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The Cultural Revolution is everywhere and nowhere in modern China. It is impossible to make sense of China without understanding what happened in this decade of political fanaticism, brutal violence and chaos, which saw perhaps two million die and tens of millions hounded. But it also seems impossible to truly understand this era, with its constant changes and contradictions. Discussion has been suppressed by both political diktat and personal trauma. Even so, its memory persists.

While many remain deeply scarred by the horrors, there is now a surprising nostalgia for the era. It speaks in large part to concerns about the present day but also reflects the appeal of powerful possibilities for transformation which existed in the era, however briefly and marginally.

What exactly are people remembering when they remember the Cultural Revolution? And how has an era which turned the nation upside down come to be an essential part of the party-state’s maintenance of the political status quo?

Tania Branigan is foreign leader writer at the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent. Her book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution won the Cundill History Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Kirkus non-fiction prize. It was named as one of the Wall Street Journal’s ten best books of 2023 and TIME ’s 100 must-read books of 2023.

• Speaker: Ms Tania Branigan
• Friday 08 March 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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I will outline how a simple cycle at the heart of metabolism drove some of the most important revolutions in the history of life. By turning gases into organic molecules and back again, this deep chemistry links the origin of life with photosynthesis, the abrupt appearance of animals, cancer, and even the emergence of consciousness.

Nick Lane (PhD, FRSB , FLS) is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution (CLOE). He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to molecular life sciences and 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. Professor Lane is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages. His most recent book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death (Profile/Norton 2022) explores the elusive chemical logic of life.

• Speaker: Professor Nick Lane, University College London
• Friday 01 March 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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I will outline how a simple cycle at the heart of metabolism drove some of the most important revolutions in the history of life. By turning gases into organic molecules and back again, this deep chemistry links the origin of life with photosynthesis, the abrupt appearance of animals, cancer, and even the emergence of consciousness.

Nick Lane (PhD, FRSB , FLS) is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution (CLOE). He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to molecular life sciences and 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. Professor Lane is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages. His most recent book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death (Profile/Norton 2022) explores the elusive chemical logic of life.

• Speaker: Professor Nick Lane, University College London
• Friday 01 March 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experienced here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese and British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS , The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, has been widely used in schools, colleges and universities, and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by the Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experienced here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese and British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS , The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, has been widely used in schools, colleges and universities, and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by the Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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Until recently, the solar system provided the only basis for our knowledge of planets and life in the Universe. In 1995 Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor dramatically changed this view with their discovery of the first giant planet outside our solar system. This spawned a revolution in astronomy, both in terms of new instrumentation and in our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars, are called exoplanets. Thousands of exoplanets have been identified over the last three decades, ranging from large planets like Jupiter to smaller denser objects like the Earth. The diversity and prolific quantity of these discoveries has revolutionised our understanding of the nature and formation of planets, opening up a surprising new perspective on the possible rarity of planetary systems similar to our own. It has also raised exciting prospects for the potential to probe planetary atmospheres for traces of life.

Didier Queloz is Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and Professor of Astronomy at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the detection and measurement of exoplanet systems, aiming to retrieve information about their physical structure and to better understand their formation and evolution, by comparison with our solar system. More recently he has worked on the detection of Earth-like planets and life in the Universe. In 2019 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research and discoveries. At Cambridge he leads a research program with the goal of making further progress in our understanding of the formation, structure, and habitability of exoplanets in the Universe, as well as to promote and share the excitement of this work with the public.

• Speaker: Professor Didier Queloz, University of Cambridge
• Friday 16 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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Until recently, the solar system provided the only basis for our knowledge of planets and life in the Universe. In 1995 Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor dramatically changed this view with their discovery of the first giant planet outside our solar system. This spawned a revolution in astronomy, both in terms of new instrumentation and in our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars, are called exoplanets. Thousands of exoplanets have been identified over the last three decades, ranging from large planets like Jupiter to smaller denser objects like the Earth. The diversity and prolific quantity of these discoveries has revolutionised our understanding of the nature and formation of planets, opening up a surprising new perspective on the possible rarity of planetary systems similar to our own. It has also raised exciting prospects for the potential to probe planetary atmospheres for traces of life.

