As plans were drawn up for a new strategic plan for the next decade, the Secretary-General of the United Nations stated that conservation efforts are all too often undermined by conflicting policies; yet, “conserving biodiversity,” he said, “cannot be an afterthought once other objectives are addressed.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Professor Andrew Balmford, who helps lead the University of Cambridge’s Conservation Science Group in the Department of Zoology: “Conservation has to be mainstreamed. It can’t be on the margins. It has to be part of policy and practice across a whole range of sectors if we are to have a chance of counteracting the rapid declines in the extent and condition of natural ecosystems.”

With this in mind, he and Professor Rhys Green, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)’s Principal Research Biologist and also based in the Department of Zoology, have created a series of highly effective partnerships with conservation practitioners and policy makers. These in turn have developed a suite of tools aimed at helping decision makers make informed judgments.

“Conservation has for too long suffered from key disconnects,” explained Balmford. “One of the main problems is conservation research is often about biology, but the global loss of nature is really about people and what they do. To tackle fundamental questions about this relationship, quantitative research studies need to be linked to policies and practice that are capable of effecting behaviour change.”

“It’s an iterative process,” added Green. “Smart collaborations involve policy makers or conservation practitioners identifying the questions that need tackling and, through a dialogue with scientists, turning these into tractable research questions that researchers can answer in ways that are fit for purpose. It’s conservation in the round.”

Smart collaborations are a key part of the vision of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a pioneering collaboration between the University and eight leading conservation organisations and a conservation network based in the Cambridge area that integrates research, policy, practice and learning. Collaboration and funding through CCI have enabled Balmford and Green to address a series of questions that have important implications for global conservation and environmental management.

How, for instance, can the world respond to the growing demands for increased food production and yet conserve the raw material that biodiversity represents? A project led by Dr Ben Phalan from the Department of Zoology, and funded by the Newton Trust and CCI partners BirdLife International, RSPB and the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), is using recently developed global datasets to understand better how conflicts between conservation and farming in the tropics might be resolved.

“The expansion and intensification of agriculture are the greatest source of threat to biological diversity,” explained Phalan, “and yet there is little information about how far priority areas for conservation and food production overlap. To what extent will the expansion of a particular crop threaten wild species? Are there areas where expansion of food production would be less of a problem for biodiversity?”

Following input from policy experts at a workshop held in the project’s early stages to identify focal crops, Phalan has been intersecting detailed maps of bird and crop distributions in the tropics, where agricultural expansion is most likely to affect biodiversity. Once completed later in 2012, the study will help decision makers identify the most damaging crops and the most vulnerable areas, both now and under future scenarios of agricultural change.

Another collaboration deals with the problem of how to assess the full benefits that an area’s biodiversity brings to society – its ‘ecosystem services’. These can include the formation of soils, provision of clean water, production of crops, regulation of climate and opportunities for recreation. Most are hard to measure without expert support. So when faced, for instance, with pressures to cut down a natural forest to increase food production, how can local decision makers accurately value the ecosystem services and weigh up the implications of the proposed change in land use?

An ambitious Ecosystem Services Toolkit to do just this is currently in its testing phase, led by Dr Kelvin Peh from the Department of Zoology with a team from Anglia Ruskin University, BirdLife International, RSPB and UNEP-WCMC. The result is a manual (and eventually an online program) that enables non-experts to make state-of-the-art assessments of ecosystem services in their region, so that they can gauge for themselves how changes in local biodiversity will affect them.

“Linking declining levels of biodiversity with the benefits biodiversity delivers, and the pressures and responses affecting it, is crucial to taking us forward in the ‘post-2010’ global strategic plan for biodiversity,” explained Green. A new approach to understanding this relationship has been the driving force behind yet another project – ‘Linked Indicators’, which, like the Ecosystem Services Toolkit project, was supported by the CCI Collaborative Fund.

The idea behind the project is that indicators of biodiversity levels are easier to understand, communicate and act upon if they are linked together in a set that connects policies to outcomes. Green, one of the leaders of the study, explained: “It’s not enough to be aware of changes to biodiversity levels. It’s a bit like having a depth gauge on the Titanic – why would we want to know how fast things are getting worse unless we have an idea of why, and whether our attempts to do something about it are doing any good?”

