Dr David Baltimore speaks at Wits University

President Mbeki posthumously awarded Eddie Roux (1903-1966), botanist, activist, author and teacher, a great South African, with the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver on 21 September 2007: ‘For excellent contribution to the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist, just and democratic South Africa under trying apartheid conditions’ the citation read.

In our motivation for the award, Kader Asmal and I wrote that for most of us outside of the science community who remember Roux, it is for his remarkable book Time Longer Than Rope. [Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa 2nd Ed, Madison, 1964, p.v.]

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked about Roux, banned by an unforgiving Justice Minister John Vorster for once belonging to the South African Communist Party, that he was ‘a worthy addition to the long list of victims of bigotry from Socrates to the present day.’ [Preface to Eddie & Win Roux, Rebel Pity: The life of Eddie Roux, London, 1970].

Coffee in the morning ...

Our ability to smell is one of those interesting problems of biology. We are able to instantly smell a molecule our noses never ever encountered before.

'This is impossible' writes Chadler Burr in her book The Emperor of Scent (2004, London, p.10) for the only thing our bodies instantaneously recognise must surely be stored in memory.

Our digestive system, for example, only instantaneously recognises those food molecules our ancestors encountered before. Over the thousands of years our bodies have evolved a system of a one-to-one match between what is known as an enzyme - the agent of digestion - and the molecule it must break down.

The Living History project kicked off in Cape Town on Saturday 8 September. Over 300 people, including Mayor Helen Zille, gathered at the Mallet Centre at the Diocesan College in Claremont.

Dr Wilmot James led participants on a quick tour of 200,000 years of human history as he set the scene for the understanding of migration patterns that led to the current demographic state of the world. Participants then scraped the insides of their cheeks with swabs to collect skin cells and now await their results.

The next Living History event is to take place in Durban. The provisional date for this is Thursday, 18th October in the Colin Webb Hall. More details will be released closer to the time.