‘It is awe-inspiring to meet him’ the great science Nobel Laureate David Baltimore wrote of Nelson Mandela, as he is ‘one of the world’s few unalloyed heroes’. I had taken Baltimore to meet Madiba as the third speaker in the annual Nelson Mandela Science Lecture, a joint project of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Africa Genome Education Institute. His lecture was on the subject of viruses and it is one of the most lucid accounts on the subject.

Baltimore explained to Madiba that, in addition to giving the lecture, he was in South Africa to attend a meeting of the recipients of Bill Gates’ grand challenge grants, big money to develop what is known as a gene therapy approach to AIDS. We spoke some about HIV but, Baltimore records, Madiba surprisingly to him ‘had no comments on the present Government’s policies.’

SWINE FLU - THE 2009 PANDEMIC: A PARADIGM OF BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION IN ACTION

Professor Barry Schoub will deliver the next Darwin Lecture. As Executive Director for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases he has been in the news recently commenting on the formal declaration of the first pandemic of influenza in this country - the H1N1 virus, commonly called Swine Flu.  The influenza virus, one of the most enigmatic of all human viruses, is a perfect model of real-time evolutionary adaptation to selective pressures and as part of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin lecture series, he looks at the future course of this pandemic by reviewing past pandemics which have some common features but also some very distinctive differences.

Thursday 23 July

Time:    5.30 for 6pm

Venue: New Learning Centre, Anatomy Building, Health Sciences Campus, University of Cape Town, Anzio Road, Observatory

RSVP:   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  021 557 0246

In one of my first immunology classes at university, we played a game called Pandemic.

We were each given two sterile Petri dishes filled with a standard agar growth medium, and a sterile and very sticky piece of toffee. We washed our hands thoroughly and then, in one hand, squeezed the toffee until our hands were gooey.

Each person then, one by one, shook hands with one other person. After the first round of hand-shaking, we swabbed our sticky hand and plated it onto the first agarose gel. Then we did a second round of hand-shaking, and plated again.

One toffee, out of the whole class, had been covered in a marker bacterium. The purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate how rapidly, through simple interpersonal contact, a disease could spread.