university of cambridge research magazine www.cam.ac.uk/research/

issue 16

HorizonsReseaRch

In this issue

Languagesciences

plus stem cells,conservation and a

10,000-year revolution

2 | Guest editorial

research news 3–5

spotlight: 6–19 Language sciencesMaking sense of language: 6–7learning across the lifespan

The communicative brain 8–9

Smart listeners and smooth 10talkers

Mining the language of science 11

How languages are built 12–13

Music – or language in action? 14

Testing the world’s English 15

Island language in a sea of 16–17change

Powerful words 18

Mother tongue, prehistoric 19father

Preview 20–21Past versus present in an age ofprogress: the Victorians

Features 22–30Cambridge stem cells united 22–23

A conservation leader in 24–25the making

From foraging to farming: 26–27the 10,000-year revolution

Cartographers of the 28–29infectious world

Deep issues: communicating 30CCS

research online 31

The back page 32

For some, language is among the key distinctive characteristics of humankind. Others woulddefine language more broadly, as any mode of systematic communication, whether human orotherwise. In either case, the importance of language, and hence of the study of language, ishard to overestimate. Yet few of us are aware of the sheer breadth and diversity of languageresearch.

I suspect that most people, if asked what language research might involve, wouldprobably think first of the study of particular languages: French, Italian, Japanese, Latin,Sanskrit, Medieval Welsh, and so on. With some gentle prodding, our notional (Anglophone)everyman might add English to the list, particularly when reminded that English is the world’smost widely studied ‘foreign’ language, and indeed that Cambridge (through CambridgeAssessment) is one of the world’s leading centres for developing tools for the teaching andassessment of English. Pushed to think beyond the specific, we might come next to the studyof language as a phenomenon and a practice: that is, to linguistics.

But that is only the start. What about the research that enables us to talk to computers, andenables computers either to carry out our spoken instructions, or to talk back to us (perhapseven in a different language)? And what happens in our own brains when language isproduced, processed, responded to?

From philosophy to neuroscience, from phonetics to engineering, language researchspans institutions and disciplines right across the University, with over 150 researchers workingwithin the full multidisciplinary spectrum. This issue of Research Horizons marks the formallaunch of two major initiatives that will help to build on and maximise the benefits of suchdiverse research by strengthening the cross-disciplinary links.

First, we have created a new Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (DTAL).DTAL is formed from a merger between two smaller existing institutions (the Department ofLinguistics and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics), and we believe that itprovides a significantly stronger institutional framework in which to develop Cambridge’sworld-leading linguistics research.

Second, Language Sciences has been designated as one of a select group of University-wide Strategic Research Initiatives. The Language Sciences Initiative is jointly chaired by Dr Henriëtte Hendriks (the first Head of DTAL) and Professor William Marslen-Wilson(Department of Experimental Psychology). It represents an exciting and significantcommitment to Cambridge’s support for multifaceted inquiry in a field so fundamental to anunderstanding of our past and present, and to our capacity to shape our future.

Professor Simon FranklinHead of the School of Arts and Humanities

Editor: Dr Louise Walsh(research.horizons@admin.cam.ac.uk).Designed by iDentityCreative(www.identitycreative.co.uk/).Printed by Falcon Printing Services Ltd(www.falcon-printing.co.uk/).©2011 University of Cambridge andContributors as identified. All rights reserved.

Language sciencesM

ark M

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cover: a newlanguage can at first seem anincomprehensiblejumble of soundsuntil understandinggradually develops;see page 6 forresearch on languageacquisition. artwork:christian Faur (www.christianfaur.com/).

contents Issue 16, October 2011

Research news | 3

Magic and medicine

cambridge health research receives£110 million The university of cambridge and cambridge university Hospitals havebeen awarded £110 million to ‘boost research and allow thedevelopment of ground-breaking medicines’.

The funding is part of an £800 millioninvestment by the National Institute forHealth Research (NIHR) – the UK’s largest everinvestment in ‘early stage’ health research.

Backed by the NIHR, Cambridge iscurrently one of just five comprehensiveBiomedical Research Centres in England. Thefunding for the Cambridge BiomedicalResearch Centre (as it was designated in2007) will be allocated over a five-year period.The money will help fund the development ofground-breaking medicines, treatments andpatient care.

In Cambridge, the money will backprojects designed to benefit patients withdiseases such as cancer and diabetes,specifically targeting advances in diagnosis,prevention and treatment. “The fundamentalbasis of our research programmes is that theyare all designed to benefit patients,” saidProfessor Patrick Sissons, Regius Professor ofPhysic. “This award makes it possible for us tolead the way in translating fundamentalbiomedical research into clinical research, andultimately into advances in healthcare thatcan be put into practice within the NHS andaround the world.”

The Cambridge partnership has alsobeen awarded £4.5 million for the formationof a new specialist Biomedical Research Unit

(BRU) focused on dementia – a field in whichit was identified as a national researchleader. Professor Peter St George-Hyslop,who will lead the purpose-built CambridgeBRU in Dementia said: “£23 billion is spentper year on dementia care in the UK. TheUnit will address problems that currentlyimpede effective dementia care byharnessing discoveries from a researchpipeline that spans physics, chemistry,chemical engineering, systems biology,molecular and cellular neurobiology,psychology, statistics and medicine.” A keyaim of the BRU will be to train scientists tobe uniquely well equipped to exploit therich interface between these disciplines.

Dr John Bradley, Director of the NIHRCambridge Biomedical Research Centreadded: “[The new funding] will allow thepartnership between Cambridge UniversityHospitals and the University of Cambridge tobuild on the substantial achievements of thelast five years. A renewal was neverguaranteed – this was a competition withthe best of England’s health researchinstitutions.”

For more information, please visithttp://cambridge-brc.org.uk/

The Casebooks Project, led by Dr Lauren Kassellin the Department of History and Philosophy ofScience, is preparing a digital edition of SimonForman’s casebooks, one of the most extensivesurviving sets of medical records from the1600s.

The resource will eventually be home to acomplete archive of the 50,000 differentconsultations that he and his contemporaryRichard Napier wrote between 1596 and 1634.Forman’s original manuscripts are stored in theBodleian Library, Oxford, but the electronicedition will be freely available to all, providingusers with a detailed insight into the day-to-day lives of the many thousands of people whoapproached him for consultation. The digitaledition, which will appear in December 2011,will combine sophisticated editorial expertisewith cutting-edge digital humanities to makethese records accessible as never before.

Forman was supposedly so gifted that,according to one account, he even predictedhis own death a week before it happened, inSeptember 1611. Yet as much as he wasrevered he was also loathed, spending parts of

his career in prison for alleged malpractice. Although he was consulted mainly on

health issues, he was also approached withquestions about marriage, career prospects,missing people, stolen property, travel plans,legal suits and witchcraft. Each was noteddown with meticulous detail because Formanrelied on the ‘horary’ method of astrologicaljudgment, in which a result was determinedbased on the precise moment at which aquestion was asked.

“It’s an unbelievably rich resource,” Kassellsaid. “Forman compulsively wrote thingsdown – not just in his casebooks, but inthousands of pages of manuscripts. What wesee in his records is a full, social dynamic ofhealing. He was approached by whole familiesand households, and recorded intimateinformation about marital infidelity, worriesabout employment, and all sorts of other socialand private matters that fed into people’sworries about wellness and wellbeing.”

For more information, please visitwww.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/

a man designated as simon Forman, paintedca. 1900

a digital resource dedicated to simon Forman, the notorious, self-styled astrologer-physician, has beenlaunched to mark the 400th anniversary of his death.

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British academyFellowseight cambridge academics havebeen elected Fellows of theBritish academy.

The new Fellows, recognised for theirresearch achievements in the humanities andsocial sciences, are:• Professor Robin Alexander, Fellow of

Wolfson College, Emeritus Professor ofEducation at the University of Warwickand Director of the Cambridge PrimaryReview.

• Professor Nicholas de Lange, Professorof Hebrew and Jewish Studies at theFaculty of Divinity and Faculty of Asianand Middle Eastern Studies.

• Professor Raymond Geuss, Professor ofPhilosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy.

• Professor Robert Gordon, RegiusProfessor of Hebrew at the Faculty ofAsian and Middle Eastern Studies.

• Professor Sylvia Huot, Professor ofMedieval French Literature at the Facultyof Modern and Medieval Languages.

• Dr Neil Kenny, Reader in Early ModernFrench Literature and Thought at theDepartment of French.

• Professor Susan Owens, Professor ofEnvironment and Policy and Head of theDepartment of Geography.

• Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom, Professorof Ecological and DevelopmentalCriminology at the Institute ofCriminology.

With a client base across the world, and asupplier of software to some of the top namesin industry, Granta Design has achieved anaverage growth of 30% over the past 10 years.

Launched in 1994 by Professors MikeAshby and Dave Cebon from the Departmentof Engineering, the company is the leadingprovider of university-level teaching resourceson materials science and related topics, with itsproducts being used in over 800 universitiesand colleges worldwide.

The company has also worked withindustry since the late 1990s and last yearlaunched interfaces to the 3D computer-aideddesign (CAD) packages that are the routine

working environment for many engineers. Arecent area of expansion has been eco-design,with an increasing focus on materials and theirenvironmental impact.

“We’ve applied scientific rigour to an areawhich can sometimes lack substance,” saidChief Operating Officer Patrick Coulter. “Forexample, we help people to quantify the likelycarbon footprint over a product’s lifetime for agiven design. A choice that lowers carbonemissions in one area, such as during use of theproduct, may increase them elsewhere,perhaps in producing the raw materials. So it’simportant to base design decisions on a goodmethodology and hard numbers rather thanthe latest green hype.”

The company’s client base includes someof the best-known names in aerospace such asNASA, Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Honeywell,Eurocopter and EADS Astrium. Use of itstechnologies is spread across a wide range ofother sectors, with clients including EmersonElectric, GE, TRW Automotive and Renault F1.

Based in Cambridge, Granta Design hasretained its strong links with the University andover the summer it employed its largest evergroup of paid interns from Cambridge andelsewhere. “Having these bright and highlymotivated people working with us has all-round benefits,” said Coulter. “For them it’s ataste of the real world, and a chance to getsome professional experience under their belts,and for us it’s a great opportunity to reinforceour links with academia and spread the wordabout our products.”

For more information, please visitwww.grantadesign.com/

4 | Research news

Material designsgranta Design, a spin-out from cambridge’s engineeringDepartment, is now the world’s largest company in materialsinformation technology.

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Researchers in the Department ofPharmacology have identified a gene,HCN2, that is responsible for regulatingchronic, or long-lasting, pain. The research,published recently in Science, opens up thepossibility of targeting drugs to block theprotein produced by HCN2.

Approximately one person in seven inthe UK suffers from chronic inflammatory orneuropathic pain. Inflammatory pain occurswhen a persistent injury such as a burn orarthritis results in enhanced sensitivity ofpain-sensitive nerve endings. Moreintractable is neuropathic pain, in whichnerve damage causes ongoing pain and ahypersensitivity to stimuli. Neuropathicpain, which is often lifelong, is seen inpatients with diabetes or as a painful after-effect of shingles. It is also acontributor to lower back pain, and is acommon consequence of cancerchemotherapy. Individuals suffering fromneuropathic pain often have little or no

respite because of the lack of effectivemedications.

The HCN2 gene, which is expressed inpain-sensitive nerve endings, has beenknown for several years, but its role inregulating pain was not understood. Theresearchers engineered the removal of thegene from pain-sensitive nerves and, in cellcultures, used electrical stimuli to determinehow their properties were altered by itsremoval.

Following their promising results in thecell culture studies, the researchers studiedgenetically modified mice in which theHCN2 gene had been deleted, and foundthat this abolished neuropathic pain.Interestingly, they found that deleting HCN2does not affect normal acute pain (the typeof pain produced by a sudden injury – suchas biting one’s tongue).

Professor Peter McNaughton, the leadauthor of the study, which was funded bythe Biotechnology and Biological SciencesResearch Council and the European Union,said: “Many genes play a critical role in painsensation, but in most cases interfering withthem simply abolishes all pain, or even all

sensation. What is exciting about the workon the HCN2 gene is that removing it – orblocking it pharmacologically – eliminatesneuropathic pain without affecting normalacute pain. This finding could be veryvaluable clinically because normal painsensation is essential for avoiding accidentaldamage.”

For more information, please contactProfessor Peter Mcnaughton(pam42@cam.ac.uk).

Gene that controls chronic pain identifiedresearch lays groundwork forthe development of new,targeted pain medications.

Research news | 5

The Caribbean Poetry Project, which isbacked by the Poet Laureate Carol AnnDuffy, involves specialists from theUniversity of Cambridge and the Universityof West Indies. It seeks to revive the study ofluminaries of the genre – writers such asDerek Walcott and Kamau Braithwaite – insecondary schools, as well as introducingpupils to new and lesser-known Caribbeanpoetry.

In Cambridge, a pilot training courseinvolving 17 teachers, many of whom workin ethnically diverse parts of London, hasjust been completed, and further coursesare being developed in Britain and the WestIndies for 2012.

The research arm of the Project isfocusing on the literature and also on howCaribbean Poetry can best be taught inschools, and a major internationalconference will be hosted by Cambridge’sFaculty of Education next year. Researchershave also linked up with a specialistpublisher (Peepal Tree Press) to produce anew anthology of Caribbean poetry.

The long-term ambition is not only tospark the enthusiasm of young readers forCaribbean poetry, but also to use it as apoint of access for 11- to 18-year-olds thatmight inspire them to study more poetryoverall.

