Podcast: Download (40.9MB)
Broadcast: 6.30pm – 7.30pm, Tuesday 22nd June.
Historically the only way to look inside the human body was during an autopsy. Since the late 70s, technologies such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) allow for non-invasive imaging and even researching the workings of the living brain. How do changing ways of viewing our anatomies affect scientific research and understandings of humanity?
The speakers were Dr Ruth Richardson, Prof. Geraint Rees and Dr Tom Rice. The show was hosted by Seph Rodney.
Guest biographies:
Historian Ruth Richardson is the author of Death, Dissection & the Destitute (Chicago 2000) and The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy (Oxford 2008). Her interests lie in the history of bodily appropriation and donation, and in the interaction of medical and lay cultures of bodily understanding. She is a Londoner, an associate scholar at the Universities of Cambridge and Hertfordshire, and Honorary Professor in Humanities & Medicine at Hong Kong University.
Prof. Geraint Rees is Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Funded by a Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellowship, he holds a personal chair at University College London and is an honorary consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery. His research seeks to understand the neural basis of human consciousness. In 2003 he was awarded the Young Investigator Medal of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping at the Human Brain Mapping meeting in New York, and in 2007 was awarded the Experimental Psychology Society Prize and the Royal Society Francis Crick medal. In 2009 he gave the Goulstonian Lecture of the Royal College of Physicians, and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.