The Environmental Imagination 2–3

Pieraz et les Darwiniens 3

Alumni Society Forming in India 3

Darwin College Trip to Down House 4

A Message from the Alumni Office 5

Book Reviews & Publications 5–7

Tribute to Hugh Casburn Price 7

Obituary 8

An Evening of Mixed Emotions 8

College Lecture Series 9

The Master’s Garden Party 10

Current Research Fellows 10

New York Alumni Boat Race 11

Paris Darwinian Dinner 11

Bernard Leong 12

Newsletter ofDarwin CollegeAutumn 2005

Inside

The Master heads the Colleges’ effort in theCambridge 800th Anniversary Campaign

Launching the Campaign in London, Professor Alison Richard, Vice-Chancellor of the University, said:“Cambridge is one of the world’s greatestuniversities. Our commitment to sustainthis pre-eminent position and ouroutstanding contribution to education,scholarship and research is reflected in our ambitious campaign target of £1 billion. Our 800th anniversary in 2009 is a cause for great celebration. But it is also a time for reflection on thechallenges we face and the opportunitiesthat we must grasp if we are to remain abeacon of excellence internationally. TheCampaign has four investment priorities:our students; our staff; our freedom to

discover and our creativity; ourcollections and architectural heritage.”

The University and Colleges areworking closely together on theCampaign and gifts to any of theinstitutions that make up Cambridge will be counted against the target. “The 800th Anniversary Campaign is a landmark fundraising programme for Cambridge,” said Professor WilliamBrown, “The Colleges and the Universityhave an over-riding commitment tosecure the future excellence of educationand research at Cambridge in a vibrantcollegiate setting.”

Led by the Vice-Chancellor, theCampaign is also supported by a

As Chairman of the Colleges Committee, the Master of Darwin,Professor William Brown, is spearheading the colleges’ efforts to raise£1 billion by 2012 – a target set by the Cambridge 800th AnniversaryCampaign to secure the excellence of Cambridge in the 21st century.

Campaign Board, an international group of alumni and friends who have providedhigh-level financial support and leadershipto the Campaign. Sir David Walker,Chairman of Morgan Stanley International,and Dr William Janeway, Vice-Chairman ofWarburg Pincus, are chairing the Board.

College Receives aGenerous DonationThe college has received a generous donation in the form of shares from EmeritusFellow, Richard King. Richard has been a fellow of Darwin since 1986. His workinglife, mostly Cambridge based, has been in the world of hi-tech. His particularinterests are in the spawning of intellectual property and technology and in thecreation of early stage development companies. Many fail. Some do not, and thisis from where the gift to Darwin came. The College is extremely grateful.

The Environmental ImaginationDean Hawkes

Architecture is frequently, and with goodreason, represented as being primarilyconcerned with shelter. Our buildingsprotect us from the extremes of thenatural climate, helping to keep us warmin winter and cool in summer. Modernbuildings sustain the activities that theyaccommodate by providing defined andcontrolled conditions of heat, light andsound. These environmental provisionsare largely a matter of calculation,realised through the mechanisms ofengineering. This is an essential attributeof practical design, but there is another,critical dimension of the architecturalenvironment that reaches beyond thisessentially pragmatic practice. Thecomplex sensory experience that weenjoy in great buildings is the product of acts of imagination in which thecomplex interaction of light and air and sound with the form and materialityof architectural space. In 2002 I wasawarded an Emeritus ResearchFellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake an investigation into theenvironmental character of the works of a selected group of nineteenth andtwentieth century architects. The projectis now completed and the book, TheEnvironmental Imagination, is in press.

The book is broadly chronological,but does not attempt to present acontinuous historical account of thedevelopment of environmental design.

The approach is thematic and the worksof the selected architects are used toidentify and explore a variety of issues.At the outset documentary and archivalresearch was used to establish thethemes and this was followed by aprogramme of visits to a large number of buildings in Europe and the UnitedStates. The essence of what I am tryingto capture must be directly experienced.It cannot be discerned from images orverbal descriptions. The only reliableinstruments of observation are thehuman senses and this demands first-hand experience. As a consequence I have spent many hours in someremarkable buildings, looking, listeningand feeling their atmosphere. This is themost self-indulgent research imaginable,but it has, I hope, been purposeful.

The book is in three parts. Part One, ‘From Enlightenment to Modernity’,reviews the environmental visions of three architects, Sir John Soane, Henri Labrouste and Charles RennieMackintosh, whose work spanned thenineteenth century. In Part Two, ‘TheTwentieth Century Environment – Themesand Variations’, the environmental rangeand diversity of master architects of the Modern Movement is examined. Part Three, ‘Image and Environment’, is concerned with the work ofcontemporary architects who giveprecedence to the poetic potential of

environment in the conception andrealization of their buildings.

At the beginning of the nineteenthcentury the new technologies of theindustrial revolution were already beingapplied to controlling the environmentwithin buildings. At the century’s endmechanical means of heating andventilating were commonplace and thedevelopment of electric light offeredflexibility of use and precision of control.Soane, Labrouste and Mackintosh allembraced the potential of these newtools, but in their work technology was invariably applied in the service ofpoetic ends. The remarkable library inMackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art,with its central heating, mechanicalventilation and purpose made electriclight fittings, is just one illustration of this.

