Author Archives: Guy Collender

Science Week: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll

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Chlamydia: unlocking the secrets of a stealth pathogen

Dr Richard Hayward – a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a member of the Institute of Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck/UCL – presented his group’s latest findings on Chlamydia on 17 April during Science Week.

Professor Nick Keep and Dr Richard Hayward

Dr Richard Hayward (right) and Professor Nick Keep. Photo: Harish Patel

Dr Hayward started with an overview of bacteria, explaining that most bacteria are good so-called commensal bacteria that coexist alongside us fine. Indeed our bodies contain more bacterial cells than human cells. Some bacteria can be bad when we are weakened and there is opportunist infection. A few bacteria are always BAD, these are the pathogens such as the bacteria that cause TB. These pathogenic bacteria secrete toxins or, as in the case of Chlamydia, have developed a syringe like mechanism to inject proteins into host cells. Dr Hayward also compared the parts of both a bacterial cell and human cell to parts of a town – the power station, the waste dump and so on.

He then focussed on Chlamydia, which is the most common sexually transmitted disease. Often infections are not noticed, but even these can lead to infertility. Chlamydia infection is also associated with pelvic inflammatory disease and cancer in women. He turned to the effect on men towards the end of the talk, where his own research in collaboration with Addenbroke’s Hospital in Cambridge has shown that Chlamydia bacteria can enter sperm and will almost certainly therefore impact on male fertility.

The National Screening Programme for Chlamydia has unfortunately had a limited effect in reducing infection according to a National Audit Office report. Persuading teenagers to reduce their sexual activity has proved to be difficult. Perhaps development of a vaccine will be a more productive approach.

In the third world Chlamydia, however, is the cause of blindness by trachoma, which is an eye infection spread by touch between family members rather than a sexually transmitted disease. The WHO S.A.F.E. programme (Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness and Environmental change – access to clean water) is starting to positively impact on this form of infection.

The core of Dr Hayward’s was his group’s own research on looking at Chlamydia. Chlamydia is hard to study as it cannot be grown in liquid or plate culture, it can only be grown in cell lines. There are also no systems to manipulate its genetics. It has two stages of its life cycle – elementary bodies and reticulate bodies. These had led to a debate only recently resolved as to whether Chlamydia was a bacteria, virus or parasite.

Dr Hayward showed some beautiful pictures and movies using fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy and electron tomography, which have shown for the first time the interactions between Chlamydia and the host cell in great detail. It was even possible to just about see the needle injection apparatus of the bacteria actually penetrating the host cell. These new insights into the infection cycle show up possible places to target to counter this complex infection. Dr Hayward did an excellent job in explaining what we know and what we still need to find out.

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Science Week: The latest findings in autism research

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, of Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

ProfessorMichaelThomas400, of Birkbeck's Department of Psychological Sciences

Professor Michael Thomas shared the latest autism research during Science Week. Photo: Harish Patel

The media spotlight never seems to be far away from autism, and interest in the developmental disorder has been reignited by the measles outbreak in Swansea. The discredited research linking the MMR vaccine and autism is in the news again, and other debates about autism abound – what causes it?, how early can it be diagnosed?, and how can it be treated?

In light of these controversies and unanswered questions, it was not surprising that a packed lecture theatre awaited the thoughts of Professor Michael Thomas when he delivered his talk about autism on 17 April during Birkbeck’s Science Week. Grabbing the last seat on the back row, I joined the audience and found it refreshing to hear a considered and comprehensive assessment of the spectrum disorder that affects how a person communicates with, and relates to, other people. The talk helped separate fact from fiction and explored an interesting new hypothesis about the cause of autism too.

Professor Thomas, of Birkbeck’s Department of Psychological Sciences, explored the different causal explanations of autism. He described how genes play the major role, but that most cases involve a mixture of common variants (not mutations) and that genetic explanations do not tell the whole story. For example, Professor Thomas said that an identical twin has a 60-90 per cent chance of developing autism if the other twin is affected by the disorder. Therefore, environmental factors must play a role in determining whether a child develops autism as if genes were wholly responsible the figure would be 100 per cent. He also highlighted how the severe deprivation experienced by children in Romanian orphanages caused around 10 per cent of these children to show quasi-autism.

