UCL RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, EVOLUTION AND ENVIRONMENT

Congratulations to Siobhan Cox who successfully passed her PhD viva held at The Natural History Museum on Friday 5 April.  Her thesis is on Diversification and Molecular Systematics in African Zosterops (Aves: Passeriformes). This project was co-supervised with Dr Julia Day (UCL GEE) and Dr Robert Prys-Jones (NHM).

On Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, Jonathan Freedland journeys from the origin of life to the possibilities of new life-forms with the geneticist Adam Rutherford. Steve Jones updates the Bible from the point of view of modern science and Barbara Sahakian looks at our ability to make decisions, and whether 'smart drugs' should be used to boost our reactions. The artist Susan Aldworth is inspired by neuro-scientific imagery to explore the relationship between mind and body in her portraits of those with epilepsy and in doing so asks how this material corresponds or contrasts with the subject's sense of self.

The Bible was the first scientific textbook of all; and it got some things right (and plenty more wrong). Steve Jones' new book rewrites it in the light of modern science. Are we all descended from a single couple, a real-life Adam and Eve? Was the Bible's great flood really a memory of the end of the Ice Age? Will we ever get back to Methuselah given that British life expectancy is still rising by six hours a day, every day?

My colleague David Wilkie who died recently at the age of 89 was an extraordinary and endearing character. As an undergraduate at Glasgow University he played football for Queens Park, then an amateur club in the professional Scottish league, having previously represented Scotland as a schoolboy. David's studies were interrupted in 1942 when, at the age of just 19, he volunteered for service in the RAF.