In the twentieth century the ModernMovement led to new conceptions andconfigurations of architecture, not leastin its environmental intentions. The workof Le Corbusier and Mies van der Roheserves to demonstrate the adventurousspirit of the modernist environment and the buildings of the Scandinavianmasters, Erik Gunnar Asplund and AlvarAalto, are eloquent illustrations of adeeply rooted response to the Nordicclimate. The American, Louis I. Kahn,placed the question of environment atthe centre of his architectural method.He wrote, “The sun never knew how

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great it was until it struck the side of a building”. A sequence of his buildingsis used to illustrate the translation of this idea into concrete reality. The finalessays in Part Two turn to the work of two of the most intensely poeticarchitects of the last century; theVenetian, Carlo Scarpa, and the Swede,Sigurd Lewerentz. Scarpa’s buildingswork with the ambience of the Veneto to produce cool, shimmering interiors. In contrast, Lewerentz, in particular in his late designs for churches, respondsto the low summer sun and winterdarkness and deep coldness of northernlatitudes to create profoundly affectingand comforting interiors.

Part Three of the book examines the environments of buildings constructedin the last decade of the twentieth century.Designs for churches in Switzerland,Portugal and the United States illustrateentirely different and original interpretationsof the nature of the sacred environment.The modern art museum presents a

particularly demanding technicalchallenge in order to meet the stringentenvironmental requirements for theconservation of works of art. A group of four recent museums reveals howthese are in new conceptions of the kindof space in which art, and particularly the art of the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies should be displayed. Two ofthe buildings that I studied return to the“primitive” idea of a building as simpleshelter. Sverre Fehn’s ArchbishopricMuseum at Hamar in Norway and Peter Zumthor’s enclosure over theremains of Roman buildings at Chur inSwitzerland are unheated enclosures inwhich new construction simply protectssurviving historic fabric. In doing this they re-establish contact with deepthemes of architecture, by arranging theelements of material, form, construction,solid and void, to make buildings that arealert to the specific conditions of theirlocations, appropriate to their contentsand, most significantly, are original.

My concluding essay, for which I have borrowed Hippocrates’ title “Airs,Waters, Places”, is a study of PeterZumthor’s Therme Vals, a spa bath high in the mountains in Switzerland.This offers the most complex synthesisof sensory experience imaginable. The primary experience is of bodilyimmersion in waters at temperaturesranging from 14° C to 42° C, but thebather also encounters, in almostendless permutations, diverse airtemperatures, humidities, luminosities,scents and sounds.

My hope is that these studies will make a useful contribution to theliterature of architecture, both in thespecific field of environmental design and to the broader history and theory of the last two centuries.

Reference:Dean Hawkes, The Environmental Imagination:poetics of the architectural environment, SponPress, London.To be published April 2006, price £75.ISBN 0415360862

Pieraz Cryozootech Stallion, the world’s second cloned horse, receives a visitation of Darwinians (from leftAnastasios Karamanos (1998–2001), Eric Palmer, Marc Milhoud (hidden),Pascale Chavatte-Palmer (1992–96),Julian Goodman (1997–98) and GeorgeEccles (1992–93)). Pascale and herhusband, Eric, who heads the biotechcompany Cryozootech, hosted aDarwinian evening at their wonderfulfarmhouse home close to Paris. PierazCryozootech Stallion is the clone ofPieraz an arab gelding double world

champion in endurance racing. Pieraz will not be gelded and hence can beused for the rapid improvement of equine genetic stock in this sport. He is registered in Studbook Z (Belgium)and is for sale! Cryozootech is a french company based in Evry, France,owned jointly by Eric Palmer (EquineReproduction Specialist) and his wifePascale Chavatte-Palmer (Veterinarian,Darwin PhD 1996, specialised in equinereproduction and currently working for a French research institute on cloning in cattle).

Pieraz et les Darwiniens

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AlumniSocietyForming in IndiaSohini Banerjee (Darwin 2002–03) is organising a new Darwin AlumniSociety in India. Based in Calcuttashe is hoping to encompass all Old Darwinians living in theSubcontinent, and indeed any Indian ex-pats who are interested.

The group will hold informal get-togethers in Calcutta. Alumniwho live throughout the rest of India are encouraged to join as there will be news and informationdisseminated throughout the group by e-mail, there will also be an internet home-page accessed through the DarwinCollege website.

If you are interested in joining this group contact Sohini onsohini.banerjee@gmail.com.

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In mid-June, a group of nearly thirtystudents and fellows of the college, alongwith members of the University’s Historyand Philosophy of Science department,went to visit Charles Darwin’s home atDown House, near Bromley in Kent.

After Darwin’s death, in 1882, those ofhis children who had been living at Downmoved to Cambridge (Darwin college ispartly housed in Newnham Grange, theformer home of his son George). Charles’swidow, Emma, continued to spend hersummers in the old house, which she andCharles had bought a few years after theirmarriage, but after her death in 1896, fewof the Darwins ever went back to Down.The house had been empty for some timewhen, in the 1920s, the Master of Darwin’scollege, Christ’s, decided it should bepreserved for the nation. He managed topersuade the British Association for theAdvancement of Science to buy andmanage it, but after the Second WorldWar, they found the cost of running it toohigh and the Royal College of Surgeons(RCS) took it over.

