not all accepted; we did.

So did you, our alumni. Together you have contributed more than £500,000 to the scheme. Gifts came from all over the world, from alumni of all faculties, from all age groups. The total includes gifts from more than 750 donors who gave in response to an appeal this summer, more than 200 of whom were giving to UCL for the first time. Many donors supported a postgraduate initiative despite perhaps only having

Philanthropy has a transformative effect on UCL by giving us the freedom to think and do differently. It supports people that make UCL what it is had an undergraduate experience themselves. To all those who gave and encouraged others to give, thank you. The students who benefited from this funding have now started their Master’s degrees at UCL and we’ll keep you updated on their progress.

And Jeremy, who among his many idiosyncrasies had a “sacred teapot”, would surely have loved our annual afternoon tea for alumni and friends who will be leaving a gift to UCL in their will. Many of those gifts are what we term “unrestricted”. This is a humbling statement of trust, and one that gives

us flexibility to invest where the needs are greatest. Last year’s unrestricted support was spent on our new Institute of Advanced Studies, on student union activities, improving teaching and learning spaces across campus, and an event for Astrea, the network for women in professional service roles at UCL. Thinking about big institutions like UCL, it may be hard to appreciate the difference made by a recent graduate giving a small gift each month. Research council and industry funding is hugely important and sustains our academic excellence, but there is no research council for widening participation for year 10/11 BME students – another beneficiary of collective alumni support – or for providing a fellowship to a refugee academic. This is where you help us achieve remarkable things.

Philanthropy has a transformative effect on UCL by giving us the freedom to think and do differently. It supports the people and activities that make UCL what it is, exemplified by our crossdisciplinary Grand Challenges and allied developments in global prosperity – activities at the intersections and overlaps of disciplinary expertise and, as a consequence, often lying outside the agenda of research council funders.

And where research funding does exist, philanthropy helps to dramatically accelerate progress, as seen in our life sciences, our translational medical research or our engineering and the social sciences.

The coming year is an exciting one for all of us, as we will be launching UCL’s most ambitious ever fundraising and supporter engagement campaign.

I can’t wait to share the good news stories in next year’s issue, and I’m sure Jeremy would be proud of the collective efforts of UCL’s lifelong community.

Professor Michael Arthur UCL President & Provost U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 45

UCL + R ESE A RCH

THIS IDEA MUST DIE:

“Forensic evidence is always irrefutable” Forensic science still has a long way to go to always make a watertight case, says Dr Ruth Morgan.

Interview Becky Allen Illustrations Jason ord

46 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

F

orensic science’s reputation is on trial. In April this year, the FBI admitted its hair comparison unit had given flawed testimony in trials going back 20 years, including 33 cases where defendants were sentenced to death. And in the UK, in 2007, Barri White’s forensic-based conviction seven years earlier for killing his girlfriend, Rachel Manning, was quashed. White was cleared of the murder, after which police resumed their hunt and ultimately convicted Shahidul Ahmed for the murder in 2013.

These, and other such cases, have thrust forensic evidence into the spotlight. If the proliferation of TV crime dramas – from ‘NCIS’ to ‘Dexter’ – are to be believed, the forensic scientist is king (or queen). Theirs is the most damning evidence, the result of highly specialist crime scene analysis that always delivers incontrovertible facts.

But however complex a fictional crime drama might be, what happens at crime scenes, in laboratories and in courts is far more complex – and more nuanced. Investigators and juries need to stop believing that forensic evidence is always irrefutable. And forensic science needs to continue addressing both the validity and the interpretation of forensic evidence. We need a stronger evidence base: more robust science to underpin the techniques and interpretations of evidence that people rely on in court.

In the majority of cases in which forensic evidence is critical, forensic science offers valuable intelligence evidence. However, I’m aware of the damage forensic evidence can do when people believe it is always infallible.

In 2007, the evidence in the Rachel Manning case was re-examined. In the original trial the most crucial evidence concerned some metallic particles found on Manning’s skirt – and in a van belonging to Barri White’s friend, Keith Hyatt. A forensic expert said the particles were extremely rare and this helped put White and Hyatt in prison.

But our research found that far from being rare, the particles in question were incredibly abundant. At least 4,000 of them are produced each time a disposable cigarette lighter is used – and they can stay on people’s clothing for more than 18 hours. It was enough

One participant left none of her DNA but did leave some DNA from her partner – even though he had never been in the lab

to quash the conviction and open the way for the real killer to be found.

That’s what the UCL Centre for the Forensic Sciences, part of the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, is all about. Much forensic science in the UK is about developing new technology and new ways of finding more information. Our aim is to understand how evidence behaves and how we interact with evidence in casework, so we can ensure that our interpretation of what forensic evidence means in a case is robust and is based on empirical evidence; that’s crucial to preventing miscarriages of justice.

As well as looking at old cases, we also do a lot of work on DNA transfer. Fifteen years ago, DNA technology meant you needed a reasonable amount of material to get a DNA profile. Today, you can generate profiles from trace amounts of DNA. That sensitivity is powerful, but it also raises issues for the interpretation of that evidence in a forensic context.

In one project we’ve been trying to understand how much DNA the regular – as opposed to the last – wearer leaves behind on a garment. It’s been assumed the major DNA profile would be from the last wearer, but our research shows it depends on the person.

Miscarriages of justice like the Manning case are terrible examples of how forensic evidence can be misinterpreted and presented as unequivocal when it is not. For all our advances in technology, we still lack the evidence base for a lot of what’s being looked at. Our research is providing that evidence base for the robust interpretation of what trace evidence means when it is found. And that’s why I believe that the idea that forensic evidence is always irrefutable must die.

Dr Ruth Morgan is director of the UCL Centre for Forensic Science U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2 47

UCL + STUDENT LIFE

London vs World Tessa Snelgar (UCL Global Health and Development 2015) explains why the view from Waterloo Bridge is world-beating.

Photograph Marcus Ginns

T

he Kinks had it right when they sang about being in paradise in Waterloo Sunset, their famous anthem inspired by the view from Waterloo Bridge. I spent three years in the mid-2000s walking over this bridge every day as I trained to be a midwife.

In those rare quiet moments during the night, as brand-new London babies prepared to enter the world, we would gaze out at the bridge and marvel at the view of the Houses of Parliament across the river, smothered in orange light and history.

The position on a strategic bend in the river make the views from Waterloo Bridge, of Westminster to the west and the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east, in my opinion, the two finest in London. But it is London’s rich and changing history that makes the view from Waterloo Bridge so poignant 48 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 015 | I S S U E 2

to me. A cathedral dedicated to St Paul has stood at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, for more than 1,400 years. Once king of this skyline, standing on Waterloo Bridge, St Paul’s is now dwarfed by its neighbours.

And I think of identity and belonging, as the wonderful multicultural city of today passes by. From the Romans and Saxons to Vikings and Normans, we’ve always been an interesting melange, made up of many.

The seasons alter the light and colours throughout the year, and summer sunsets cast ochre light reflections on the glass structures.

The Kinks’ "dirty old river" keeps flowing to the sea and, as I stand on the bridge looking out to London, I can truly understand what they meant about being in paradise.

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