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SIR FREDERICK EDWARD WARNER
Frederick Edward (‘Ned’) Warner’s childhood home was a London County Council flat in north London. He won a scholarship to Bancroft’s School, where he was successful in both academic and sporting activities and was awarded an Exhibition to read chemistry at University College London. Following this chemistry degree he took a diploma in chemical engineering. Sport, debates and left-wing politics dominated his student years. Warner was at the forefront in developing health, safety, risk assessment and environmental policies, particularly in their implementation to chemical process plant; early professional experience in several chemical manufacturing companies and extensive wartime work associated with acid manufacture had driven this commitment. He was a leading figure in the creation of the consulting company Cremer and Warner, and was appointed court expert to the Court of Enquiry following the Flixborough explosion in 1974. As treasurer of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, he chaired three of its major projects: Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War; Pathways of Artificial Radionucleotides; and Radiation from Nuclear Test Explosions. His expertise in the environmental effects of radiation put him in a position to lead the first international team to Chernobyl after the reactor meltdown in 1986. Warner served on many governmental, professional and academic bodies, particularly the Institution of Chemical Engineers, of which he was president in 1966–1967. He was knighted in 1968 for services to chemical engineering, was elected to the Royal Society in 1976 and was a founder fellow of the Fellowship of Engineering (now the Royal Academy of Engineering). He died in 2010, aged 100.
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Trepanation of the skull
\"Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella Trepanation of the Skull is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky's brain tumor, surgery, and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet's personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin. Gandlevsky tells wonderfully strange but true episodes from the bohemian life he and his literary companions led. He also frankly describes his epic alcoholism and his ambivalent adjustment to marriage and fatherhood. Aside from its documentary interest, the book's appeal derives from its self-critical and shockingly honest narrator, who expresses himself in the densely stylized version of Moscow slang that was characteristic of the nonconformist intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. Gandlevsky is a true artist of language who incorporates into his style the cadences of Pushkin and Tiutchev, the folk wisdom of proverbs, and slang in all its varieties. Susanne Fusso's excellent translation marks the first volume in English of Sergey Gandlevsky's prose, and it will interest scholars, students, and general readers of Russian literature and culture of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods\"-- Provided by publisher.
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CALESTOUS JUMA
Until his untimely death in December 2017 Professor Calestous Juma was an internationally-recognized authority and leader in the application of science, engineering and innovation to sustainable development in developing and developed countries. His continuing original work focused on analysing the co-evolution of technological innovation and institutional change in socio-economic systems. He ran programmes that advanced science, technology and innovation policy research, especially biotechnology, provided high-level science and technology advice and promoted the conservation of biological diversity. Juma was a Kenyan national and US permanent resident.
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Passions
\"Revenge-Revenge is so sweet one often wishes to be insulted so as to be able to take revenge, and I don't mean just by an old enemy, but anyone, or even (especially when in a really bad mood) by a friend.-from Passions The extraordinary quality of Giacomo Leopardi's writing and the innovative nature of his thought were never fully recognized in his lifetime. Zibaldone, his 4,500-page intellectual diary-a vast collection of thoughts on philosophy, civilization, literary criticism, linguistics, humankind and its vanities, and other varied topics-remained unpublished until more than a half-century after his death. But shortly before he died, Leopardi began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure and system to his philosophical musings. Now freshly translated into English by master translator, novelist, and critic Tim Parks, Leopardi's Passions presents 164 entries reflecting the full breadth of human passion. The volume offers a fascinating introduction to Leopardi's arguments and insights, as well as a glimpse of the concerns of thinkers to come, among them Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, and Beckett\"-- Provided by publisher.
