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FQR Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Building Up British Art
VEEDON FLEECE
With a trio of fine new museum-galleries newly opened in England, Charles Saumarez Smith finds himself spoilt for choice
A custom weaving house specialising in hand knotted carpets
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Purely bespoke and exclusively to your specification Muga ~ Pashmina ~ Silk ~ Veedon ~ Wool www.veedonfleece.com veedon@veedonfleece.com Telephone: +44 (0)1483 575758 had scientists in a buzz since the Human Genome project over 10 years ago, and most would still consider it early days. So what have we learned in that time? We’ve learned that in some ways we are shockingly dissimilar and, in others, surprisingly similar. As a result, we have learned that we cannot continue to practise medicine in the traditional one-sizefits all way, but we can use genetic information to prescribe drugs that fit best because there is enough similarity between us to target certain therapeutic pathways. So we are now beginning to be able to prescribe therapies in a targeted fashion and not by trial and error. The FDA (US regulatory body for drugs) and EMEA (EU equivalent) have in the past few years started adding clear genetic guidance on drugs. For example, the FDA just recently added drugdosage guidance to the label of Warfarin – a blood thinner that has been around for over 50 years – that takes into account three specific letters in our DNA code. So just as in the case of medical imaging giving us sequentially better resolution to view the body, we have now reached an era when molecular biology has given us the resolution to understand it. But also just like medical imaging in the early days, we have a problem with data deluge, high cost and long sample-to-answer time. So in order to bring personalised medicine to the hospitals of today, I founded DNA Electronics to commercialise my invention of a semiconductor microchip – the same kinds of chips found in computers and mobile phones – that can “read” DNA. These chips can identify specific segments of DNA that are of interest to a doctor and give a result in about 30 minutes. Since it is electronic, the entire device can be plugged into a computer or smartphone and display results while the patient is with the doctor. So instead of prescribing a drug such as
Warfarin in a trial-and-error fashion as we do now – and potentially causing life-threatening bleeding in some patients – we can use this technology to first determine if Warfarin is the right drug for the patient and, if so, in what dosage. This change to personalised medicine will keep all of us safer and avoid millions of pounds lost on ineffective drugs. s someone with a long history in consumer electronics, you might think it somewhat surprising to find me working in the medical field. But it is my belief that if a fraction of the technology and innovation behind consumer electronics can be applied to healthcare, we would solve many of the cost and logistic problems plaguing the industry. Taking DNA Electronics as an example, we have managed to take equipment traditionally used to read letters of the DNA code, and which use lasers and large heating blocks costing tens of thousands of pounds, and have reduced it to a disposable semiconductor chip about the size of a postage stamp that can do the same thing. Furthermore, by leveraging the technology of semiconductors, which is scalable to vast volumes, we developed these DNA chips at a price point similar to consumer electronics with similar userfriendliness. This way, instead of waiting weeks for a test to come back from a lab – and incurring the costs of all the logistics and people involved – a doctor in his own office can perform the test and make the right therapeutic decision in real time. Personalised medicine is not the only area of medicine that can benefit from our DNA chips, but the discussion on virus, bacterial, animal or plant DNA will have to wait for another time. Professor Christofer Toumazou is the Director, Chief Scientist and Research Director at the Department of Bionics at Imperial College. He was made one of the youngest ever professors at Imperial College at the age of 33, in recognition of his outstanding research.
