Wellcome Film of the Month: The fight against cancer
This month we highlight three films made by the charity British Empire Cancer Campaign. It was established in 1923 and merged with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 2002 to become Cancer Research UK. The Wellcome Library has recently been granted permission to digitise these films and make them available online. This is very timely as World Cancer Day is on the 4th of February, which focuses on the global effort to co-ordinate research to combat the disease. The films are illustrative of different creative approaches to fund-raising for cancer research in the 1950s, when cancer was a feared and often taboo illness. These films were made for cinema audiences; the cinematic language of the films very closely references both fiction and non-fiction movie making of the time.
The earliest film, Onwards to Victory, 1953, most closely resembles government war propaganda from the Ministry of Information and the newsreels shown during the Second World War. The film exploits the viewers’ patriotism and builds on the metaphor of science and technology’s contribution to Britain’s victory. The public are asked to give generously in support of the campaign to defeat the peacetime ‘menace’ of cancer.
The second film, The Modern Crusaders, 1958, celebrates the heroic struggle of the white-coated ‘mid-twentieth century crusaders’ against cancer. The voice-over, by an unseen male narrator, explains how much money is needed to cover the cost of the high-tech equipment shown. Despite the reassurance of scientific progress, the film communicates an urgent and ‘anxious’ appeal for funds. It was shot at the British Empire Cancer Campaign’s Chester Beatty Research Institute at the Royal Cancer Hospital (aka Royal Marsden Hospital), Surrey.
The Fight against Cancer: An appeal by Margaret Leighton, 1959, is an appeal by the British celebrity Margaret Leighton, who would have been familiar to cinema audiences during the 1940s and was critically acclaimed for her theatrical performances in the 1950s. Complete with her clipped accent, pearls and fur stole, she gives a very personal appeal to the public to contribute to the funding effort. The endorsement of charitable causes by famous but more accessible actors became more prevalent around this time: Harry Secombe appears in Penny Parade, 1964, an appeal on behalf of the Spastics Society, which became later became Scope, a charity for those with cerebral palsy, which also campaigns for equality for disabled people.
A trend in health communication is to have a more patient-centred approach and use the testimony of the patients themselves. Television and the Internet are much more intimate spaces – the emotional impact of these real stories can be more powerful. A compilation of Cancer Research UK’s television commercials can be viewed on their YouTube channel. A selection of videos made for patients about cancer, including testimonies, can be viewed on the NHS Choices website.
Angela Saward, Wellcome Film
You can learn about the Wellcome Film project here. If you would like to make use of this archive footage in your own projects, please visit the Wellcome Library catalogue to download the original files, which are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales licence.
Tiger stripes and ice volcanoes
In the latest of our shortlisted entries to the 2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Kelly Oakes tells us about a distant moon.
Its surface is white as snow and covered in ice. Large expanses are smooth and unblemished, belying a history of constant meteorite bombardment. In one site near this moon’s south pole there are cracks tens of miles long. Ice and water, from vast underground oceans, are constantly spewed out of these cracks into the blackness of space.
Sounds like something from Doctor Who, right? Well, this moon actually exists, and it’s closer than you might think.
Enceladus is the second smallest of Saturn’s major moons. Until the Voyager 2 satellite passed in 1981, we knew little about it. Now, with the Cassini-Huygens satellite performing having performed several close fly-bys, the story of Enceladus is beginning to become clear.
Playing on the Brink of climate change
One of the major, if not the major challenge of our age is climate change, with the health implications a major part of the Wellcome Trust’s work. Threats include heat waves and flooding, changing patterns of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue, and water scarcity and rising sea levels, which could displace hundreds of thousands of people.
Understanding these health impacts is a challenge for science. Communicating and acting upon that information is a challenge for all of us. Artists have been helping with this important process, for example the 2005 visit to the Arctic by a joint group of artists and scientists, which produced the novel Solar.
Video games have, in their own way, responded too. There are games that look specifically at the health issues (such as Climate Health Impact by the Wellcome Trust and Playgen) and games that put the player in the position of trying to persuade the world’s countries to act together (Fate of the World). But there are also games that use the changed world as a narrative setting.