GCSE and A-Level English syllabi offerlimited opportunities for teachingCaribbean poetry. Morag Styles, Professorof Children’s Poetry at the University ofCambridge and the academic leading theproject, said: “We wish to promote thoseopportunities and encourage teachers toengage with the exciting range and variedpossibilities of this appealing oral, as well aswritten, literature, which has so many linkswith popular music and performance.”

“We’re trying to make teachers feelmore confident about using poetry in theclassroom in general. Although ourparticular content is Caribbean, what theylearn from this training course can beadapted to the use of poetry in a moregeneral sense as well. This is a way ofpromoting poetry across the board and thecontent should be seen that way. After all,the best of someone like Derek Walcott isthe best poetry there is, regardless ofgenre.”

For more information, please visithttp://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk/

Poets of thecaribbeana new research collaborationaims to put caribbean poetryback into the classroom both inBritain and the West indies.

university of cambridge spin-out eight19 has devised a new methodof using solar cells to bring electricity to those living off the grid indeveloping countries.

Pay-as-you-go solar power

The company, which was spun out from theCavendish Laboratory in 2010, develops solarcells based on printed plastic that are ideallysuited to small-scale solar lamps and mobilephone chargers.

Solar lamps are widespread in countriessuch as India and Kenya but their uptake hasbeen limited by the initial purchase price,which is beyond the reach of manyconsumers. Eight19’s IndiGo productcombines mobile phone technology withsolar power to allow the lamps to be paid foras a service, just like a pay-as-you-go mobilephone.

There are presently about 1.6 billionpeople worldwide without access toelectricity. Instead, they have to make use oftraditional fossil fuels such as kerosene forlighting and other purposes. A typicalhousehold in Kenya, for example, will spendKSh900 (about US$10) per month on simplelighting – about a thousand times the cost ofthe equivalent mains electricity in the West. Moreover, using kerosene can be dangerous(more than one million people are reportedto die each year from kerosene-relatedaccidents) and kerosene lighting emits about190 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Bycontrast, solar-powered lamps are safe,sustainable and reliable.

“The problem with almost all renewables,be they wind, solar or tidal, is the upfrontcost,” said Simon Bransfield-Garth, ChiefExecutive Officer of Eight19. “By offering solaras a service, customers are able to make adirect transition from their current spend onfossil fuels to lower cost and higherperforming solar power.”

Eight19’s solar cell uses a standard SMS

message to authenticate the top-up and thecustomer receives a pass code that theypunch into the meter attached to the cell,giving them electricity to light a room orcharge their mobile phone.

Field trials of the IndiGo system began inKenya during September, and larger trialsstarted in October in Kenya, India, Malawiand Zambia. Full-scale manufacturing of thedevices will begin in early 2012.

For more information, please visitwww.eight19.com/

Demonstrating the IndiGo pay-as-you-go solar cell

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6 | Language sciences

Linguistics – the scientific studyof human language – is central to our understanding of thelanguage system and theacquisition of this highlycomplex system ofcommunication, as Dr HenriëtteHendriks explains.

a new language can at first seem an incomprehensible jumble of sounds untilunderstanding gradually develops

Makingsense of

language:learning

across thelifespan

“are some languages ‘harder’ tolearn than others? Whatcharacterises language learningat birth versus later in life?”

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Language fundamentally defines anddistinguishes us from other livingbeings. It gives us a tool more

powerful than any other to communicateand to organise ourselves, our cultures andthe world around us.

Since ancient times, scholars havedebated the question of how we come toacquire it. Children typically developlanguage quickly and, although acquisitioncontinues well into our teen years, thefundamental elements are established by theage of three years. Of course languagelearning also happens at other times in ourlives, whether it’s learning a second languageat school or after moving to a new country.

The research portfolio of the newlycreated Department of Theoretical andApplied Linguistics (a merger of theDepartment of Linguistics and the ResearchCentre for English and Applied Linguistics)covers language acquisition at all momentsacross the lifespan, in all possible andimaginable contexts. Researchers specialisein language learning in monolingual andbilingual children and in adults, either inlongitudinal studies that take place overmany years or in experiments that evaluatehow the language system is understood.

An important question in languageacquisition concerns the existence of aninnate human capability, or ‘languagefaculty’, which prepares us for the acquisitionof whatever language we encounter at birth.Is there such a faculty? And if so, whatunderlies it? One suggestion is that this

innate ability develops independently ofother cognitive areas; another is that we areequipped with learning mechanisms, suchas being able to pick up statisticalregularities, which can be applied to manydifferent types of learning, only one of whichis language.

Then there is the question of theinfluence of the specific linguistic system weare learning. Are some languages ‘harder’ tolearn than others? Are some features inlanguages learned earlier or later thanothers? And what characterises languagelearning at birth versus later in life?

One way of illuminating the relationshipbetween language and cognition is toexamine how first and second languages areacquired, such as by comparing child first-language acquisition with child or adultsecond-language acquisition. In one project,for instance, an artificial language has been invented to investigate whetherunderstanding features of innate learningcan be used to facilitate learning languageas an adult (see panel).

Some children grow up in anenvironment where they acquire two ormore languages simultaneously or

Language sciences | 7successively. Researchers are interested in how children develop grammar in the two languages and also in identifying thedifferences between typically and non-typically developing children. The latter research is being turned into an off-the-shelf language assessment tool todifferentiate between a typical languagedelay and an underlying learning problem inchildren.

Looking specifically at English languagelearning, researchers involved in the EnglishProfile project, which is funded by CambridgeESOL and Cambridge University Press, are

working to identify criterial features forlearners of English at given levels ofproficiency, such as errors that learners makeonly during a given period of learning andthen cease to make.

Building on the strengths of the previousinstitutions, the new department will cover ayet more comprehensive domain of thelanguage sciences and provide strongertheoretical, empirical and interdisciplinaryresearch across the board, from historicallinguistics and comparative syntax tolanguage processing and computationallinguistics.

Dr henriëtte hendriksFor more information, please contact Dr Henriëtte Hendriks(hpjmh2@cam.ac.uk), Head of theDepartment of Theoretical and applied Linguistics(www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/).

Unconscious language learningOne project in the Department of Theoretical and applied Linguistics isexamining unconscious language learning.

When linguists talk about unconscious or implicit language learning, they don’t meanlearning while you sleep. rather, they are talking about one of the most intriguing ofall mental phenomena: the ability to learn the complex and subtle regularities thatunderlie a language without even realising.

For children, such ‘implicit’ language learning seems to happen spontaneously inthe first few years of life; yet, in adulthood, learning a second language is generally farfrom effortless and has varied success.

so marked is the difference between first- and second-language learning – at leastwhen it takes the form of classroom learning – it might suggest that implicit learningmakes no significant contribution to learning a second language. or it may indicatethat typical foreign language teaching doesn’t take full advantage of the process.

The challenge that faces linguists is how to test whether implicit learning is takingplace. How can you differentiate between a person consciously recognising a certainpattern or rule in the language they are learning and the same person unconsciouslyknowing that something sounds right simply because their brain has judged it to beright?

artificial languageThe new approach to solving the puzzle taken by Dr John Williams at the Departmentof Theoretical and applied Linguistics and his collaborator, Dr Janny Leung from theuniversity of Hong Kong, has been to invent an artificial language. in their recentlypublished research, participants were tested to see whether they correctly acquired,over periods as short as one hour, an understanding of patterns embedded within theartificial language.

Do they pick up on the concealed pattern when tested? “The answer is yes,” said Dr Williams, whose research was funded by the economic and social research council.“We found significantly above-chance selection of sentence constructions that were‘grammatically correct’ according to the hidden pattern. Yet, the participants had noawareness of what they had learned or how. Moreover, we were able to show learningof the same material by native speakers of two typologically very different languages,english and cantonese.”

interestingly, picking up the hidden pattern unconsciously doesn’t always happen– if, for instance, the hidden pattern is linguistically unnatural. “one explanation couldbe that certain patterns are more accessible to language learning processes thanothers. Perhaps our brains are built equipped to expect certain patterns, or perhapsthey process some patterns better than others,” he added.

Opening the mindThe research provides a window onto unconscious learning processes in the mind andhighlights an important element that has practical implications for languageteaching. in each test, the learner’s attention was directed to the part of the sentencethat contained the hidden pattern. By directing attention, it seems that otherelements of the sentence construction are picked up unconsciously.

“in a teaching situation, merely teaching the rules of a language may not be theonly answer,” explained Dr Williams. “instead, using tasks that focus attention on therelevant grammatical forms in language could help learners access unconsciouslearning pathways in the brain. This would greatly enhance the speed of acquisition ofa second language.”

For more information, please contact Dr John Williams (jnw12@cam.ac.uk).

Bilingualism is good forlearning

The cambridge Bilingualism network(http://sites.google.com/site/cambiling/), an outreach activity of theDepartment of Theoretical andapplied Linguistics, is spreading themessage that bilingualism is good forlearning. The activity is aimed atparents and teachers, and seeks todispel misconceptions aboutbilingualism by facilitating contactbetween the community and thenetwork of specialists at the university.

To read more, an online article isavailable at www.cam.ac.uk/research/

8 | Language sciences

What is it about the human brainthat makes language possible?Two evolutionary systemsworking together, sayneuroscientists Professor WilliamMarslen-Wilson and ProfessorLorraine Tyler.

The communicative brain

The ability to communicate usinglanguage is fundamental to thedistinctive and remarkable success of

the modern human. It is this capacity thatseparates us most decisively from our primatecousins, despite all that we have in commonacross species as intelligent social primates.

A major challenge for the cognitiveneurosciences is to understand thisrelationship: what is the neurobiologicalcontext in which human language andcommunication have emerged, and what arethe special human properties that makelanguage itself possible?

For the past 150 years, scientific thinkingabout this relationship has been dominatedby the concept of a single, central languagesystem built around the brain’s lefthemisphere. Pioneering 19th-centuryneurologists Paul Broca and Carl Wernickenoticed that patients with left hemispherebrain damage had difficulties with languagecomprehension and language production.Two areas of the left frontal and temporallobes, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, andthe bundle of nerve fibres connecting them,were identified as critical for speaking andunderstanding language.

Recent research in our laboratoriessuggests major limitations to this classicapproach to language and the brain. TheBroca–Wernicke concept captures oneimportant aspect of the neural languagesystem – the key role of the left hemispherenetwork – but it obscures another, equally important one. This is the role of bi-hemispheric systems and processes,whereby both left and right hemisphereswork together to provide the fundamentalunderpinnings for human communicativeprocesses.

A more fruitful approach to humanlanguage and communication will require a

dual neurobiological framework in whichthese capacities are supported by twointersecting but evolutionarily andfunctionally distinguishable subsystems. Thehistorical failure to make this separation has,we suggest, severely undermined scientificattempts to understand language, both as aneurocognitive phenomenon in the modernhuman, and in terms of its evolutionary andneurobiological context.

Dual systemsA strong evolutionary continuity betweenhumans and our primate relatives is providedby a distributed, bi-hemispheric set ofcapacities that support the dynamicinterpretation of visual and auditory signals inthe service of social communication. Thesecapacities have been the object of intensivestudy in monkeys and apes, and there is goodevidence that their basic architectureunderpins related communicative functionsin the human.

In the context of human languagecomprehension, the bi-hemispheric systemssupport the ability not only to identify thewords a speaker is producing – typically byintegrating auditory and visual cues in face-to-face interaction – but also to make sense ofthese word-meanings in the general contextof the listener’s knowledge of the world andof the specific context of speaking.

Where we see divergence betweenhumans and other primates is in the domainof grammatical (or syntactic) function.Primate communication systems are notremotely comparable to human language intheir expressive capacities. Human languageis much more than a set of signs that stand forthings. It constitutes a powerful and flexibleset of grammatical devices for organising theflow of linguistic information and itsinterpretation, allowing us to represent and

combine abstract linguistic elements, wherethese elements convey not only meaning butalso the subtle structural cues that indicatehow these elements are linked together.

It is the fronto-temporal network ofregions in the left hemisphere that mediates these core grammatical functions in humans. This is a network that differsneuroanatomically from those of the brains ofother primates, showing substantial increasesin size, complexity and connectivity.

Although it’s not yet understood just howthese evolutionary changes in the lefthemisphere provide the neural substrate onwhich grammatical functions depend, it isclear that they are essential. When the lefthemisphere system is damaged, the parallelright hemisphere regions cannot take overthese functions, even when damage issustained early in childhood.

Critically, however, the left hemispheresystem that has emerged in humans neitherreplaces nor displaces the bi-hemisphericsystem for social communication and actionfound in both humans and other primates. Itinteracts and combines with it to create a co-ordinated process of linguistically guidedcommunication and social interaction.

Functional separabilityThe most direct evidence for a dual systemapproach is the ability to separate thesesystems in the modern human. Using acombination of behavioural andneuroimaging techniques, we have been ableto demonstrate this both in patients with lefthemisphere brain damage and in unimpairedyoung adults.

In the research with patients (conductedwith Dr Paul Wright in the Department ofExperimental Psychology and Dr EmmanuelStamatakis in the Division of Anaesthesia) wefocus on the comprehension of spoken words

Left

by speech inputs with different properties.Listeners hear either words that are

specifically linguistically complex (words likeplayed, which have the grammatical inflection‘ed’), or words that make more generaldemands on the language processing system(words like ramp, which have another word,ram, embedded in them). Using an analysistechnique that identifies the separatedimensions of the brain’s response to thesesets of words, we see that the linguisticallycomplex words activate a responsecomponent that is restricted to the left fronto-temporal region. By contrast, words that areperceptually complex, due to increasedcompetition between the whole word and the embedded word, activate a strongly bi-hemispheric set of regions, partiallyoverlapping with the linguistic component.Even in the intact brain, therefore, we can seethe dynamic allocation of processingresources across the two systems, as afunction of their joint roles in thecommunicative process.

implicationsA dual systems account of the ‘communicativebrain’ is likely to have important andilluminating consequences for the sciences oflanguage and its disorders.

