Ri The Royal Institution
of Great Britain
U3A/R1 out and about!
Tuesday 04 April 2006. 1.30pm
The Friends Meeting House, 173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ 
Draft Programme
1.30pm Registration
2.00pm Welcome and Introductions
2.10 pm Baroness Susan Greenfield
The brain in sickness and in health
Baroness Susan Greenfield is Director of the Royal Institution and Professor of
Pharmacology at Oxford where she heads a multidisciplinary group studying
neurodegenerative disorders. Baroness Greenfield has also written several books
on the brain for general readers including her own theory of the physical basis of
consciousness. Her latest book Tomorrow's people: how 21st century technology is
changing the way we think and feel was published in October 2003.
2.45pm Question and answer session
2.55pm Prof Tony Ryan
Will nanotechnology change the world?
The potential dangers of nano+echnology have been in the news a lot recently and
the fear of the world being overrun by 'grey goo' was even highlighted by
HRH Prince Charles. This fear has to be balanced against all the potential benefits we
hear that nanotechnology will bring, in medicine and the environment, with
nanomachines saving lives and cleaning up pollution. Tony will review the current state
of the art, in consumer goods, medicine and energy management, seeing where the
first applications of nanotechnology might be. What will a nanobot look like? Will it be
the shrunken submarine envisaged by Hollywood and Microsoft Encarta? Tony doesn't
think so. But what will it be? He thinks it is more likely to be something soft and wet, just
like biology, and he and his team have built a series of biomimetic devices based on
polymers, which include a synthetic muscle and membranes with valves. Assessing the
risks associated with new technology is not easy and involves some crystal ball gazing.
The biggest risk of all is that the creativity of our finest scientists might be constrained by
reactionary regulations and single issue political groups.
Tony Ryan is the ICI Professor of Physical Chemistry and EPSRC Senior Media Fellow at the
University of Sheffield. Tony presented the Ri Christmas Lectures on Channel 4 in 2002,
which looked at subjects as diverse as: what do spiders' webs and suspension bridges
have in common? And what connects the trainers on your feet to a jumbo jet flying
40,000 feet in the air? He is a regular contributor to radio and newspapers and is
developing a number of TV opportunities. He was born in Leeds, and got his three
degrees from UMIST. He is married with two daughters. Tony is a creative cook, a keen
cyclist and an occasional mountaineer with a weakness for gadgets. His research cover;
the synthesis, structure, processing and properties of polymers and he was in at the
beginning of polymer nanotechnology. He has co-authored more than 200 papers and
patents, and written a book on polymer processing or how things are made from plastic.
3.30pm Question and answer session
3.40pm Tea and coffee
4.20pm Prof Marcus du Sautoy
The music of the primes
Why did Beckham choose the number 23 shirt? How is 17 the key to the evolutionary
survival of a strange species of cicada? Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic -
the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers. Despite their fundamental
importance to mathematics, they represent one of the most tantalising enigmas in the
pursuit of human knowledge. Mathematics is the science of patterns. Yet the most
fundamental numbers in the subject seem to have no patterns to them at all. They
seem scattered randomly through the universe of numbers but by looking at these
numbers in a new way mathematicians have discovered what they believe is the
secret to the way Nature chose the primes.
Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of
All Souls College and a research fellow of the Royal Society. He writes for the Times ,
Daily Telegraph and the Guardian and is frequently asked for comment on BBC radio
and television. He is the author of The music of the primes (Fourth Estate).
4.55pm Question and answer session
5.05pm Close
Tickets will cost £13 each including tea and biscuits and are available from The Third Age Trust,
19 East Street, Bromley BR1 1QH.
Please enclose a cheque made payable to The Third Age Trust and a stamped addressed envelope.
A map will be enclosed with your ticket(s). If you are block booking a number of seats we will only
send as many programmes and maps as we can get into the envelope you supply.
NB. If you require wheelchair access or have a registered disability or mobility problems, please let
us know when you book your ticket(s) so that we can make suitable arrangements. We cannot
sort this out on the day.