Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Dr Richard Henderson gives our Honorary Fellows Lecture: Using electron microscopy to understand the molecules of life.
Structural biology has been highly successful during the last 60 years. The first protein structure of sperm whale myoglobin was solved in 1960 using X-ray crystallography, a method now producing over 10,000 structures per year, all of them deposited in and available from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). In recent years, electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) of single particles plunge-frozen in a thin film of amorphous ice, has developed rapidly in power and resolution, so that over 3,000 PDB depositions based on cryoEM were made in the last year. Many of these cryoEM structures represent unstable, flexible or dynamic assemblies whose structure cannot be determined by any other method, and improvements to the method are being continuously developed. We are fortunate now to have superbly detailed images of many of the most important molecules of life, with electron microscopy still having great potential to expand its reach.
Dr Richard Henderson CH FRS FMedSci HonFRSC is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.
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Musical instruments like the clarinet and saxophone do not obviously have anything in common with a bowed violin string. This talk will explore the physics behind how these instruments work, and it will reveal some unexpectedly strong parallels between them. This is all the more surprising because all of them rely on strongly nonlinear phenomena, and nonlinear systems are notoriously tricky: significant commonalities between disparate systems are rare. For all the instruments, computer simulations will be used to give some insight into questions a musician may ask: What variables must a player control, and how? Why are some instruments “easier to play” than others?
In the millennium poll, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was voted the third greatest physicist of all time – behind Newton and Einstein. He is best known for his equations of electromagnetism and thermodynamic relations, but his interests and achievements extended far beyond these fields. His profound insights across many extraordinarily diverse areas have laid the foundations for much of contemporary physical science.
The day will begin with an overview of James Clerk Maxwell’s life and achievements. The talks following will focus on just a few of the fields where he did seminal work, and in which current research is revealing interesting developments.
There will be a small exhibition of artefacts including some of Maxwell’s models from the Cavendish collection. The exhibition catalogue can be found here
James Clerk Maxwell had strong links with the Cambridge Philosophical Society during his time at Cambridge. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate – initially at Peterhouse, but moving to Trinity before the end of his first term. He graduated in 1854, and shortly afterwards presented his first paper On the transformation of surfaces by bending to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. His career took him to Aberdeen, King’s College London and ther family estates at Glenlair before returning to Cambridge in 1871 to become the first Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics. He was President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 1875-1877. In 1879 he died in Cambridge at the age of 48.
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