In the context of left hemisphere braindamage we can better appreciate – and buildupon for rehabilitation – the substantial bi-hemispheric communicative capacities thepatient may still possess. In first- and second-language acquisition, we can betterunderstand the learning trajectories that leadto language proficiency in terms of the relativecontributions of these two aspects ofcommunicative function.

The approach also provides a newperspective on the variation betweenlanguages, where different languages may

load more or less heavily on the differentcomputational resources made available bythe two systems. Most importantly, it enablesus to clarify and focus the core issues for aneurobiological account of language andcommunication, a scientific domain cloudedby ideology and inconsistency.

Language sciences | 9

Functional neuroimaging of the humanbrain; linguistically complex words

primarily activate the left fronto-temporal regions of the brain (blue),

perceptually complex words activate abilateral set of brain areas mainly in the

temporal and frontal areas (orange),overlap between these two distributions

is shown in dark red

“a dual systems account of the‘communicative brain’ is likely tohave important and illuminatingconsequences for the sciences oflanguage and its disorders.”

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Professor William Marslen-Wilson and Professor Lorraine Tyler For more information, please contactProfessor William Marslen-Wilson(wdm10@cam.ac.uk) and ProfessorLorraine Tyler at the Department ofexperimental Psychology. ProfessorMarslen-Wilson was previouslyDirector of the Mrc cognition andBrain sciences unit, cambridge.

and spoken sentences. In initial testing,patients perform classic measures of syntacticfunction, where they match different spokensentences to sets of pictures. Shown threepictures – a woman pushing a girl, a girlpushing a woman and a woman teaching agirl – patients will correctly match thesentence ‘The woman pushed the girl’ to thefirst picture but will incorrectly match thepassive sentence ‘The woman is beingpushed by the girl’ to the same picture. Thesecond sentence requires the use of syntacticcues to extract the right meaning – just usingthe order of words is not sufficient.

These behavioural tests of syntacticimpairment are linked, in the same patients,to their performance in the neuroimaginglaboratory, where they hear sentences thatvary in their syntactic demands, and wherethe precise extent of the injury to their brainscan be mapped out. When we put thesedifferent sources of information together, wesee that damage to the left hemispheresystem progressively impairs the syntacticaspects of language processing – the moredamage, the worse the performance.

Critically, however, the amount of lefthemisphere damage, and the extent to whichit involves the key fronto-temporal circuit,does not affect the patients’ ability to identifythe words being spoken or to understand themessages being communicated – so long assyntactic cues are not required to do so. Thesecapacities are supported bi-hemispherically,and can remain relatively intact even in theface of massive left hemisphere damage.

In work carried out with Dr Mirjana Bozic,then based at the Medical Research Council(MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit inCambridge, we have been able to delineatethese systems in the undamaged brain, usingfunctional neuroimaging to tease out thedifferent processing regions that are engaged

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10 | Language sciences

Human conversation is rich and it’smessy. When we communicate, weconstantly adjust to those around us

and to the environment we’re in; we leavewords out because the context providesmeaning; we rush or hesitate, or changedirection; we overlap with other speakers;and, crucially, we’re expressive.

No wonder then that it’s proved sochallenging to build machines that interactwith people naturally, with human-likeperformance and behaviour.

Nevertheless there have been remarkableadvances in speech-to-text technologies andspeech synthesizers over recent decades.Current devices speed up the transcription ofdictation, add automatic captions to videoclips, enable automated ticket booking andimprove the quality of life for those requiringassistive technology.

However, today’s speech technology islimited by its lack of ability to acquireknowledge about people or situations, toadapt, to learn from mistakes, to generaliseand to sound naturally expressive. “To makethe technology more usable and natural, andopen up a wide range of new applications,requires field-changing research,” explainedProfessor Phil Woodland of Cambridge’sDepartment of Engineering.

Along with scientists at the Universities ofEdinburgh and Sheffield, Professor Woodlandand colleagues Drs Mark Gales and Bill Byrnehave begun a five-year, £6.2 million projectfunded by the Engineering and PhysicalSciences Research Council to provide thefoundations of a new generation of speechtechnology.

complex pattern matchingSpeech technology systems are based onpowerful techniques that are capable oflearning statistical models known as HiddenMarkov Models (HMMs). Trained on largequantities of real speech data, HMMs model

the relationship between the basic speechsounds of a language and how these arerealised in audio waveforms.

It’s a complex undertaking. For speechrecognition, the system must work with acontinuous stream of acoustic data, with fewor no pauses between individual words. Todetermine where each word stops and starts,HMMs attempt to match the pattern ofsuccessive sounds (or phonemes) to thesystem’s built-in dictionary, assigning aprobability score as to which sounds are mostlikely to follow the first sound to complete aword. The system then takes into account thestructure of the language and which wordsequences are more likely than others.

adapt, train and talkA key focus for the new project is to buildsystems that are adaptive, enabling them toacclimatise automatically to particularspeakers and learn from their mistakes.Ultimately, the new systems will be able tomake sense of challenging audio clips,efficiently detecting who spoke what, whenand how.

Unsupervised training is also crucial, asProfessor Woodland explained: “Systems arecurrently pre-trained with the sort of datathey are trying to recognise – so a dictationsystem is trained with dictation data – butthis is a significant commercial barrier as eachnew application requires specific types ofdata. Our approach is to build systems thatare trained on a very wide range of data typesand enable detailed system adaptation to theparticular situation of interest. To access andstructure the data, without needing manualtranscripts, we are developing approachesthat allow the system to train itself from alarge quantity of unlabelled speech data.”

“One very interesting aspect of the workis that the fundamental HMMs are alsogenerators of speech, and so the adaptivetechnology underlying speech recognition is

also being applied to the development ofpersonalised speech synthesis systems,”added Professor Woodland. New systems willtake into account expressiveness andintention in speech, enabling devices to bebuilt that respond to an individual’s voice,vocabulary, accent and expressions.

The three university teams have alreadymade considerable contributions to the fieldand many techniques used in current speechrecognition systems were developed by theengineers involved in the new project. Thenew programme grant enables them to take awider vision and to work with companies thatare interested in how speech technologycould transform our lives at home and atwork. Applications already planned include apersonalised voice-controlled device to helpthe elderly to interact with control systems inthe home, and a portable device to enableusers to create a searchable text version ofany audio they encounter in their everydaylives.

Human-like performance inspeech technology could be justaround the corner, thanks to anew research project that linksthree uK universities.

Professor Phil Woodland For more information, please contactProfessor Phil Woodland(pcw@eng.cam.ac.uk) at theDepartment of engineering(www.eng.cam.ac.uk/).

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Language sciences | 11

ask any biomedical scientist whetherthey manage to keep on top ofreading all of the publications in their

field, let alone an adjacent field, and few willsay yes. New publications are appearing at adouble-exponential rate, as measured byMEDLINE – the US National Library ofMedicine’s biomedical bibliographic database– which now lists over 19 million records andadds up to 4,000 new records daily.

For a prolific field such as cancer research,the number of publications could quicklybecome unmanageable and importanthypothesis-generating evidence may bemissed. But what if scientists could instruct acomputer to help them?

To be useful, a computer would need totrawl through the literature in the same waythat a scientist would: reading the literatureto uncover new knowledge, evaluating thequality of the information, looking forpatterns and connections between facts, andthen generating hypotheses to test. Not onlymight such a program speed up the progressof scientific discovery but, with the capacityto consider vast numbers of factors, it mighteven discover information that could bemissed by the human brain.

The aim of Dr Anna Korhonen andresearchers in the Natural Language andInformation Processing Group in theComputer Laboratory is to developcomputers that can understand writtenlanguage in the same way that humans do.One of the projects she is involved in hasrecently developed a method of ‘text mining’one of the most literature-dependent areas ofbiomedicine: cancer risk assessment ofchemicals.

craB: catching facts on chemicaltoxicityEvery year, thousands of new chemicals aredeveloped, any one of which might pose a

potential risk to human health. Complex riskassessment procedures are in place todetermine the relationship between exposureand the likelihood of developing cancer, butit’s a lengthy process, as Royal SocietyUniversity Research Fellow Dr Korhonenexplained: “The first stage of any riskassessment is a literature review. It’s a majorbottleneck. There could be tens of thousandsof articles for a single chemical. Performedmanually, it’s expensive and, because of therising number of publications, it’s becomingtoo challenging to manage.”

CRAB, the tool her team has developedin collaboration with Professor Ulla Stenius’group at the Institute of EnvironmentalMedicine at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, isa novel approach to cancer risk assessmentthat could help risk assessors move beyondmanual literature review.

The approach is based on text-miningtechnology, which has been pioneered bycomputer scientists, and involvesdeveloping programs that can analysenatural language texts, despite theircomplexity, inconsistency and ambiguity.The tool Dr Korhonen has developed withher colleagues is the first text-mining toolaimed at aiding literature review in chemicalrisk assessment.

At the heart of CRAB, the developmentof which was funded by the MedicalResearch Council and the Swedish ResearchCouncil among others, is a taxonomy thatspecifies scientific evidence used in cancerrisk assessment, including key events thatmay result in cancer formation. The systemtakes the textual content of each relevantMEDLINE abstract and classifies it accordingto the taxonomy. At the press of a button, aprofile is rapidly built for any particularchemical using all of the available literature,describing highly specific patterns ofconnections between chemicals and toxicity.

“Although still under development, thesystem can be used to make connections thatwould be difficult to find, even if it had beenpossible to read all the documents,” added Dr Korhonen. “In a recent experiment, westudied a group of chemicals with unknownmode of action and used the CRAB tool tosuggest a new hypothesis that might explaintheir male-specific carcinogenicity in thepancreas.”

The tool will be available for end-users viaan online web interface. However, researchinto improving text mining will continue. Oneof the biggest current challenges is todevelop adaptive technology that can beported easily between different text types,tasks and scientific fields.

One day, rather than being at the mercyof the flourishing rate of publication, scientistswill have at their fingertips a system to workalongside them that will not only point themtowards those references that are relevant totheir search, but will also tell them why.

Dr anna Korhonen For more information, please contactDr anna Korhonen (alk23@cam.ac.uk),who has a joint appointmentbetween the computer Laboratory(www.cl.cam.ac.uk/) and theDepartment of Theoretical andapplied Linguistics(www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/).

scientists are developing acomputer that can read vastamounts of scientific literature,make connections between factsand develop hypotheses.

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Parents are often amazed by the speedat which children acquire language inearly childhood, becoming fluent

around three years of age. Compare this withthe average adult attempting to acquire asecond language, and it’s a quite remarkableachievement.

In the late 1950s, the American linguistNoam Chomsky suggested that children areborn with an innate ability to acquirelanguage – a ‘blueprint’, as it were, forspeaking any language on the planet.According to Chomsky, encoded in thehuman brain is an innate set of linguisticprinciples he called the ‘universal grammar’that encompasses all of the properties thatany language can have. The language thechild then actually speaks is simplydetermined by exposure to the language (orlanguages in the case of a multilingual family)they hear as they develop.

But precisely how a universal grammarmight underlie the range of languages wehave today, not to mention the many pastlanguages that have vanished completely, is acontinuing puzzle, as Cambridge linguistProfessor Ian Roberts explained: “If you talkabout a universal grammar then you mightnaturally think there is a universal language,when of course there isn’t. Rather, there arethousands of different languages.”

“The central notion is that thespecification that the child has in thegenome, the universal grammar, must be ofthe most abstract, general, structuralproperties of language and that differentlanguages manifest these properties inslightly different ways,” he added. “Theempirical question then is to work out what itis about a language that guides the child’sinnate ability to acquire it. In other words, tounderstand how Chomsky’s theory couldwork, we need to work out how languagesare built.”

Language footprintsOne way to investigate the variation betweenlanguages is to suppose that there is in factvery little difference, and that each languagecan be deconstructed to a ‘typologicalfootprint’ that defines it. This is the hypothesisthat Professor Roberts and his team have nowset out to investigate over the next five years,with €2.5 million funding from the EuropeanResearch Council (ERC) Advanced InvestigatorGrant scheme.

“This starting premise is almost certainlygoing to prove too simplified,” admittedProfessor Roberts, “but in the process ofhoming in on precisely how languages arebuilt, what we hope will emerge is a newperspective on comparative grammar for thelanguages of the world.”

The idea that languages can becategorised into different types is not a newone but this project will break new ground insyntactic theory (the understanding of howsentences are constructed) by exploring howdifferent languages measure up in terms of aset of five structural properties defined by theteam.

Professor Roberts believes that arelatively small number of structuralproperties are needed to define eachlanguage’s unique ‘footprint’ and that thisfootprint is crucial to learning the language,as he explained: “We think that while theinnate universal grammar may determinecertain gross features of language, it isencountering this footprint that fine-tunesthe acquisition of language in children.”

a linguistic duck-billed platypusThe carefully chosen properties underinvestigation relate to the more abstract,structural features of languages. “Theseproperties are not always immediatelyapparent from surface data and require a bit

of analysis to discover,” said Professor Roberts.“If children acquiring language can discoversuch complex properties spontaneously, thisprobably reflects their innate abilities sincethey are doing more than simply reproducingpatterns.”