Brink is a first-person shooter. Most such action games use aliens, World War II or terrorism as their setting. Brink uses climate change. I asked the game’s writer, Edward Stern, why. Read more…
Sue Horner
What is the role of inquiry-based learning in an inspiring science education? And what are its boundaries and limitations? In the last of our Perspectives essays, former Director of Curriculum Sue Horner outlines the difficulties in developing clear policy that can be easily interpreted and implemented.
A central challenge in writing a National Curriculum is one of definitions: what do we want the core content to be and how can this be best explained to a range of users? This is in addition to the challenge – common to all education policy – of offering a legislative framework that raises standards. For it to be respected, the framework needs to be intellectually cogent, realistic and practical to implement, and to attract sufficient support from the scientific and teaching communities.
One of the conventions of the National Curriculum is that it specifies the matter to be taught but not how it should be taught. The supposition that any subject can be ‘pedagogically blind’ is simplistic for two reasons. First, learning is constructed through pedagogy and the nature of a subject is conveyed by how it is taught. Second, the way the curriculum is written has implications for the classroom: the importance of scientific inquiry is inferred from how it is represented in the National Curriculum. The 2007 curriculum (1) emphasises ‘scientific thinking’, ‘practical and enquiry skills’ and ‘critical understanding’, and these rightly have clear implications for pedagogy. Read more…
Professor Fiona Powrie
Professor Fiona Powrie, a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator at the University of Oxford, is one of two scientists who will be awarded the 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine at a ceremony in Switzerland in April. She will receive CHF 625,000 (£430,000) for her research and CHF 75,000 (£50,000) as a personal award.
Fiona wins the prize for her work on “the interactions between the bacterial intestinal flora and the immune system”. Her research looks at why the immune system does not usually attack the numerous beneficial bacteria that live in the gut, and how we can improve treatment for conditions caused when the immune system gets it wrong. Inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease are caused by an inappropriate immune response in the gut.
I interviewed Fiona last year and will be posting a feature on her work in the next week or so. It is fascinating research, not least because the immune system in the intestines in not quite the same as it is in the blood, which is where it is more usually studied. Immune cells and signals do different things according to where they are. As Fiona said, it’s all about location, location, location!
Fiona was one of the first people to receive a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and she has made important contributions to immunology throughout her career. As a DPhil student in Oxford, she discovered the role of regulatory T cells in suppressing inflammation, and later she developed some of the first mouse models for inflammatory bowel disease. Today, she is Head of the Experimental Medicine Division and the Translational Gastroenterology Unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, as well as being the inaugural Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology.
Many congratulations to Fiona, and to Professor Matthias Mann, a German researcher who also wins the Prize this year for his work on developing the use of mass spectrometry in proteomics.
Image credit: Wellcome Images
Nuts and bolts: the neuron
The neuron. Click for the full diagram (PDF)
Individual neurons were first identified by Santiago Ramón y Cajal at the end of the 19th century. Using a tissue-staining technique invented by Camillo Golgi, he produced microscopy images showing that the brain is not a continuous mesh of tissue but formed from individual cells, or neurons.
A single neuron may be connected to as many as 200 000 others, via junctions called synapses. They form an extensive network throughout the body, and can transmit signals at speeds of 100 metres per second. This enables animals to process and respond to events rapidly, for example by carrying sensory information from the ears to the brain, then instructions for movement from the brain to the leg muscles.
Within a neuron, signals are transmitted by a change of membrane voltage – a variation in the difference in electrical charge between the inside and outside of the cell. This electrical signal moves along the neuron as an electrical pulse (the ‘action potential’).
The nature of the connection between neurons was hotly debated until early-20th-century experiments by Otto Loewi and Sir Henry Dale (a founding trustee and chairman of the Wellcome Trust) showed that signals are typically transmitted across synapses by chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Researchers are investigating how changing levels of neuron activity alter the number of synapses and how well they transmit signals. This has given us insight into cognitive processes such as memory and learning, and has suggested treatments for diseases in which neural network activity becomes uncontrolled, such as epilepsy.
