Do you need to explore molecular gastronomy or research the food industry or trends in the beverage business? Are you concerned with global food security, safety  and supply? Are genetically modified foods a threat to our health and ecosystems or a benefit of biological research? What are the markets for different types of food and what is the impact of European regulation on these markets? These questions and many more can be explored by undertaking research at the British Library.

Image from Flickr

Our science reading rooms contain a strong food technology collection including books, journals, both print and electronic  plus discovery tools such as the Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) database.

Electronic resources for research: our full set of databases are listed here and are accessible to registered readers on-site.

Accessing a world of knowledge: reader registration and pre-registration is quick and easy as outlined on our web site.

Explore the scope and depth of the British Library collections: digital books include topics such as “Developing food products for consumers with specific dietary needs" edited by Steve Osborn, Wayne Morley, Oxford, Woodhead Publishing, 2016, touching on the health aspects and books on wider cultural issues include examples such as “On the Town in New York : The Landmark History of Eating, Drinking, and Entertainments from the American Revolution to the Food Revolution" by Michael Batterberry and  Ariane Batterberry, 2016.

Image from Flickr

Inter-disciplinary and multi-format collections: apart from the multidisciplinary links to the business, humanities and cultural aspects of food, the science collections cover packaging, preservation, agricultural production, food processing, microbiology, engineering and nutrition.

We hold the publications of the major food sector organisation such as the Institute of Food Science and Technology’s  (IFST)  “International Journal of Food Science and Technology" and the European Federation of Food Science and Technology’s (EFFST) journal entitled “Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies”.

The British Library  offers a wide variety of formats and resources including the oral history food collections which have recently been made available online. These cover the history of food production from the start of the 20^th Century and are a fantastic resource for food researchers and historians.

Image from Wikimedia

Our collection of historical patents are also a rich resource for understanding food technology and innovation. We offer amongst many other patent databases, the British granted patent specifications database, a  document store that contains pdf copies of British patents from 1617-1899, and PDF copies of granted British patents from 1st January 2007. Although this database is searchable only by patent number, the reference staff can help with subject access using print patent indexes and up to five specifications per week can be downloaded for personal research. See the Business and IP Centre website for more information.

Image from Flickr

Sources of research in food standards and regulations can be found at the British Library where we collect these UK national publications, e.g. UK Food Standards Agency  and international publications of key organisations such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations in our social science reading rooms.

Whet your appetite by visiting the British Library’s collections of food related resources, including recipes, it’s history, science and nutritional benefits.   

Paul Allchin

Science Content Specialist

Ahead of next week's TalkScience event on Doping in Sport Julian Walker explores some historical examples of performance enhancement described in his new book "The Roar of the Crowd".

The essence of the debate regarding the use of drugs in sport is: what is an unfair substance to use, and how do we decide? The dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable is, and for decades has been, constantly moving. For the lay-person the terms ‘anabolic steroids’ and ‘human growth hormones’ sound warning bells, but the equally prohibited ‘diuretics’ sound relatively harmless, and the word ‘stimulants’ requires detailed specification to the point where the word itself is more or less meaningless. How does the cultural history of sport handle this subject?

In Book 23 of Homer’s Iliad the funeral games held for Patroclus include a boxing match and a wrestling match. When the boxing match is announced forward comes Epeues, who has certainly done his mental preparation:

"I boast myself To all superior"

His endorphins are running and performance-enhancing even before he has a challenger, his control of the mind-game as assured as Ferguson’s or Mourinho’s. He is answered by the equally confident Euryalus. The fighters each dress for the fight, and:

"Mingling with fists, to furious fight they fell;

  Dire was the crash of jaws, and the sweat stream'd

  From every limb"

Eurylaus looks for an opening but effectively the fight is over with a single blow from Epeues, and he is taken away, spitting blood.

The wrestling bout is more of a match, Homer pitting brain against brawn, Ulysses against Ajax, neither managing to lift and throw the other. Ulysses then enters the running match, against Oiliades. It’s a close thing, Ulysses is probably tired from the wrestling, and it looks like he is going to lose:

"Oiliades

  Led swift the course, and closely at his heels

  Ulysses ran. Near as some cinctured maid

  Industrious holds the distaff to her breast,                  

  While to and fro with practised finger neat

  She tends the flax drawing it to a thread,

  So near Ulysses follow'd him, and press'd

  His footsteps, ere the dust fill'd them again,

  Pouring his breath into his neck behind,                      

  And never slackening pace.[1]"

At this point Ulysses uses the Ancient Greek equivalent of a performance-enhancing drug – he calls on Minerva for help; and sure enough she trips his opponent so that he falls face-down in some cow-poo (ironically his prize for coming second is an ox). Quite blatantly Ulysses has use external assistance to gain victory, and got away with it. Oiliades puts in a complaint:

"Ah--Pallas tripp'd my footsteps; she attends                

  Ulysses ever with a mother's care."

And what happens?

    "Loud laugh'd the Grecians."

It’s a disgrace.