One example is the order of words in asentence. In English, for instance, the wordorder follows subject-verb-object (as in Johnloves books). Although this is one of the mostcommon word orders in the world, it’s by nomeans the only one. In fact, all of the logicalpermutations of subject, verb and object canbe found in different languages but in verydifferent frequencies, the most frequentbeing subject-object-verb (John books loves)in languages such as German and Japanese.In languages like Mohawk, words can even becombined to form new verbs (Johnbookloves).

a team of cambridge linguistshas embarked on an ambitiousproject to identify how thelanguages of the world are built – from inuit Yupik to sub-saharan Bantu, from navajo to nepalese.

how languages are built

12 | Language sciences

we refine the classificatory system when wecan make predictions about what types oflanguages are out there.”

gap fillingProfessor Roberts’ hunch is that theclassification will turn out to be morecomplicated than the team initially envisaged:“I suspect that we will need to evolve theproperties as we go along until we arrive atthe perfect set. That’s what we are mostinterested in doing. It’s the first time this hasbeen done systematically or on this scale.”

Tantalisingly, when the researchers arriveat a set of properties that categorise thestructure of the languages of the world, theresults will not only reveal relations amonglanguage families but could also tell ussomething about ancient patterns of humanmigration. Here, the project dovetails with

research being carried out by ProfessorGiuseppe Longobardi’s group at the Universityof Trieste in Italy; Longobardi’s group arelooking at the variant features of languagesthat remain constant over long historicalperiods. In this way, they hope to be able todiscern very ancient relationships amonglanguages and language families, which inturn may tell us something about ancientpopulation distributions and movements.

The main aim of the project though is todeepen our fundamental understanding ofhow languages vary and how the humanmind works in acquiring language, explainedProfessor Roberts: “Our current view is thatlanguage is not pre-specified but ratherunder-specified in the sense that there arecertain aspects about the structure oflanguage that universal grammar doesn’t sayanything about. These gaps appear to be filledin as the child develops by cognitivemechanisms that work with the properties ofthe language they hear, and it is theseproperties that we aim to define.”

Each language will have its own rules forthis property, and for each of the other fiveproperties being analysed; the task of theteam is to identify these patterns. They willlook at thousands of languages, from thelanguages of Europe to the Bantu dialects of the sub-Sahara, from Caribbean languagesto the Carib languages of the indigenousXingui peoples of Brazil, and from Navajo toNepalese. Information will be garnered fromonline grammars, original historicaldocumentation of language structures and,where feasible, native-speaker consultants.

“There are bound to be quirks andanomalies – the linguistic equivalents of theduck-billed platypus – a language that is justweird and doesn’t quite fit into the bigcategories,” said Professor Roberts. “But ofcourse these isolated cases are interesting inthemselves. We hope to reach a situation as

“We hope to reach a situationwhen we can make predictionsabout what types of languagesare out there.”

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Visual representation of ‘rules-based’ construction of language by artist christian Faur

Language sciences | 13

14 | Language sciences

in present-day Western cultures, we tendto underestimate the remarkable overlapbetween music and language in the

functions they fulfil as communicativemedia. At first glance, music seems to usquite different from language; after all, weclearly cannot exchange informationthrough music as we do through language.

But if we shift our cultural perspective,we find that in many traditional societiesmusic is not just presentational but alsoparticipatory. People engage with eachother in musical performance, making musictogether – what has been called ‘musicking’.

Among the research priorities of theCentre for Music and Science (CMS),established in 2003 in the Faculty of Musicand staffed by Professor Ian Cross andProfessor Sarah Hawkins (respectively,specialists in music and speech), is therelationship between music and language asclosely interconnected systems ofcommunication. Ongoing research, such asthat of graduate student Sarah Knight, isdemonstrating how participatory musicshares many functional attributes withaspects of speech – language in action.

all in the timingConversation is not just about informationexchange, it’s about continually establishingand reaffirming the mutual recognition ofeach other as social beings. This relationaldimension in speech involves tone of voiceor prosody – not dissimilar from melody inmusic – as well as timing.

Timing in conversational interactions isextremely important to enable us toproduce signals (gestures, interjections) atappropriate points and to take turns tospeak. Timing in speech makes it clear thatwe understand the information that we arereceiving, creates and sustains a sense ofrapport with other speakers, and directsanother’s attention to what is being said.

There’s now a substantial amount ofevidence from research at CMS and acrossthe field of psychology that regularity orperiodicity of timing – a regular beat – alsohas these last two functions. If people movetogether to a beat, then they are more likelyto experience each other as sympathetic; ifwe hear a beat, even subconsciously, it willcapture our attention.

Feel the rhythmSarah Knight has applied these ideas tounderstanding aspects of timing inlanguage. Although speech lacks the overtrhythm of music, speakers might modulatehow they deliver speech to capture listeners’attention. To understand how rhythmicity isused in speech, Sarah analysed examples ofeveryday conversation, university lectures,political speeches and highly rhythmicpoetry, measuring how listeners rated therhythmicity of each.

Everyday conversation, she finds, has noregular pulse; to a lesser extent, didacticlectures also lack rhythm, probably as a resultof being constrained by the forms of thespecific information that we wish to impart.

In party political oratory, however, shefinds the very opposite is likely to hold.Rhythm is used deliberately andconsistently, even to the extent that theactual information is often the leastsignificant component of the talk. Theimplication is that rhythmicity is used in anattempt to manipulate the attentiveness oflisteners, and also signals how muchspeakers ‘want to be liked’.

Part of the human toolkitOther research at CMS is also reinforcing theidea that speech and music are closelyconnected, and may have commonevolutionary origins.

The early appearance of music in ourarchaeological record lends weight to the

idea that the capacity for music is anadaptive characteristic of the humanspecies. Music might have played a role inenabling our ancestors to get on with eachother – to form, maintain and re-form stableyet flexible groups or cultures – in effect, anevolutionary scenario that would have beenimportant for survival.

In fact, music and speech are bestconceived of as having co-evolved ascomponents of a generalised humancommunicative toolkit. Music provides arelational medium similar to the relationaldimension of speech, but different enoughto be an important component of thehuman repertoire of communicativeinteractions in its own right, and far bettersuited than speech for the management ofsituations of social uncertainty.

If this is the case, then music may be –and may have been – as important aslanguage in enabling humans to achieve theunique flexibility in social interaction thatcharacterises the human species.

Music is more than just sound.sharing many features withlanguage, it has all the hallmarksof a communicative system, asProfessor ian cross explains.

sarah Knight and ProfessorIan crossFor more information, please contactProfessor ian cross (ic108@cam.ac.uk)at the centre for Music and science(www.mus.cam.ac.uk/cMs/) at theFaculty of Music.

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Language sciences | 15©

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every year, over 3 million people in 130 countries take a cambridge english exam

Language testing affects the lives ofmillions of people every year. TheCambridge English qualifications,

produced by the University of CambridgeESOL Examinations and taken by more than3.3 million people worldwide annually, are apassport to countless opportunities. Asuccessful test result could open the door tojobs, further education and even countries.

But Cambridge ESOL is much more thanexams. Behind these gold standard tests is anorganisation (part of the Universitydepartment Cambridge Assessment) that isdeeply committed to research into languageteaching and learning. Cambridge ESOL’steam of specialists not only deliver tests thatare fair, accurate and valid but their work isalso contributing to global educationalreforms. And with the biggest ever study ofthe language proficiency of European schoolchildren now under way, their researchpromises to shine new light on the waylanguage is taught across Europe.

Fit for purposeFor almost 100 years, ever since the firstCertificate of Proficiency in English test rolledoff the presses in 1913, Cambridge has beenassociated with English language testing.Now with a portfolio of over 20 differentexams, Cambridge ESOL prides itself onbeing able to provide the right assessmentfor the right person. ‘Cambridge English’, abranding developed by Cambridge ESOL andCambridge University Press, is synonymouswith good practice in English languagelearning, teaching and assessment.

“Language assessment has evolved tokeep pace with the way in which English isbeing used around the world,” saidCambridge ESOL’s Chief Executive, Dr MikeMilanovic. “But this process has acceleratedover the past 20 years with the growingrecognition by governments that English is abasic skill essential for the future

employability of their citizens. English is nowa core part of school curricula, no longerregarded as a foreign language.”

With this comes a great responsibility forassessment providers to develop reliabletests that meet the needs of teachers andlearners, and are relevant to evolvingeducational curricula. This is where researchbecomes especially important.

Cambridge ESOL’s 40-strong team is thelargest dedicated research capability of anyprovider of English language assessment.Each year, its researchers interrogatehundreds of millions of pieces of informationrelating to the tests taken by over 3 millioncandidates. It’s a vast, complex exercise thatcombines data from pre-tests and tests,candidates’ demographics and informationon the impact that tests have on life-changing decisions such as immigration,education and employment. Only then can apicture emerge of how fit for purpose theexams are and how they can be continuallyimproved.

global impactCambridge ESOL’s research also looks beyondits exams to global curricula developmentand educational reforms. English Profile, forinstance, is a ground-breaking programme itleads with Cambridge University Press that isshaping the future of English languagelearning, teaching and assessmentworldwide. The aim of the network of globalspecialists, which includes researchers atCambridge’s Department of Theoretical andApplied Linguistics, is to develop a definitivedescription of English – its grammar,vocabulary and functional language – and torelate this to the language that learners canbe expected to demonstrate at each level ofthe Common European Framework ofReference for Languages.

Meanwhile, results from the largest andmost comprehensive survey ever to assess

how well European pupils know otherlanguages are being finalised ready forreporting to the European Commission (EC)in early 2012. SurveyLang, which is beingconducted by a consortium led byCambridge ESOL, is measuring the languagecompetence of 50,000 pupils aged 16–18years across 15 countries in Europe for twoout of five European languages.

Once the survey is completed, policymakers will have access for the first time toevidence on a European scale that linksforeign language competence and insightsinto good practice in language learning. Notonly will the information be useful to the ECfor understanding the nature of foreignlanguage learning in schools, but it will alsohelp individual governments makeimportant policy decisions around the waylanguage is taught in their own country.

“What we’re striving for through these and other research projects,” added Dr Milanovic, “is to make sure that what wedo really does have a positive impact on thelearning, teaching and assessment of Englishin the real world.”

Dr Mike MilanovicFor more information, please contact Dr Mike Milanovic(Milanovic.M@cambridgeesol.org) at esoL (www.cambridgeesol.org/).

english language testing, and theresearch that underpins it, hasbeen elevated to a new level bythe increasing global dominanceof english, now used by anestimated 1.8 billion peopleworldwide.

Testing theworld’senglish

16 | Language sciences

it may come as some surprise thatNorman is spoken in the British Islestoday. In the British parliament, the use of

certain Norman phrases, for example duringthe passage of Bills between the House ofCommons and the House of Lords, is atradition that dates back to a time just afterthe Norman Conquest, when Norman Frenchwas the official language of government.

But on the Channel Islands of Jersey,Guernsey and Sark, Norman is a nativelanguage, albeit now endangered. In fact,Norman has been spoken in the Islands for athousand years and, despite the fact that thearchipelago has been united politically withGreat Britain since 1204, until relativelyrecently most of the inhabitants wereFrancophone.

The presence of English was probablyfirst felt to any significant extent when, inthe Middle Ages, military garrisons wereestablished on the Islands to defend themagainst the French. But Norman Frenchremained the everyday speech for mostIslanders until well into the 19th century,when growing trade and transport links ledto ever-increasing contact with the Britishmainland and hence to progressiveAnglicisation.

Dr Mari Jones, from the Department ofFrench, has worked extensively in theChannel Islands, painstakingly analysing anddocumenting the dialects and examiningthe linguistic consequences of the contactthat has taken place between English andthe (three distinct) Norman French dialectsof the Channel Islands (called locally Jèrriais,Guernésiais and Sercquais).

Her research takes place against abackdrop of dwindling numbers of nativespeakers, many of whom she hasinterviewed and recorded. “This is work thatsimply cannot wait until a metaphoricaltomorrow,” she explained. “On Sark, forinstance, speakers of Sercquais – the most

vulnerable variety of Norman French and theleast studied – probably number no morethan 20 in a population of 600. Sadly, it maynot be too long before the tongue sharesthe same fate as Auregnais, the Normandialect of the island of Alderney that diedout in the mid-20th century. Analysis of thelanguages of the Channel Islands is thereforeessential while they are still alive.” Dr Jones’srecordings feature, in all likelihood, peoplewho will be the last ever native speakers ofthese dialects.

Language lossLanguages become threatened for a varietyof reasons – there might, for instance, bepolitical, religious or cultural forces at play.“But for many endangered languages,” saidDr Jones, “the reason they are vanishing isbecause people don’t want to speak themany more. In a nutshell, they perceive thenative language as outdated and the newlanguage as the language of progress.”

A changing view of the world aroundthem has, Dr Jones believes, had an impacton speakers’ motivations to speak ChannelIsland French. Events in the 20th century,such as the growth of tourism and theoffshore finance industry, led to Englishbeing seen as a means to prosperity andsocial advancement, and also brought intheir wake large-scale immigration to Jerseyand Guernsey from the British mainland.

Moreover, before this, the evacuation ofa significant number of the women andchildren from Guernsey, Jersey and Alderneyin the days preceding the Germanoccupation of the Channel Islands duringthe Second World War also had severelinguistic repercussions, as Dr Jonesexplained: “A considerable proportion of thechild population of each island spent thenext five years, until 1945, cut off from theirnative tongue and immersed in the verylanguage with which it was in competition.

On their return, many had either forgottentheir Channel Island Norman French orchose to continue using English.”

