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.

Our ancient ancestor

I propose the introduction of a new field of study called the Molecular Humanities. It is about exploring the meaning of discovering and describing molecules and their structures. It is affects every field of existing knowledge, cutting through the boundaries of fields of enquiry, as we know it.

Most people know what it is I am talking about in the field of medicine and health. Discovering molecular structures like dysfunctional DNA leads to much better understanding – and potentially, diagnosis and treatment of – disease. The UCT Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine are for example about that very connection.

Understanding molecular structure is also becoming increasing useful for understanding human mental states and therefore mental disease. The balance of chemicals in the brain that provide for stability and instability has a repertoire shaped – even determined – by large protein molecules.

Brighton Sewer circa 1874

The single most important contribution to improving aspects of public health in most cities of the southern hemisphere is to install proper sewage and sanitation systems. With sewers human waste is removed and stagnant water is drained. And with that go the diarrhoea, malaria and all of the other bacterial and parasitic diseases that compromise human lives.

We are not talking of science big or little here, for there are no science problems to be solved in these instances. We are not even talking about high-level engineering issues either, for these too pose no to little difficulty. We are talking about tried and tested pedestrian engineering that simply has to be tweaked to work in local circumstances.

Step 1: Book via the link in the email that was sent to you (if you did not receive an email invitation then you may still participate but it will cost you R1,000)

The following two steps are optional but do add to your experience of your geographic ancestry understanding.

Step 2: Register on this website (NOTE: registration on this website is NOT registration for the Ancestry project, only for the website)

Step 3: Login and write a short (2 - 3 sentence) submission on what you believe your geographic ancestry to be in the Ancestry 300 Forum

The first 300 people who respond to their email invitation (at AGEI's discretion) will be invited to get a free ancestry evaluation as part of this project.

In this way we wish to develop an ancestry map which draws from the indigenous people of Southern Africa, namely the former hunters or San groups, the pastoral Khoikhoi who are thought to have migrated to the Cape in the last 2,000 years introducing sheep and cattle to the region, and people originating from the Niger-Congo area speaking Nguni-languages who migrated south in the last 1,200 years. In addition, sea-borne immigrants from Western Europe (largely from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and France), indentured labourers from India and slaves from the Malaysian Archipelago, Madagascar and other parts of Africa, have also contributed to the gene pool.

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