Video/Podcasts

Episode four of the weekly science news podcast with Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy. This week they discuss the tiny movements of the Mars rover Spirit.

The Third installment of the pulse project podcast hosted by Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy. This weeks topics discussed include citizen science project solar storm watch. The new ideas from the Seti institute.

Charles Webster

9th of February 2010 Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

This paper gives an insight into the inner or ‘secret’ history of the upper ranks of the British health administration, based on many interviews with senior officials. After World War I, the work of the new Ministry of Health was handicapped by the economic depression. In addition, the new department was handicapped by the premature death of Sir Robert Morant, its architect and first Permanent Secretary. The success of the department depended on the harmonious working relation between the Permanent Secretary and Chief Medical Officer. Under the first incumbents, who were in office until 1935, this harmony failed to materialize. In addition, the early talent recruited to the department was quickly dissipated. By the late 1930s the health department had sunk into the doldrums.

This is the second Pulse Project Podcast hosted by Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy. This weeks news stories include the discussion of the taking down of a science website by wordpress due to complaints link.

This is the first pulse project podcast. Brendon and Colin discuss some science stories of the week. This podcast is a chance for open discussion of science in the news. So if you want to get involved, email us stories or even just clarify some issues email us on podcast@pulse-project.org we look forward to hearing from scientists who wish to add to the stories for greater understanding.

A short Documentary about the 1023 campaign. At 10:23am on January 30th, more than four hundred homeopathy sceptics nationwide took part in a mass homeopathic 'overdose' in protest at Boots' continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them. This is the protest in Oxford.

Dan Stone

8th of December 2009 Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

It has become common to argue that the Nazi Euthanasia programme was an important way-station on the ‘twisted road’ to Auschwitz, that the elimination of ‘undesirables’ that began with the murder of asylum inmate

Volker Roelcke

24 November 2009 Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

In this lecture, Volker Roelcke details the history of the relationships between eugenics and medical genetics between 1910-1060, demonstrating that the history of eugenics can yield broader analytical tools for investigating the international dimension connecting medicine, science, and politics. Volker reconstructs the emergence of institutionalized research agendas in the field of psychiatric genetics in three national contexts,

Maria Teschler-Nicola

3rd Nov 2009, Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

In this fascinating lecture, the Natural History Museum in Vienna’s Maria Teschler-Nicola explores the points of convergence between Austrian anthropological and medical traditions between 1850 and 1920. Investigating a largely neglected period dominated by physicians, anatomists, pathologists, and geologists and their respective research interests, this lecture focusses on the lives and achievements of various key figures such as Ferdinand v. Hochstetter and the anatomist Carl Toldt who promoted the young physician Rudolf Poech. Poech, a member of the team the Academy of Sciences sent to study the 1897 plague outbreak in India, was also an early supporter of a ‘modern biology’ that increasingly centred on hereditary theories, an approach he explored through numerous research projects on both European as well as non-European populations.

Benedek Varga

20 Oct 2009, Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865) was a Hungarian physician who, in 1847, discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by improving on hand washing standards. As head of Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, he reduced puerperal fever’s mortality rate to 1-3%. Although his achievements were welcomed by some, he also encountered serious criticism. Dismissed from his post in 1850, Semmelweis returned to Budapest where he worked as a university professor in obstetrics. But by the time of his death aged 47 in 1865, Semmelweis’ mental balance had collapsed, he had been deserted by his family and friends, and was soon forgotten.

Andrew Williams

23rd July 2009; Oxford.

Thomas Willis (1621-75) is regarded as the founder of modern clinical neuroscience. He established the speciality of neurology and left a body of work that defined mid-seventeenth-century medicine. Recent interpretations of Willis’ work have led to a growing appreciation of his significant contributions to paediatric neurology, a speciality founded approximately three centuries after his death.

16th May 2009; British Science Association Oxford Branch

A short interview with Professor Richard Wiseman on the 16th May. This was just before his lecture on the luck Factor for the British Science Association held at Science Oxford.

12th May 2009; Skeptics in the Pub Oxford

A very short interview with Ben Goldacre on the 12th of May. This was just before Ben appeared at the Skeptics in the Pub, Oxford. Ben took the time to answer some questions on quackery, skepticism and advice for bloggers.

Juris Salaks

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia.

World War One marked a historic turning point for Latvia, and the interwar period was awash with assessments of the country’s perceived demographic crisis and the declining proportion of ethnic Latvians in Latvia. The ‘Institute for the Study of Living Strength’ was set up to battle this moral panic in Spring 1938, and comprised three departments – anthropology, population density, and eugenics. In this fascinating conference paper, Juris Salaks introduces the Institute’s hereditary and public health agendas, and its attempts to engage with the wider Latvian public unto its dissolution in 1940.

Prof Paul Weindling

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia

In his opening address to the conference on “Eugenics, Race and Psychiatry in the Baltic States: a Trans-National Perspective 1900-1945” (7/8 May, Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia), Paul Weindling introduces the themes and ambitions of various discourses on race and racial anthropology more widely, and discusses their relevance to the Baltic states and their ethnic composition in particular. Offering a fascinating insight into the general history of race and eugenics, Paul Weindling discusses the transformation from imperial dynasties to democracies and the intensification of anthropological research locally as well as internationally. During the First World War frequently anthropological traditions turned into biological determinism that although continuously criticized and challenged, nonethess gained great influence - and so too in the Baltics.

Arunas Germanavicius

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia.

This lecture offers an analysis of the development of Lithuania’s psychiatric services between gaining its independence in 1918 and the Soviet occupation of 1940. Psychiatric services in Czarist Russian territories belonging to Lithuania had been underdeveloped, and in 1903 the only major regional psychiatric hospital was in Naujoji Vilnia (Vileika), a suburb of Vilnius. But its role eroded during the First World War when it served as military base.