Jèrriais is now spoken by just 2,874(3.2%) of the Jersey population andGuernésiais by 1,327 (2.2%) of the Guernseypopulation, according to censuses carriedout in the Islands in 2001. However, as Dr Jones pointed out, conscious steps arenow being taken to safeguard the future ofChannel Island Norman French: “What wasonce seen as a negative link betweenlanguage and identity is nowadays regardedas a positive one and, on Jersey andGuernsey, the language is currently beingtaught in schools.” Revitalisation efforts arefocused by the ‘Office du Jèrriais’ on Jersey,where language planning has made themost headway in the archipelago.

Language contactOne element of Dr Jones’s research is aimedat understanding what happens whenlanguages are in contact. In Jersey, forinstance, bilingualism has been widespreadsince at least the mid-20th century and so-called contact phenomena abound: inthe course of a conversation, speakers mayalternate between one language variety andanother (called code-switching) or transfersyntactic patterns such as word order fromone language to another.

During several field trips to the ChannelIslands, Dr Jones has interviewed andrecorded speakers to examine precise

norman languages spoken in thechannel islands for a thousandyears are now severelyendangered. Linguist Dr MariJones has been analysing thelanguages and tracing why theyhave declined.

Island language in a sea ofchange

Language sciences | 17

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anglicisation of the language of the channel Islands took hold in the 19th century, when trade links with england led to improved communication by postal service and boat, and ever-increasing contact with the english

cambridge Group forendangered Languages andcultures (ceLc)The varieties of channel IslandNorman French are among 6,000languages spoken worldwide todayas estimated by UNescO. But thislinguistic wealth – the culturalequivalent to biodiversity – is underthreat as languages becomeendangered and die out.

ceLc has brought togetherresearchers from across the university,united by their common interest inendangered languages. some of theresearchers study endangeredlanguages because of what they cantell us about the cultural history andidentity of a people; others examinethe nuts and bolts of how languagechanges and the insight this provideson how languages are ‘built’; yetothers are concerned withunderstanding, preserving anddocumenting dying languages beforethey are lost for ever.

“There is no one size that fits allwith languages,” explained Dr MariJones, who is a founder member ofceLc, “That’s why the differentperspectives on language that ceLcbrings together are so stimulating.”

With funding from the centre forresearch in the arts, social sciencesand Humanities (crassH) for2011–12, ceLc continues its series ofworkshops and seminars. Theseevents have brought internationallyrenowned speakers to cambridge toraise awareness of the threats facinglinguistic and cultural diversity.

For more information, please visithttp://groups.pwf.cam.ac.uk/celc/

Dr Mari Jones For more information, please contactDr Mari Jones (mcj11@cam.ac.uk) atthe Department of French(www.mml.cam.ac.uk/french/).

instances where language change occurs.She has also conducted a detailed study of aremarkable corpus of 19th-centurytranslations into Guernésiais that include theBible and Shakespeare’s plays from which shehas been able to gain insight into hithertoundocumented grammatical features of thisdialect. Her work thus provides importantclues as to how languages develop over timeand the effects of contact with moredominant tongues.

“The presence of contact phenomena onthe Channel Islands came as no surprise.Social conditions mean that no variety ofinsular Norman is used any longer by any speaker as their sole means ofcommunication,” she said. “However, at thesame time, we should be careful not to makeassumptions about what we are likely to find.Just because a ‘big’ language is in contactwith a ‘small’ one we should not take it forgranted that the influence will all be one-wayor that the speech of all members of a givencommunity will be influenced in the sameway. For example, and quite surprisingly, asignificant number of Jèrriais speakers didnot code-switch at all. It is possible that thisdesire to keep their language free of Englishwords may be in some way linked to theirpositive attitude towards Jèrriais: they maybe bilingual but they did not feel they had adual identity.”

The Duchy’s legacyDr Jones’s newest research will take her tomainland France, to study the continentalspeakers of Norman. “Since the loss of theDuchy of Normandy in 1204, the Normanterritory has been fragmented,” sheexplained. “Although the split was initiallypolitical, rather than linguistic, the fact thatthe Channel Islands have been governed byBritain, and continental Normandy by France,has meant that these territories have foundthemselves on different sides of an ever-widening linguistic gulf as English andFrench, respectively, become dominant indaily life.”

Linguistically, insular and continentalNorman have never been further apart thantoday. Dr Jones’s project will investigatewhether their contact with different standardlanguages (English and French) is leading tothese varieties of Norman evolving viadifferent linguistic mechanisms.

The impending extinction of Normanmakes it vital that this comparison isundertaken while native speakers still exist –a linguistic situation that has parallels all overthe world. As the UNESCO Atlas of the World’sLanguages in Danger makes only too clear,230 languages reached extinction in the past60 years, and some 3,000 languages arecurrently endangered.

“This is work that simply cannotwait until a metaphoricaltomorrow.”

18 | Language sciences

untapped source for understanding the pre-colonial past of South Asia, and therefore itspresent.

By combining traditional philologicalmethods with advanced informationtechnology, the project will make theseextraordinary documents available in newways, helping to further research on theintellectual traditions, religious cults,literature and political ideas of South Asia. Thecorpus of information will be made availablethrough the Library’s new online digitallibrary (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/).

Tantalisingly, there are many works inIndian literary history that today are knownonly in name. “The hope has always been thatone day these missing works will be found,”said Dr Vergiani. “Perhaps some will reappearin this collection.”

ancient manuscripts thathold important clues toindia’s intellectual andreligious traditions will bethe focus of a new study.

Powerfulwords

This palm leaf manuscript in the University Library’s south asian collection is the oldest dated andillustrated sanskrit manuscript known worldwide (997 aD); Ms add.1464, 127v, left panel

in a world that seems increasingly small,every artefact documenting the history ofancient civilisations has become part of a

global heritage to be carefully preserved andstudied. Among such artefacts, manuscriptsoccupy a distinctive place – they speak to uswith the actual words of long-gone men andwomen, bringing their beliefs, ideas andsensibilities to life.

In this respect, the collections of SouthAsian manuscripts in the CambridgeUniversity Library are a precious resource.Written on now-fragile birch bark, palm leafand paper, the 2,000 manuscripts in thecollection express centuries-old South Asianthinking on religion, philosophy, astronomy,grammar, law and poetry. An early catalogueof part of the collection in 1883 found amongits treasures a 10th-century Buddhist Sanskritmanuscript from India – the oldest dated andillustrated Sanskrit manuscript knownworldwide.

Now a major exercise in ‘linguisticarchaeology’ has set out to complete acomprehensive survey of the full collection, asubstantial academic challenge that is beingfunded by the Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil. Led by Dr Vincenzo Vergiani with Dr Eivind Kahrs, both specialists in Sanskrit,the project will study and catalogue each ofthe manuscripts, placing them in their broaderhistorical context. Most of the holdings willalso be digitised by the Library.

“One reason this collection is so importantis because of the age of many of themanuscripts,” explained Dr Vergiani. “In theheat and humidity of India, materialsdeteriorate quickly and manuscripts neededto be copied again and again. As a result,many of the early Indian texts no longer exist.”

In fact, some of the oldest holdings of theLibrary’s South Asian collection werediscovered not in India but in Nepal, where theclimate is more temperate. In the 1870s,

Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the BritishResidency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts froma disused temple, where they had survivedlargely by chance.

Perfect languageMore than half of the collection is in Sanskrit, alanguage that has dominated the literaryculture of pre-modern South Asia for almostthree millennia. Its earliest attestations arefound in the Vedic hymns (texts that are stillcentral to Hinduism), dating from the end ofthe second millennium BC.

“The word Sanskrit means refined orperfected. From a very early stage, its speakerswere obsessed with handing down theirsacred texts intact,” said Dr Vergiani. “Out ofthis developed an attention to how thelanguage works. A grammatical tradition arosethat produced, around the 4th century BC, thework of Pāṇini, an amazing intellectualachievement and arguably the beginning oflinguistics worldwide, which made thelanguage constant, stable and transmissible.”

It is this robustness that Dr Vergianibelieves explains how the language becameso prevalent across South Asia – a situationthat has been likened to the spread of Latinacross Europe: “It was used by religious figuresand royalty, scholars and scientists,administrators and artists. Well into moderntimes, Sanskritic culture was very much alivethroughout India, and the language is stillused by a number of intellectuals and religiousfigures today.”

opening up scholarshipThe widespread use of Sanskrit as thelanguage of power and communication acrossSouth Asia makes the collection at the Libraryso significant. The manuscripts, written incenturies that spanned momentous politicaland economic change, are an invaluable and

Dr Vincenzo VergianiFor more information, please contactDr Vincenzo Vergiani(vv234@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty ofasian and Middle eastern studies(www.ames.cam.ac.uk/).

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spoken language leaves no fossils. So,determining how language developedin early prehistory, long before the

development of writing around 5,000 yearsago, is a challenging task.

Many of the languages of the world can begrouped into language families. A languagesuch as English, in the Indo-Europeanlanguage family, along with most of thelanguages of Europe, Iran and India,developed from Proto-Indo-European,brought to Europe by our migrating ancestors.Individual languages will have emerged fromthese shared beginnings, becoming morediverse and changing following contact withother languages over many thousands ofyears. But where those migrant ancestorscame from remains a disputed question.

In the absence of written artefacts, tracing language change is more challenging thantracing a sequence of ancient colonisations. Inrecent years, scholars have turned theirattention to whether genetic markers couldprovide the key. Several genetic studiesworldwide have looked for correlationsbetween the presence of certain geneticmarkers in communities with the language itsmembers speak.

Now, out of a reassessment of thepublished data by geneticist Dr Peter Forsterand archaeologist Professor Colin Renfrew hasemerged a global picture – one that suggeststhat mother tongue is spread by prehistoricfathers.

The Y of language changeThe new analysis, published in September2011 in Science magazine, studied theinstances of genetic markers [specifically themale Y chromosome and female mitochondrial(mt)DNA] from several thousand individuals incommunities around the world.

From Scandinavian Vikings who ferriedkidnapped British women to Iceland, to

African, Indian and Polynesian tribes, a patternhas emerged which appears to show that thearrival of men to already populated locations –as a result, for example, of agriculturaldispersal or the arrival of military forces – canhave a significant impact upon the languagethat is spoken.

Perhaps the most striking instance of sex-biased language change comes from a geneticstudy carried out by researchers in theNetherlands in 2008 on the prehistoricencounter of expanding Polynesians withresident Melanesians in New Guinea and theneighbouring Admiralty Islands. The NewGuinean coast contains pockets of Polynesian-speaking areas separated by Melanesian areas.The Polynesian mtDNA level (the female-specific marker) is similar in these areasregardless of language, whereas the male Ychromosome correlates strongly with thepresence of Polynesian languages.

“It may be that during colonisationepisodes by emigrating agriculturalists, mengenerally outnumber women in thepioneering groups and take wives from thelocal community,” explained Professor Renfrew,from the McDonald Institute forArchaeological Research. “When the parentshave different linguistic backgrounds, it mayoften be the language of the father which isdominant within the family group.”

Past studies have shown similar findings inthe Indian subcontinent among the speakersof Tibeto-Burman and among the immigrantIndo-European languages as opposed toindigenous Dravidian languages. In theAmericas, too, language replacement in thecourse of postulated farming dispersal has alsobeen found to correlate for the Uto-Aztecanlanguage family.

Dr Forster, of Murray Edwards College, alsopointed to the fact that men have a greatervariance in offspring than women – they aremore likely to father children with different

mothers than vice versa. This has beenrecorded both in prehistoric tribes such as the19th- and 20th-century Polar Eskimos fromGreenland and in historic figures like GenghisKhan, who is believed to have fatheredhundreds of children. Indeed, his Ychromosome is carried by 0.5% of the world’smale population today.

“Prehistoric women may have more readilyadopted the language of immigrant males,particularly if these newcomers brought withthem military prowess or a perceived higher status associated with farming ormetalworking,” added Dr Forster. “Whether inEuropean, Indian, Chinese or other languages,the expression ‘mother tongue’ and its conceptis firmly embedded in popular imagination –perhaps this is the reason why for so manyyears the role of fathers or, more likely, specificgroups of successful males, in determiningprehistoric language switches has not beenrecognised by geneticists.”

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Professor colin Renfrew (left)and Dr Peter Forster For more information, please contactDr Peter Forster (pf223@cam.ac.uk) atMurray edwards college or Professorcolin renfrew at the McDonaldinstitute for archaeological research.

a new analysis suggests thatlanguage change among ourprehistoric ancestors came aboutthrough the arrival of immigrantmen – rather than women – intonew settlements.

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Modern-day Melanesian tribe; in prehistory, some Melanesian tribes switched to speaking Polynesian whenthe immigrant Polynesian male component of the population reached about 10–20%

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The Victorians had a penchant for exhibiting livehuman beings, especially those from exotic foreignclimes; Dr sadiah Qureshi’s new book explores how

foreigners were displayed for the amusement andeducation of 19th-century Londoners

it was the age of industrialisation andpolitical revolution, compulsoryeducation and the dominance of the

novel, the start of the postal service and theinvention of the train, the excitement ofevangelical Christianity and the criticalchallenge to the authorities of the past.Above all, it was an era that knew it was atime like no other, a time of radical progressand visionary reform. As the Victorians wereforging remarkable economic andtechnological innovations, they were alsoobsessed with understanding their ownhistory. In archaeology, geology, history,theology and evolutionary biology, how thepast was understood was revolutionising thepresent – and shaping the future in whichwe now live.