Birkbeck research
Referring to recent Birkbeck research, Professor Thomas explained that changes in brain activity among babies can be detected and are able to predict whether a child will develop autism. Ongoing work at Birkbeck as part of the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings (BASIS) Network is investigating these early months, and early behavioural indicators of autism are being identified at 12 months.

Professor Thomas mentioned screening for autism, but indicated that this isn’t yet a realistic prospect because of the costs involved, concerns about the accuracy of the diagnosis, and what happens after diagnosis. For instance, if autism can be diagnosed, but effective interventions do not exist, then how helpful is a test? Earlier in the lecture, he referred to interventions and stressed that where they are effective they need to be sustained and intense. Research has shown that the most promising approach is early intensive behavioural intervention, which needs to start before age two and be carried out for at least 40 hours per week over two years.

New hypothesis
Professor Thomas also set out a new hypothesis regarding the cause of autism. He explained how connections within the brain are ‘pruned’ in early and middle childhood as unused connections, which are expensive for the body to maintain, are cut away. The pruning hypothesis proposes that this natural process malfunctions in children with autism. Instead of just cutting unnecessary connections, exaggerated pruning means functional connections within the brain are cut. In some children this occurs slightly later, allowing normally looking early behaviour followed by the loss of acquired skills during the second year of life. In other children, exaggerated pruning in the first year leads to atypical development after the first few months of life. The hypothesis predicts that such pruning should affect the sensory and motor systems first, and home videos of infants with autism recorded at four or six months do show some anomalous movements.

The complexities of autism were clearly made throughout the presentation, but what was also clear is that more and more research is leading to a greater understanding of autism and is likely to lead to earlier and earlier diagnosis of the disorder.

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Science Week: Piecing together the jigsaw of climate change and human evolution

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, of Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Dr Phil Hopley, of Birkbeck's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Dr Phil Hopley exhibited replica skulls of our ancestors during Science Week. Photo: Harish Patel

I knew an unusual presentation was in store as soon as I saw six skulls menacingly positioned at the front of the lecture theatre. The exhibits – all different shapes and sizes – immediately caught the audience’s attention, and our questions about their origins were answered in the fascinating hour that followed.

Dr Phil Hopley began Birkbeck’s series of Science Week lectures with a talk on 16 April about the links between climate change and human evolution. He used the skulls – five replicas of our ancestors and one gorilla skull – to illustrate how evolution is all about the changing dimensions of the head as it has become rounder and larger to accommodate a bigger brain over millions of years. In comparison, the gorilla’s skull includes ferocious canines and space for huge powerful jaws – it certainly sent a shiver up my spine being only a few feet away from my seat.

A family tree dating back millions of years
Dr Hopley, of Birkbeck’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, explained how the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and modern humans was on this planet about six of seven million years ago. Both branches of the family tree then developed separately, with chimpanzees on the one hand, and about 20 species of hominins – the ancestors of modern humans – walking on two legs on the other. As the hominins evolved, they became characterised by their tool use, larger brains, language and art, eventually developing into Homo sapiens – our own species. But our ancestral line has not been straightforward, and Dr Hopley highlighted the complexity. He said: “Homo sapiens is the only human species alive today, but for most of human evolution there have been a number of co-existing human species.”

As Dr Hopley explained, hominin fossils have mainly been found in two areas – the Rift Valley in East Africa (dating back five million years), and caves in Southern Africa (dating back 2.5 million years). Yet, hardly surprising, given the awesome amount of time involved, it is very rare to find a whole hominin specimen. What is clear is that the human fossil record is very incomplete, both geographically and temporally, and solving the mystery is a bit like piecing together a jigsaw.