There is also great interest in glial cells, found in the spaces between neurons. Some glial cells (astrocytes) maintain the composition of this watery space, helping neurons to function properly. Others (oligodendrocytes) wrap neurons in an insulating myelin sheath, which can become damaged in neurodegenerative conditions such as stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy. A better understanding of how neurons interact with glial cells may help in finding new treatments for these conditions. Read more…
The only way is Wikipedia
Alex Bateman
In a world in which anti-science appears to be on the increase, it is imperative that scientists improve how they engage with the general public about their research. A traditional way to do this is to give talks at science fairs and engage directly with schools. A problem with this ‘standard’ public engagement approach, however, is that the reach can be quite limited and is often a case of preaching to the converted.
Of course, if your research is ‘hot’ enough you can push stories through the mass media, such as TV and newspapers, hoping that the results don’t get too garbled in the telling. I believe that these limitations, combined with the fact that many of these activities are time-consuming, inhibit many scientists from communicating effectively with the public.
If you really want to let the public know about your science then the only way is Wikipedia. For better or worse, Wikipedia has become the central repository of knowledge on the internet. If you don’t believe me then try the following experiment. Pick a word and type it into Google. For most terms – e.g. ‘malaria’, ‘research’ or ‘opinion’ – Wikipedia is the top hit.
If you want to get a quick overview of a topic, it’s likely you’ll go straight to Wikipedia. Now think about the hundreds of millions of internet users out there who will, at some point, want to find out something about science, technology or medicine. I’m afraid that they will almost certainly not be heading to your latest research article to do so.
Editing Wikipedia can seem daunting at first. Some researchers might be put off because their first impulse is to tackle editing an article there the same way as they would write a research paper – perfect it and then let others review it before final publication. Wikipedia doesn’t work that way. You don’t need to rewrite the history of a science article, just add a sentence here, a reference there. You can make a useful contribution to Wikipedia without making a large investment of your time.
So if you are interested in helping the public understand what your research is all about then I urge you to learn how to edit and improve Wikipedia. Find the relevant article and make whatever changes you think are needed to ensure that the content is scientifically accurate and up to date. It doesn’t take a lot to make a big difference, and you get to fulfil some of your public engagement responsibilities in the process too.
Alex Bateman
Dr Alex Bateman is a research scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) affect the world’s poorest people, causing death, disability and prolonged disadvantage. Many of these diseases lack effective treatments but the rising profile of NTDs means more resources are becoming available for research and development. However, the challenges of finding new drugs for NTDs go beyond funding, as Michael Regnier reports in the fourth post in our NTDs series.
A handful of NTDs – schistosomiasis, trachoma and hookworm, for example – have effective drugs available for treating them. For these diseases, the challenge lies in acquiring and distributing sufficient doses to treat the millions of people suffering with them. However for many, if not most, NTDs either there are no drugs or the drugs we do have are old, cause significant side-effects, are very expensive, or are losing their potency because the parasites, viruses and bacteria that cause the diseases are developing drug resistance. Read more…
Prof. Elaine Fox
What causes mental illnesses such as anxiety disorder or depression? Are some people more likely to develop these conditions than others? What is the best way to treat them? These are just some of the challenging questions that Professor Elaine Fox, a psychologist at the University of Essex, is trying to answer. She and her colleagues have recently found that a variation in the gene that encodes a particular protein could make some people more sensitive to their emotional environment – and more susceptible to anxiety disorders – than others. I spoke to Professor Fox to find out more.
Which protein have you been studying?
We’ve been looking at the serotonin transporter, a protein that ‘recycles’ serotonin [a neurotransmitter] during nerve signalling. When a nerve signal is passed from one neuron [nerve cell] to the next, serotonin released by the first neuron carries the signal across the gap to the second neuron. Afterwards, serotonin transporters remove serotonin from the gap and return it to the initial neuron, ready to be released again when another nerve signal is transmitted.
Why were you interested in it?
