The BA Festival of Science this year returned to its spiritual home after 175 years. Shefbase science correspondent, Glyn Hemsworth, went along ‘to see what all the fuss was about’ and sends us this report:
“The BA Festival of Science is an annual 7 day event that takes place in a different city each year dedicated to communicating science to the general public. It has become the largest celebration of science open to absolutely anyone and this year the festival returned to where it was first held: York.
“On each day of the festival there was a huge range of things to see from exhibitions in marquees in the City centre to talks given on nearly every form of science at the University campus. I was only able to go on the Monday but I could have quite happily spent the whole week there from the great range of topics covered by the programme.
“The first event I went to was a talk given by Lord Robert Winston discussing genetic engineering in large animals. His coverage of the topic was thorough, discussing how genetic engineering is done to the ethical and legal issues in doing this sort of research. I had not realised before attending this talk how stringently research on animals is regulated in this country. It was very good to hear that the government takes great care of the animals used in research, although Lord Winston did express a worry that such tight regulation may hamper the progress of this research and drive scientists to take their research elsewhere where such tight legislation does not exist leading to a loss of intellectual property from this country.
“I enjoyed Lord Winston’s talk so much; I decided to go for another genetics session entitled “Facing Up to Genetics”. This session included a talk given by Professor Peter Hammond on the work he has been doing using 3D photography. Certain genetic diseases manifest themselves by giving patients particular facial features and Prof Hammond’s techniques can be used to help doctors recognise these features.
“Using a 3D camera, Hammond has been able to take photographs of many children suffering from Williams Syndrome, for example, a disease that causes some learning difficulties, heart problems and quite distinctive facial features. Professor Hammond was then able to combine all his data and generate an average face for a sufferer of Williams Syndrome and then compare this to an average face for people who are not affected by any such disease. By morphing between these two images it was much easier to see what changes occurred in the face of the patient compared to an unaffected person.
“Professor Hammond’s work has hit the headlines recently but he is no longer talking to the press as he feels that he has been misquoted and people have misunderstood what the results of his work mean, saying that it could recognise whether a child is autistic or not, which it cannot. He intends his results to be used as a tool to teach young doctors how to recognise diseases like Williams Syndrome as it can take years of experience before being able to do this. This would reduce the number of genetic tests being carried out, therefore saving money, and would give parents a quicker diagnosis allowing them to come to terms with what their child is suffering from sooner.
“After all this genetics I decided to go for something completely different, so I went to a session entitled “to Boldly go: 50 Years in Space”, which was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of space missions.
“Kicking off with a question-and-answer session with three young space scientists, this gave youngsters aspiring to become space scientists an insight into how to enter the field and offered some excellent careers advice from people who have and are making their way in that world.
“After was a series of talks from this country’s finest space scientists about different types of satellites and their capabilities and what they have shown us about our solar system. I thought the talk by Dr Ian Crawford, putting forward a case for re-establishing human space travel, first to the moon and later further afield to mars, was particularly good.
“The powers-that-be in the UK have a long-standing belief that sending humans into space is too expensive, but Dr Crawford put forward an excellent argument that this should change. He argued that humans can do things that robots cannot and that with the signing of the global exploration strategy it was important for the UK to make a decision on whether to send humans into space or not.
“I personally have never really been particularly interested in space science but Dr Crawford put a slant on space science that I had not heard before, that lunar exploration could actually tell us something about the origins of our planet. Study of the early Earth is difficult as the Earth has shed much of its history. However, volcanic discharges may have been embedded on the moon and if this could be explored it could give us a wealth of information about the early earth.
“Unfortunately, that was all I had time for at the festival as I had to get back to my own research with the hope of maybe one day presenting at the festival. I would recommend this festival to anyone whether you’re a scientist or not; there’s definitely something there for everyone. Next year the festival will be in Liverpool, but if you can’t wait that long, why not try the Manchester Science Festival taking place this October.”
For more information on this festival, visit the website at www.the-ba.net/the-ba/Events/FestivalofScience
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article The Fuss About: BA Festival of Science, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.