Part of Words on Monday
Curated by Nature
The Nature Debate: Biology And Physics: The Next 50 Years
Physics helped define the 20th century. We know that its numerous impacts include electric power, the microchip and the automobile. We also know that these have helped to cause global warming and a rate of species-loss not seen since the last mass extinction. Will the next 100 years be dominated by biology? What role will physics play? And what will the likely impacts be?
Join three distinguished panellists -- a physicist, a biologist and a historian -- as they cast their gaze into the future of science, during a lively evening organized by the weekly science journal, Nature.
Panellists:
David Edgerton, Professor of the History of Science, Imperial College London
Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine, University College London
Alison Wright, Editor of Nature Physics
Chair: Ehsan Masood, Acting Chief Commissioning Editor, Nature
Host: Nick Campbell, Managing Editor, Nature
Biographies
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London of which he is also the founding director. His most recent books are Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970, and The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. A prolific essayist he has written for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Prospect and Nature. He is currently completing a book on Britain in the Second World War.
Lewis Wolpert is Professor Emeritus of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College London where he has worked since 1987. Wolpert's research is in the field of developmental biology, which seeks to describe how it is, for example, that cells in muscle, or skin arrange themselves as legs in one place and arms in another. His books include The Triumph of the Embryo (Oxford, 1991), based on his 1986 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. He also wrote The Unnatural Nature of Science (London, 1993), against what he saw as philistine attacks from journalists and politicians against modern science. His latest book is How we Live and Why we Die: The Secret Lives of Cells.
Alison Wright is the Chief Editor of Nature Physics. A graduate of the University of Manchester, she completed her PhD in high-energy particle physics in 1995, having conducted research at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. She conducted postdoctoral research at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and then at CERN in Geneva, focusing on two-photon interactions in electron-positron collisions at CERN's Large Electron-Positron collider. She has worked with the BBC Radio Science Unit before moving to Nature where she worked as a News and Views editor. In 2004, she was appointed to head up the launch team of Nature Physics, the first issue of which came out in 2005.
Ehsan Masood is a science journalist and currently the Acting Chief Commissioning Editor of Nature. He also teaches international science policy to journalism students at Imperial College London and is a trustee of Leadership for Environment and Development. He is a regular panellist on Home Planet on BBC Radio 4 and his books include Science and Islam: A History (Icon, 2009), and Dry: Life Without Water (Harvard, 2006)
Choose where you would like to sit. Use our seating plan to choose your price and seat.
Date: Monday 8 June
Time: 19:00
Venue: Hall One
Please note that online booking closes 90 minutes prior to the start of the performance.