Climate change: from forest to grassland
The question of why our ancestors evolved to become bipedal was then addressed, and this was where Dr Hopley referred to his work studying fossils from caves in South Africa. The study of carbon and oxygen isotypes and climate modelling has shown that the savannah in Africa developed eight million years ago due to the reduction in carbon dioxide and reduction in rainfall. As the grasslands replaced the forests, our ancestors evolved to walk on two feet as they needed to cover large distances to search for food, which wasn’t necessary when they were still living in the forest. Although it’s difficult to build up a comprehensive understanding of how climate change drives evolution, Dr Hopley did present a general conclusion. He said: “Human evolution did occur because of climate change in the broad sense as forests were replaced by savannah.”

I’ve never been to a lecture with skulls on display before and I’ll certainly never forget this one. It was a powerful way to remind us that our common ancestors adapted to the African bush and started walking when the forests began to recede.

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Cinema and Human Rights Days

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This post was contributed by Dr Emma Sandon, Lecturer in Film and Television, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

What is the impact of cinema in raising public awareness of human rights? Can films about human rights make a difference and promote political change? These are some of the questions that the Cinema and Human Rights Days addressed at the Gordon Square cinema, Birkbeck, on 15 and 16 March. Timed to coincide with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, Birkbeck hosted a debate on human rights cinema, a screening of Salma and a Q & A with the documentary film director, Kim Longinetto, and heard John Biaggi, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival director and Nick Fraser, the BBC commissioning editor of Storyville, talk about their promotion of human rights films and programmes.

John Biaggi talked about how important it was that ‘good’ human rights films were selected for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and he explained how that criteria was arrived at, whilst Nick Fraser, in his discussion of the importance of storytelling for any programme that television commissioned, admitted that ‘the spectacle of injustice is always gripping’. Rod Stoneman, former commissioning editor at Channel 4 and director of the Irish Film Board, presented a timely discussion and screening, in the week that Hugo Chavez died, of Chavez: Inside the Coup (also entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised|) (2003), a film that caused media controversy when it was screened on the BBC and which was turned down by the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver for being biased in favour of Chavez. Participants then watched the Human Rights Watch Film Festival screening of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s film, Fatal Assistance (Haiti/France/US, 2012), an indictment of the international community’s post- earthquake disaster intervention and the failure of current aid policies and practices. The screening was followed by a discussion with the director at the ICA.

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, from Birkbeck’s School of Law, and I asked participants to consider the politics of human rights discourse in film. What is a human rights film? How has the notion of a human rights film emerged? Can we talk about a history of human rights cinema? How are human rights films selected, promoted and circulated through film festivals, broadcasting, cinema theatrical release, dvd sales and internet distribution? What are the criteria by which a human rights film is judged?

I discussed how the human rights film has been constituted by human rights film festivals, first set up in the late 1980s and 1990s by human rights organisations, to promote human rights advocacy. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and the Amnesty International Film Festival (now Movies that Matter), the two largest of such initiatives, then established the Human Rights Film Network in 2004, to ‘promote the debate on the ethics, professional codes of conduct and other standards regarding human rights film making.’ The charter of this network seeks to promote films that are ‘truthful’ and that have ‘good cinematographic quality’. It is these criteria of style and taste that become politically charged in the process of commissioning, selecting and curating films. If we look at a range of examples, it becomes clear that the subjects of human rights films are constituted in specific ways. However the way in which film represents human rights and engages viewers and audiences are complex. It is important that we understand the effects of the different audio and visual narrative and rhetorical devices used in films, be they feature films, documentary, newsreel, essay films, community or advocacy video.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera reflected on the dimension of political agency shown in films that represent revolutionary struggle in Latin America. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Story of a Death Untold, The Coup against Allende, 9/11/1973, and screening clips from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s, Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) (Cuba, 1968) and Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile) (Cuba, 1975, 1976, 1979), he weaved a layered narrative of the human potential for change. These important political films engage with the portrayal of what he termed the ‘discourse of anxiety’ and the ‘discourse of tenacity and courage’ in relation to people’s belief in the possibilities of social transformation and their ability to fight for freedom. These films are also tributes as well as memorials to those who have struggled for real social and political change.

The event was the result of a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Galway and Middlesex University and was supported by Open Society Foundations. The organisers hope to run this event in conjunction with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival again next year at Birkbeck.

The podcasts of this event are available on the School of Arts website.

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