We’ve known for a while that the gene that contains the instructions for making the serotonin transporter seems to play a role in increasing the risk of a person being emotionally vulnerable, particularly in relation to depression and anxiety.
This gene varies across the population. Some people have short versions that result in them having fewer copies of the serotonin transporter, and therefore higher concentrations of serotonin in the gaps between neurons. Others have long versions of the gene that lead to more copies of the serotonin transporter and lower serotonin levels.
About a year ago Arne Öhman, and his group from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, published a paper that showed that people with short versions of the serotonin transporter gene learnt to fear [by exposure to a “highly annoying but not painful” electric shock] much more quickly than people with long versions.1 Their findings suggested that these people have brains that are much more reactive to threat.
I thought it would be really interesting to look at this link between the serotonin transporter gene and how the brain learns in the context of the attention bias modification (ABM) procedures that I was already using. Read more…
Gourmet Science
In the latest of our shortlisted entries to the 2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Jasmine Spavieri takes on a gastronomic journey.
It all starts with an apple pie. That fresh-from-the-oven baked crust, curling around the rich, succulent fruit. Steaming corkscrews of warmth bring the aroma to our nose, ringing bells of desire. Get to work salivary glands! Ready the battleground for a scrumptious engagement.
Success. We’ve managed to load the perfect ratio of pie crust to apple filling onto our dessert fork. A quick pitstop into the vanilla ice cream and we’re good to go. Oh, sensory jubilation!
In this post, broadcaster and journalist Quentin Cooper talks about the search for a good story .After starting my career as a news trainee with the BBC I went on to present the arts programme ‘Kaleidoscope’. Interestingly for me, when I interviewed a photographer, visual artist or film maker nobody ever asked what my qualifications were, they just accepted I was there.
A good concept: The science of mitochondrial DNA
Three mitochondria surrounded by cytoplasm
When new scientific understanding makes novel medical treatments a possibility, it is right that society should have the opportunity to debate whether the new treatments should be adopted. This is especially important if the technology involved could present ethical concerns.
Such democratic debate, as much as the final decisions made by policy-makers, should be based on a proper understanding of the science behind the treatment. That is not always helped by the way potential medical advances are reported in the media.
Two announcements were made yesterday concerning a potential new technique using in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to prevent children inheriting mitochondrial diseases. We announced a £4.4 million award to establish the new Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research at Newcastle University. A large part of the centre’s remit is to undertake research necessary for the new treatment to be introduced, building on years of previous work by the centre’s scientists funded by the Trust, the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign and others.
At the same time, the Government has asked the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to run a public dialogue exercise to gauge views as to whether this kind of treatment would be acceptable.
The technique has been reported before – notably last year when it was the subject of a report by an HFEA expert scientific panel. Their study concluded that while there was no evidence to suggest the technique was in any way unsafe, more research was needed before it could be licensed because it was a new technique for use on human embryos and, while any new medical technique has associated risks, these risks should be managed to be as small as possible in this case.
Many media reports of the panel’s 2011 conclusions described the proposed procedure as ‘three-parent IVF’ (here are some examples: BBC, New Scientist, Independent). Several reports of yesterday’s announcements repeated this phrase (see the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Channel 4 and the BBC, who have since changed their wording to “Three-person IVF”), which is in danger of becoming a common, but flawed, concept of the technique. Read more…
Replay: Engines of destruction
Food has evolved to be experienced as something that is, on the whole, delicious. But in addition to enlivening taste buds, food and the calories within are the source of power needed to make us move, think and live. Every cell in the human body (barring red blood cells) contains the means to convert carbohydrate into the energy needed by cells to perform their basic and vital functions: mitochondria.
These numerous, self-contained ‘organelles’ inhabit our cells, churning out molecular energy to be used in the daunting number of tasks a normal cell must achieve every second in order to ensure its smooth running. But more than mere ‘batteries’, mitochondria have their own genetic identity, their own DNA separate from that in other cells in the body, affording them a touch of independence from the vast genetic repository of the cell’s nucleus.