I first visited Down in the last years ofthe RCS’s stewardship, by which time itwas clear to visitors that the house neededconsiderable restoration: much of it was

closed to the public and the displaysabout Darwin and evolution were notimpressive, to put it mildly. The RCScouldn’t afford to do the work the housedesperately needed, so the Natural HistoryMuseum was approached and, with thehelp of a lottery grant, they arranged forEnglish Heritage to take over in 1996.

In the last nine years, a huge amounthas been done to restore the building and improve the facilities for visitors. The ground floor is now just as it was inDarwin’s day (apart from the gift shop andcafé). The famous study, where he wroteOn the Origin of Species, has beencarefully restored using contemporaryphotographs and as many of his originalpossessions and pieces of furniture aspossible. Similar care has been taken with every other room and as you wanderround, it’s almost possible to imagine thatDarwin and his children have only just left.

Upstairs is a small museum aboutDarwin’s life and work, with displays ofthings he owned and used, from hisbeetle-collecting boxes to his hats. Ourgroup disagreed a little as to how goodthis was: basically, the more you knowabout Darwin and the history of Victorianscience, the more you could find tocriticise. While academic Darwin experts are hardly the target audience for thesedisplays, most visitors would probably find them informative and engaging.

In recent years, English Heritage haveturned their attention to the garden andgreenhouses, gradually restoring them tothe condition they would have been induring Darwin’s lifetime. Archaeologists

had excavated the garden to discover howit was laid out and what plants grew thereand Victorian varieties of gooseberries and cabbage grace the kitchen garden.But for me the most interesting aspectwas being able to see how many ofDarwin’s botanical experiments have beenre-created, particularly in his greenhouses,where the carnivorous and climbing plantsthat fascinated him can be seen growing.Outside you can see a recreation of hisexperiments in what would now be calledbiodiversity, which he devised in order tomeasure how many different species asquare yard could support.

Thanks to the organisational skills ofMelanie Keene, who made most of thearrangements, and the generosity of thecollege, who paid for the coach, we wereable to enjoy a very pleasant day in Kent.The rain even eased off long enough for us to tour the garden. For anyone with aninterest in Darwin who hasn’t been, Downis well worth the trip.

Jim Endersby, Research Fellow

Darwin College Trip to Down House

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My first year here at Darwin College has been fascinating and extremelyenjoyable. I have heard from many alumnieither wanting to find friends they have lostcontact with or who wanted to re-acquaintthemselves with the College. It has been apleasure to talk to all of you and I lookforward to hearing from many more of you over the course of the next year.

Over the last few months we havebeen pleased to help an alumni group inParis form. They have just held their first‘get together’ and you will find an articlewritten by the group co-founder, JulienGoodman in this issue. If you would beinterested in organising a group whereyou live we will do all we can to help.

Remember also, if you have justmoved to a new area there is almostcertainly an ‘Old Darwinian’ living nearby.We will be very happy to contact themand, if willing, they can provide you withlots of very useful ‘local inside knowledge’.

Year group reunions have been runsuccessfully by Oxford and CambridgeColleges for many years. However, Darwinalumni have not had this opportunity. Thisis about to change – we are setting asideone Friday each term and inviting OldDarwinians to a Formal Hall Reunion.These reunions will be operated on a trial basis for the next year and if (as weexpect) they are successful will continuefor years to come. The first group to beinvited back will be those that matriculated from 1964 to 1974 – we hope to see youin College soon.

Recently, the Alumni Office launchedan e-bulletin, which goes out 3 times ayear. We will up-date you on news fromthe College and inform you of events.

This, we hope, will provide you withinformation that may not make it into this newsletter. Many of you have already signed up for this but if youhaven’t I urge you to – just e-mail mesas65@cam.ac.uk, and I will add your e-mail address to the list. If you do nothave an e-mail address and would still like to receive this information, I will besending out ‘hard copies’ – again justmake sure I have your address and tell me you need a posted copy.

The Alumni website has finally been updated and provides (amongstother things) information on benefitsDarwin alumni enjoy, any up-comingevents and more detailed news ofarticles in The Darwinian. We have also just added some ‘Merchandise’pages. You can now purchase cards,prints, College crests or Darwin Lecture Series books via the website.www.dar.cam.ac.uk/merchandise.htm.

We also review books written byDarwin alumni and Fellows. You can buy any of the books listed as we have included a link to Amazon. If you purchase these or any other goods from Amazon via our website the College library will receive a 5% referralfee which supports the Library. So yourpurchase will increase the readingmaterial available to our current students.www.dar.cam.ac.uk/alumni/publications.htm. If you have written a book that you would like included please e-mail me with all relevant details.

The website also includes a facility by which you can donate to Darwin. This is extremely safe and secure – you are re-directed to The Charity Aid

Foundation (CAF) who will process your donation for us. CAF will acceptmost currencies and also acceptsdonations by direct debit. Please go towww.dar.cam.ac.uk/alumni/fromthemaster.htm and take a look.

