With the development of new vitrification techniques, egg freezing has become a viable option for women to protect and extend their fertility. Being able to control when to have children can help achieve life-goals. But there are downsides. This lecture explains the science of fertility and egg freezing, the impact of child-bearing and rearing on women’s educational and employment prospects, and outlines the law on freezing eggs. It will cover the complex issues around the law's regulation of th...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Many people are inspired by stories of individual litigants, often with few financial resources and little assistance, taking on large corporations in court and fighting for their rights. This lecture will explore some of those stories, from Thomas Cook to the islanders in Barbuda, and from the perspective of a lawyer who has represented many Davids against many Goliaths. A lecture by Leslie Thomas QC The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College ...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Are villains cardboard characters? If so, why do we enjoy them so much? Drawing examples from film and TV drama, as well as from popular fiction, this lecture will try to explain the satisfaction of villainy for the audience. Using the novels of Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy, it will look at the development of the villain in nineteenth-century fiction; and at examples of contemporary literary novelists, like Hilary Mantel, who are willing to unleash the energies of villainy. A lecture by John ...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr 5 min
What is dementia? Is it inevitable as we live longer that more of us will suffer dementia, or could we live longer lives without getting it? There are hundreds of different causes of dementia, and this lecture will look at how they are diagnosed and where we are with treatment and prevention. What can you do to reduce your risks of getting dementia, and – if you do get it- what’s the best treatment? A lecture by Martin Rossor The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available ...
Apr 06, 2022•53 min
How can new worlds be discovered, and how many exo-planets might be out there? What does today’s technology in astronomical observatories now enable, and what is it that holds us back from finding what is actually out there? What hinders us from pushing forwards the frontiers of space science? A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/planetary-universe ...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Dr Nathan Robinson’s video of him removing a plastic drinking straw from a sea turtle’s nose went viral in 2015. He has since been developing new ways of using technology to gain insights into the secret lives of marine creatures, including capturing the first footage of a live giant squid in US waters and mounting cameras on shells of sea turtles. This lecture will give a practical guide to building viral science stories to bring about environmental change. A lecture by Dr Nathan Robinson The t...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr
Science fiction’s most frequent alternative to human is 'alien', another rich imaginative resource with which to think about what makes us human. This lecture will include reflections on various aliens, from H.G. Wells Selenites, to Octavia Butler’s Oankali, the genetic traders who link the novels of her Xenogenesis trilogy who are imagined as both saving and enslaving humanity. Whether aliens are imagined as conquerors or saviours, their superiority has often been used to explore human limitati...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 2 min
The law has been used to entrench and uphold racial prejudice, most infamously in South Africa during the apartheid years, but also in the United States in the period up to the mid-twentieth century. In South Africa and the southern states of America, judges showed themselves willing to use the law to uphold and promote white supremacy. This lecture will discuss the uneasy interplay between the concept of the rule of law and the enforcement of segregation legislation. A lecture by Thomas Grant Q...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Monogamy is a hotly contested practice. In many cis-gender marriages, engaging in sexual intercourse with a non-spouse is regarded as a serious betrayal. But during some periods in history, it was not only accepted but expected. 'Philanderers' are now portrayed as suffering from 'sex addiction'. What do these shifts reveal about gender and sexual relations? Has the proliferation of sexualities and genders, together with rapidly changing sexual mores, dealt a death blow to monogamy? Or is it stro...
Mar 25, 2022•52 min
Some diseases are spread almost exclusively by touch or through the skin or mucus membranes. These include Ebola, several parasitic diseases such as hookworm, strongyloides and scabies and some bacterial and fungal infections. Other diseases like COVID-19 and influenza are mainly transmitted via other routes but use touch as a secondary method of spread. This has implications for controlling these diseases, including the role of isolation and sanitation. A lecture by Chris Whitty The transcript ...
Mar 25, 2022•54 min
A good night's sleep is anything but quiet: a myriad of processes occupy our brains, crucial for every aspect of our waking lives. Our increased understanding of the neuroscience of sleep – that sleep may not affect the brain in its entirety – provides a window into the human experiences of sleep deprivation, lucid dreaming, spiritual visitations and a range of clinical sleep disorders, such as insomnia, dream enactment and sleep paralysis. A lecture by Guy Leschziner The transcript and download...
Mar 24, 2022•58 min
Philanthropy has long played a key role in our communities on local, national, and global scales. Yet if we have often assumed that giving is good, we must also step back and ask, “good for whom?” In recent years, more voices are raising questions and critically engaging philanthropy and the notions of the public good. In short, how do we know when philanthropy does the public good? In partnership with the Fulbright Commission A lecture by David King The transcript and downloadable versions of t...
Mar 23, 2022•58 min
Psychosis is a mental state where people experience a 'different' world. If, as clinical psychiatry and neuroscience suggests, it is our 'default mental state' why isn't everyone psychotic? Psychosis does not arise de novo; external sensory input and cognition actively inhibit its expression. It is important to understand: how thin the boundary is between sanity and madness and what leads from one to the other; and to appreciate the frailty of rational thought. A lecture by Peter Woodruff The tr...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 2 min
The path traced out by a given point on the rim of a circle as you roll it along a straight line is a beautiful curve called a cycloid, whose appeal to mathematicians has had it dubbed “the Helen of Geometry”. This curve is known in geometry as a roulette, which is a curve you get by rolling one curve along another, and there are many more with an amazing range of applications, from clockwork toys to nuclear reactors. This lecture will provide a guided tour of the beauty of geometrical curves. A...