Where there’s DNA there’s also the possibility for mutation and mitochondria are not exempt. In around one in every 6500 women (because mitochondria are passed directly from the mother’s egg to the foetus) such mutations in the mitochondrial DNA pass unrepaired from mother to child. Unfortunately, many of these mutations result in the child inheriting any one of a number of associated, debilitating mitochondrial diseases – the result of mitochondria not being able to live up to their cell’s energetic expectations. This can set in motion an evolutionary domino effect, with successive women carrying such mutations, passing the disease onto subsequent generations.
In this film, recent research from Professor Doug Turnbull and his team (now part of the newly-announced Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research at Newcastle University explain the safe, permanent, way they’ve developed to stop the passage of faulty mitochondria once and for all.
What struck me when I spoke with Doug and Professor Alison Murdoch, Professor of Reproductive Medicine at Newcastle University and Head of Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life, was the apparent controversy surrounding such work; it seems the mere mention of ‘human embryos’ is enough to spark controversy without regard for the precise nature and potential of the work being carried out.
The human material they use for this research is provided entirely voluntarily and, were it not used, would simply be discarded. Doug, Alison and others are pioneering a way to eliminate human misery and suffering, removing a biological albatross from families throughout the UK. Isn’t one of science’s greatest achievements this ability to improve lives through such advances?
Monogamy is easy
In the latest of our shortlisted entries to the 2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Fiona Lethbridge explains the reproductive strategies of the males of different insect species.
It’s hard enough having to spread yourself thinly during your normal daily activities – work, sustenance, childcare, rest, the list goes on. Luckily for us monogamous types, our efforts in the bedroom are most often directed towards one individual. Imagine, though, the dilemma of having to divide your reproductive resources between many partners. If you were a male seed beetle (Callosobruchus maculatus), you might face this very problem. You would have a limited supply of ejaculate, numerous females of differing ages and reproductive states, lots of rival males, and about a week to live. To fulfil your evolutionary potential and achieve reproductive success you need to prioritise your sexual encounters – do you allocate a little of your seed to several different females, which may offer fairly decent returns, or do you use up all your sperm on one ripe, virgin female in the hope of fertilising each one of her hundreds of eggs? Read more…
Mark Hahnel introduces a new free service aiming to push forward open access.
The Wellcome Trust has a strong view on open access and scientific data, expecting authors of research to “maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free”. Other funders have statements along similar lines and the UK’s science minister, David Willetts recently declared a “commitment by the coalition [government] to transparency and open access to publicly funded data”. Yet scientists are notoriously secretive, due in no small part to the current model of scientific publishing.
Scientists carry out research to push the boundaries of knowledge. In the current model of dissemination, a small fraction of this knowledge is handed over to journals in the form of scientific articles, or ‘papers’, for them to sell at a profit (with profit margins increasing).
Journal subscriptions and profits 1986-2008. Source: Association of Research Libraries. 2008.
Is this how science should be disseminated? The current process is based on a 17th century model, which was undoubtedly the best way to share this knowledge at the time. But today, the internet offers new ways to publish scientific data that many argue to be better. Read more…
Though you might not notice, advances in genetics and genomics are revolutionising everyday healthcare – something young people need to be prepared to engage with, say Matthew Hickman, Bella Starling and Peter Finegold.
A recent article on BBC News highlighted the apparent gap between the promises made when the human genome was sequenced, and what doctors are able to offer in terms of disease diagnosis and treatment.
The article mentions some ‘promises’ already in clinical practice, such as pharmacogenetics, but suggests that the cost of sequencing a person’s whole genome is a limiting factor. However, whole genome sequencing has already been used in medical diagnoses, with some commercial suppliers advertising a fee of $698 for whole ‘exome’ sequencing, and Life Technologies’ new machine being capable of whole genome sequencing for $1000 – a long-targeted barrier.
Read more…
Jim Ryder
What is the role of inquiry-based learning in an inspiring science education? And what are its boundaries and limitations? University reader and researcher Jim Ryder suggests the greatest promise for scientific inquiry lies in supporting understanding of the practices of the professional scientist, but that this goal cannot be achieved through inquiry alone.
