Recent Research Highlights
The Molecules of Life That Trigger Death
Layal Liverpool, DPhil in Infection, Immunology, and Translational Medicine Nucleic acids – DNA and RNA – are the molecules of life. Without them we wouldn’t exist but, ironically, they are the very molecules used by viruses to hijack our cells. Viral nucleic acids act like a virus-blueprint, containing all the instructions necessary to make more […]
The Death of the Brainstem: Should Each Person be Permitted to Define Death for Themselves?
Jake White, Law Established understandings of when death occurs have been critically undermined by technological advancement and medical innovation. Conceptions of what ‘it’ is that is constitutive of human life has been destabilised as medical intervention makes possible the continuation of major organs that would otherwise succumb to failure. Where a patient is in […]
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Developing Antibiotics
Hannah Behrens, DPhil Infection, Immunology and Translational Medicine (m.2015) Although first discovered in 1928, it was only during the Second World War that Penicillin was developed into a drug that could cure people of bacterial diseases. This started the “antibiotic era” and is considered to be one of the most important medical discoveries of the […]
‘Good entertainment & civill mirth’: English Provincial Fairs in the Eighteenth Century
Jessica Davidson, DPhil in History On 24 May 1702, 18 year old John Cannon set off with his friend John Berryman for Binegar fair, 12 miles from their home in West Lydford, Somerset, ‘being joyous of seeing this great fair’. There they were to set up a stall to sell hats made by Berryman’s […]
The Paradox of Reality
Linde Wester, a fourth year DPhil in Computer Science Reality cannot exist. At least not any reasonable reality. A reasonable reality must satisfy some basic assumptions such as causality: the idea that the past can influence events in the future, but not the other way around. We’ve known this since 2005, when research groups from The […]