Over the coming months three recently appointed professors will be presenting their inaugural lectures open to all:
Inaugural lectures Professor Jeff Williams of anatomy and physiology will begin the series on 17 May with "A singular route to multicellularity?: the signalling pathways that direct Dictyostelium":
The "social amoeba" Dictyostelium is a remarkable organism. It spends part of its life cycle as a single cell that moves through the soil eating bacteria. When the bacteria have all been eaten the Dictyostelium cells move together and about 80% of the cells transform themselves into spore cells, while the remaining cells transform themselves into stalk cells.
Spores are cells that in many respects resemble plant seeds; they are highly resistant to extreme environmental conditions and can remain dormant for many years, waiting until external conditions improve. The stalk cells form a supporting column that lifts the spore cells up and so increases their chances of dispersal. Professor Williams studies the development of Dictyostelium because it is a genetically simple organism in which it is possible to discover cellular components that are also found in animals and that can lead to disease when absent or malfunctional.
Professor Elaine Rankin of radiotherapy and oncology will be presenting her
inaugural on 24 May. A resume of the lecture will follow in June's issue.
Professor of General Practice, Frank Sullivan, will be taking his audience to America in the final inaugural lecture on 7 June when he talks about: "Clinical informatics is a fine America":
Industrial age medicine is giving way to information age medicine. In this altered world health care professionals will need to act more as partners to patients who may have better access to medical information than experts by virtue of education and experience.
General practitioners who fail to respond effectively to the challenges of the "knowledge economy" may find themselves replaced by a call centre. Other branches of the medical profession with skills in technical procedures may consider themselves immune from this threat. In time, however, reductionist approaches which fail to account for the full range of effects produced in consultations will just as surely lead to replacement of surgeons and interventional radiologists by machines or operatives. In some cases it may not matter that warm but relatively inefficient humans are replaced by precise and effective machines. For a poor, sick and frightened patient a clinician rather than a computer is likely to be a better choice for some time yet.
Better delivery of high quality of information during consultations will improve patient care beyond that currently achievable. Evaluation of emergent informatics tools typically demonstrate 20-40% improvements in the process of care. Undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing clinical education is being transformed by an infinitely richer learning landscape.
Dundee University is a leading contributor to the research which underpins these developments. We possess educational, epidemiological and informatics resources which few other UK academic centres can match.
In the early stages of the industrial revolution George Eliot had her hero in Middlemarch, Lydgate, say: "We are apt to think that the finest era of the world was when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark territories of pathology were a fine America for a spirited adventurer."
The information revolution offers similar challenges to clinicians today.
All inaugural lectures are free and take place at 5.15pm in the Tower Extension Lecture Theatre.
Return to April 2000 Contact