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we now have the means to interrogate the very foundation that makes our bodies unique
Autumn 2011
ne of the great pleasures of the spring of the café, so the structure floats in the garden. months was going to visit the new I thought it was brilliant, like a new species museums that have sprung up in different of plant, green and faintly Japanese, with long parts of England, thanks to Lottery largesse and the hanging fins, an exotic that has been allowed to belief on the part of funding agencies that a beacon invade the paradise of classicism. of culture can act as an agent of regeneration. Inside, it is nearly equally adventurous, First up was Turner Contemporary in architecturally packed, with two floors of galleries Margate. Its ceremonial opening was held on a sandwiched between the café and the exhibition wonderfully sunny evening space and stuffed with objects in mid-April, so that the that are extremely crowded troops of art lovers were by the standards of modern able to walk from the railway exhibition display. Everything station along the esplanade about it is beautiful, including with the beginnings of the ash of the banisters and a Turner-esque sunset the very precise, sans-serif disguising the tat of a typeface of the labels. I was rundown seafront while the annoyed to have to leave for new building hovered like a my train and jumped on to mirage in the space between one that was going in the the shops and the 19thwrong direction, thereby Margate century customs house – a missing the party. grand factory for contemporary art. By the time The third of the triumphal openings was The I arrived, Tracey Emin had left, but she is as Hepworth in Wakefield. Long ago – so long ago that much the guiding spirit of the place as Turner, I had nearly forgotten – I was a member of the jury symbolising the possible transformation of the that appointed David Chipperfield to design the town from slut to princess. building. He arrived as the last of the architects we The building was designed by Sir David interviewed, following on from Kengo Kuma, David Chipperfield, who has in recent months changed Adjaye and Zaha Hadid, and was unexpectedly from a figure who was in the past slightly cold- low-key and casual in his presentation. His design shouldered by the architectural establishment – or, is correspondingly undemonstrative, consisting at least, he certainly believed of a series of interlocking, himself to be – coming asymmetric blocks, which second in the competition depend for their impact not for Tate Modern only on their external appearance, because in a slightly mad but on the quality of the moment over the Christmas spaces, their scale, their holiday he decided to chop fluidity and, most especially, off the tower, as he had been the way the natural daylight advised by Julian Harrap, flows in from windows his conservation architect, buried in the roof. that it was unsafe. Now, he So, it was a slightly odd suddenly looked the part sensation looking out of of the big man in British the window of the taxi architecture, with hair that and seeing the drawings Bath had been allowed to grow physically realised in long for the occasion. He talked knowledgeably built form. Inside, I found it much more solid and intelligently about the importance of daylight and serious than I had expected, with big, for the viewing of art and the pleasures of a building calm, open spaces and a very complex floor that would be battered by the waves. I liked and plan, filled with works of art from the middle admired what I was able to see of it. It feels spacious of last century – an art gallery that might more – big and generously proportioned and sensibly normally be found in a Swiss canton than beside undemonstrative, a warehouse for the display of the banks of the River Calder. art, shimmering in the distance on the seafront. Upstairs, there were many Hepworths on display, Next to open was the transformed Holburne of course, because it was her home town, but also Museum in Bath, not a new-build, but a highly the evidence of a strong provincial collection, intelligent addition to the assembled in the early rear of a late-18th-century 20th century as a result of hotel that was converted municipal ambition and into a museum in the highly intelligent postwar early 20th century by Sir curators. There was one Reginald Blomfield. The particularly moving display idea for the extention case upstairs devoted to the goes back nearly a decade, exhibitions that were held when the Trustees of in the immediate postwar the Holburne Museum period, when Wakefield selected Eric Parry to was in the forefront of the design an addition that modern movement and would provide extra the then curator, Helen Wakefield space – more galleries, a Kapp, held exhibitions new café and exhibition space. He has designed with catalogues designed with Bauhaus graphics. a building that is brilliantly counterintuitive. In particular, I couldn’t help but notice a review of Instead of doing what the custodians of Bath’s an exhibition of the work of Alan Davie published heritage would have liked, which was to design in the Arts Review in February 1958. It extolled a polite neoclassical building in the style of the the fact that “Wakefield has had the courage of its existing museum, he has designed a building convictions… the small city poignantly reveals the that turns these expectations on their head. Its lack of enterprise of almost every other provincial vocabulary belongs not to the city, but to the centre throughout the country”. The same might be parkland in which it sits. It is built not of Bath said of Wakefield’s new museum. stone, but green, nearly slimy, iridescent ceramic Charles Saumarez Smith CBE is FQR’s Fine Arts tiles. It is, in classical terms, deliberately upside Editor and Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal down, with a base that consists of the open glass Academy of Arts
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