Robert Burton explores, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1652), the role of exercise in balancing the body. He notes the Roman physician Galen’s contention that ‘to play at ball, be it with the hand or racket, in tennis-courts or otherwise, … exerciseth each part of the body, and doth much good, so that they sweat not too much’[2]. Burton here points out the control on exercise – do it to a certain level of sweating, but stop there; earlier he says that exercise should be done ‘after he hath done his ordinary needs, rubbed his body, washed his hands and face, combed his head and gargarised [gargled]’. These are physical and mental preparations, getting the body empty (I take this to be the meaning of ‘done his ordinary needs’), clean and warmed, and knowing exactly how far to go. While not explicitly involving the ingesting of external substances, they do indicate that exercise does not stand in isolation: the mind and body are made ready for maximum benefit by specific preparation.

The pre-match preparation of Captain Barclay, the early nineteenth-century endurance athlete, pushed this process further, and was carefully described by Walter Thom in Pedestrianism (1813). Using Barclay as a model, Thom offers a regimen for the preparing athlete, beginning with ‘a regular course of physic, which consists of three dozes [doses]. Glauber salts are generally preferred’. Glauber salt, sodium sulphate decahydrate, is named after Joseph Glauber, who isolated it in 1625, and named it ‘sal mirabilis’ for its supposed medicinal properties; it was used as a purgative (laxative), and is currently deemed acceptable. Thom’s diet list for the aspiring athlete starts with ‘beef-steaks or mutton-chops under-done, with stale bread and old beer’, and goes on to prohibit any ‘preparations of vegetable matter’ other than ‘biscuit and stale bread’. Prohibited foods include veal, lamb and pork, vegetables, as well as fish, butter, cheese, or milk. Profuse sweating is required, induced by running four miles in flannel at top speed, followed by the imbibing of ‘sweating liquor’, made from caraway-seed, coriander-seed, and liquorice, boiled down in cider, after which the athlete is ‘put to bed in his flannels, and being covered with six or eight pairs of blankets, and a feather-bed’ for about half an hour. As regards hydration ‘water is never given alone … avoid liquids as much as possible, and no more liquor of any kind is allowed to be taken than what is merely requisite to quench the thirst’.

While none of these steps, however eccentric, look ethically dubious, they do make up a massive control regimen for the enhancement of the athlete’s performance. The commodified successor to Capt Barclay’s ‘red-meat & no veg’ diet was Vin Mariani, the so-called ‘athlete’s wine’, launched in 1863. This popular concoction of red wine and coca leaves, whose stimulant properties were praised by the mostly sedentary great and the good, also happened to aid endurance for athletes and cyclists. Cocaine is now, of course, a banned substance for athletes, but Capt Barclay’s coriander-seed and caraway-seed are both diuretics.

By the end of the 19^th century training itself, in some circles, was deemed unsporting. When Blackburn Olympic had the temerity to beat the Old Etonians in the 1883 FA Cup Final the Eton College Chronicle wrote,

‘So great was their desire to wrest the Cup from the holders that they introduced into football a practice which has excited the greatest disapprobation in the South.  For three weeks before the final match they went into a strict course of training …’

Blackburn Olympic won 2:1 after extra time. Somehow the Old Etonians had not noticed that the goalposts had moved.

But that perhaps is the question: when we come to look at acceptable or unacceptable substances, can we compare them to laxatives, diuretics, diets and sweating regimes, training or neglecting to train, or even the possible advantage of supreme arrogance, which though it did not work for the 1883 Old Etonians probably helped Epeues? Seeding, records, divisions and trophy cabinets ensure that competing athletes never start on a level playing field. Professional status, sponsorship and training facilities make a real difference to achievement. The ethical paradigms by which we judge acceptable from unacceptable are based on judgements and categorisations that fluctuate all the time. When we compare Phendimetrazine with good old mutton chops are we looking at a difference of kind or a difference of degree?

Julian Walker is an artist, writer, researcher and educator. His latest book "The Roar of the Crowd" is a major new anthology of sports writing that captures the drama, excitement and intrigue of athletic achievement and celebrates the innate urge to compete, to fight, and to test the human body. He is also the author of "The Finishing Touch: Cosmetics Through the Ages" and "How to Cure the Plague and other Curious Remedies".

[1] William Cowper’s translation, 1791

[2] Part 2, Section 2, Member 4.

To celebrate the opening of the British Library’s Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition, Paul Allchin explores Shakespeare’s perceptive understanding of human psychology.   

 “What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff” Martin Freeman (Actor) 

The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London.

As far back as the ancient Greeks and Egyptians we have reflected on human behaviour and yet psychology was considered a branch of philosophy until the 1870s, from when it developed as an independent scientific discipline in Germany and the United States. Much has been written in the last couple of centuries on the psychology of Shakespeare and his dramatic works.

Shakespeare understood our inner demons and knew how to express them on the written page. For example Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”, pinpoints man’s flaws, that so well, feeds the fuel for his dramas:

But man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur'd; 

His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep.

Whether it is man’s inflated views of himself or the range of emotions from love to anger, Shakespeare seemed always to have something to say. In Henry VIII, Act 1, Scene 1, he advises on  anger management:

“Be advised, heat not a furnace for your foe so hot, that it do singe yourself”.

