Medicine Unboxed

Gaia Vince is a freelance British environmental journalist, broadcaster and non-fiction author who writes for The Guardian and BBC Online. She was previously news editor of Nature and online editor of New Scientist. Her book 'Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made' won the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, making her the first woman to win the prize outright.

Vahni Capildeo has published four poetry collections including Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012) – longlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – Utter (2013) and Measures of Expatriation (2016).

Sir Roger Penrose, Ph.D., OM, FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.

Michel Faber has written eight books, including the highly acclaimed The Book of Strange New Things, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-shortlisted novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps and The Courage Consort, and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Jon Copley is Associate Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Southampton, and the first British person to dive to a depth of five kilometres in the ocean. As a marine biologist, his research explores environments such as volcanic vents on the ocean floor, where his team and colleagues have discovered several new species of deep-sea creatures during recent expeditions. His work also involves teaching and writing, and he is co-founder of a company that trains scientists in how to share their research with wider public audiences. Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a bestiary for the 21st Century, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.

David Nicholl is a neurologist, human rights activist, fundraiser for Amnesty International, and online columnist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. In March 2006 he initiated a letter in the medical journal The Lancet, signed by more than 250 medical experts urging the United States to stop force-feeding at the Guantanamo Bay and close down the prison camp.

Gavin Francis qualified in medicine from Edinburgh in 1999, then spent ten years travelling, visiting all seven continents. He is the author of three books: True North, Travels in Arctic Europe (2008, 2010), Empire Antarctica, Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (2012) which was Scottish Book of the Year 2013 and shortlisted for the Costa, Ondaatje, Banff, & Saltire Prizes, & Adventures in Human Being (2015), which won Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2015. He lives and practises medicine in Edinburgh.

Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta Books and Portobello Books. He previously managed an independent bookshop and won the Young Bookseller of the Year award. He lives in South London with his wife and children. he is the author of the novella 'Grief is the Thing with Feathers'.

Robert Beckford is a British academic theologian and a professor in theology at Canterbury Christ Church University, whose documentaries for both the BBC and Channel 4 have caused debate among the Christian and British religious community.

Medicine Unboxed 2016: WONDER explored how we wonder, what we wonder about, and what wonder compels us to in both an personal and planetary sense of duty.

PhiL Hammond is a physician, broadcaster, comedian and commentator on health issues in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his humorous commentary on the National Health Service.

Lynsey Hanley is the author of 'Estate: An intimate History' and 'Respectable: the experience of class'. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. Helen Pearson is a science journalist and editor for the international science journal Nature. She has been writing for Nature since 2001 and her stories have won accolades including the 2010 Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award and two best feature awards from the Association of British Science Writers. Based in London, she has a PhD in genetics and spent eight of her years with Nature in New York.

Bob Heath

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.

Medicine Unboxed 2015 MORTALITY looked at life and death and the lines that separate them. We will marvel at how molecules are arranged into life and examine other beginnings and endings, of the universe and how all nature folds and unfolds in time. We will wonder about time. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, in our homes and fields. We will see medicine’s hand raised against death and suffering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We will ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural differences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death.