The Linked Indicators concept is based on a response–pressure–state– benefit model. It proposes a set of linked indicators for each system of interest. For fisheries, for example, the pressure on marine animals from fishing and ocean temperature is related to the resulting state of marine life, as well as the benefit fishing brings in terms of employment and food, and also the policy response to reduce losses to biodiversity by creating marine protected areas. The links between such indicators represent the best available knowledge of how the ecosystem involved works and the causal relationships between its components.

Where Linked Indicators can help decision makers is to provide them with better tools to assess whether the amount and type of response to biodiversity loss have been implemented on a sufficient scale to arrest or reverse it. The study, which was developed by a team from the Department of Zoology working with BirdLife International, RSPB and UNEP-WCMC, was presented at meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) last year. The ideas it suggests are helping the CBD to improve its ability to track progress towards biodiversity targets post-2010.

“Even in the first few years, all of these projects have demonstrated the value for money that smart collaborations can generate,” added Balmford. “By building accessible tools and strengthening the evidence base for decision makers, we can help them make wise and informed decisions for the future of people and the rest of the planet.”

The concept of extinction is alien here. To the market women who sell bushmeat, animals are a gift from God, sent down for people to “chop”. Hunters will tell you that now-absent species have “run away deeper into the forest”. But try to push deeper into the forest, and after a few kilometres you come out the other side, into a patchwork mosaic of cassava and maize fields with plantains, chilli peppers and garden eggs; cocoa farms, many with a canopy of remnant forest trees; overgrown plots of oil palm; and dense thickets springing up on land left fallow for a few years to regain its fertility. My research in Ghana looks at the biological richness of such landscapes, comparing them with forests and oil palm plantations, in an attempt to get a better understanding of a contentious debate: should conservationists focus more of their efforts on preventing conversion of forests to mosaic farmlands, or on preventing the homogenisation of those mosaics into uniform but high-yielding monocultures?

Kwesi himself is a hunter, and I ask him about monkeys. He knows five kinds well, and I ask if he would be sorry if they “finished”. He says he would be happy to see one kind finish. He calls it kraa, and says it is a “very stubborn monkey” which raids farmers’ crops. I know it as the white-naped mangabey, globally endangered, which has declined by 50% or more within my lifetime. I encourage Kwesi not to shoot those species he sees becoming rare, but as an outsider my words don’t carry much weight. It will take far more dedicated efforts to regulate hunting, protect habitats and find culturally acceptable alternatives to bushmeat if declines of this and other species are to be reversed.

It’s fully dark now. I go to “bath” in a forest stream. Little fish dart away from my light, and freshwater shrimps with long pincers peer up through the clear water. From the dark treetops, a rhythmic series of dreadful cries starts up. It sounds like an animal in pain, or perhaps in the throes of ecstasy, or both. It’s an owea, a tree hyrax, a dumpy, shaggy little creature with rather human-like toes. The hoarse wails build to a crescendo, and then stop abruptly. From further off, the quavering laugh of an African wood owl drifts through the trees. The night air is alive with the hum of insects, but mosquitoes are mercifully few.

I retreat to my hammock, slung between two trees and covered over with mosquito netting. I’m not expecting a downpour so I’ve left the fly sheet pulled back, and through the dense foliage 40 m above my head I can see a few silvery stars. I call out a good night to Kwesi, and soon fall into a deep sleep. Who knows what the morning might bring? Delicate butterflies drinking sweat from my shirt, new and unfamiliar bird sounds to be traced and identified, a blitzkrieg of driver ants, a bewildering diversity of trees to be measured and catalogued, perhaps a lucky sighting of a very stubborn monkey… One thing is certain: in a tropical forest like this there will always be something I have never seen before.

Dr Ben Phalan

Ben is a conservation biologist in the Department of Zoology and a junior research fellow at Churchill College. His current research is concerned mainly with understanding the impacts of agriculture on tropical faunas and identifying land use strategies to minimise those impacts. He works in collaboration with BirdLife International, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), and is funded by the Isaac Newton Trust, the RSPB and UNEP-WCMC.