The British Library has a rich and varied collection in psychology, counselling and psychoanalysis, both historical and current, as well as electronic journals and databases such as PsychInfo and PsychExtra.  Both the humanities and science reading rooms include works on the open shelves and we hold a wealth of psychology texts in our storage areas. Some of these are in our lending collection and can be requested through college and public libraries using their inter-library lending services.

An example of such reflective literature is the book entitled “The Vale of Soulmaking: the post-Kleinian model of the mind” by Meg Harris Williams, H.Karnac (Books) Ltd. 2005, shelf mark YC.2006.a.12437, which includes Chapter 7, “Cleopatra’s monument”. This chapter outlines the post Kleinian psychological perspective on some of Shakespeare’s works. 

The post Kleinian model of the mind is an aesthetic one, developed by W.R. Bion and Donald Meltzer and takes Melanie Klein’s ideas of our infant Self’s relationship to evolving “internalised objects”, often parental and the resolution of emotional turmoil through symbol formation, dreaming, envisioning, and counter-transference.

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist

Shakespeare’s literary power resides in him being one of the great literary symbol makers and metaphor developers, along with Milton, Keats, Homer and Sophocles, able to articulate and give form to man’s deepest desires and dilemmas. Shakespeare’s role in feeding food to psychology and the 19^th and 20^th century psychoanalysis tradition through his plays and dramas is a testament to his insights into human nature.

Freud, Jung, Klein, and the post Kleinians provide psychological meaning making frameworks, varied lenses through which contemporary thinkers can appreciate and understand Shakespeare’s works.

William Shakespeare's First Folio (Image: WIkipedia)

 

Some of our out of copyright books have been digitised and are available through Google books and the British Library Explore catalogue remotely e.g. The Psychology of Macbeth, a lecture, etc. by George Sexton, (active 1857-1887).

What is clear is that Shakespeare has an uncanny ability to create characters that are archetypal and sets up in his plays, the conflicts, challenges, resolutions and pitfalls found in our daily lives. He gave us the psychodramas on the stage through which we can project our internal worlds and learn from the characters he invented.    

Paul Allchin, Science Reference Specialist.

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The British Library's current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare’s constant reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016.

To find out more about Shakespeare collections at the British Library join our reference team for a special tour where you can find out how to access and research Shakespeare related collections not on display in the exhibition. Tickets are available here.

Find out more about Shakespeare and psychology here

After Oedipus : Shakespeare in psychoanalysis, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard. Ithaca/Cornell University Press, 1993. Shelfmark: 93/12357 DSC 

Elizabethan psychology and Shakespeare’s plays by Ruth Leila Anderson. Shelfmark: W42/6604 DSC  

The mad folk of Shakespeare, John Charles Bucknill, (1817-1897), Second edition, revised, 1867, Shelfmark 2300.c.3. 

The mind according to Shakespeare : psychoanalysis in the bard's writing, Marvin Bennett Krims. Shelfmark YC.2007.a.1806 and m06/.37542 DSC   

Psyche & symbol in Shakespeare, Alex Aronson. Bloomington. Shelfmark: 72/10648 DSC 

Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare,  Norman N. Holland. New York : Octagon Books, 1976, c1966. Shelfmark: 77/30526 DSC

The psychology of Shakespeare, by Bucknill, John Charles, 1970, Shelf mark X11/1303 DSC 

Shakespeare and psychoanalytic theory, Carolyn E. Brown, Shelfmark  YC.2015.a.10365

Shakespeare on the couch : on behalf of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy  by Michael Jacobs. Shelfmark YC.2009.a.9109 

The Vale of Soulmaking: the post-Kleinian model of the mind, by Meg Harris Williams, shelf mark YC.2006.a.12437 and  m05/.26094 DSC   

To celebrate the opening of the British Library’s Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition, Richard Wakeford (information specialist in science, technology and medicine) looks at how Shakespeare wove contemporary science into his work.

William Shakespeare lived in a remarkable time, on the cusp of the medieval world view and the scientific revolution. But how far was he aware of this new thinking and how much did it appear in his writing? Certainly Shakespeare did not make any scientific ideas obvious, any more than he made his views on religion or politics obvious. The clues are scattered but have been explored in a recent book by Dan Falk.

The Starry Messenger

One striking resonance is that the play Cymbeline, written in 1610 and first performed in 1611, drew upon Galileo Galilei’s publication of Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) in 1610. Incidentally, Shakespeare and Galileo were exact contemporaries, born two months apart in 1564.

In Cymbeline, a tangled tale of death, rape and cross-dressing, the character Postumus is in prison awaiting execution. In a masque scene, four ghosts of his dead family appear in a dream to dance around the god Jupiter, pleading for his life. This chimes directly with Galileo’s observations in the Starry Messenger that Jupiter is orbited by four moons.

Left: Frontispiece of The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) 1610. Right: Inside page.  (Images: Wikipedia)

 Galileo recorded the movement of four new objects around Jupiter over several successive nights.

“I therefore concluded and decided unhesitatingly, that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury round the Sun; which at length was established as clear as daylight by numerous subsequent observations. These observations also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal bodies performing their revolutions round Jupiter...the revolutions are so swift that an observer may generally get differences of position every hour.”