Finally, please take part in the PhotoCompetition, we would really like to shareimages of Darwin and its students fromthe last 40 years – the best will be printedin the next newsletter and will form fromthe basis of an Alumni Calendar for 2007.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sophia SmithAlumni Secretary.

+44 (0)1223 335690sas65@cam.ac.uk.

The Alumni Secretary, Sophia Smith.

The Darwin Alumni Team also consists of:The Bursar and Development Director, Peter BrindleTel: +44 (0)1223 335664E-mail: bursar@dar.cam.ac.uk

The Bursar’s SecretarySandra JamesTel: +44 (0)1223 335666E-mail: sj265@cam.ac.uk

A Message from the Alumni Office

Shimmering in aTransformed Light

Although much has been written lately on the links between painting and writing,little or no attention has been paid tothose moments in literature when thenarrative stops to allow for the descriptionof those objects we associate with

still life. Rosemary Lloyd’s book showshow fascinating this overlooked area is;how rich in suggestions of class, race,and gender; how much it indicates abouthuman pleasures and about experiencesof space and time.

Lloyd focuses on the last twocenturies, particularly at points marked by the irruption of images of contingencyand rapid change into the fields of art: forexample, the year of the Terror in Frenchhistory; the decade in which Haussman’spolitically driven transformation of Paris ledBaudelaire to write his great modernist

Rosemary LloydCornell University PressISBN 0801442966£18.50 Hardback

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Information Theory,Inference andLearning Algorithms

The native American chief Seatlh, uponwhose ancestral grounds the city ofSeattle, Washington now stands, isreputed to have said: “All things areconnected.” Skilled teachers makefrequent use of Seatlh’s law in helping their students erect new knowledge on the foundation of previously acquiredconcepts, and MacKay is a master of thistechnique. In spite of the breadth of ideassuggested by the title (and delivered by the text), he argues persuasively that, atthe root, these concepts are fundamentallythe same. The problems of transmitting a message through a noisy channel, oflearning regularities in messy data, and ofinferring the likelihood of hypotheses fromdata all use a common set of mathematical

tools. In MacKay’s case, the toolbox ofchoice is Bayesian statistics, which heexpounds on with missionary zeal.Repeatedly, he shows how a problem inone of these areas can be translated into a comparable problem in another, withgreat gain in insight.

MacKay’s tome has two importantcharacteristics beyond its integration of diverse themes around a Bayesianframework. First, it is replete with examplesand exercises, many of them worked at the end of each chapter. Building on hisexhortation in the preface, that “you canunderstand a subject only by creating it for yourself,” the author provides amplematerial to test the reader’s growingunderstanding, along with repeatedexhortations concerning the need to do the exercises. Second, the book isconversational. Without compromisingmathematical rigor, MacKay manages to reach through the page to the reader,creating the impression that the student is across the desk from a friendly andsupportive tutor. This volume deserves a wide distribution and long life, not only as a text at the upper undergraduate and graduate level, but also as a deskreference and tool for self-instruction.

Parunak, H.V.D. Review of Information theory,inference and learning algorithms. MacKay D.,

Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2002.Published in Computing Reviews, Rev. CR130668(0509-0994). The full text of this review is available

on the Computing Reviews web site(http://www.reviews.com/review/review_

review.cfm?review_id=130668).

David MacKay is a fellow of Darwin, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Gatsby Senior

Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Fatal Attraction

Fatal Attraction tells the stories of threemen who were lured by nature’s strangestpower. Edmond Halley set out to map theEarth’s magnetic patterns and improvenavigation, showing how science couldhelp England to expand her empire. Gowin

Delusions ofInvulnerability Wisdom and Morality in AncientGreece, China and Today

How were the aims of philosophy and theresponsibilities of philosophers conceivedin ancient Greece and China? How werethe learned elite recruited and controlled;how were their speculations and adviceinfluenced by the different types ofaudiences they faced and the institutionsin which they worked? How was ayearning for invulnerability reconciled witha sense of human frailty? In each chapterof this fascinating analysis ancient Greekand Chinese ideas and practices are usedas a basis for critical reflections on thepredicaments we continue to face today,with a particular focus on the key Greekideas of the equal participation of allcitizens in the political process, and on the key Chinese one of a dedication to theideal of the welfare of all under heaven.

Sir Geoffrey Lloyd (former Master of Darwin) isEmeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and

Science, University of Cambridge. He is the authorof 16 books, the most recent of which are Ambitions

of Curiosity (2002), The Way and the Word (2002),Greek Thought (edited with J. Brunschwig, 2003), In

the Grip of Disease (2003) and Ancient Worlds,Modern Reflections (2003).

poem “Le Cygne”; and “on or aboutDecember 1910”, the date to whichVirginia Woolf attributes a revolution in the definition of literary character.

Lloyd’s central concern lies with the ways in which the still life, written or painted, both evokes and attempts to deal with the sense of contingency. While she makes frequent reference topaintings, she focuses above all on writtenstill lifes, particularly those moments whennovels pause to address the subjectmatter of still life – a bowl of fruit, a hatrack, a desk cluttered with pens andpapers – in ways that invite contemplationof other and broader cultural domains.

Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French andProfessor of Gender Studies at Indiana University,

Bloomington. She completed her PhD in Darwin in1979 and gained a Litt D in 2002. She is author

of numerous previous books including Baudelaire’sWorld, Mallarmé; The Poet and his Circle and

Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature.

Patrica FaraIcon Books UKISBN 1840466324£9.99 Hardback

David MacKay, 2003Cambridge University PressISBN 0 5216-4298 1£30.00 Hardback

Kinght, a poor clergyman’s son, climbed tofame and fortune by developing powerfulartificial magnets used in compasses,scientific experiments and popular magictricks. And although Franz Mesmer claimedthat his ‘animal magnetism’, based onharnessing invisible streams of magneticfluid, was the revolutionary medicine of thefuture he was ultimately denounced as aquack. Patricia Fara, a former fellow ofDarwin, portrays the colourful protagonistsof the magnetic revolution in which themove from magnetic mysticism tocelebrating scientific rationality is amicrocosm of the Enlightenment itself.

Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, May 2005DuckworthISBN 0715633864£12.99 Hardback

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Rescued from the Reich:How One of Hitler’s SoldiersSaved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

When Hitler invaded Warsaw in theautumn of 1939, hundreds of thousandsof civilians, many of them Jewish, weretrapped in the besieged city. The RebbeJoseph Schneersohn, the leader of theultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews, wasamong them. Followers throughout theworld were filled with anguish, unable toconfirm whether he was alive or dead.Working with officials in the United Statesgovernment, a group of American Jewsinitiated what would ultimately becomeone of the strangest, and most miraculous,rescues of World War II.

The escape of Rebbe Schneersohnfrom Warsaw has been the subject ofspeculation for decades. Historian BryanMark Rigg has now uncovered the truestory of the rescue, which was propelled by a secret collaboration betweenAmerican officials and leaders of Germanmilitary intelligence. Amid the fog of war, asmall group of dedicated German soldierslocated the Rebbe and protected him fromsuspicious Nazis as they fled the citytogether. During the course of the mission,the Rebbe learned the shocking truth aboutthe leader of the rescue operation, thedecorated Wehrmacht soldier Ernst Bloch:he was himself half-Jewish, and a victim of the rising tide of German antisemitism.

A harrowing story about identity andmoral responsibility, Rescued from theReich is also a riveting narrative history of one of the most extraordinary rescuemissions of World War II.

Bryan Mark Rigg received his PhD from Darwin in2001. His previous book ‘Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers’

was reviewed in Darwinian 3.

Tribute to Hugh Casburn Price The following is an abridged version of a tribute paid by Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd at Hugh’s funeral.

I first met Hugh when I came to Darwinin 1989. Of course a Bursar always hasto be wary of an incoming Master. Thelast thing you want is for someone togo and upset the applecart with all therows of apples that you have neatlypiled up over the years. But though our styles and temperament differed(we Welsh are an enormously diverselot, aren’t we?) he made me feel athome at once. I appreciated his verycareful advice and we got through astupendous development programmetogether. We had battles with thePlanning Authorities over the StudyCentre but we won: battles again overthe Frank Young Building which wepartly won but partly lost (because wecould not have as many rooms as weoriginally budgeted for) but the greatthing was that the College had anagreed policy of development andwere more or less completely behindthe programme. Our majorbenefactors, the Rayne Foundationand Trinity especially, backed us to thehilt – kept sweet of course by Hugh.Among the spin-offs from the StudyCentre was the conversion of the OldLibrary and what an asset that hasbeen. In all of that Hugh was absolutelycrucial. He got tributes not just fromeveryone in College, but also from thearchitects Jeremy Dixon and EdwardJones. What a tactful man he was:what a professional. The College oweshim a tremendous debt.

And not just this College. In hisearlier career he first transformed

Westhill College of Education inBirmingham and then oversaw thedevelopment of University College,Durham. And here in Cambridge hewas involved in all sorts of activities, the Union Society, Kettles Yard, theStudent Counselling Service. He was a great family man, a keen cook, akeen tennis player, he sang, and hepainted. His three children by his firstmarriage are here today. Then in 1984 he met and married the love of the latter part of his life, Penny, who was recommended to go andmeet him as he might be interested in some of her work as a calligrapher.Well, it was more than just hercalligraphy that he fell in love with.

This is not the occasion to try to do justice to all his talents. Each one of us will have our own specialmemories of him. I always cherished the way in which, both at Darwin and then at the Needham ResearchInstitute – where he was part-timeBursar in his retirement – he used tocome to tell me about the year’sfinancial performance. ‘I think theoutcome is quite satisfactory, Geoffrey’,he used to say: ‘satisfactory’ in Hugh’s vocabulary was a triumph in others’. Because with all his manytalents and achievement, he was amost modest man.

We say good-bye to him here: we shall go back to College later andraise our glasses to the memory of adear, dear friend, whom we shall allsorely miss.

Bryan Mark RiggYale University PressISBN 0300104480£18.00 Hardback

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Obituary

David Wheeler was one of the pioneers of Computer Science. He worked on the original EDSAC computer and wrotethe first computer program ever to bestored in a computer’s working memory.He pioneered the use of sub-routinesand is particularly remembered for hiswork on data compression.