The stark reality, as conservation scientist Professor Andrew Balmford explained, is that biodiversity is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for human life: “As well as being a vital source for many people of food and fuel, wild nature is crucial for every one of us in mitigating climate change, regulating water flows, and buffering people from the impact of storms and floods.”

“World agriculture developed and flourished during a period of climate stability,” he added. “We don’t yet know how our current agricultural systems will be affected by climate change but my guess is that they will be more sensitive than we realise. For me, this uncertainty underscores the importance for the future of farming of agriculture having least possible impact on what remains of nature.”

Professor Balmford, who helps lead the Conservation Science Group in the Department of Zoology, advocates thinking smart from the start. “It’s vitally important to integrate biodiversity concerns into the inevitable expansion in agriculture, especially in developing countries and regions where crop farming is likely to increase the most,” he said, “and to do this at an early stage, not when it’s too late to save remaining wild habitats and the species that depend on them.”

A dual challenge

From the moment that humans first began transforming land from wild nature, we have been a direct competitor with biodiversity, as a great many studies measuring the rate of species extinction in relation to land development have shown.

However, as Professor Rhys Green, also from the Department of Zoology, explained: “It’s now not enough to count how many species are disappearing or to understand why ecosystems are collapsing. We need to work out what kinds of farming provide the food we need yet give the best prospect for minimising biodiversity losses.”

The real question therefore is what can be done to tackle both problems in tandem? Professor Green, together with Professor Balmford and others, came up with a model (published in Science in 2005) that, when the right data are collected, can be used to answer this question. They looked at the impact on biodiversity of two potential solutions – land sparing and land sharing – and asked, theoretically, which would be best for wild nature.

“With land sparing, the idea is to farm the productive region as intensively as possible, without damaging areas away from farmland, and then to set aside other land for wild nature,” explained Professor Green. “With land sharing, agricultural practices encourage wildlife through retention of hedgerows, patches of native vegetation and fewer pesticides. This usually means lower yields and therefore more land is needed to grow a given amount of produce.”

“The argument for land sparing is rarely made by conservationists – it’s more commonly advocated in the agriculture literature,” he added. “Yet our mathematical model suggested that land sparing might allow more species to persist.”

In search of data

To find out if land sparing was indeed a better option for productivity and wildlife required a combination of data that had never been collected before.

Measurements were needed of the abundance of individual species in matched landscapes that vary only in the degree of agricultural development – from wild nature, through wildlife-friendly farming, to high-yield intensive farming – as well as, crucially, of the agricultural yield of these same landscapes.

“We know quite a lot about the impact of different landscapes on wildlife, but this can be misleading without information on yields as well,” said Dr Ben Phalan, who for his graduate studies spent 15 months in Ghana surveying wildlife and measuring agricultural yields and profits, while fellow graduate student Malvika Onial did the same in northern India.

Although agricultural change is an important driver almost everywhere, the research focused on developing countries because these regions are home to some of the largest concentrations of biodiversity and also to the most rapid changes in human populations and agricultural practices.

“By quantifying how species are affected by increasing yield, we can work out whether it’s better to spread farming out over a larger area to dilute its impact or to concentrate production in existing croplands, allowing the protection of natural habitats such as rainforest,” said Dr Phalan.

More recently, the team has also begun to look at other regions of the world such as more-developed countries.

Smarter thinking

“Inevitably, there will be unease about advocating high-intensity food production,” added Professor Balmford. “It will be important to look carefully at practices that have impact beyond the farm – use of fossil fuels, fertilisers, water abstraction, pollution, social concerns and so on. But our studies suggest that if we want to reconcile biodiversity and food production then we might well be better separating them than trying to integrate them on the same land.”

The first steps in using the information to inform future agricultural practices have already begun. Dr Phalan has embarked on a broad-sweep analysis of the tropics to identify where croplands are expanding most and where there is likely to be greatest conflict with conservation priorities.

This project is a collaboration between the Department of Zoology, BirdLife International, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre – all of which are members of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (see panel) – with vital seed funding provided by the Isaac Newton Trust.

“The new project is a chance to understand how to resolve trade-offs between conservation and agriculture, and to make wise choices about where and how we farm,” explained Professor Balmford. “Only then can we hope to meet increased food demands at the least cost to the other species with which we share our planet.”