For the past five years, a project fundedby the Leverhulme Trust has taken a freshlook at the development and impact of thecompeting views of the past in 19th-centuryBritain. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning thePast in an Age of Progress’, a project carriedout by the Cambridge Victorian StudiesGroup, has broken new ground intranscending the disciplinary boundariesthat are themselves an intellectual legacy ofthe Victorians.

It has proved to be a wonderfulexperience for all concerned, and a model ofhow productive and exciting a long-terminterdisciplinary project can be. Eachmember of the project has found their work

developing and expanding its horizons, andthe group has provided a remarkablysupportive space for exploring the richnessof Victorian culture. Historians of modernBritain (Professor Peter Mandler) have beenbrought together with historians of science(Professor Jim Secord), and classicists(Professors Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill)with experts in literary criticism (ProfessorClare Pettitt), along with eight postdoctoralfellows and three graduate students, toexplore the full range of the Victorianexperience, representation andcomprehension of the past.

Central to the group’s activities was theweekly meeting where we read anddiscussed Victorian material, secondarysources and our own research in progress.These were generous but heated debates,where each member had somethingdifferent to bring to the table. The variedranges of knowledge and approaches werethrashed out, sometimes painfully. These ledto regular workshops with invited guestsfrom around the world, which in turnproduced editions of journals and otherpublications (see panel for the two mostrecent books).

Our projects looked at major definingquestions of Victorian culture that can beproperly treated only by a multidisciplinaryteam: from what the Victorians learned inschool and university, to the poetry ornovels they wrote; from how the new

Past versuspresent in an age ofprogress: the Victoriansas a £1.2 million project onVictorian Britain reaches the endof its five-year programme,Professor simon goldhill reflectson how interdisciplinary researchhas to be the answer when itcomes to understanding theVictorians.

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“The project has left a mark inthe field of Victorian studies. ithas raised the profile of hithertoneglected bodies of knowledgewhich the Victorians took forgranted but which we do not.”

Professor simon GoldhillFor more information, please contactProfessor simon goldhill(sdg1001@cam.ac.uk), who is at theFaculty of classics and is Director ofthe centre for research in the arts,social sciences and Humanities(crassH; www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/), orvisit www.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk/

Victorian appetitesa fascination for imported Zulus and the living curiosities of the modern world,an obsession with the beauty and perfection of ancient Greece and Rome – twovery different sides of Victorian appetites, and the subject of recently publishedbooks by members of the cambridge Victorian studies Group.

in 1853, 13 zulus were brought and displayed as “the savages at Hyde Park corner”(where Dickens saw them), to perform dances, rituals and songs for a public ofgazing english men and women. at first, such shows tended to be small-scaleentrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end ofthe century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed inpurpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds andallowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial differences,foreign policy, slavery, missionary work and the empire.

in the recently published Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, andAnthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dr sadiah Qureshi provides the firstsubstantial overview of the Victorian penchant for exhibiting live human beings,especially those from exotic foreign climes.

The book is full of startling stories and stunning images, but what makes it sointeresting and important is its revelation of how science and popular culturedeveloped hand in hand where race, anthropology and geography are concerned.We are still inheriting the impact of the Victorian fascination with race, and thisbook reveals that history with vibrant and incisive insight.

if Dr sadiah Qureshi explores how the Victorians looked at the exotic, disturbingand denigrated ‘others’ of Victorian thinking – the natives, the savages, the raciallyinferior – Professor simon goldhill looks at the Victorians’ projection of an ideal,glorious origin for Western culture in classical antiquity. Just as the Victorians staredwith horrified distance at “the savages”, so they wondered at the perfection of greekbodies, the order of the roman empire, the beauty and profundity of classical poetry.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamationof Modernity demonstrates how classics made up the furniture of the mind forVictorians, educated, as they were, in greek and Latin and surrounded by classicalimagery.

But, more significantly, this book also shows how classics became the way ofenacting the most pressing cultural anxieties of the period. Whether it was oscarWilde and his chums looking back to greece for sexual liberation, or paintersturning to classical nudity to ground their aesthetic vision, or historians andnovelists arguing the politics of democracy or the role of the early church, it wasalways a detour through the ideal of classical antiquity that framed their thinking.

The Victorians prided themselves, anxiously, on being an age of progress, butprogress was often judged and understood according to the ideal model of theancient past – the greece, as nietzsche paradigmatically put it, which is the onlyplace where we are truly at home.

These newly published books show how complex a business Victorian self-definition and self-understanding is: between public shows and grand opera,anthropology and history, religion and novels, science and painting, an image ofwhat Western culture is, and should be, was being forged – and we are all still theheirs of this work of historical self-consciousness. Both books are the product ofmany years of research – and both have been fundamentally affected by theirgestation within the interdisciplinary milieu of the cambridge Victorian studiesgroup.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, andAnthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain

(2011) by Dr sadiah Qureshi is published byUniversity of chicago Press

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art,Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of

Modernity (2011) by Professor simon Goldhill ispublished by Princeton University Press

technologies of archaeology transformedbiblical scholarship, to how imperialadministrators changed policies fromconquering and looting to ruling andmaintenance of national cultural heritage;and from explorations of contemporarypolitical violence to explorations of theinfluence of the ancient world oncontemporary political idealism.

The project has left a mark in the field ofVictorian studies. It has raised the profile ofhitherto neglected bodies of knowledgewhich the Victorians took for granted butwhich we do not, largely because of ourdifferent disciplinary map. We have gained anew appreciation of the paramountsignificance for the Victorian imagination of

classical languages and archaeology, of Egyptand the Far East, of geology and the Biblicaltexts.

Although the project inevitably calls itselfby the buzzword ‘interdisciplinary’, we wereactually studying a period when thedisciplines were just beginning to be formedand professionalised. In effect, much of thework was not so much interdisciplinary, aslearning to reach back behind the disciplinesto different regimes and organisations ofknowledge. In exploring the Victorianattitudes to the past, we were exploring howthe current scholarly map was formed. Ininvestigating a Victorian sense of heritage, wewere discovering the intellectual heritagethat all modern academics share.

22 | Features

Few areas of research have beensurrounded by such hope – and suchhype – as stem cell biology. With their

unique capacity to renew themselves and togive rise to the body’s many different celltypes, stem cells have the potential to repairtissues damaged by disease or trauma: froma failing heart to lost nerve cells.

But the route from the laboratory to theclinic is a long one. Before patients can betreated, many years of fundamental researchand clinical testing have to take place.“Rushing into the clinic without basicunderstanding may create some headlinesbut no real benefit for patients,” saidProfessor Austin Smith, Director ofCambridge’s Wellcome Trust (WT) Centre forStem Cell Research. “Cambridge is one of thefew places in the world that has a criticalmass in both basic stem cell science andmedical translation.”

Since 2007, the University has investedover £38 million in laboratories and posts,and has prioritised stem cell biology as aStrategic Research Initiative. There are now26 stem cell laboratories across theUniversity, which have attracted some £95 million in funding. Many of theresearchers are hosted by the WT Centre andthe University’s Medical Research Council

(MRC) Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine(established by Professor Roger Pedersen),which focus on fundamental andtranslational stem cell research, respectively.

Now, a major effort is under way to drawtogether stem cell research across theUniversity into a new Stem Cell Institute (SCI).The SCI currently spans several sites but theintention is to bring all these groups togetherultimately in a major new research instituteon the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.Unification will create the ideal stage for thetranslation of fundamental research intoclinical benefits – research such as the long-running programme led by Professor RobinFranklin in the Department of VeterinaryMedicine, whose work on multiple sclerosis isabout to move into clinical trials (see panel).

“Collaboration has always happened inCambridge,” explained Professor Smith, “butpulling people together will capitalise fullyon the rich opportunities. SCI will provide aunified organisation and a strategic directionfor stem cell research that starts from basicscience but sets clinical delivery andinteraction with bioindustry firmly in itssights.” A key component will beinterdisciplinary research teams that linkstem cell biology with molecular diseasemechanisms through to clinical applications.

cambridgestem cellsunitedcohesion, collaboration andclinical impact are thewatchwords of a new phase ofstem cell research in cambridge.

Rosettes of human, patient-specific neural stemcells generated from induced pluripotent stem cells

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Alongside Professor Smith inspearheading the reshaping will be thenewly established Chair of Stem CellMedicine, to which Professor Oliver Brüstlehas been elected. Professor Brüstle iscurrently Director of the Institute ofReconstructive Neurobiology at theUniversity of Bonn, Germany, and an expertin stem cells of the nervous system and theirapplication in neurodegenerative disease.

Professor Brüstle – who notably foughtfor legalisation of research on humanembryonic stem (ES) cells in Germany andfinally became the first scientist to obtain arespective license – regards stem celltherapies as “just another way to treatdisease”. He is at pains to emphasise that celltransplantation is not the only way that stemcells can bring clinical benefit: “In fact, amuch closer prospect is the use of stem cellsto study specific diseases in the laboratoryand to develop new drugs.” Anotherimportant opportunity is the possibility ofimproving cancer treatment by identifyingand targeting tumour stem cells.

“Of course there are challenges toovercome before stem-cell-based medicineis commonplace,” added Professor Brüstle.“For example, we need to learn more abouthow human ES cells differ from mouse EScells, and how their fate is controlled.”

In fact, a major discovery about thedifferences between human and mouse EScells was made in Cambridge. ProfessorPedersen and Dr Ludovic Vallier andcolleagues showed that human ES cellsrepresent a developmentally more maturestage than naive mouse ES cells. This canexplain why some procedures for producingspecific cell types from mouse ES cells donot work well with human cells. “Human EScells are less versatile. This research haschanged the way stem cell researchers thinkabout human ES cells,” explained ProfessorSmith.

The goal now is to understand thisdifference at a molecular level. ProfessorAzim Surani at the WT/Cancer Research UKGurdon Institute in Cambridge haspioneered a deep-sequencing technique todo precisely this. His team can now analysethe entire transcriptome (all the geneproducts) in a single stem cell, opening thedoor not only to understanding the specificnature of human ES cells but perhaps also tohow to make them more like mouse cells.

Professor Smith foresees a time whenstem cells will permeate all areas of biology:“Stem cells are going to be instrumental intaking us to the next level of understandingabout how cells make decisions about theirfate. Increasingly, we’ll see them being usedin laboratories as systems to look at basicbiological questions that may have nothingdirectly to do with stem cell biology. Stemcells will soon become the research tool ofchoice in mammalian cell biology.”

Professor austin smith (left)and Professor Oliver BrüstleFor more information, please contactProfessor austin smith(agssec@cscr.cam.ac.uk) or visit thecambridge stem cell initiativewebsite (www.stemcells.cam.ac.uk/).

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unification will create the idealstage for the translation offundamental research intoclinical benefits.

self-service brain repair in multiple sclerosis (Ms) a new clinical trial hopes to restore the functions lost in Ms by boosting theactivity of stem cells in the patient’s brain.

researchers led by Professor robin Franklin at the Ms society cambridge centrefor Myelin repair recently discovered a molecule that is capable of activating thebrain’s own stem cells to repair damage caused by Ms. Preparations have begun fora small-scale trial to test whether this process can regenerate lost nerve function,for which there is currently no treatment available.

nerve fibres are progressively damaged in Ms because they lose a protectivecoating of myelin when the cells that make it (the oligodendrocytes) are destroyedby the body’s immune system. The new treatment will stimulate stem cells thatoccur naturally in the brain and which have the ability to regenerate lostoligodendrocytes.

in the course of over two decades of research, Professor Franklin andcolleagues have found that one of the major problems in Ms is that the patient’sstem cells lose the ability to become normal oligodendrocytes. Whenoligodendrocytes are destroyed during the Ms disease process, they are notreplenished from the brain’s pool of stem cells. But the ability can be regainedwhen the patient’s stem cells are activated through the retinoid acid receptor rXr-γ, as shown in collaboration with colleagues in edinburgh using animalmodels and published in Nature Neuroscience in January 2011.

The discovery was a landmark moment in the search for treatments for Ms, asProfessor Franklin explained: “if we can encourage the patient’s own stem cells todevelop into oligodendrocytes and replace the lost myelin, then this might restorethe nerve functions lost in Ms.”

in fact, the proposed treatment revolves around two elements: not onlyrepairing the damage but also arresting any further damage caused by thepatient’s immune system. an effective treatment for halting the destruction ofoligodendrocytes using alemtuzumab (campath) was developed in cambridge byProfessor alastair compston and Dr alasdair coles at the Department of clinicalneuroscience.

The new trial, which is currently being designed by Dr coles together withcolleagues at university college London and the university of edinburgh, and isnot yet recruiting patients, will use a licensed drug, bexarotene, which activatesrXr-γ.

Professor Franklin added: “essentially, the philosophy of our approach is not totransplant stem cells from elsewhere but to encourage the patient’s own stem cellsto do the work of repairing the damaged tissue.”

For more information, please contact Professor Robin Franklin(rjf1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Ms society cambridge centre for Myelin Repair.

24 | Features

cycling to lectures through Cambridge’smedieval streets, learning leadershipskills from pioneers in conservation of

the environment, splashing into the turquoisewaters of the Caribbean to observe marinelife. These are among the many memoriesthat Joy Juma will take home to Kenya after ayear at the University of Cambridge as one ofthe first cohort of graduate students on theMPhil in Conservation Leadership programme(see panel).

The past year has been one of the mostvaried and demanding in Joy’s life. Not onlyhas she experienced one of the coldest Britishwinters on record but she also spent sevenweeks on a placement with the Cambridge-based conservation organisation Fauna &Flora International (FFI) on the islands ofAntigua and Barbuda, extending her practicaland grass-roots knowledge of marineconservation.