Octavian Buda

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia.

Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) is identified as the founder of contemporary scientific psychiatry, as well as of psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics. Kraepelin believed that psychiatric diseases stemmed  from biological and genetic malfunctions. His theories dominated the field of psychiatry at the start of the twentieth century, despite the later psychodynamic incursions of Sigmund Freud and his followers.

Bjorn Felder

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia.

This paper seeks to examine these themes by scrutinising Latvian racial anthropology after 1918 within not only its local, but its European context. A ‘latecomer’ to the club of nation states, the Latvian state founded in 1918 was soon confronted with many of the problems it shared with many Central and East European states seeking to create a national history in the tradition of the European ‘master story’. The process of defining the Latvian nation was influenced by the contemporary European discourse that promoted biological paradigms as ‘modern’, while the Latvian national discourse on nationhood was dominated by ethno-nationalism by the 1930s, and that understood the nation as an organic unity generated by a distinct biological heritage. The introduction of a nationwide eugenic project in 1937 exacerbated the virulence of these biological tenets that came to dominate the definition of what a nation was.

Ken Kalling

7th May 2009; Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia.

In this lecture, Ken Kalling investigates the themes and agents that sought to biologize Estonian national thought between the turn of 19th century and the Second World War. Ken argues that Estonian eugenics’ popular appeal lay with its ability to constitute the lowest common denominator adjoining popular scientific knowledge, populism, and social reasoning. Analysing how a small nation’s self perception broached the questions of how to regulate the quality and quantity of it’s ‘stock’, and the influence exerted by its substantial pre-independence anti-alcohol movement, Ken traces the institutionalisation of Estonian eugenics from the 1924 creation of  the ‘Estonian Eugenics Society’ unto the 1940 Soviet rescinding of the country’s eugenic legislation.

Tim McHugh

28th April 2009; Oxford Brookes University

This lecture seeks to contest Jean-Pierre Goubert’s picture of eighteenth-century Brittany as a medical desert by examining the roles played by parish priests in shaping the medical experience of the peasantry.  The parish priest in Brittany was largely responsible for implementing much of the charitable action unlocked by the Catholic Reformation.  One part of this was the ‘rescuing’ of the peasantry from medical ignorance.  The paper also argues that parish priests deserve to be seen as amateur practitioners in their own right.

Anne Digby

17th March 2009; Oxford Brookes University

Race has been called the South African disease, and in this lecture I shall be discussing two aspects of it as it relates to my recent and forthcoming research on the history of medicine in South Africa. After outlining some general points about the distinctive features of the country, I outline my current project on changing access to public and private healthcare in a segregationist and then apartheid society from the 1940s to 1990s.

Steve King

17 March 2009; Oxford Brookes

This lecture looks at the inter-relationships between clothing and medicine. It explores some established fields (clothing as protection from disease and clothing and medicine in advice literature for instance), but also a wide range of under-explored topics such as clothing as a vector of disease and clothing as therapy and cure for disease.

28th February 2009, Oxfordshire Science Festival Opening Day,

The 2009 ‘Oxfordshire Science Festival’ began with the launch event ‘Science in Your World’ held on the 28 February 2009 in Oxford’s Bonn Square. Opened by Professor Marcus Du Sautoy’s ‘Mind Games’ show, the event featured 15 organizations whose themed stalls showcased their particular research interests with various hands on activities for all ages, in addition to the half hourly science shows.

Anna Nekaris

9th December 2008; Science Oxford

Could the Yeti really exist, or is it just a popular legend? Anthropologist and primate expert, Dr Anna Nekaris, will be explaining how you find unknown animals, looking at examples of new species of primate still being discovered today, and exploring the likelihood of the Yeti's existence. She will also bring us up-to-date with recent research into unidentified hairs reportedly taken from a Yeti-like creature in India.

Susan Cheyne

4th December 2008; Science Oxford

“The charismatic orang-utan and the singing, swinging gibbon are threatened by logging, oil palm, the illegal pet trade and forest fires.  But more people are learning how they can help our primate cousins, so the situation is not all bleak.  Dr Susan Cheyne will discuss what we know about these wonderful creatures, and how they can be protected”

Becky Dulieu

27th November 2008; Science Oxford.

What impacts do domestic cats have on wild bird populations? Despite being fed regularly by their owners, a proportion of domestic cats will still hunt wild prey.  Join Becky Dulieu as she investigates whether this predatory behaviour is contributing to the decline of wild bird populations

Mike Bonsall

20th November 2008; Science Oxford.

Dr Mike Bonsall provides an insight into the lifestyles of the minibeast. By focussing on the diversity of insects we find in our own gardens, he will look in particular at ‘pest insects’ and how we can use bugs to control bugs.

Danielle Schreve

12th November 2008; Science Oxford.

Over the last half million years, Britain has experienced extreme variations in climate, switching from “Ice Ages” to warmer times when hippos wallowed in the Thames.

Mike Widdowson

31 October 2008; Science Oxford.

‘Continental flood basalt’ eruptions are examples of volcanic ‘super-eruptions’. They can smother hundreds of thousands of square miles in red-hot molten rock, create stacks of lava over a mile thick and spew out mind-boggling quantities of toxic gas. Dr Mike Widdowson investigates the geological record for past eruptions, and speculates upon what might happen if such super-eruptions were to occur today – after all, it’s only a matter of time before the next one blows!

Bill McGuire

30 Oct 2008; Science Oxford.

The future of the Earth's climate looks bleak - new research points to higher temperatures, bigger storms, more floods and the drowning of coastal towns and cities across the planet. Prof Bill McGuire, head of Europe's leading academic hazard research centre, explains that if we are to stop it from happening we may have less than 10 years to do something about it.