For more information, please contact Professor Andrew Balmford (a.balmford@zoo.cam.ac.uk) or Professor Rhys Green (r.green@zoo.cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Zoology. Professor Green is also a Principal Research Biologist at the RSPB.

More than 15,000 currently known letters written by or to Darwin will be published, in full, by 2022. The edition is the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project, widely acknowledged as the greatest editorial project in the history of science, and one of the major international scholarly projects of the past half-century.

It is jointly managed by the University Library and ACLS. By the time the edition is complete, locating, researching, and editing the letters will have taken several teams of scholars more than forty years. Summaries of all known letters are freely available to the public through the Project’s website www.darwinproject.ac.uk

The letters, exchanged with around 2000 correspondents, take in every stage of Darwin’s life from school and student days, through the voyage of HMS Beagle, the publication of On the Origin of Species and the controversies that followed, his later publications on the implications of his theories for humans, right up to his death. They offer unparalleled, intimate insight into every aspect both of Darwin’s scientific work and of his personal life – including his thoughts on marriage – and also into the lives and work of many of his contemporaries.

Project Director Dr Jim Secord said: “Darwin’s conclusions about how all living things have evolved and are interconnected are among the most important ever made. Unlike his published works, Darwin’s letters are vitally important in showing how science is done, with the constant gathering of new data, and the testing and questioning of theories and ideas.”

The funding has been given in recognition of the potential that the completed edition of Darwin’s letters will have – not only as a foundation and catalyst for further scholarship, but for education in all aspects of evolution and its history, at all levels. The lead gift to the University Library of £2.5 million from the newly established Evolution Education Trust is matched by generous grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Added Secord: “We are deeply grateful for this visionary support. The greatest threat to long running projects in the Arts and Humanities is that it’s almost impossible to secure long term funds, and so much project time is taken up in applying for and managing short term grants.  Now we can concentrate on finishing the job.”

Now reaching the end of its first decade at Cambridge, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) – once a fragile newcomer with a controversial moniker – has established itself as a focus for humanities activity, while its post-modern acronym has won international name-recognition.

CRASSH was conceived as a way to create interdisciplinary dialogue across the University’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social sciences and humanities. It brings together early career researchers, established faculty members and visiting scholars – for research groups, workshops, colloquia, lectures and conferences – across an array of established and emerging fields.

Indispensible to the research environment, it serves at once as a centripetal hub, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives, and as a centrifugal force for disseminating
new ideas. It provides a space for both reflection and interaction, where researchers can step beyond the frames of their disciplines.

Hunger for dialogue

As well as fostering interdisciplinarity, the Centre, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has taken on the challenge of disciplinary innovation. Some of the most innovative work has originated in the Centre’s graduate/faculty research groups – currently spanning Endangered Languages, East European Memory Studies, GreenBRIDGE (sustainable architecture), the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Network, and the Science, Technology and Bio-Social Studies Forum.

Meanwhile long-running groups such as Cities, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum continue to flourish, along with recent comers such as Late Antiquities, Health and Welfare, and Postcolonial Empires. Each year brings fresh proposals and new graduate cohorts.

Like the 20 or so conferences sponsored by CRASSH each year, research fora do more than challenge familiar disciplinary silos: they create collaborations from which fresh ideas and projects grow. Many of the conferences run by CRASSH – convened by early career researchers as well as established faculty – produce edited books; some form part of ongoing projects; others spearhead new initiatives and propel them forward to the next stage.

Research today involves networking, often internationally. But the term ‘network’ hardly begins to evoke the research culture engendered by face-to-face meetings and discussion. One of the discoveries made by the Centre at the outset was not just Cambridge researchers’ hunger for dialogue, but their need for a physical space where it could take place: a hospitable interdisciplinary location with common intellectual ownership.

Humanities world view

Recent CRASSH conferences have made an implicit argument for the importance of the humanities perspective and remind us how the world is changing before our eyes: forays into science like Have You Ever Seen a Molecule? Art, Science, and Visual Communication; attempts to grapple with modernity such as Understanding New Wars or Can I see your ID? Personhood and Paperwork in and after the Soviet Union; and, topical today, New Media/Alternative Politics: Communication Technologies and Political Change in the Middle East and Africa.