Her visit to the Caribbean entailedgathering data on the marine environmentand the ways in which it intersects with twoof the area’s most important sources ofrevenue – fishing and tourism – which arevital to the livelihoods of thousands of peopleon modest or low incomes. The emphasis ofher research was on marine governance. “OnAntigua, I was based at the Fisheries Divisionof the Ministry of Agriculture, Lands, Housing

and the Environment, and also spent sometime talking to individual fishermen abouttheir working lives. It was so encouraging thatthe fishermen are really keen to conservetheir environment and they showed a deepunderstanding of ecosystem dynamics,” shesaid.

“On Barbuda, I found that people felt aneven stronger sense of ownership of themarine environment, perhaps because landthere is communally owned. This revealeditself in their interest in marine conservation.On both islands, there is a profoundcommitment to sustainable managementand a willingness to work towards this thatwas really exciting. It shows howconservationists and communities can worktogether to protect threatened species andthe habitats they live in. What emerged mostforcefully from my placement was thesimilarity of conservation problems globallyand the opportunities for learning from eachother.”

Once back in Kenya, where she works forthe East African arm of FFI, Joy will apply herexperiences in the Caribbean and what shehas learnt on the MPhil programme inCambridge. In 2009, together with colleaguesat FFI, she was instrumental in setting upmarine conservation projects with fishingcommunities at six different landing places on

Joy Juma is among the first early-career conservation practitionersto take an innovative Mastersprogramme at the university ofcambridge.

a conservation leaderin the making Joy, working with Fauna & Flora International (FFI)

in the caribbean

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“What emerged most forcefullyfrom my placement was thesimilarity of conservationproblems globally and theopportunities for learning fromeach other.”

The conservation Leadership students 2010–11 on afield trip to the norfolk Broads

MPhil in conservation Leadership

Launched in 2010 by the Department of geography, the MPhil in conservationLeadership focuses on equipping its students with the tools to become professionalmanagers in the world of conservation. Key to its success is the collective expertise ofpartners in the cambridge conservation initiative (cci; www.conservation.cam.ac.uk/):eight leading conservation organisations and one conservation network clustered inthe cambridge area and six departments across the university, including thecambridge Judge Business school and the cambridge Programme for sustainabilityLeadership.

students go beyond developing a deeper awareness of the complex drivers ofbiodiversity loss to learn skills that will prepare them for the challenges of leadership:strategic planning, finance, innovation, entrepreneurship, advocacy andcommunication.

The Director of conservation Leadership, and Fellow of churchill college, Dr nigelLeader-Williams, explained: “The programme is built along similar lines to the businessschool model, with a professional placement spent with one of cci organisationsproviding the students with hands-on experience of management tasks.”

Many of the students are from less-developed countries, where the mostbiodiversity remains but also where the losses are probably the greatest. “We need togrow the number of dedicated scholarships that are available for the course becausemost of the students we aim to attract don’t have the funds necessary to cover thecosts of the course,” added Dr Leader-Williams. The programme is supported for aperiod of 10 years by a generous gift from the MaVa Fondation pour la Protection de lanature, while arcadia has agreed to establish a Miriam rothschild scholarshipProgramme in conservation Leadership for the next five years.

as the first cohort of students complete their studies and resume their careers inconservation around the globe, the contacts they have made will be invaluable. This,explained Dr Mike rands, executive Director of cci, is a strategic aim of theprogramme: “With successive years, this innovative course will create a growinginternational leadership network, build conservation capacity and become a majorforce for better environmental stewardship.”

For more information, please contact Dr Nigel Leader-Williams (nigel.leader-williams@geog.cam.ac.uk) or visitwww.geog.cam.ac.uk/graduate/mphil/conservation/

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the south coast of Kenya. The objective is tomanage marine resources in a way that issustainable and participatory. “It’s a schemethat brings diverse stakeholders together fora common purpose – and the earlyindications are that it is very effective,” sheexplained.

Joy has been passionate aboutconservation ever since she was a teenager.On leaving school, she took a degree inenvironmental studies at Nairobi’s KenyattaUniversity, concentrating on communitydevelopment. After graduating, she spent ayear working as a volunteer for the EastAfrican Wildlife Society, a Kenyan-based NGO.“I worked on the restoration of a lake thatstraddles the boundary between Kenya andTanzania, and during this time I gainedessential skills and experience,” she said.Having excelled as a volunteer, and shown

her ability to co-ordinate and manageprojects, Joy was offered a post with FFI as aprogramme assistant. After four years she waspromoted to a programme co-ordinator.

In East Africa, FFI works across fourcountries – Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda andSudan. In her five years with the organisation,Joy has been involved in various projects,including participatory forest managementand species recovery. During this time shetwice visited the headquarters of FFI, whichhas strong links with Cambridge University asa founding partner of the CambridgeConservation Initiative (CCI). “I liked what Isaw of Cambridge, which is a real hub forconservation and has a strong internationalethos. So when I heard about the newMasters in Conservation Leadership, I wasreally keen to apply for a place,” she said.

“What appealed to me about the coursewas the chance to develop skills that arecrucial in project management. I liked the wayin which the course is structured to giveparticipants a solid grounding in leadership –such as communication and financialplanning – as well as incorporating aplacement with a partner organisation thatwould offer a chance to see anotherenvironment and another set of challenges.”

When FFI and the MAVA programme inConservation Leadership agreed to sponsor

Joy’s place on the programme, she wasthrilled but also nervous. “I knew it was ahuge opportunity to develop myselfprofessionally. I was also aware that I’d bethrown back on my own resources far frommy usual support network in East Africa,” sheadmitted. She need not have worried. The 12students from nine different countries on theprogramme quickly formed a strong bond.“We have a huge diversity of backgroundsand interests, so we have been able to learn avast amount from each other,” she said.

The Masters comprises two parts: the firstof which is largely taught by lecturers fromevery organisation in CCI, talking about theirspecialist fields, and the second of which isthe placement. “In the first two terms we hadlectures from many of the pioneering groupsand centres based in and around Cambridge– it was an amazing chance to hear fromthem and to be able to ask questions. What Ifound especially useful were the leadershiplectures from people at the helm ofestablished institutions,” added Joy.

Life as a Cambridge student has beenrewarding and challenging. “Spending a yearliving and working in Cambridge has been astimulating experience. I will be returning toKenya ready to be an innovative and effectiveconservation leader.”

Reporting by Alex Buxton

26 | Features

excavation of 19,000-year-old hunter-gatherer remains, including avast camp site, is fuelling a reinterpretation of the greatestfundamental shift in human civilisation – the origins of agriculture.

From foraging to farming:the 10,000-year revolution

The moment when the hunter-gathererslaid down their spears and beganfarming around 11,000 years ago is

often interpreted as one of the most rapidand significant transitions in human history –the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.

By producing and storing food, Homosapiens both mastered the natural world andtook the first significant steps towardsthousands of years of runaway technologicaldevelopment. The advent of specialistcraftsmen, an increase in fertility and theconstruction of permanent architecture are justsome of the profound changes that followed.

Of course, the transition to agriculturewas far from rapid. The period around 14,500years ago has been regarded as the point atwhich the first indications appear of culturalchange associated with agriculture: theexploitation of wild grains and theconstruction of stone buildings. Farming isbelieved to have begun in what is known asthe Fertile Crescent in the Levant region,which stretches from northern Egypt throughIsrael and Jordan to the shores of the PersianGulf, and then occurred independently inother regions of the world at different timesfrom 11,000 years ago.

Recent evidence, however, has suggestedthat the first stirrings of the revolution beganeven earlier, perhaps as far back as 19,000years ago. Stimulating this reinterpretation ofhuman prehistory are discoveries by theEpipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project(EFAP), a group of archaeologists andbioarchaeologists working in the Jordaniandesert comprising University of Cambridge’sDr Jay Stock, Dr Lisa Maher (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) and Dr Tobias Richter(University of Copenhagen).

Over the past four years, their researchhas uncovered dramatic evidence of changes in the behaviour of hunter-gatherersthat casts new light on agriculture’s origins, as Dr Stock described: “Our work suggeststhat these hunter-gatherer communities were starting to congregate in large numbers in specific places, build architectureand show more-complex ritual and symbolic burial practices – signs of a greaterattachment to a location and a changingpattern of social complexity that imply they were on the trajectory towardagriculture.”

Fertile crescentWorking at the fringes of the Fertile Crescent,at sites in the Azraq Basin and the marshlandsof Jordan, the EFAP team is excavating thearchaeological remains of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the region. Such siteshave been under studied, said Dr Stock:“Because these early hunter-gatherers havebeen perceived as building only transientcamp sites, they have been largely disregardedin explanations of the development ofagriculture. Instead, excavations have focusedon the later ‘Natufian’ period, beginningaround 14,500 years ago, since this periodmore clearly shows cultural precursors of thetransition to agriculture.”

Today, the Azraq Basin is a 12,000 sq kmarea of dusty, wind-blown desert, and a verychallenging place to work. Temperatures cansoar to 45°C, requiring the researchers to startfield work at 5 am and finish by midday whenthe heat and winds become too strong toallow work to continue.

But when the first humans were leavingAfrica, the open grasslands and lushmarshlands of the Fertile Crescent teemedwith gazelle, antelope and plant life. Given thisregion is situated at the crossroads betweenAfrica and the rest of the world, it is perhapsunsurprising that it should be the site ofregional agricultural innovation.

Few previous archaeological excavationshave been carried out in this inhospitableterrain, most instead focusing on regionscloser to the Mediterranean. With fundingfrom the Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil, the researchers set out four years ago to redress the balance.

complex burialsDr Stock’s expertise lies in the analysis ofhunter-gatherer bones. Over the past 15years, he has analysed over 1,400 skeletonsfrom around the world to understand what it is about early humans that made them such successful colonisers of the naturalenvironment.

One of the most startling of theresearchers’ findings in Jordan has been thehunter-gatherer graves. Evidence suggeststhat, far from simple burials, the hunter-gatherers had elaborate mortuary andsociocultural practices. In one grave in

ʻAyn Qasiyya, an adult male was placed inmarshland in a sitting position, and was likelyto have been tightly wrapped in cloth. Aprevious finding by another archaeologist atKharaneh IV was a burial of an older manunderneath a hut floor, his age suggestingthat he would have required the care ofothers in life.

At another site, ʻUyun-al-Hammam, aUniversity of Toronto-based project led by Dr Maher has excavated a total of 11 burials,some of which show elaborate mortuarytreatments. Indeed, one grave that includes a human buried together with a fox, said Dr Maher: “suggests a close emotional orsymbolic tie between humans and foxes priorto the first domesticated animal – the dog –and shows continuity in burial and socialpractices with the later Neolithic”. Dr Stock’s

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study of the human remains demonstratesthat these people were ancestral to the laterfarmers.

The researchers argue that theseexamples may represent an increasingcultural sophistication and a greatercomplexity in the relationship betweenhumans and animals – trends that had only previously been identified in later timeperiods.

Mega camp siteA major focus of the work of the EFAP teamover the past four years has been theexcavation of the site of Kharaneh IV, in theAzraq Desert of eastern Jordan. The site ismuch more than the sort of temporary camp site normally ascribed to hunter-gatherer groups. Covering almost twohectares, the 19,000-year-old site wasoccupied for 1,200 years and is, as Dr Stockdescribed, “so huge, it’s the earliest sign ofhuman activity that is large enough to bevisible on Google Earth.”

“To produce the debris of stone tools andbones, in some places almost 3 m deep, webelieve that many groups of hunter-gathererswould meet and live together for severalmonths of the year before splitting intomobile groups at other times.”

The team is researching the area inastonishing detail – in a technique known as 100% flotation, every square centimetreexcavated is floated to check for plantremains and charcoal. As Dr Richter pointedout: “even very small remains are providingvery important clues towards ourunderstanding of the relationship betweenprehistoric humans and their habitat”.

To date, they have found plant remains,animal bones carved with repeated incisedmotifs, stones carved with geometricpatterns, stone tools in their thousands,hearths, pierced shells and, just recently, ovalhut structures. As the work continues, allindications point towards an advancedcultural and technological complexity in theexploitation of bone, shell, plants andarchitecture. “The size of the site, combinedwith evidence for huts and other symbolicgoods, imply that Kharaneh IV was long-termand repeatedly occupied,” said Dr Stock. “Itcould be regarded as a precursor to laterfarming villages.”

The revolution that wasn’tThe team’s discoveries extend many aspectsof the behavioural complexity associatedwith the Neolithic to about 10,000 yearsearlier, pushing back the true roots of thetransition to agriculture.

“On evolutionary timescales, thetransition to agriculture can undoubtedly be regarded in revolutionary terms,” said Dr Stock. “But, we can now see this as aculturally dynamic process that began muchearlier than previously thought.”

“This picture would not have cometogether through the excavation of one sitealone,” he added. “The burial complexity ofʻUyun-al-Hammam and ʻAyn Qasiyya,together with the architecture and size of thesettlement at Kharaneh IV, collectively offerglimpses of a protracted period in whichhumans worked through the cultural andbiological changes that needed to happenbefore village life and the systematicexploitation of grain could emerge.”

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Dr Jay stock For more information, please contactDr Jay stock (jts34@cam.ac.uk) at theDivision of Biological anthropology(www.pave.bioanth.cam.ac.uk/) at theDepartment of archaeology andanthropology.

Was this hunter-gatherer on the cusp ofagriculture? excavation of sites in Jordan,

including ‘Uyun-al-hammam where this 16,000-year-old skeleton was discovered, suggests that

hunter-gatherers were closer to becoming farmersthan previously thought

“Because these early hunter-gatherers have been perceived asbuilding only transient camp sites,they have been largelydisregarded in explanations of thedevelopment of agriculture.”