David Wheeler was elected a Fellowof the Royal Society in 1981, one of the earliest computer scientists to be so honoured. In October 2003, he wasmade a Fellow of the Computer HistoryMuseum for his invention of the closedsubroutine, his architectural contributionsto the ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, andcomputer testing.

David started his PhD in theUniversity of Cambridge’s Computer

Laboratory (then the MathematicalLaboratory) in the late 1940s, graduatingin 1951. He then spent time at theUniversity of Illinois before returning to the UK. He continued to work in theComputer Lab right up until his death, a decade after he had officially retired.

David will be remembered for his vast knowledge of all areas ofcomputing, for his willingness to talk with anyone about the things whichinterested him, for his friendliness and for his humility. David was an inspirationand a help to hundreds of students and colleagues over his long career. His legacy is as much in the lives hetouched as in the work he published. We have lost a good man and a friend.He will be missed.

David Wheeler, FRSEmeritus Professor of Computer Science

Fellow of Darwin College

9 February 1927–13 December 2004

A circle of Darwinians and their guestsgathered in the Old Library on Sunday, 8 May 2005, for an intimate culturalevening of poetry and music incommemoration of the sixtiethanniversary of the end of World WarTwo. George Gömöri, Emeritus Fellow,poet, translator and expert of EasternEuropean literature, compiled theprogramme of poems (including piecesby W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, CliveWilmer, Richard Burns, Miklós Radnóti,Tadeusz Rózewicz, to name but a few),which not only expressed feelings priorto the War, but also vividly brought homeits harrowing reality and aftermath, all the time perhaps pointing in between the lines to the tricky moral questionsaddressing the future beyond the War and the responsibility held by futuregenerations. In view of this, the choice of poems, as a member of the audiencelater expressed, was not only extremelybleak but, more significantly, seemedrather one-sided in that pieces written

from the German point of view were decidedly absent. But with aninformative approach, Gömöri gave short and seminal contextualisingcommentaries on the poems themselvesso that the evening ultimately gained avery rich educational dimension. Theliterature was read and brought to life by Gömöri, as well as by distinguishedpoet Richard Burns and acclaimed actor Peter Wickham, both of whom the organisers were very lucky to have involved in the evening. Trying to assuage the pain of the poetry,however, a careful selection of moretraditional as well as twentieth-centurymusical interludes (from Bach andTelemann to Toru Takemitsu) weredispersed throughout the programme,with affiliated College member LouisKelly shining on the flute and LydiaWilson, current MPhil student at Darwin,playing on the violin. All in all, the eveningleft a profound emotional impact on theaudience, and reminded of the very

honest and universal power of art toarticulate, critique and affect lives – past, present and future. Thank you to all involved and thanks to all whoattended. May we learn from the past,and learn never to forget.

Ariane Kossack (Student Librarian)

Lydia Wilson

An Evening of Mixed Emotions:Darwin College Commemorates the Sixtieth Anniversary of the End of WW I I

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‘Conflict’ provided a fascinating theme for this year’s Darwin CollegeLecture Series. As usual, speakers from a range of backgrounds drewpacked audiences. Conflict is sowidespread in human society that a recurring question throughout the series concerned its inevitability. A vividstarting point was Richard Wrangham’santhropological comparison ofchimpanzee communities with simplehuman hunter-gatherers. For both,

their tendency to aggression turns lethal when killing is relatively risk-free.The implications of this for moresophisticated societies were neatlypicked up in Barry Cunliffe’s review of archaeological evidence of the historyof warfare up to the Romans. It has been the emergence of technologies and of hierarchies that distance the killer from the victim that has permittedthe lethal conflicts of recent millennia.

Nothing could have better rubbedhome the savage contemporaryconsequences than Kate Adie’seloquent reflection on her experience as a war correspondence. Her accountstressed the ways in which television has changed and distorted society’sperceptions of war. But while conflictmay be endemic, society’s capacity toaccommodate it is a matter of politicalwill and skill. Lisa Anderson analysed the background to the turmoil of theMiddle East in a fascinating history of the frustration of opportunities for Arab politics by inside rivalries andoutside intervention. At the level of theworkplace, William Brown argued that a worldwide decline in strikes did not

reflect the passing of industrial conflict,but rather the fact that weakened tradeunions exposed more working people to the implicit conflict of unregulated and often harsh employment.

Other disciplines do not identifyconflict as a social phenomenon. Theastrophysicist Paul Davies described the sequence of violent episodeswhereby the universe and the fragile life within it have emerged. Turning to the evolution of that life, David Haigdiscussed the theory of genomic conflict, with its unbalanced implicationsfor their off-springs’ genetic inheritance of the differing interests of mothers and of fathers. Gender was also central to Simon Baron-Cohen’spowerful argument from thepsychological evidence that males and females have tendencies to differentmental capacities. Gender was, indeed, a perhaps surprising theme emergingfrom these nicely meshed lectures.Whatever level you look at, from genes to generals, males are unpleasantlypredisposed to outdo females inaggressive conflict.