During 2009–10, a Mellon Sawyer seminar on Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty ran throughout the year, with seminars on finance, health, environment, policy making and democracy, bringing together faculty from across the University, including the Statistical Laboratory, History and Philosophy of Science, Geography and the Cambridge Judge Business School.

This year’s Mellon-funded CRASSH conference in June, The Future University, will address urgent questions about the role of the humanities, including the arts and social sciences, in a modern technological university. The theme asks what universities are for – examining their evolving character and changing concerns in the digital age – a poignant theme at a time when cuts to university funding and fees threaten especially (but not only) the humanities.

For the Centre’s new theme kicking off at the start of the next academic year (see panel), we have selected visiting fellows from our largest ever application pool, along with new India and EUIAS fellows and two new Mellon postdoctoral fellows working on subjects relating to the theme. The generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Newton Trust and the Charles Wallace India Trust has helped to establish CRASSH as an academic destination for researchers.

As the fellowship group grows, it becomes clearer than ever not only what our visitors gain from access to Cambridge research resources, but also how much they bring to Cambridge: the lively intellectual traffic that energises an international university.

Crystal-ball gazing

From the start, the CRASSH ethos has been strongly participatory. Even as the major research councils look for bigger and better research applications, they note the importance of the bubbling up of new ideas that lead to innovative work. CRASSH plays a part here, through competitive funding for graduate-led research groups, sponsorship of graduate-convened conferences, and Early Career Fellowships for Cambridge faculty beginning a new project. Our postdoctoral and early career fellows this year are working on projects that span terror and terrorism, complex simplicity in architecture, educational innovation and the economics of infectious diseases.

If one function of research is to keep us from forgetting the past – its achievements or its failures, its languages, histories and literary productions – another is to anticipate future concerns: energy, intergenerational justice, the environment; new forms of art, music and culture that cross media; new possibilities for peace as well as war; or new forms of human interaction, whether via digital media or ID papers.

Gateway to the humanities

The vision that underpins CRASSH involves distance and engagement: both stepping outside one’s own discipline or institution, and getting together with like-minded (or unanticipated) collaborators. It aims at the indispensible combination of reflection and argument that gives rise to the best research.

Contact among opposed positions, the ability to learn from working with other people, bridging differences without conceding essential ground – these are facets of the ‘human’ face of the humanities that we teach and encourage through critical study and practice of humanities disciplines.

The argument for the humanities made by CRASSH is that fresh thinking and innovation take place in the interaction between independent research and research collaboration, in the interstices of disciplines, and in the collaborative ethos and international perspective that characterise humanities research at its best. CRASSH aspires to provide this unique form of encounter: a gateway to the humanities.

For more information, please visit www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/

‘It has become increasingly difficult to pursue academic research in African universities,’ explains Professor Megan Vaughan, Director of the Centre. ‘Aside from teaching commitments, which can hinder researchers from having the time to complete their PhDs, there is a severe lack of funding to maintain their research. As a result, many African scholars feel increasingly isolated from academia at an international level in the social sciences and humanities.’

Over the past seven years, a total of 43 academics from 14 African nations have taken part in the Cambridge/Africa Research Collaborative Programme. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust, the Programme provides the visiting scholars with an opportunity to renew their access to international scholarship and to develop collaborations in Cambridge and beyond that will continue to vitalise their research after they return to their home universities.

Myth and modernity

The research of the five scholars currently visiting takes its cue from this year’s theme – Myth and Modernity in African Literature – and is providing a fascinating glimpse of how African nations place themselves in a global context.

Dr Chris Warnes, a specialist in postcolonial literature in the Faculty of English and a member of the Centre, leads the research programme: ‘This is a very exciting topic,’ he explains. ‘The talented scholars we have with us are using mythology as a key to unlock important questions about Africa both past and present, exemplifying the contributions that such research can make to societal concerns of today.’

For instance, mythology can tell us about national identity, explains Dr James Tsaaior, one of the visiting scholars: ‘How African novelists have dealt with mythology reveals the struggle to construct nationhood and a sense of an African identity.’