He hath overthrown all astronomy

This discovery cracked Aristotelian cosmology apart and rang around Europe. It is known that the mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot had read the work in London during the summer of 1610, soon after its publication in March in Venice¹ and the English ambassador in Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, had immediately sent a copy to Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Chamberlain, for the attention of the King, writing that “he [Galileo] hath first overthrown all former astronomy”.

It is likely that a book with such a high profile was read, or even more likely, gossiped about, by the King's playwright. Shakespeare’s company had become the Kings Men on the accession of James the First with Shakespeare made a “groom extraordinary of the chamber”. Furthermore the King was a science and technology fan, an enthusiastic collector of clocks and mechanical devices, and an admirer of the German astronomer Kepler².

What was Shakespeare attempting to do in the masque scene? Scholars have disagreed over his knowledge of science, seeing him either as a native of the medieval world of astrology, or a science nerd writing Hamlet as a detailed, coded exposition of Copernican astronomy. Or maybe it was neither of these two extremes but simply that he sprinkled fashionable new ideas over his play to catch the fancy of the King. It is not known if Cymbeline was performed at court but a masque, accompanied by music, dancing and spectacular staging, strongly suggests a court performance.

Left: William Herschel, discover of Uranus' moons Titania and Oberon. Right: Hubble Space telescope used to identify the moons Mab and Cupid (Images: Wikipedia)

Shakespeare’s links to astronomy have continued down the centuries. Sir William Herschel, after discovering Uranus in 1781, went on to locate the first two of its many moons in 1787, naming them Titania and Oberon. In 2003 the moons Cupid (after a character in Timon of Athens) and Mab (after Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet), were discovered using the Hubble space telescope.

Richard Wakeford, Science Reference Specialist

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To find out more about Shakespeare collections at the British Library join our reference team for a special tour where you can find out how to access and research Shakespeare-related collections that not on display in the exhibition. Tickets are available here. 

The British Library's current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare’s constant reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016.

An original copy of the Starry Messenger is displayed in the science case in the Treasures of the British Library gallery. It opens at one of the pages illustrating the surface features of the Moon, another of Galileo’s discoveries that broke with the traditional concept of celestial perfection. Galileo’s sunspot letters are also on display and can be seen here.

The title of this blog "A king of infinite space" is taken from a quote by Shakespeare's Hamlet: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams" (Act II, Scene 2)

 Read more about Shakespeare and Galileo here:

1. Bloom T,F., Borrowed perceptions: Harriot’s maps of the moon. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1978, 9: 117-122. An online version is here.
2.  Feingold, M. The mathematicians' apprenticeship : science, universities and society in England 1560-1640.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.General Reference Collection X.800/38615
3.  Galileo, G. The starry messenger or Galileo's O, edited by Horst Bredekamp. Berlin: AkademieVerlag, c2011. General Reference Collection YD.2012.b.2230
4. 4Shakespeare W. Cymbeline; edited by John Pitcher London: Penguin, 2005 General Reference Collection YC.2005.a.2678 (John Pitcher’s introduction also explores the link between Shakespeare and Galileo.)
5. Richard Wakeford: Science Reference Specialist

The British Library holds the personal archive of W. Ross Ashby - psychiatrist and expert in cybernetics (the study of the control of systems using technology). In this guest post Hallvard Haug, postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, examines the figure of W. Ross Ashby and his key invention the homeostat - a machine capable of adapting itself to the environment. A shorter article on W. Ross Ashby is featured on the British Library Untold Lives blog.

Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a central figure of the post-war cybernetics movement in the UK, especially due to the popularity of his books Design for a Brain (1952) and  An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Ashby kept a thorough record of his thoughts throughout his adult life, and a collection of his papers has been donated to the British Library by his family.

Photograph of W Ross Ashby taken in his office 1963, Biological Computing Laboratory, University of Illinois. Copyright the Estate of W. Ross Ashby. www.rossashby.info

The centrepiece of the collection is Ashby’s notebooks which he kept from 1928 up until the year of his death. Among students of cybernetics these are legendary, and for good reason. Over the course of nearly 50 years, Ashby took meticulous stock of his thoughts on the material nature of the brain, and the notebooks show the workings of a highly systematic and deeply creative mind. Written in a precise hand, the journals brim with insights, speculations, calculations, graphs, drawings, newspaper clippings and circuit diagrams. Ashby also kept a meticulous topical record complete with content pages, cross referencing, summaries of entries, as well as two different sets of indexes — also included in the collection (Add MS 89153/27-30). Eventually, the notebooks ran to 7189 pages and spanned a total of 25 volumes.

Journals 18-25 with handwritten labels including page numbers (

At first, the notebooks were a pastime; eventually, however, the ideas Ashby explored became original enough to be publishable and in time these notes became the focus of his working life as his cybernetics work. The most famous of his innovations was the homeostat, a machine which demonstrated and embodied his theory of learning and adaptation in a mechanical apparatus which, entirely on its own, regains stability when perturbed. The development of the homeostat is documented thoroughly in the notebooks, from its first entry on 19 November 1946:

"I have been trying to develope [sic] further principles for my machine to illustrate stability, + to develope ultrastability" (Add MS 89153/9).

In the coming years, it was the centrepiece for his cybernetic activities.