Mar 16, 2022•58 min
The Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, was a landmark moment in British legal history, with quasi-constitutional protection for fundamental rights. Meanwhile, the national constitutions of the Commonwealth Caribbean contain fundamental rights provisions which are often inspired by, but diverge significantly from, the European Convention. This lecture will examine the judicial protection of human rights in the UK and the Commonweal...
Mar 16, 2022•59 min
The entire Atlantic economy in the 17th and 18th centuries was based on the enslavement of (mostly) non-Christian Africans. As this lecture will show, slavery was at first a practice which many missionaries hoped to mitigate; then a vast reality with which they felt they had to work, and in which they were deeply implicated; until, finally, it became an intolerable obstacle. Spiritual and worldly matters could not, despite the missionaries’ best efforts, be kept apart: a lesson with enduring con...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 1 min
The most commonly used computer in the world is surely the one in your hand. Mobile or cellular telephony is nowadays hardly about telephony at all, but about communication in its broadest sense. Companies and governments have fallen and risen due to the use of mobile phones and in many countries without a phone you cannot transact with society. The smartphone is therefore a, if not the, pivotal innovation of this century. A lecture by Richard Harvey The transcript and downloadable versions of t...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 7 min
If, as displeased reviewers and readers sometimes complain, coincidences mar good plots, why do so many novels turn on them? From Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, to Sebastian Barry and David Nicholls, novelists have relied on coincidences. While these can reveal the weaknesses of a novel’s design, they can also be put to creative use: as we will see, novelists, like Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, choose to emphasise coincidences, making them entertaining and revealing. A lect...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min
What will the characteristics of successful innovators and entrepreneurs be in a wellbeing economy? In this lecture, we look at how the Wellbeing Economy is shaped by the co-creation of value through co-design and co-production processes, and how this promises to make success look very different from what we’ve been used to. This lecture will challenge what success looks like and give examples from Kenya, Grenada, London and Lebanon. A lecture by Jacqueline McGlade The transcript and downloadabl...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min
What was life like in 1649-1660, Britain's only decade as a republic? This lecture explores the immense changes of the period through the personal experiences of prominent figures. It argues that, despite the failure of the republican project and the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the decade forged the British Isles and created the conditions for the commercial and colonial prosperity of the centuries that followed. A lecture by Dr Anna Keay The transcript and downloadable versions of the ...
Mar 07, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Coral reefs are transforming under climate change. What is the nature of this change and the major influences upon it? The role of common management approaches is also changing. Seabird nutrient inputs through guano can benefit coral and fish growth, and have potential to help coral reefs recover from disturbances. Finally, fisheries are responding to coral reef degradation in unpredictable ways, with some finding that fish stocks are holding up well. A lecture by Nick Graham The transcript and ...
Mar 03, 2022•58 min
Risk is one of the most powerful and dangerous concepts in finance – powerful because it allows individuals and companies to earn huge returns, but dangerous because it can cause their bankruptcy. How do you measure financial risk, what is the relationship between risk and return, and how can you – surprisingly – reduce your investment risk without sacrificing any returns? This lecture will explain why even the simple idea of 'higher risk means higher return' is actually incorrect. A lecture by ...
Mar 02, 2022•59 min
Magnetic fields have mysterious effects that can be dramatically counterintuitive, and they are ubiquitous throughout the Universe and can have influence on large scales. This lecture will explore how some of the exotic and energetic phenomena in the Universe can only be explained in terms of these magnetic fields that pervade space. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.u...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min
In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (which was the first exposé of child prostitution in the UK) not only reveal attitu...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (which was the first exposé of child prostitution in the UK) not only reveal attitu...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Professor Eleanor Stride will discuss the history and development of cancer therapy from its origins in Ancient Egypt - when surgery was the only option to remove a tumour, to the more recent developments of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. She will end by looking at present-day clinical trials that aim to harness the body’s own immune system to eliminate disease (immunotherapy). A lecture by Eleanor Stride The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham Coll...
Feb 24, 2022•50 min
The Deep Sea is Earth’s last great frontier. After almost 150 years of exploration and research we understand it is deep, dark and definitely different; but there remain large gaps in our knowledge that hinder progress in sustainable management of this vast system. New technology – from manned submersibles, to satellite measurements, acoustic systems, and artificial intelligence – is key to future research, and the next ten years promises to deliver a new age of deep-sea science. A lecture by Ke...
Feb 23, 2022•1 hr
This lecture will follow the tortuous path of Prokofiev’s transformation into a Soviet artist. Prokofiev had pursued his career abroad and returned to (Soviet) Russia as a major international celebrity. Even though he was willing, in principle, to write “music for the people”, he found it very difficult to meet the precise demands of the state. Prokofiev was one of the most highly honoured Soviet artists, but he was still hounded into near silence towards the end of his life. During the lecture,...
Feb 21, 2022•1 hr 15 min
The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 led to international disruption and a crisis in the post-war order. Domestically, weaker productivity growth, the squeeze on profits, and de-industrialisation led to conflict between capital and labour. Public finances came under strain and led to major changes associated with Thatcher and Reagan. The result was an intellectual revolution: a shift to neo-liberalism with a stress on individualism and incentives rather than collectivism and equality, and greater pow...
Feb 18, 2022•57 min
Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet, Pelléas & Mélisande are three pairs of lovers who have fired composers’ imaginations. Films like Love Story, Love Actually, and Shakespeare in Love are made all the more poignant by their musical scores. And where would The Beatles, 10cc, or Queen have been without All you need is love, I’m not in love, and Love of my life? This lecture shows how there is no emotion more likely to inspire musical creativity than love. A lecture by Jeremy Summerly The...
Feb 17, 2022•1 hr
