Gresham College Lectures

The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere determines what global temperature is reached. So, just like a braking distance, future warming is determined by global emissions today, the year we start emission reductions, and the year we achieve net zero. The goal of climate policy is no longer up for debate: we have to reduce global emissions to net zero. We just need to decide when and ho...

Microplastics - tiny plastic particles less than 5mm long - were first identified in the ocean but are now known to be ubiquitous throughout the environment, within soil, air food and water. Recently, microplastics have been detected in human blood, placenta, and other tissues (liver, lung, colon) raising concerns about potential adverse health effects. This lecture reviews the science on micropla...

This lecture looks at a series of divine female figures in the ancient world from the Middle East to Western Europe: Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite and Venus.  What they have in common, is that to varying degrees they all combined the personae of deities of sexual love and of war. It brings out the special characteristics of each, traces the relationships between them, and shows how each in th...

Portrayals of hackers in the movies lead us to believe that cybercriminals are young white males who wear hoodies. The cybercriminal population is actually much more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity and other aspects. Motivations range from the ideological, to profit, to mischief and back again.  We will meet the cybercriminals in all their variety and discover how a bett...

How is music able to convey and trigger such range and depth of emotion? Why does it elicit joy, sorrow, consolation and the chills?  Employing research and theoretical models from neuroscience, psychology and musicology, we examine the extraordinary ways that primal and conditioned listening combine to such complex emotive effect.  Examples from pop, jazz, rock, film, global, traditional and clas...

The discovery that we live in an ordinary galaxy, one of several hundred billion in the observable Universe, instigated a profound change in thinking about our place in the Universe.  This first lecture covers the Great Debate of the early twentieth century as new telescopes and new ways of observing the cosmos put our Milky Way in its place; and looks at how subsequent observations helped us unde...

In the Annual Gray's Inn Reading, Dame Siobhan Keegan will present a lecture on the legal topic of freedom of expression.  A lecture by The Right Hon Dame Siobhan Keegan recorded on 15 June 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/grays-inn-23 Gresham Coll...

Sir Christopher Wren’s success was underpinned by his consummate skill as a courtier, retaining the confidence of four monarchs through social and economic disasters and political revolution. Wren's life at court can be minutely reconstructed and shows a man who was first and foremost a courtier serving the architectural whims of the Stuart dynasty. Taking Wren the courtier as its starting po...

Graph theory is the study of connections, as may be seen in the London Underground map with stations linked by rails, or a transportation network with cities linked by roads. Dating back to the 18th century, the subject increasingly took hold in the 20th century, developing rapidly from mainly recreational puzzles to a mainstream area of study with widespread applications and strong links to compu...

Did paganism survive all through the Middle Ages, as scholars once thought, remaining the religion of the common people, while the elite had embraced Christianity? Or did it die out earlier? This lecture will consider a broad range of evidence, including figures in seasonal folk rites, carvings in churches, the records of trials for witchcraft and a continuing veneration of natural places such as...

Alan Turing is well-known for his work on the Enigma code in World War II, and his theoretical work underpinning computer science. But he is less well-known for his pioneering work on one of the great challenges of biology – how do complex living organisms develop from tiny collections of cells? This lecture will discuss Turing’s ground-breaking work in this area, showing how patterns like a leopa...

What are the risks of using technological innovations in business? There are risks associated with the crypto world, including custodial risk and economic exploits. There are also regulatory risks with competition from central banks issuing their own digital currencies, and risks associated with extrapolation from patterns detected in big data by AI systems. Applying algorithms blindly can lead to...

Sickle Cell Disease can only be understood in the context of racial politics.  Predominantly seen in populations of African heritage, the diagnosis and treatment of this disease from the 1920s onwards draws attention to the importance of culture in biogenetic understandings of disease. Medical practices associated with sickle cell disease also shed light on health care disparities and the cultural...

The Universe is expanding, increasingly so. Will this persist or will it collapse back on itself? If it does expand forever, what happens to the galaxies? What is the long-term trajectory for the ultimate in collapsed matter, black holes? A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE recorded on 31 May 2023 at Barbican Centre, London. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available fro...

The Annual Sir Thomas Gresham Lecture 2023 The period from 1988 to 2003, was one of extraordinary optimism. Every year the number of democracies increased, human rights improved, violent conflict reduced, there were fewer refugees and there was less global poverty. It was an era of triumph for the western liberal Democratic model for the United States and the politics of the centre ground. But the...

AIDS is an example of a highly stigmatising ailment. This lecture explores Susan Sontag’s aphorism that “metaphors kill”. Focussing on the period before the invention of antiretroviral drugs, the lecture also addresses questions of civil liberties, gender and sexuality, race, religion, and cultures of both harm and care. By paying attention to how hierarchies of grief were created and contested, i...

Since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, some have asked whether we need a police force. This lecture will examine the role and purpose of the police in our society. What do the police do? What is their historical and social context? Does the current system of policing work? If so, for who? Are all citizens in our society policed fairly? Should we defund the police? If there were no police wha...

In partnership with the London Mathematical Society. The first female Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, left an astonishing mathematical legacy at her untimely death in 2017. This talk will explain the lasting contributions of her work to our understanding of the world, and give a glimpse into Professor Mirzakhani's imaginative and hands-on approach to mathematics.  This lecture will be deli...

The climate had a bad year in 2009. Talks collapsed. Emails were hacked. And several papers found even 50-80% reductions weren’t enough: we had to get to net zero. Yet six years later, negotiators from 190 countries acknowledged the need for net zero in the Paris Agreement, even resolving to try to limit warming to 1.5 °C, which means net zero global emissions around 2050. Can it be done? It certa...

AI is another major technological innovation. AI needs data, or more precisely, big organized data. Most data processing is about making it useful for automatic systems such as machine learning, deep learning, and other AI systems. But one big problem with AI systems is that they lack context. An AI system is a pattern recognition machine devoid of any understanding of how the world works. This le...

In the early 20th century, the system of tonal harmony started to break down. The vertical accumulations of notes became too complex for our powers of memory and recognition, and some have suggested that this led to a loss of meaning and even humanity in music. In this lecture we will discuss expressive uses of atonality, and also the return of familiar chords to music, but outside the grammar tha...

** Please note that this lecture will contain several mentions of early animal testing which some audience members may find upsetting** Christopher Wren was part of probably the first ‘research team’ assembled in Oxford in the 17th century, dedicated to better understanding the human body. With colleagues, Wren contributed to: the near-discovery of oxygen; the first human transfusion of blood; the...

Florence Nightingale is the founder of modern nursing and a pioneer of data science and medical statistics. Her innovative use of statistical diagrams helped people see just how many deaths were being caused by poor hygiene in military hospitals. This lecture will look at the importance and legacy of Nightingale’s work, which led to her becoming, in 1858, the first woman elected to the Royal Stati...

Microbes have existed on Earth for almost 4 billion years; 3x as long as multicellular organisms and 1000x longer than humans. So what does the future hold? Will recent advances in genetic engineering enable us to create bacterial ‘drug-delivery’ machines or self-replicating microbial vaccines? What will the first human-created lifeform mean for our understanding of biology? Will humanity end with...

The normal heart is very robust. Some people are born with abnormalities of the heart structure. Others acquire damage to the heart valves which become too narrow or unable to close properly. The muscle and linings of the heart may be affected by infections, drugs or other inherited or acquired diseases. All of these can cause heart failure or death if not treated. This lecture will consider the p...