Didier Queloz is Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and Professor of Astronomy at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the detection and measurement of exoplanet systems, aiming to retrieve information about their physical structure and to better understand their formation and evolution, by comparison with our solar system. More recently he has worked on the detection of Earth-like planets and life in the Universe. In 2019 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research and discoveries. At Cambridge he leads a research program with the goal of making further progress in our understanding of the formation, structure, and habitability of exoplanets in the Universe, as well as to promote and share the excitement of this work with the public.

• Speaker: Professor Didier Queloz, University of Cambridge
• Friday 16 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE , she was a Post- doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

Professor Ypi has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE , she was a Post- doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

Professor Ypi has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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There have been many genetic revolutions: • The realisation that characteristics could be inherited in the 18th century. • Mendel’s experiments on hybrid pea plants in the 1850s. • The rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1903. • The identification of the genetic role of DNA in 1944. • The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. • The advent of genetic engineering in 1972. And yet none of these moments was immediately transformational. Even the description of the double helix in 1953, often seen as a striking example of a radical breakthrough, a single definitive moment, did not settle the question of the nature of the genetic material. For nearly a decade afterwards, many scientists continued to think that proteins played a role, while the genetic role of DNA in multicellular organisms was demonstrated only in the 1970s. Through the history of our attempts to understand heredity we can perceive something of the history of science and how scientific revolutions are rarely immediately perceptible at the time. The wheel of scientific history turns, but much less rapidly and dramatically than appears in retrospect.

Professor Matthew Cobb is at the University of Manchester where he studies the sense of smell in maggots and Neanderthals. He is also interested in the history of science and has published books and articles on the history of biology, from the 17th to the 21st century, and two books on the history of the French resistance. He is currently writing a biography of Francis Crick.

• Speaker: Professor Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester
• Friday 26 January 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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There have been many genetic revolutions: • The realisation that characteristics could be inherited in the 18th century. • Mendel’s experiments on hybrid pea plants in the 1850s. • The rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1903. • The identification of the genetic role of DNA in 1944. • The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. • The advent of genetic engineering in 1972. And yet none of these moments was immediately transformational. Even the description of the double helix in 1953, often seen as a striking example of a radical breakthrough, a single definitive moment, did not settle the question of the nature of the genetic material. For nearly a decade afterwards, many scientists continued to think that proteins played a role, while the genetic role of DNA in multicellular organisms was demonstrated only in the 1970s. Through the history of our attempts to understand heredity we can perceive something of the history of science and how scientific revolutions are rarely immediately perceptible at the time. The wheel of scientific history turns, but much less rapidly and dramatically than appears in retrospect.

Professor Matthew Cobb is at the University of Manchester where he studies the sense of smell in maggots and Neanderthals. He is also interested in the history of science and has published books and articles on the history of biology, from the 17th to the 21st century, and two books on the history of the French resistance. He is currently writing a biography of Francis Crick.

• Speaker: Professor Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester
• Friday 26 January 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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PLoS Pathog. 2024 Jan 11;20(1):e1011729. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1011729. eCollection 2024 Jan.

ABSTRACT

Both constitutive and inducible immune mechanisms are employed by hosts for defense against infection. Constitutive immunity allows for a faster response, but it comes with an associated cost that is always present. This trade-off between speed and fitness costs leads to the theoretical prediction that constitutive immunity will be favored where parasite exposure is frequent. We selected populations of Drosophila melanogaster under high parasite pressure from the parasitoid wasp Leptopilina boulardi. With RNA sequencing, we found the evolution of resistance in these populations was associated with them developing constitutively active humoral immunity, mediated by the larval fat body. Furthermore, these evolved populations were also able to induce gene expression in response to infection to a greater level, which indicates an overall more activated humoral immune response to parasitization. The anti-parasitoid immune response also relies on the JAK/STAT signaling pathway being activated in muscles following infection, and this induced response was only seen in populations that had evolved under high parasite pressure. We found that the cytokine Upd3, which induces this JAK/STAT response, is being expressed by immature lamellocytes. Furthermore, these immune cells became constitutively present when populations evolved resistance, potentially explaining why they gained the ability to activate JAK/STAT signaling. Thus, under intense parasitism, populations evolved resistance by increasing both constitutive and induced immune defenses, and there is likely an interplay between these two forms of immunity.

PMID:38206983 | PMC:PMC10807768 | DOI:10.1371/journal.ppat.1011729