The homeostat — a bulky and somewhat baroque machine built from military surplus parts — had a single purpose: to regain stability in response to perturbations in its environment. It is hard to convey precisely how the homeostat worked: set up as four identical units connected to each other via electrical inputs and outputs, each unit was topped with electrically conducing vanes dipped in water troughs. Like oscillographs, the vanes moved back and forth in the trough, reacting to the electrical input from their environment — the output from other blocks in the setup — and each block had an electrical output determined by the position of the vane in the trough. If the vane was directly in the middle of the trough, the electrical output was zero; if, however, it was positioned any other place in the trough, it provided electrical output to the other blocks, affecting the positions of the vanes it was connected to. Thus, when the machine was set in action by pushing a vane out of position, the vanes on all four units would react by moving back and forth, in reaction to their respective environments.

Image of Ashby’s hand drawn diagram for the final version of the Homeostat from page 2432, Journal 11. (

What made the homeostat so interesting, however, was its ability to return to equilibrium once a vane had been upset. Each of the units was constructed to also produce electric feedback to their respective vanes, depending on the conductivity of the vane. This feedback was determined according to a random table, and the machine would cycle through the table as long as the electrical output was not zero. Eventually, however, the vanes, cycling through random states, would come to a halt as each block found the appropriate feedback configuration. For Ashby, the return to equilibrium that the homeostat demonstrated was equivalent to the brain’s — whether human or animal — capacity for learning. The return to equilibrium demonstrated by the homeostat also showed how what only seems purposeful can come about by randomness, and Ashby believed this principle of feedback mechanisms spontaneously restoring equilibrium was a governing principle in nature. Indeed, in 1945 he noted that he had decided to follow in Darwin’s footsteps: like with the homeostat’s return to equilibrium, he viewed a species’ evolutionary adaptation to its environment as a return to equilibrium, and is only apparently purposeful. This tendency towards what Ashby called ‘ultrastability’ was referred to by Norbert Wiener as no less than ‘one of the great philosophical contributions of the present day.’ Eventually, Ashby was invited to present it at the ninth Macy conference for cybernetics in 1952.

Image of the Homeostat taken from Ashby’s lecture slides. (

The influence cybernetics exerted on both the sciences and humanities in the 1950s and ’60s was considerable: its central insights touched upon, transformed and occasionally dominated disciplines ranging from computer science, artificial intelligence and genetics through psychology and sociology, and also influenced intellectual movements such as structuralism. Its universal character gained it great popular appeal, but also meant cybernetics never had a comfortable institutional or disciplinary home, with only a few university departments dedicated to it. Despite its popular appeal, Ashby has remained something of an obscure figure. The autobiographical notebook ‘Passing through nature…’ gives a rare insight into his private thoughts, and suggests that it was at least partly due to Ashby’s reticence towards being in the public eye:

"My fear is now that that [sic] I may become conspicuous for a book of mine is in the press. For this sort of success I have no liking. My ambitions are vaguer.

   I am something of an artist, not with pencil or paint, for I have no skill there, but with a deep appreciation of the perfect. […] I have an ambition some day to produce something faultless." (Add MS 89153/33)

Against his inclinations, Ashby set out to spark public interest in his ideas in the 1940s, and for a brief period the homeostat was the topic both of popular magazines and radio shows, promoted as an ‘artificial brain.’ Ashby kept a record of his success, pasting newspaper clippings in the notebooks. The journals are a treasure trove for insight into the trajectory of ideas: from the premature attempts at precisely stating a problem, to the mature implementation, years later, of a successful theory and its subsequent dissemination.

Hallvard Haug is a Wellcome ISSF postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His interest in W. Ross Ashby stems from his PhD research on the history of human enhancement technologies, which included a section on cybernetics.

Further reading:

The British Library acquired the W. Ross Ashby archive in 2003. It consists of notebooks, correspondence, notes, index cards, slides and offprints and is available to researchers through the British Library Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 89153. The estate of W. Ross Ashby also maintains a website The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive which contains digitised copies of much of this material as well as a biography and photographs. It can be found at www.rossashby.info

Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches for Another Future (Chicago: 2010).

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 2nd ed. (London: 1989).

Ziggy Jacobs is Lighting Designer for Calculating Kindness, which is presented by Undercurrent and Camden People’s Theatre in partnership with the British Library. The production was researched using the papers of George R Price and W.D. Hamilton held at the British Library. George Price (1922-1975) was an evolutionary biologist who formulated the Price equation which is widely acknowledged as the mathematical explanation for the evolution of altruism.

Tell us a little about your usual creative process, and how this differs when working on a Science & Art project?

I specialize in the intersection between science, technology, art, maths, and performance – so a show like this is a gift, and it’s why I was contacted by Laura Farnworth (Director).
I don’t think of “art” and “science” as separate things at all, so I find exploratory processes in all fields immensely creative. There’s a flip side to that coin however, in that I find some performance and scientific work can be equally dry and un-creative, when they are not exploratory or experimental. I think we have become unfortunately stuck in a cycle of creating theatre lighting in a very limited way, working from what our existing tools can achieve. This breeds a kind of expected repertoire of pretty techniques which are applied over and over again, a lexicon of colour temperatures and shapes which are signifiers for a regular and dedicated audience of mostly other performance makers.