28 | Features

aglobal killer that eludes capture bychanging its coat, influenza is one ofthe world’s most intractable viruses

and consuming public health challenges. Itinfects 5–15% of the world’s population andkills up to about half a million people eachyear; a figure that rose to many millions inthe three major flu pandemic outbreaksthat have occurred in the past century. In asingle year in 1918, flu claimed more thanfive times the number of lives than werelost during the World War that preceded it.

It is the coat-changing behaviour thatmakes flu such a problem. The part of thevirus that our immune system recognises isits outer coat. By changing the shape of theviral glycoprotein haemagglutinin thatmakes up most of this coat, the virusescapes destruction and begins theinfectious process that spreads rapidlythroughout the upper respiratory tract.Alarmingly, these so-called antigenicdifferences in the viral coat can evolve soquickly that a vaccine in use one year maybe obsolete the next.

Spearheading the race to identify thebest vaccine to combat seasonal flu, theWorld Health Organization (WHO)organises a consultation to makerecommendations about the compositionof the vaccine in February for the upcomingnorthern hemisphere’s flu season and inSeptember for the southern hemisphere.

“It’s a very high-risk public healthdecision – 350 million people getvaccinated with the flu vaccine every year –so a lot rides on the decision of thecommittee,” said Derek Smith, Professor ofInfectious Disease Informatics in theDepartment of Zoology. Since 2004,Professor Smith has been a member of thegroup responsible for making these crucialrecommendations.

“It’s a huge responsibility and so everyanalysis that can be used is used,” he added.One analysis that is transforming howscientists track changes in the virus isantigenic cartography. Developed byProfessor Smith with Dr Alan Lapedes (LosAlamos National Laboratory, New Mexico)and Professor Ron Fouchier (ErasmusMedical Center, Rotterdam), and firstpublished in Science in 2004, the techniqueis useful not only for tracking the pastevolution of the virus but also holdspromise for predicting what comes next.

cambridge scientists, and theirmap-making skills, arecontributing to an annualworldwide public healthendeavour – the race to select avaccine against seasonal flu.

cartographers ofthe infectiousworld

global surveillance and mapmaking For over six decades, the WHO hasorchestrated a remarkable global system toprotect us against seasonal flu. Each year,10,000–20,000 samples of the virus areisolated from throat swabs of patientspresenting with flu-like symptoms bymembers of the WHO Global InfluenzaSurveillance Network in 105 countries.Many of these strains are then sent to oneof the five WHO Collaborating Centerslocated in the USA, the UK, Japan, Chinaand Australia.

And so begins the massive task ofcollating information about the flu viruses incirculation worldwide in the precedingmonths: to what extent the viruses differgenetically, epidemiologically andserologically; how fast they are spreading andto which global region; and how well currentvaccines are likely to protect against them.

The most critical data for the vaccinerecommendation come from the detailedantigenic analyses of the virus strains –essentially this gives the scientists a senseof how well our immune system, inducedby prior infection or vaccination, willrecognise a virus.

“For many years, people have looked atdata for antigenic differences between

pathogens in numerical, tabular form, butthis is inherently difficult because ofparadoxes that were not previouslyunderstood. Not many people can makeaccurate inferences from such data,” saidProfessor Smith. “We wanted to understandthese paradoxes and be able to look at fine-grain differences between strains, andwe wanted to interpret them in a morevisual way.”

He likens the process to a road atlas.Just as understanding the relationshipbetween different cities is difficult tovisualise from a table of distances and yeteasy to see on a road atlas, so too is therelationship between different virusesclearer when a table of lines of numbers istranslated into a two-dimensional graphic.The end result – a series of coloured dots,each representing clusters of similar viruses – even resembles the geographical scattering of cities across a landscape.

“We use data from experiments that test how well antibodies bind to each strain’s coat protein and turn this into a geometric interpretation in whicheach antigen, and the antibodies against it, are assigned a point on an antigenicmap,” Professor Smith explained. “Computationally it’s not complicated so it’s fast and fortunately it’s also visual –

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two criteria that are very important whendealing with large amounts of informationof this type.”

The computer program is freelyavailable as open source software atwww.antigenic-cartography.org/. Today,laboratories worldwide, including ProfessorSmith’s, are now using the software to mapdiseases such as HIV, malaria, dengue feverand rabies, as well as Smith’s first love,influenza.

Have new coat, will travelSignificantly, the maps can be used to tracethe evolution of different strains as theymove around the globe. When Dr ColinRussell, Professor Smith and colleaguesanalysed 13,000 samples of influenza A(H3N2) virus from the WHO Global InfluenzaSurveillance Network, they were able to seehow over the course of five years the virusdrifted away from the original strain to forma series of new antigenic clusters ofprogressively different strains. Each time thiscluster transition happens, a new vaccine isneeded.

Not only was this experiment, which waspublished in Science in 2008, the first timethat the evolution of a virus had beentracked in detail in this way, but it alsoprovided an answer to the mystery of howflu circulates around the world.

Scientists have long wondered whetherinfluenza epidemics arise from locallypersisting strains or whether they are‘seeded’ from other regions of the world.When Dr Russell looked at the maps ofH3N2, it was clear that the viruses originatedin East and Southeast Asia and then reachedNorth America and Europe via Oceania after6–9 months, finally ending up in SouthAmerica a few months later. Once the H3viruses leave Asia they rarely return, andthus regions outside of East and SoutheastAsia are considered the ‘evolutionarygraveyards’ of influenza viruses.

This information highlights theimportance of ongoing collaborations andsurveillance in East and Southeast Asia, as Dr Russell explained: “If we see an H3 virus inthe region that has undergone a changethen we know that we’re likely to see that inthe northern hemisphere at some stage. Itgives us a head start on what might happennext.”

“Many of the important pathogens thatremain today are the pathogens that evolve,”added Professor Smith. “Flu vaccine iscurrently the only vaccine against anantigenically variable pathogen and the onlyone licensed to be updated every year. Butas vaccines become available againstdengue, HIV and so on, they would probablyhave to be updated too and it’s likely thatsimilar worldwide monitoring systems willalso be needed to track movement of theseviruses.”

Predictive powerCurrently, recommendations for influenzavaccine are based on the evaluation of pastdata. But what the scientists would like to dois use antigenic cartography as a means ofpredicting how the virus will evolve ahead ofthe event.

“In Cambridge, and with colleagues atErasmus University, the primary aim now isto see how predictive this evolution is and tomove the prediction horizon to a yearahead,” commented Professor Smith, whowith Dr Russell and their team now analysesup to 20,000 flu viruses a year.

“We already have some indications thatthis is possible for influenza and, if so, thepublic health implications are vast – frompredicting at a much earlier stage whichvaccine might be best, to predicting wherein the world the virus might migrate to next.”

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Professor Derek smith (left)and Dr colin RussellFor more information, please contactProfessor Derek smith(d.smith@zoo.cam.ac.uk) or Dr colinrussell (car44@cam.ac.uk) at theDepartment of zoology or visitwww.antigenic-cartography.org/

“it’s fast and it’s also visual – twocriteria that are very importantwhen dealing with largeamounts of information of thistype.”

an antigenic map of influenza viruses: each virusstrain appears as a small coloured blob, eachantiserum as an unfilled blob; the scale barrepresents one antigenic unit, a measure of howsimilar are the strains

Influenza virus

The research was funded by the National Institutesof Health Director’s Pioneer Award Program, whichsupports ‘individual scientists of exceptionalcreativity who propose pioneering – and possiblytransforming approaches – to major challenges inbiomedical and behavioral research’. The group isalso funded by the European Union, Wellcome Trust,Royal Society, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation andHuman Frontier Science Program.

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cCS has been described by advocatesas the single biggest lever to combatclimate change. The technology –

which aims to capture carbon dioxidegenerated by fossil fuel power stations andstore it safely and permanently deepunderground – has, said Rt Hon. Chris HuhneMP, UK Secretary of State for Energy andClimate Change, “a key part to play inensuring that we can keep the lights on atthe same time as fighting climate change.”

Despite the enthusiasm, no commercial-scale CCS projects for power plants are yet inoperation. For governments and industry,the main barrier is cost. By contrast, forenvironmental groups, concerns have beenvoiced about the continued use of fossilfuels and the impact on their preferredoptions such as renewable energy sources.

Concerns about CCS also extend to localpopulations, as Dr David Reiner fromCambridge Judge Business Schoolexplained: “Recent early stage CCS projectsin Germany, the Netherlands and Americahave all generated substantial localopposition and led to projects failing. Asidefrom technical progress that will bring downcosts, more needs to be learned about whatfactors will affect the chances of CCSbecoming widely adopted.”

His research team, together withcolleagues from across Europe, has focusedon how information about CCS iscommunicated, asking whether key lessonscan be learned that will affect thetechnology’s deployment.

communication strategyA key step was to carry out a global reviewof CCS communication practices: who iscommunicating what aspects of CCS, andwhy? “We found that most CCScommunication, which is principally viawebsites, is very good at explaining thetechnological processes involved. But, inareas that are likely to be of most concern tosociety, such as costs, policy alternatives andwider social implications, there is scant

coverage,” said Dr Reiner. “Moreover, most ofthe information about CCS is from sourcesthat are perceived by the general public as‘less trusted’, such as business andgovernments, rather than researchinstitutions, established media or NGOs.”

These are serious obstacles believe theresearchers, particularly as their findingsindicate that environmentalists base theirevaluations about CCS on what role theybelieve it will play in society rather than onwhether they think CCS technology works ornot. This view of environmental activists isbased on data the researchers gathered inClimate Camps – grassroots movements thatadvocate direct action on climate change –and Green Party conferences in the UK.Participants at both displayed considerableunderstanding of the issues involved.

When it comes to the general public,though, the level of understanding of CCSwas found to be considerably less. Theresearch team investigated the opinions andperceptions of CCS by residents in fiveEuropean Union member states who live inthe region of planned projects. “One majorfinding was that if the residents felt that theplanning process was fair or that their localcommunity had been treated fairly in thepast, this had a direct relationship to theirattitudes towards the local project,” addedDr Reiner.

avoiding a ‘perfect storm’“Our research has shown that many of the firstprojects have engendered a type of ‘perfectstorm’, whereby the communication with thelocal community is problematic, is presentedas a fait accompli and is provided by ‘less-trusted’ sources, such as the developers,”explained Dr Reiner. “In addition, thecommunity is frequently sceptical from thestart because of previous bad experienceswith local infrastructure planning.”

The researchers believe that improvingcommunications and thinking more carefullyabout the social characteristics of the project

at the design stage will reduce the likelihoodof opposition. Under certain conditions, theyfound that even many strident environmentalactivists are willing to support (or at least notoppose) CCS.

“There is no magic formula,” he added,“but taking the extra time needed to bring inmore-trusted voices such as universityscientists or environmental groups willincrease the likelihood that these first projects,and ultimately CCS more generally, will besuccessful.”

new research has identifiedcommunication gaps that couldhinder the deployment of carbondioxide capture and storage(ccs) technologies to mitigateclimate change.

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Dr David ReinerFor more information, please contactDr David reiner (dmr40@cam.ac.uk)at cambridge Judge Business school(www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/).

Deep issues: communicating ccs

Demonstration banner byclimate change activists

cambridge centre for ccsstudiesa recently launched centre, led byDirector Professor Mike Bickle(Department of earth sciences), with Dr stuart scott (Department ofengineering) and Dr David reiner, willfacilitate collaborative research and actas a focal point for ccs research atcambridge.

For more information, please visitwww.ccs.cam.ac.uk/

This research was funded by the European Commissionand the Global CCS Institute.

cambridge ideas: Memories of old awake

The latest in the flagship Cambridge Ideas video series follows Dr Emily Lethbridge as shebreathes new life into the centuries-old Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) during a uniqueyear-long research trip to Iceland‘s incredible landscapes:

www.cam.ac.uk/research/tag/cambridge-ideas/

www.cam.ac.uk/research/ | 31

Research online

To keep up to date by email with what’snew on the website, subscribe to ournew weekly e-bulletin atwww.cam.ac.uk/research/bulletin/

if you’re interested in the latest research from the university of cambridge, take a look at our dedicatedresearch website at www.cam.ac.uk/research/

Here you’ll find news, features, videos and audio covering research across the disciplines, all in a fullysearchable and easy-to-use format. We’ve also created themed areas, bringing together articles on subjects asdiverse as energy, neuroscience, international development and food security. Look out for the latest theme,language sciences, or see the full range of themes at www.cam.ac.uk/research/themes/

What’s new on the website?

Discussion

A new ‘Discussion’ forum has been added to the website. Here, researchers provide expertcommentary on a variety of topics, from international water strategy to the writings of RoaldDahl, and from criminal rehabilitation to death by monoculture:

www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/

under the Microscope

Look out for a new series of one-minutevideos featuring research across theUniversity. Watch a killer cell attackingcancer, silicon nanowires growing from goldparticles, the minute parts of a fruit fly’s foot,the intricate detail of a daisy’s head, andmuch more. Weekly release of videos fromNovember onwards:

www.cam.ac.uk/research/tag/under-the-Microscope/

Picture This

Cambridge is home to a treasure trove ofartefacts and unusual objects. In this newseries, we explore images and objects fromsome of these remarkable collections. See, forexample, the 12th-century Bury Bible fromthe Parker Library at Corpus Christi Collegeand Baroness Thatcher’s handbag from theChurchill Archives Centre at Churchill College:

www.cam.ac.uk/research/tag/Picture-This/

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