blog

If you’re around the Great Metropolis in October, you might like to check out these two upcoming public lectures (as well as dropping by F1000 Mission Control for a coffee).

First, for the princely sum of £5 you can listen to comedy writer Daniel Maier as he examines the stranger side of the Victorian polymath and scientist Francis Galton. Cousin to Charles Darwin, Galton (among other things) coined the term ‘eugenics’ and found evidence that ability could be inherited–back in 1869! Maier will be at the National Portrait Gallery on 13^th October, talking about Galton’s work from measuring insect hearing to better ways of cake slicing.

There’s more on the more controversial aspects of Galton’s work at UCL’s Petrie Museum (free entry).

And on 24^th October, from 17.30 to 18.30 at UCL’s Cruciform Lecture Theatre 1 on Gower Street, Nobel Laureate (for green fluorescent protein–GFP) and F1000 Section Head (Chemical Biology of the Cell) Professor Roger Tsien will be giving the 2011 UCL Prize Lecture in Clinical Science. This is a popular series of lectures, and entrance is free. It’s likely to get booked up quickly: get your ticket now! (And if you’re coming, let me know and say ‘hello’).

Whether or not you can make his lecture, it’s well worth checking out the F1000-evaluated output from Tsien’s lab, particularly the latest paper on miniSOG–a genetically encoded tag visible under both light and electron microscopy. Check out this month’s The Scientist for our ‘Modus Operandi’ column, all about this new technique.