I wholeheartedly believe in beginning from scratch – asking what we want to achieve, what story are we telling, and thinking sky-high about what visual elements can support that, discussing them in initial meetings and devising sessions. During rehearsals, those ideas can be pared back to the achievable, and engineered from the ground up. It may require building an app, creating a new source of light, learning from the technology of completely disparate or unexpected industries, or engineering a brand new concept – and sometimes it needs a 2kW Fresnel and a good old fashioned profile fixture. The point is that I never know what the show needs, simple, complex, or unheard of, until I work within it, and I like it that way. I like to learn new skills, hone old ones, and start from total scratch each time – I think it’s the only way to inject innovation into performance tech. Lucy Sierra is an incredible designer to work with for this kind of process. We work in a very similar way – she doesn’t start outside or inside a box. There just isn’t a box to consider. It means that she comes up with these incredible visual images that I can bounce technological ideas off of, and every time we work together I am very proud of an original concept and execution that we create.

How have you related the Price equation to your design?

I went through a number of ideas about how to relate the equation – from creating a “population” of sources that could demonstrate “fitness” and attrition in a live way every night, to a brain-world that reflected neurological activity through the light. In the end, we have decided to create a corner of George’s mind, where this story lives, and the lighting is related to the things that occupy this mind. The equation, and George’s mind, are reflected in an organized, angular way, but also have a natural and dynamic quality to their movement, a sort of spontaneous variable. The most important sources attached to the equation exist as they are, they do not make a judgement, or attempt to lead perception in a single direction – just like the equation doesn’t. They are neutral factors, their spread and activity is inevitable, fractal.

To an extent the individual sources are a population, and each one has had to survive the selection process; you will see clearly that the successful attributes and the “fittest” type of sources certainly demonstrate a covariance with their frequency in the population of lighting objects. If you view the entire lighting of the Camden People’s Theatre as a population of controllable sources, we have increased the figure dramatically – and the frequency of one type of source is drastically higher by the same amount. This can be seen as very much like genetic frequency; when the frequency of one gene (this type of source) increases in a population, the fitness of the population is covariant (the fitness of lighting objects in the theatre). Obviously they are not able to reproduce (although that could be an amazingly cost-effective idea!), but the concept is sort of beautifully similar! 

Undercurrent’s Calculating Kindness opens at Camden People’s Theatre on 29 March until 16 April. All images used with kind permission of Undercurrent UK.

In honour of British Science Week Jonathan Pledge explores the work of Donald Michie, a code-breaker at Bletchley Park from 1942 to 1945. The Donald Michie papers are held at the British Library.

Donald Michie (1923-2007) was a scientist who made key contributions in the fields of cryptography, mammalian genetics and artificial intelligence (AI).

Copy of a photograph of Donald Michie taken while he was at Bletchley Park (Add MS 89072/1/5). Copyright the estate of Donald Michie/Crown Copyright.

In 1942, Michie began working at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire as a code-breaker under Max H. A. Newman. His role was to decrypt the German Lorenz teleprinter cypher - codenamed ‘Tunny’.

The Tunny machine was attached to a teleprinter and encoded messages via a system of two sets of five rotating wheels, named ‘psi’ and ‘chi’, by the code-breakers. The starting position of the wheels, known as a wheel pattern, was decided by a predetermined code before the operator entered the message. The encryption worked by generating an additional letter, derived from the addition of each letter generated by the psi and chi wheels to each letter of the unencrypted message entered by the operator. The addition worked by using a simple rule represented here as dots and crosses:

• + • = •

x + x = •

• + x = x

x + • = x

Therefore using these rules, M in the teleprinter alphabet, represented as:  • • x x x, added to N: • • x x •, gives • • • • x, the letter T.

Detail of the Lorenz machine showing the encoding wheels. Creative Commons Licence.

In order for messages to be decrypted it was initially necessary to know the position of the encoding wheels before the message was sent. These were initially established by the use of ‘depths’. A depth occurred when the Tunny operator mistakenly repeated the same message with subtle textual differences without first resetting the encoding wheels.

A depth was first intercepted on 30 August 1941 and the encoding text was deciphered by John Tiltman. From this the working details of Tunny were established by the mathematician William Tutte without his ever having seen the machine itself; an astonishing feat. Using Tutte’s deduction the mathematician Alan Turing came up with a system for devising the wheel patterns; known as ‘Turingery’.

Turing, known today for his role in breaking the German navy’s ‘Enigma ‘code, was at the time best known for his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’ in which he had theorised about a ‘Universal Turing Machine’ which today we would recognise as a computer. Turing’s ideas on ‘intelligent machines’, along with his friendship, were to have a lasting effect on Michie and his future career in AI and robotics. 

Between July and October 1942, all German Tunny messages were decrypted by hand. However changes to the way the cypher was generated meant that finding the wheel setting by hand was no longer feasible. It was again William Tutte who came up with a statistical method for finding the wheels settings and it was the mathematician Max Newman who suggested using a machine for processing the data.

Colossus computer [c 1944]. By the end of the War there were ten such machines at Bletchley. Crown Copyright.

