This year’s Nelson Mandela Science Lecture will be held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the invited speaker is Professor Chris Stringer, Research leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

His theme is Charles Darwin, Africa, and Human Evolution. Charles Darwin was one of the first to suggest that humans probably had their origins in Africa, but at the time, there was no fossil evidence to support this notion. However, since 1921, there has been a tremendous growth in fossil, archaeological and, most recently genetic, data supporting this idea. Although most experts now accept that Africa was our original evolutionary homeland, there is less agreement about whether it was the only place of origin for our own species Homo sapiens. In this talk Professor Stringer will discuss our African origins and our eventual spread out of the continent to populate the Earth.

The Nelson Mandela Science Lecture is sanctioned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The 2009 lecture is held jointly with the Darwin200 series of lectures, a partnership project of the Africa Genome Education Institute & the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town.

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With HIV, TB, Malaria, malnutrition, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and cholera to contend with, you know Africans shouldn’t be forced to worry about anything else.

Unfortunately, as Africans start to live longer thanks to improved healthcare, diseases usually associated with wealthier nations are starting to make their presence felt.  The UN Global Cancer study, released in 2002, highlighted that over 50% of cancers were occurring in developing countries.  By 2020, they expect that number to go up to 70%.

Yet, because the perception is that cancer is so anomalous in Africa, people are diagnosed very late. “80 percent of cancer victims already have late-stage incurable tumours when they are diagnosed, pointing to the need for much better detection programs,” says the report.  There are over 11 million deaths every year as a result of cancer.

Raw scientific research is speculative, difficult and frequently obscure. It can be hard for funders to justify ongoing expenditure when the results are often unclear.

On Christmas day in 1984, one such piece of blue-sky research yielded results.  Carol Greider, then a graduate student working under the direction of Elizabeth Blackburn, discovered an enzyme responsible for constructing a genetic sequence found on DNA chromosome ends, called telomeres, which protects the chromosome from damage.

This telomere sequence, maybe likened to book ends on a library shelf, holding together the genetic material packed into the chromosome.  The discovery pertains to the enzyme  which maintains these book-ends, and which  is a fundamental biological mechanism present in nearly all plants and animals.  Without it, cells would rapidly age and degrade.  They called their discovery “ telomerase”.