'How do the cells know about the jungle?'

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Joan Bakewell is a speaker who needs no introduction, and in this capacity she's been introducing and interviewing speakers on key ideas for the 21st Century. Yesterday's topic was numbers, and the speaker was Ian Stewart. She introduced him by saying that of all the topics in her series, she found mathematics the hardest to understand, but that Ian Stewart was the best person to explain it.

Bright Ideas on the HFE Act 2008

I’ve been lucky this January to have a visit here at the Forum from friend and colleague Dr Malcolm Smith, currently a Claims Manager within the Legal Services Department of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Malcolm completed his PhD last year on the issue of ‘saviour siblings’ at Queensland University of Technology, and will be returning to Brisbane in just a few months’ time (floods permitting!) to take up a lectureship in Law. In the meantime he’s taken the opportunity to visit us here in Edinburgh as part of the Forum’s Bright Ideas Programme.

One of the main activities during Malcolm’s visit has been a workshop we co-organised on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, which took place at the Forum on 20 January. This followed two other events on the HFE Act which I’ve organised in my time at the Forum – the first a major ‘retrospective’ on the policymaking process leading to the Act (London, March 2009), and the second a smaller workshop at the EGN Conference in Cardiff (October 2009).