Initially an electronic counter dubbed ‘Heath Robinson’ was used for data processing. However it was not until the engineer Thomas Flowers, designed and built Colossus, the world’s first large scale electronic computer, that wheel patterns and therefore the messages could be decrypted at speed. Michie too, along with Jack Good, played a part, discovering a way of using Colossus to dramatically reduce the processing time for ciphered texts.

The decrypting of Tunny messages was critical in providing the Allies with information on high level German military planning in particular for the Battle of Kursk in 1943 and surrounding preparations for the D-Day invasion of 1944

One of the great ironies is that much of this pioneering and critical work remained a state secret until 1996. It was only through Donald Michie’s tireless campaigning that the General Report on Tunny, written in 1945 by Michie, Jack Good and Geoffrey Timmins, was finally declassified by the British Government; providing proof of the code-breakers collective achievements during the War. 

Pages from Donald Michie’s copy of the General Report on Tunny. (Add MS 89072/1/6). Crown Copyright.

 Donald Michie at the British Library

The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprises of three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2007. They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072.

 

Jonathan Pledge: Curator of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts, Public and Political Life

Read more about ciphers in the British Library's collections on Untold Lives

From Brian Cox and his past life as a pop star to Albert Einstein’s career as a patent clerk, PhD placement student Eleanor Sherwood delves into the more unknown pursuits and occupations of well-known scientists. 

Brian Cox 

©Vconnare at English Wikipedia

 

Brian Cox is an Advanced Fellow of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester and also conducts research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  Although a well-known face in the media, presenting popular TV shows such as The Wonders of the Solar System and The Wonders of the Universe¹, Professor Cox has had previous brushes with fame as a member of two separate bands.  Between 1986 and 1992, Cox was a keyboard player in hard rock band Dare and, during the completion of his Physics PhD, Cox also played the keyboard in the more well-known pop rock/dance group D:Ream^2,3.  The band’s best-known single ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was performed live on Top of the Pops in 1994 and was featured heavily in Labour’s 1997 election campaign³. 

Read Brian Cox’s PhD thesis here via the British Library's online e-theses service, EThOS.

Albert Einstein

© Ferdinand Schmutzer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist born in Germany.  He is probably one of the most famous scientists of modern times and his most well-known work, the general theory of relativity, forms the basis of modern physics.  However, after graduating from the Swiss Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1900⁴, Einstein struggled to find a job in academia and so found work as a clerk in the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern. He worked here throughout his ‘miracle year’ of 1905, where he was awarded his PhD and also published four groundbreaking papers, and only left in 1909 to accept the post of ‘Professor Extraordinarius’ in theoretical physics at the University of Zurich⁵.

 

Read some of Einstein's many books at the British Library, ranging from explanations of the Theory of Relativity to autobiographical writings. 

William Herschel

Friedrich William Herschel was born in Hannover yet moved to Bath, England at age 19.  An accomplished astronomer, Herschel is credited with the discovery of Uranus, the confirmation of the theory that nebulae were composed of stars rather than a luminous fluid, as was the opposing theory, and a theory of stellar evolution⁶. However, Herschel was only a professional astronomer from the age of 43; until this time, William Herschel taught, performed and composed music and was employed for some time as the organist of a chapel in Bath.

Alexander Graham Bell

By Moffett Studio, via Wikimedia Commons

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh to a family of elocutionists.  Although he is most notably credited with the invention of the telephone,Bell contributed to many other inventions including metal detectors and early aircraft⁷, and was also a professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University⁸.  However, as well as his scientific endeavours, Bell was a teacher of his father’s ‘Visible Speech’ system at a number of institutions for deaf or deaf-mute students.  He also opened his own ‘School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech’; a notable student being Helen Keller, with whom he worked and was friends for over 30 years⁹.

Polly Matzinger

Polly Matzinger is an American immunologist and has held research posts at The University of  
Cambridge, The Basel Institute for Immunology and most recently at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Maryland¹⁰.  She is most well-known for her work on ‘The Danger Model’, a theory explaining how immune cells can sense when the body is under attack and thus when to mount an immune response.  Leading up to her scientific career however, Matzinger undertook a number of ‘unconventional’ career paths.  Among many jobs, Matzinger worked as a jazz musician, problem dog trainer and even a playboy ‘bunny’, however it was her job as a cocktail waitress and an evening serving two university professors which led to her being persuaded to pursue a career in science¹¹. 

Read Matzinger's 1994 review on the Danger Theory published in Annual Reviews of Immunology at the British Library - available to order as a hard copy here from the British Library collections.

Alan Turing

Author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons

Alan Turing was a British computer scientist, cryptanalyst, logician and mathematician, and is widely regarded to be the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence.  Turing is also credited with the design and development of the ‘Bombe’- an electromechanical device which was used during World War II to decipher Enigma-encrypted messages from the German military.  Aside from this, Turing was a talented long distance runner and used to frequently run the 40 miles from his work station at Bletchley Park to London for meetings.  Turing even tried out for the 1948 British Olympics marathon team and, despite being injured at the time, finished with a time only 12 minutes slower than winning time for that year¹².