Advocacy of ‘scientific inquiry’ is common in discussions of school science. However, the meaning of this call is clouded by two issues. First, there is often a failure to distinguish between scientific inquiry as a learning aim (what we want students to learn about scientific inquiry) and as a set of teaching/learning approaches (inquiry activities that support student learning). Second, there is often insufficient detail about what teaching/learning approaches might count as scientific inquiry and how these activities would fit within an extended teaching/ learning sequence.
Let us first consider scientific inquiry as a learning aim. In other words: what do we want students to learn about the practices of the professional scientist? Based on the history, sociology and philosophy of science, we might want students to learn about. Read more…
Neglected tropical diseases: The Wellcome connection
In the third post of our series about neglected tropical diseases, Penny Bailey explores the history of the Wellcome Trust’s consistent support for research into tropical medicine, encompassing many diseases that have been labelled ‘neglected’.
A look back over the Wellcome Trust’s history of funding research into tropical diseases suggests it’s not a career for the faint-hearted: a certain resilience to capture by bandits along with a readiness to use yourself as bait to trap disease-carrying insects seems to have been par for the course.
Thanks to that bold and pioneering spirit, early Trust-funded research into tropical diseases has developed into thriving research programmes on the African, Asian and South American continents. Rooted in long-standing partnerships with local researchers, communities and institutions, our Major Overseas Programmes (MOPs) tackle a range of health problems, including malaria, anaemia, tuberculosis, typhoid and several ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (NTDs) such as leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease. The MOPs also help train, support and equip researchers to help them address the health challenges on their doorstep. Read more…
The Mystery of the split-brain
In the latest of our shortlisted entries to the 2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Jerome Langford tells us how the brain is more than the sum of its parts.
Very few people can claim to have never paused for a little introspection on who they really are. From psychology to philosophy, the fascination with identity has been tirelessly studied over many years. Aside from academic interest, the preservation of cultural and spiritual identity in this modern age of homogenising globalisation is an issue close to the hearts of many.
For most people however, life is too short to worry about whether or not you truly are who you think you are. Between juggling work and maintaining an active social life, there is little room for some good old-fashioned existential musing. To counter this prevailing attitude, let’s take a glimpse into the bizarre and astonishing world of ‘split-brains’.
Wellcome Image of the Month – Wine crystal
The subject of January’s Wellcome Image of the Month might not be instantly recognisable, but I’d wager that more than a few of you came into contact with it over the festive period, most likely decanted from a bottle into a glass, then poured down your gullet. Yes, this is a confocal micrograph of crystals present in wine.
Dr Fernan Fedrici and Marcia Sartor first dehydrated a Malbec from their home province of Mendoza, Argentina, before using polarizing light and a magnification on 20x to capture the striking image displayed above. At a time of year when huge numbers of people will be resolving to cut down on their alcohol intake, it’s certainly a novel way to enjoy your favourite tipple, free from the dangers of over consumption. And for a significant proportion of people, giving up alcohol is not as simple as it may sound. In Great Britain 9.3 per cent of men and 3.65 per cent of women currently suffer from alcohol dependency.
New research offers cause to be optimistic for those though. The fruit of the Japanese raisin tree (Hovenia dulcis) has long been used to counteract alcohol intoxication and poisoning in East Asia (compounds in the fruit increase activity of alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase). Now, Jing Liang and her team at the University of Los Angeles in California have identified the flavonoid dihydromyricetin (DHM) as a key component in this effect. They found that in cultured rat neurons, DHM enhanced GABA currents. And as alcohol tolerance and withdrawal symptoms are the result of reduced GABAergic inhibition, DHM could have a significant clinical application in reducing alcohol intake if further studies prove positive.
Al McCartney, Wellcome Images
References and further reading
- Shen, Y., Lindemeyer, A., Gonzalez, C., Shao, X., Spigelman, I., Olsen, R., & Liang, J. (2012). Dihydromyricetin As a Novel Anti-Alcohol Intoxication Medication Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (1), 390-401 DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.4639-11.2012
- NHS Choices
- The NHS Information Centre, Lifestyles Statistics: ‘Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2011’
