This week Professor Susan Greenfield of the University of Oxford comes to Darwin College, Cambridge to launch the annual Darwin Lecture series. The Darwin Lectures, a series of public lectures run in the second term of each academic year, were established in 1986 and quickly established themselves as one of the highlights of the University's yearly programme of public education.

This week Professor Susan Greenfield of the University of Oxford comes to Darwin College, Cambridge to launch the annual Darwin Lecture series. The Darwin Lectures, a series of public lectures run in the second term of each academic year, were established in 1986 and quickly established themselves as one of the highlights of the University's yearly programme of public education.

Each series has been built around a single theme, approached in a multi-disciplinary way. Previous themes have included commmunications, intelligence, catastrophe and the environment. Each lecture is given by a leading authority on his or her subject. The distinguished list of speakers from previous years includes Stephen Hawking, Helena Kennedy, Jonathan Miller, Roger Penrose and Roy Porter.

This year's theme is space, a choice in part inspired by Stanley Kubrick's seminal film 2001-A Space Odyssey. "It occurred to us that the theme of space would be at once timely and ideal for the series, as it has such different resonances in different fields," explains Francois Penz, a Fellow of Darwin College and one of the organiser of this year's lectures. "We have planned our intellectual journey from inner to outer space, with excursions into the brain, language, buildings, virtual reality, mapmaking, politics, astronautics, and cosmology."

Lecture one Friday 19 January
Inner space - chemicals and conciousness
Professor Susan Greenfield (University of Oxford)
Consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists as well as philosophers. Despite the attempts of physicists and mathematicians to model consciousness in artificial systems, is a need to understand consciousness in a way that caters for the diverse range of chemicals operating in the brain; how else might one explain the various mood modifying and consciousness changing effects of specific drugs?

We need to develop a way of describing consciousness, that on the one hand caters for different momentary states of the physical brain, whilst at the same time respecting the subjective phenomenology that is all too often ignored by scientists.

In this talk, we shall explore a list of properties that would be required of the physical brain, to cater for the subjectivity of consciousness. We can then test this 'Rosetta Stone' model, in various scenarios of everyday life, and see how such scenarios might be interpreted in terms of functioning of the physical brain.

Professor Susan Greenfield CBE
Susan Greenfield is Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. She is also Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a co-founder of Synaptica Ltd, a company specialising in novel approaches to neurodegeneration.

Professor Greenfield is a Trustee of the Science Museum and regularly makes significant contributions to the communication of science to the general public. In 1994 she was the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas lectures and has subsequently made a wide range of broadcasts on TV and radio. She has written and presented four half hour programmes for BBC Radio 4 on drugs and has just finished a major six part series on the brain and mind, 'Brain Story' broadcast on BBC2 in July 2000. She received the Michael Faraday medal from the Royal Society for making the most significant contribution in 1998 to the public understanding of science.

Lecture programme
19 January Inner Space
Susan Greenfield (Department of Pharmacology, Oxford)

26 January Space and Language
Karen Emmorey (Salk Institute, California)

2 February Architectural Space
Daniel Libeskind (Berlin)

9 February Virtual Space
Char Davies (Montreal)

16 February Mapping Space
Lisa Jardine (School of English, University London)

23 February International Space
Neal Ascherson (London)

2 March Outer Space
John Barrow (Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge)

9 March Exploring Space
Jeffrey Hoffman (NASA, Paris)

The lectures will start at 5.30 pm in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue. An adjacent overflow theatre is provided with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people, so it is advisable to arrive around half an hour early to ensure a place.

Further information To find out more about the lecture series go to the events section on the Darwin College website.

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