Willy Brown

CONFLICT: 2005 Darwin College Lecture Series

TWENTY FIRST ANNUAL DARWIN COLLEGE LECTURE SERIES 2006

SURVIVALFridays at 5.30 pm in the Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge

ALL WELCOME

20 January Survival of Empires Paul Kennedy

27 January Survival of Culture Edith Hall

3 February Survival of Languages Peter Austin

10 February Surviving Disease Richard Feachem

17 February Surviving Natural Disasters James Jackson

24 February Surviving Famine Andrew Prentice

3 March Surviving Longer Cynthia Kenyon

10 March Survival into the Future Diana Liverman

The lectures are given at 5.30 p.m. in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, with an adjacent overflow theatre with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people so you must arrive early to ensure a place.

Did you know...?• There is an alumni group

forming in China. If you live in China and would like to bepart of this new initiative, pleasee-mail Dr. Ming-Wei Wang onmwwang@siniwest.com.

• Darwin College has 38 alumni in Malaysia. If you live here and would be interested inmeeting other Darwin alumnisocially, please e-mail Sophia on sas65@cam.ac.uk and shewill help to organise a group.

10

One of the most rewarding College tasksis involvement in the selection of post-doctoral Research Fellows. From scoresof applicants with research interestsacross the whole range of academicendeavour, those short-listed presenttheir work before the final, painful task of decision-making. It is a privilege to beon board this whistle-stop tour of thefrontiers of research. Darwin’s currentResearch Fellows reflect this wonderfuldiversity. On the Arts side, Andy Bell hasbeen working on the social organisationthat lay behind public works such as seadefences and land-draining in earlymedieval England. The other FinlayFellow, Alexandra Lianeri, is exploring the way in which Western scholars of recent times have interpreted thephenomenon of classical Atheniandemocracy, and what this tells us aboutboth intellectual worlds. Another historian,Grant Tapsell, a British Academy Fellow,is studying the emergence of partypolitics in the crucial formative period ofBritish politics of the 1680s. The AdrianFellow, Jim Endersby, is a historian ofscience, whose work on 19th centurybotanists has had the spin-off of his prize-winning over-view of 200 years of biology,endearingly entitled ‘A Guinea Pig’s

History of Biology: the Animals and Plants that Taught us the Facts of Life’.

As might be expected, we have astrong group pushing the frontiers ofbiology forward. These include the two Schlumberger InterdisciplinaryFellows. Giselle Walker is working with the most primitive of life forms,eukaryotes, using genetic analysis toexplore the origin of multi-cellular life.Selvino de Kort is exploring the psychologyof memory and anticipation by observinghis flock of scrub jays. Also working with birds, but in her case great tits inMadingley Woods as well as captivecanaries, Camilla Hinde is investigatingthe influences that appear to shapeparental decisions in chick rearing. Using the less endearing subject of marine algae, Ellen Nisbet is studying thegenomic origins of the parts of cells thatpermit photosynthesis. As part of herwork to inform anti-cancer therapies,Sarah Drayton, is examining themolecular chemistry of the signallingsystems that counter malign tumours.Physics continues to play an importantpart in molecular biology, and David Kreil, who has just won an MRC fellowship, is drawing on his background in thesubject to devise statistical techniques

to investigate how genes are turned onand off as organisms develop.

Two other physicists have wonprestigious 5 year Advanced ResearchFellowships. Kostya Trachenko is workingon the molecular characteristics of glassesthat inhibit radiation damage, an issuecentral to the storage of nuclear waste.Michael Murphy is studying absorptionlines from extremely distant quasars to test the heretical hypothesis that thestrength of electromagnetism may not beconstant. At an immediately practical level,Mark Hughes is exploring the intriguingproperties of carbon nanotubes whencoated with electrically conductivepolymers. Our present Microsoft Fellow,John Winn, is using layered probabilisticmodels to devise more versatile methodsof computerised image recognition. Abitter-sweet feature of so many of ourresearch fellows is that they are snatchedfrom us early. Having won the RoyalSociety for Chemistry’s Harrison MemorialPrize for 2005 as the best physical chemistunder 30, Sharon Ashbrook is shortly totake up a tenured Academic Fellowship atSt Andrew’s University, to pursue furtherher path-breaking development of nuclearmagnetic resonance techniques for thestudy of mineralogical solids.

Current Research Fellows

Two new Honorary Fellows werewelcomed to Darwin with the traditionalsigning of the Fellows’ Book during the Master’s Annual Garden Party.Professor Richard Perham, ScD, FRS,(pictured left) is the new Master of St John’s College. Professor Sir MartinRees FRS (pictured right) is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, andMaster of Trinity College.

The Master’s Garden Party 2005

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Inaugural Oxford-Cambridge New York Alumni Boatrace

A week after Oxford beat Cambridge in the2005 boat race, Oxford and Cambridgealumni re-enacted the event in New York at the first New York Alumni boat race.

Although the weather conspiredagainst them, over 80 alumni rowers and friends came out to row or to cheerthe crews on. One of the rowers wasDarwin alumna Beth Picard (nee Lacy) whostudied Computer Science in 1984–85.While at Darwin College, Beth was a keenrower and took it up again two years agoat her local club in Connecticut.