Read all about the life of Alan Turing in the book by Robert Hodges: 'Alan Turing: The Enigma'. Available to order here from the British Library collections

 

Eleanor Sherwood weighs up the benefits and concerns of health data ahead of our upcoming TalkScience event

Current government initiatives such as the 100,000 Genomes Project and care.data aim to revolutionise biomedical research and how our healthcare is delivered.  However, concerns have been raised regarding the safe, practical and ethical use of personal health data.  Are these risks outweighed by the possible benefits to research, NHS governance and your healthcare? On Tuesday 15 March, we will be holding our 32nd TalkScience event to discuss these issues and more with our expert panel including Sharmila Nehbrajani OBE, Professor Liam Smeeth, Peter Knight, Sam Smith and a public audience.  If you would like to join in with this discussion, book tickets (£5) via our What’s On page.

What’s the plan?

Sharing is caring

By 2020, the government aim to make most patient health records electronic, resulting in a paperless NHS. Under the care.data programme, data on these records, from date of birth to diagnoses and postcodes to prescriptions, are intended to be shared across all of NHS England. Research institutes, medical charities and pharmaceutical companies may also request access to this data. This process was initially attempted in early 2014; however controversy surrounding the communication of the scheme halted proceedings. The care.data programme is now being trialled using existing electronic patient records in 'pathfinder' regions of the UK before any national rollout.

Personalised care

The 100,000 Genomes Project is a research-based initiative funded by the Department of Health. Its main aim is to sequence the entire genome of up to 70,000 volunteers, many with rare genetic diseases and cancers. Using this approach, scientists hope to identify genetic mutations underlying these conditions and use this data to research new, personalised therapies.

Faster, stronger, better

Using approaches such as these, the NHS hope to provide faster diagnoses, improved, personalised care, and targeted NHS funding; all of which should combine to make the NHS more efficient, streamlined and progressive.  

What’s the problem?

Dealing with data

Generating large quantities of data is relatively easy.  However, concerns have been raised about the practicalities of actually using the data.  For example, what kind of computer systems and analysis tools would be needed to make large sets of data ‘user friendly’ for GPs and other healthcare workers? On average, GPs spend 8-10 minutes with each patient – would accessing these large files at each appointment increase this time and reduce the availability of GP appointments? Or would this be saved by not having to rifle through stacks of paper medical records?

Safe and secure?

Computer hacks and data security breaches occur regularly; banks, governmental organisations, mobile phone and insurance companies have all been recent victims to this.  One of the USA’s largest health insurance firms, Anthem, was hacked this time last year exposing the personal data of almost 80 million people.  Could this happen in the UK? What ramifications could this have? What security systems does the NHS have in place to prevent this?

Patient privacy

In terms of patient privacy, the NHS say that all data will be pseudonymised, meaning that any names will be replaced by numbers – but is this enough?  Can a person be identified based upon their medical records alone?  Aside from this, can we justify the fact that numerous people and organisations, some of whom will not be directly working towards the betterment of your personal health, will have access to your data? 

Keep it consensual

Reassuringly, both the care.data program and 100,000 Genomes Project require consent from patients, but in the light of previous controversy surrounding care.data, how this consent is acquired is highly important.  Also, how can the government/NHS effectively communicate the nature and intentions of these schemes to the public?  Full consent is not possible if a person isn’t completely aware of what they are consenting to. Furthermore, the way that data is used in scientific research can be complex and evolve quickly – so is it always possible for a participant to know exactly what they are consenting to?  What about potential future applications of their data? 

To discuss these topics and much more, book tickets (£5) via our What’s On page.

A previous TalkScience event 

 

©TheBritishLibrary Board 

All other photographs iStock/Shutterstock

Applications now open

The British Library is currently running a series of 3-month (or PT equivalent) PhD Placements, to be hosted by specialist curatorial teams and other Library experts.  Of the 17 placements on offer, this opportunity will be of particular interest to PhD students with interests in science, science policy and the social perception of scientific issues.

Science in Society

Working within the Research Engagement Team, the placement student will have the opportunity to organise and deliver a TalkScience event on a topic relevant to scientific policy.  TalkScience is well-established, highly successful series of public debates organised by and held at the British Library. Previous topics have ranged from the use of personalised genomics to science education in schools.

A previous TalkScience event

The placement student will also have the opportunity to use the Library’s collections in relation to science and its social perceptions, for example by working with the Web Archive Team to produce a special online collection related to science and science policy.  Additionally, placement students can also get involved with a number of activities across the Research Engagement Team, such as contributing to research reports or social media activity. 

We have hosted Science in Society interns in previous years. You can read more about their projects here:

Stuart Smith (BBSRC intern, 2012)

Adam Levy (NERC intern, 2014)

Rachel Huddart (BBSRC intern, 2014)

Further information

The application deadline for all of the PhD placements is Friday 19 February 2016.

Further information, including eligibility criteria and details on the application process, can be found here:

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/highered/phd-placement-scheme 

All applications must be supported by the applicant’s PhD supervisor and their department’s Graduate Tutor (or equivalent). Please forward any questions to: [email protected]

 

Eleanor Sherwood

Research Engagement PhD Placement Student