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RICARDO MILEDI
For nearly five decades, Ricardo Miledi was among the foremost researchers in elucidating how nerves transmit signals across synapses. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, he qualified as a medical doctor, obtained a PhD with Arturo Rosenblueth and then, while in Canberra with John Eccles FRS, was invited by Bernard Katz FRS to join the Biophysics department at University College London, where he stayed from 1958 to 1984. Both independently and with Katz, he demonstrated that influx of calcium into the presynaptic nerve terminal is the essential trigger for the release of the neurotransmitter that carries signals across to the postsynaptic cell. He found that cutting the nerve to a frog’s muscle increased the number and distribution of its muscle acetylcholine (ACh) receptors, which he purified and established as membrane proteins. Together with Katz, he introduced the technique of membrane noise analysis to determine the properties of the individual ion channels opened by ACh, providing the first functional characterization of a single receptor with integral ion channel. With Eric Barnard (FRS 1981), he pioneered a new approach facilitating the study of neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels by ‘transplanting’ them from brain and other tissues into large Xenopus oocyte cells by injection of messenger RNA. After moving to the University of California, Irvine, in 1984, he helped to establish the Mexican Institute for Neurobiology at Querétaro. Working in Irvine and Mexico he extended this oocyte expression technique to incorporate transplanted brain membranes, particularly from patients with epilepsy or other neurological disorders. He received many honours for his work, including the Royal Medal (1998), but was happiest working in his lab applying his extraordinary technical skills and imagination to study synaptic transmission and inspiring a generation of neuroscientists.
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Autumn
\"From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons. 28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you... I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice--the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is\"-- Provided by publisher.
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HUBERT SIMON (JIM) MARKL
Hubert (Jim) Markl was a zoologist and animal behavioural physiologist; but, beyond that, he was arguably the most influential figure in European science policy and the key person influencing the relationship between science and society in Germany. He uniquely served as president of both the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation) and the Max Planck Gesellschaft. In these roles he was an outstanding and bold advocate for scientific research in Germany and throughout Europe, and his astute judgement, cogency and intellectual rigour commanded the respect of all his peers. His occupancy of the two most senior positions in German science policy followed from his earlier substantial scientific contributions to the emerging discipline of behavioural ecology, as well as his books on science, society and culture. Markl was a leading spokesperson in Germany on contested issues at the interface between science and society; for example, he was an eloquent advocate of stem cell research, speaking out against the political mainstream. He also strove to expose fully, and acknowledge, the Max Planck Society’s responsibility for atrocities committed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft scientists during the Nazi era; Markl will be remembered as the president who oversaw a historical analysis of the involvement of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (the scientific society that legally preceded the Max Planck Gesellschaft), and in 2001 he apologized in the name of the Max Planck Society for the expulsion and deaths of Jewish scientists.
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The object parade
\"This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell? In recalling her experience, Dinah's essays each begin with one thing - real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the gifted watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth's love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream. Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of moving to Los Angeles and raising a family; of coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with up-ended notions about home and family and career and aging, too. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time. \"-- Provided by publisher.
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JOHN PHILIP GRIME
John Philip ‘Phil’ Grime developed fundamental theory in plant ecology that emerged from a lifetime of fieldwork and experimental studies in the Sheffield region, South Yorkshire, UK. His approach was an unusual combination of observation, experiment and theory: he conducted detailed, intensive observations of natural communities, alongside experimental manipulation of those communities and simulated ‘microcosms’ in the service of formulating general rules (‘strategies’) by which plants evolve with respect to their environment. In this way, Grime was one of several key figures that propelled plant ecology away from descriptive methods focusing on vegetation composition and toward a science more integrated with other fields, including evolutionary biology and Earth science. Grime’s investigative approach was an inspiration for the modern field of global change biology, and, by focusing on understanding the contrasting roles species and their traits play in the functioning of ecosystems, marked the beginning of the field of plant functional ecology. For much of his career Grime held the post of full professor (and in retirement, emeritus professor of ecology) at the University of Sheffield, where he also served as the director of the Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology and of the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory. Awarded an honorary doctorate by Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and a foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grime was the first person awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Award of the International Association for Vegetation Science.
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