This lecture is now full – to be put on the waiting list please email Katie Weeks (k.weeks@imperial.ac.uk).
Look to the person on your left, then to the person on your right – two out of three of you will die for reasons associated with your genes.
Until recently, most of us were killed by external agents such as starvation, cholera and filthy air. Now that heritable diseases such as cancer and diabetes are becoming more significant, it might seem that more of our fate resides in DNA.
Geneticists are becoming uneasily aware that the more we learn, the less we really understand. The idea that simple genes are linked to simple conditions faded with the human genome project and has faded further with ‘missing heritability’ – the failure to find genes behind even basic attributes such as height.
Genes always work within an environmental context, and the relative importance of the two is often impossible to separate. In the question of nature and nurture, the more we learn about genes, the more important the environment appears to be.
Biography
Steve Jones is emeritus professor of genetics at UCL, where he has been for almost 40 years. In that time he has become one of the world’s top six experts on the genetics of land snails (and the other five agree), but this does not stop him from pontificating about human genetics, marine biology, and other subjects about which he knows little.
He has written a number of popular science books and his latest, The Serpent’s Promise, an attempt to re-write the Bible as a scientific text, appears in early 2013.
Peter Lindsay 1920-2006
This lecture is presented by the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in partnership with the City and Guilds College Association.
Professor Peter Lindsay was a renowned electrical engineer who escaped Poland when Hitler invaded in 1939, and came to London, where he gained a BSc, MSc and PhD at Imperial in quick succession. He specialised in research on microwave electron tubes (valves) and produced seminal papers on electron velocity distributions and noise phenomena in magnetron devices.
He worked in industry and academia in the US before returning to England as a lecturer in electrical engineering at King’s College. He was promoted to reader in 1970 and to a personal chair in physical electronics in 1974. He also served as dean of engineering. He was a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Physics and the City and Guilds College.