Beth, who met her husband William(also a Darwin alumni, LLM 1985) atDarwin College, was the only woman to row for both Universities. A fantasticendorsement to her rowing prowess!

Two eights races were held.Cambridge won the first race with ease.

The second race, in which Beth took part,was more of a battle of wills. Cambridgeled to begin, but by the halfway markOxford led by several seats. Cambridge re-doubled their efforts, but Oxfordprotected their lead and finally won byalmost half a length. So the friendly andgood-natured day ended in a draw, and a well-earned lunch at the New Leaf Café.

Beth, in the meantime, is lookingforward to next year. ‘The first New YorkOxford Cambridge Alumni Boat Race wasa lot of fun and I was thrilled to be part ofwhat I hope will be the first of many futureannual events. It was a little daunting beingthe only woman to row for either University,especially amongst such a ‘star-studded’roster, but I enjoyed the race a great deal.Most enjoyable however was the friendlymanner of all the competitors and their

families in and around the Boat House. I look forward to next year’.

A full report of this event is on the Cambridge in America websitewww.cantab.org, search on ‘past events’.If you are interested in taking part in nextyears race then contact Kathy Lord atCambridge in America, Kathy@cantab.org.

On May 14th this year a small group ofDarwin Alumni living in France met for thefirst time in a restaurant in Paris. This wasthe inaugural meeting of the Paris DarwinAlumni that was established by JulienGoodman and Pascale Chavatte-Palmerearly in 2005. Six Darwinians, AlainBouvet, Pascale Chavatte-Palmer, JulienGoodman, Sabrina Henze, Anastasios

Karamanos, Peter Kearns and theirpartners attended the meal. Anh-TuanDinh-Xuan, George Eccles and NickGreen were unable to attend. Theenvironment was extremely friendly andjovial and everybody agreed that we shouldhold another meal soon in the near future.We also spoke of the intent to keep eachother informed about activities that are

happening in France that may be ofinterest to the others in the group. SabrinaHenze and Alain Bouvet have alreadypassed around information on internationaldining events and conferences and this is something that we intend to continue to do through a message board on thenewly established website.

The new Paris based alumni webpagecan be found at http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/alumni/paris/index.html. We wouldpersonally encourage other Darwinians to look to establish their own groups andto have a web presence on the collegewebsite. This has proved a very rewardingexercise that has led to meeting (and re-meeting) some very interesting peopleand friends that share one special thing in common.

Julien Goodman (1997–1998) &Pascale Chavatte-Palmer (1992–1996)

Above: Darwin May Bumps DinnerLeft: The DCBC President Dr Chester White, with a new boat named in his honour

Rog

er W

hite

head

Editors:

George Gömöri

Richard Jebb

Andrew Prentice

The editors especially welcomeshort articles, pictures, artwork andnews from our overseas alumni.Correspondence to:darwinian@dar.cam.ac.uk

Designed and printed by Cambridge Printing, the printingbusiness of Cambridge University Press.www.cambridgeprinting.org

Calendar of Old Darwinian Events2005

2nd Dec Former Fellow’s Reunion(Formal Hall)

2006

11th March Former Fellow’s buffet lunch

17th March Darwin Society Dinner

31st March Reunion Dinner

19th May Darwin Society Dinner

9th June Former Fellow’s Reunion (Guest Night)

16th June Reunion Dinner

23rd June Darwin Ball (provisional date)

14th July Old Darwinian Summer Party

In the last issue of The Darwinian there were some beautiful images ofthe College taken by current studentsfor the 2005 Darwin calendar. Many ofyou commented on the beauty andquality of the photos, and how theybought back happy memories.

There must be a treasure-trove of photos of the College amongst our alumni, and it would be fantastic if we could share your photographicmemories of your time here with all our alumni across the world. So, pleasesend us pictures of the buildings, river,friends, year group photos, graduationsand dinner’s. Photos or posters of theMay Ball would also be fascinating.

In fact, please send images of anything that other alumni will findinteresting and entertaining.

Digital images can be e-mailed to sas65@cam.ac.uk or postphotographs to Sophia Smith. All photos will be well looked after and returned.

The best images will be re-producedin the next Darwinian, and we hope touse them to produce a Darwin Collegealumni calendar for 2007.

Remember to note where and when photos were taken and to name the people in them.

Thank you and we look forward to memory sharing.

Soon after returning to the GenomeInstitute of Singapore, Biopolis,Bernard Leong (1998–2003) wasawarded the National University ofSingapore Centennial EntrepreneurialGenesis Award for his entrepreneurshipefforts in starting up a biotech company,SimuGen specializing in gene profilingand computational biology. Thecompany has produced a kit that will predict liver heptatoxicity cheaply,accurately and efficiently. The awardwas presented on 7th September

2005 by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, theMinister for Community Development,Youth and Sports, and Second Ministerfor Trade (right of picture) and Prof TanChorh Chuan, NUS Provost (left ofpicture). Whilst at Darwin Bernardstudied his Part III Mathematical Tripos followed by a PhD at theCavendish Laboratory. He then movedto Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with an International Fellowship from Singapore from 2003–5 before returning home to Singapore.

Your Memories of DarwinCollege are Wanted!

Closing date for entries is 1st February 2006