‘By studying authors such as Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt, Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana and Ben Okri from Nigeria,’ he continues, ‘it is clear that there is a confluence of certain strong and recurrent themes, including slavery, the slave trade and (neo-)colonialism, which have shaped the way that Africans think about Africa and perceive the world.’

Understanding relations between identity and myth is an issue that is particularly salient in the Sudan where religious tensions have increasingly divided the country. In her research, Dr Eiman El-Nour is hoping to document and record some of these myths, which frequently take the form of verbal storytelling. ‘Mythology is tremendously strong and influential in Sudan, providing the codes by which ordinary people live their lives,’ she explains. ‘I’m interested in looking at how myth influences the recreation of Sudanese identity, whether Islamic, African or both.’

Likewise, in the west of Africa, mythology has had a major influence on the identity, culture, philosophy and beliefs of the Yoruba people, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. Dr Oyeniyi Okunoye is interested in how a genre of Yoruba poetry (Ewi) is being shaped by modernity.

‘My task,’ he maintains, ‘is to clarify why Ewi, despite being rooted in the past, dynamically responds to the various experiences that Yoruba people have witnessed within the global environment.’ He will be looking at how the poetry, which is both written and chanted, is actively involved in inventing a pan-Yoruba identity today.

Mythology also has the potential to sustain and preserve the literature of African modernity, says Dr Tunde Awosanmi: ‘A challenge set by novelist Ayi Kwei Armah has been to encourage African writers not just to use ancestral myth and history as a cultural resource, but also to engage in the creative modernisation of primitive mythology. I am interested in how this is being played out in modern African drama, through identifying contrasting attitudes in terms of orthodox
and unorthodox users of myth.’

‘Myth and modernity are concepts that have increasingly come to mark our world,’ adds Dr Kenneth Simala. ‘From African mythology we can make deductions that tell us not just about times that have passed but also about issues that are relevant today. The legend of Fumo Liyongo [see below] is a wonderful example of this modern-day resonance for what it has to say about civilisations in conflict and the need for civilisations to engage in dialogue.’

Unlocking research potential

As the African scholars come to the close of their sabbatical, they will have attended a seminar series that brings international speakers to Cambridge, presented their findings at a workshop at the Centre in March and a conference in Nigeria in August 2011, as well as published their research as a book.

Professor Vaughan and her colleagues are immensely proud of the Programme: ‘Without an initiative such as this, there is a real danger that African countries will fall further behind in a global economy that is ever more dependent on expert knowledge. This Programme provides our hard-pressed colleagues in African universities with a break during which they can carry out research and create new research networks based on collaborations that are just as valuable for the University of Cambridge’s Africanists.’

Blood pressure is controlled by hormones called angiotensins, which cause the blood vessels to constrict. These hormones are released by the protein angiotensinogen. Until now, it was not understood how this occurred.

Dr Aiwu Zhou, a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Fellow at the University of Cambridge, who made the breakthrough, said: “Although we primarily focused on pre-eclampsia, the research also opens new leads for future research into the causes of hypertension in general.”

To make the discovery, the researchers solved the structure of angiotensinogen with the help of an extremely intense X-ray beam produced by Diamond Light Source, the UK synchrotron. Their results revealed that the protein is oxidised and changes shape
to permit ready access to angiotensinogen by an enzyme, renin. Renin cuts off the tail of the protein to release the hormone angiotensin, which then raises blood pressure.

Taking their lab results into the clinic at the University of Nottingham, the research team showed that the amount of oxidised, and hence more active, angiotensinogen was increased in women with pre-eclampsia.

Professor Robin Carrell at the University of Cambridge, who led the 20-year research project, explained: “During pregnancy oxidative changes can occur in the placenta. These changes, the very ones we have found stimulates the release of the hormone angiotensin and lead to increased blood pressure, can arise as the circulation in the placenta readjusts the oxygen requirements of the growing foetus with the delivery of oxygen to the placenta from the mother.”

Drugs currently used to treat high blood pressure – such as ACE inhibitors – focus on the later stages of the mechanism that controls blood pressure. Today’s findings, which give insight into the previously mysterious early stages of the regulation process, provide scientists with new opportunities to research novel treatments for hypertension.

