• 18:30 - 19:30
• Babbage Lecture Theatre

Originally a term used almost exclusively in the industrial domain, automation is now being applied in most aspects of life. Yet the rationale for automating and its implications is often not clearly understood. This talk will explore the origins of automation and examine what is encompassed by the term today. It will explore the rationale, benefits and downsides of automating - including implications for the future workforce - and will attempt to provide some signposting around whether we should automate, and if so when and where. A range of industrial automation developments from more than thirty years experience will be used to support this presentation.

• 18:30 - 19:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

Structural biology has been highly successful during the last 60 years. The first protein structure of sperm whale myoglobin was solved in 1960 using X-ray crystallography, a method now producing over 10,000 structures per year, all of them deposited in and available from the Protein Data Bank (PDB).  In recent years, electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) of single particles plunge-frozen in a thin film of amorphous ice, has developed rapidly in power and resolution, so that over 3,000 PDB depositions based on cryoEM were made in the last year.  Many of these cryoEM structures represent unstable, flexible or dynamic assemblies whose structure cannot be determined by any other method, and improvements to the method are being continuously developed.  We are fortunate now to have superbly detailed images of many of the most important molecules of life, with electron microscopy still having great potential to expand its reach.

• 18:30 - 19:30
• Babbage Lecture Theatre

Imaging the metabolism of tumours is likely to play an increasingly important role in predicting and detecting tumour responses to treatment and thus in guiding treatment in individual patients. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging has long been used to study non-invasively the metabolism of tissues in the human body.  The problem is that it is a very insensitive technique which means that the resolution of the images is poor and examination times can be very long.  We have been using a technique, called dynamic nuclear hyperpolarization (DNP), which can increase sensitivity in the MRI experiment by >10,000x.  In this technique we “hyperpolarize” 13C-labelled substrates, such as glucose, and then inject them intravenously.  13C is a non-radioactive isotope of carbon that can be detected in the MRI experiment. The massive increase in sensitivity afforded by hyperpolarization of the 13C nucleus means that we can image the location of the labelled substrate in the body and its metabolic conversion into downstream metabolites. A former colleague once said that it allowed us to watch tumours “eat and breath” and most importantly we can also watch them die when a therapy is effective.  In this lecture I will describe the work that we have done using this technique over the last 15 years, which has taken it from the lab and into the clinic.  I will finish by describing a new MRI technique for imaging tumour metabolism, which has also recently gone into the clinic and that uses deuterium (2H)-labelled substrates (2H is a non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can also be detected in the MRI experiment).  2H is even less sensitive to MRI detection than 13C and is not suitable for hyperpolarization.  In this case we exploit an NMR property of the 2H nucleus which allows us to acquire signal very rapidly without signal saturation, which compensates for the low sensitivity of detection.  I will show how we think that this can provide complementary information to that provided by imaging with hyperpolarized 13C-labelled substrates.