Lunch Hour Lectures - Spring 2012 - Audio

Surgeons look back and see the expectations of their predecessors exceeded, and obstacles to progress once thought to be insurmountable, bypassed as a matter of routine. But in cancer surgery there have been some notable reversals. Selection of only the most favourable cases and the need to accompany operations with chemotherapy and radiotherapy must raise doubts about how effective surgery itself is in controlling cancer. In this lecture, to mark World Cancer Day, Professor Treasure will describe research findings and changes in practice that indicate that the limits of cancer surgery may have already been overstepped. He poses the question: when our present day efforts become history, how will cancer surgery be judged by future generations?

In the sixteenth century, the rise of Muscovy was accompanied by military aggression and the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. As a result of military conflicts and cultural differences, Westerners began to see Russia as a barbarian kingdom, whose rulers kept it locked away from the outside world. However, this lecture will demonstrate that the court of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and other tsars was actually a focus point of exchange in technology, commodities and ideas with both the East and the West, and that Muscovite regalia, court rituals and illuminated manuscripts were in fact a result of intensive global interactions.

Since 1945, the language of human rights has acquired great potency and resonance. Human rights law plays an ever-greater role in national legal systems, and states are now expected to respect an ever-growing range of basic rights. However, a growing backlash can now be detected against the apparently ever-expanding scope of human rights guarantees. Has the concept of human rights been stretched too far? Has it departed from its core mission? This lecture will address some of these questions, and make the case for an expansive conception of rights.

Natural selection is a kind of search engine. Given enough time, and suitably vast populations, it should find the best solutions repeatedly. So why are bacteria still bacteria? And why did all complex life on our planet share an ancestor that only arose once in four billion years? I will suggest that everything we see around us stemmed from a freak accident two billion years ago. We are far from inevitable, and may be alone in a universe of bacteria.

Detailed research on the impact of Facebook on a population reveals very different consequences from those generally presented in newspapers. It also suggests the future of such social networking sites may be very different from their past.

The Arctic’s supposed promise of abundant natural resources, shipping routes and scientific discoveries, has a long held fascination for those prepared to brave its harsh environment. With climate models predicting that the Polar Regions are the most sensitive to climate change, our need to understand them becomes increasingly important. The sub-zero temperatures and inhospitable icescapes faced by explorers also present problems to scientists collecting data. This lecture focuses on how satellites can help us understand the changing Arctic, and will also come back down to Earth to show UCL scientists stepping out onto the frozen ocean to validate the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which is designed to measure changes in the ice cover with unprecedented accuracy.