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director of the BHF, which largely funded the study, said: “Every year in the UK pre-eclampsia is responsible for the deaths of around six women and several hundred babies. This research is of the highest quality and offers real hope for developing strategies to prevent or treat this dangerous condition by targeting the process that these scientists have identified. And of course, although the researchers only looked at pre-eclampsia in this study, similar strategies may be useful for those people with high blood pressure that is not effectively controlled by current medicines.”

High blood pressure frequently affects pregnancy. However, in 2-7 per cent of pregnancies this develops into pre-eclampsia, which threatens the health and survival of both the mother and child. In Britain, it affects about one in 20 women during pregnancy, and every year 50,000 women and 500,000 infants die globally as a result of pre-eclampsia. There is no treatment for pre-eclampsia and often the mother is either induced early or undergoes a Caesarean.

The research was largely funded by the British Heart Foundation, with additional funding provided by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Photo credit: House of Sims

Two centuries after his birth, Charles Darwin is probably one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, and certainly the most controversial. Yet, far from being the isolated genius of legend, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, who used letters very much as we use email. They were the lifeblood of his research. His correspondence provides us with a remarkable record of intellectual development, from his voyage around the world on HMS Beagle, to the decades formulating and honing his theories. They also provide a window onto his extraordinary global network of informants – the Victorian men and women who provided him with observations on the fauna, flora and peoples of the world: from gardeners, nurserymen, geologists and naturalists, to diplomats, army officers, novelists and suffragettes. They offer a remarkable picture of civil discussion and reasoned debate, from which we would do well to learn.

Today, the world’s largest archive of Darwin’s correspondence, together with his notes, manuscripts and annotated books and periodicals, is housed in Cambridge University Library (www.darwinproject.ac.uk/). The richness of this resource has made the Library an international centre for studies of Darwin and 19th-century science. Scholars from all over the world regularly visit the manuscripts room and communicate with its expert staff. They also depend on the Library’s collection of 19th-century books and scientific periodicals, unrivalled in its accessibility and extent.

These remarkable resources have led to an ambitious project, now in its 35th year and planned to continue until 2025: to publish a comprehensive chronological edition of all known letters, both to and from Charles Darwin, wherever they might be in the world.

Building and interpreting an archive

The bulk of the collection was given to the Library by the Darwin family and the Pilgrim Trust in 1942, and since then materials have continued to be added. Work on publication of the letters began in 1974, with a team led by an American scholar, Frederick Burkhardt, with the aid of Sydney Smith, a zoologist in the University of Cambridge. The first 10 years were occupied solely by searching worldwide for any letters the team could find and putting them into initial chronological order – less than half of the known letters have a date written on them.

A total of almost 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin with nearly 2000 correspondents, spanning the period from 1821 until his death in 1882, have now been located, some in libraries and some in private collections. One letter even turned up on a recent broadcast of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. About 8000 are in Cambridge, including important materials on deposit from the Down House Trust.

Each letter requires painstaking transcription, retaining all original spellings (and mis-spellings!), followed by annotation. Crucial bits of information are gradually fitted together, each informing and being informed by another. The result gives not just a new perspective on the 19th century, but fundamental insights into our own controversies about science and religion, the nature of evolution, and issues in ecological science. In this way, the meticulous research required to annotate the letters becomes the starting point for further understanding.

All the letters are being published in chronological order in the complete edition of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin by Cambridge University Press, of which the 17th of a planned total of 30 volumes will be published this summer. The letter transcripts and notes are also made freely available in a searchable online database five years after printed publication (www.darwinproject.ac.uk). As new letters come to light, or as new information on their contents or dating becomes available, the database is revised. The aim is to provide a unique, comprehensive and reliable source of information on his correspondence, as well as major topics in Darwin’s life and work.

Funding – past and future

A project on this scale requires commitment from funding partners who understand the importance of supporting accessible, innovative research carried out to the highest standard over many years. Contributions from private donors have been essential for the research to progress, as well as long-term support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, British Ecological Society, Isaac Newton Trust, John Templeton Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. Funding is currently being sought for the next phase of work.

For more information, please contact Professor Jim Secord, Director (jas1010@cam.ac.uk), and Dr Alison Pearn, Assistant Director (ab55@cam.ac.uk), of the Darwin Correspondence Project.