'Strange Brains, Alien Minds'
Channel: MRC_CNDD King's College London
Date: 2018-04-12

Dr Christine Aicardi, from the Foresight Lab of the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King's, and SciFi authors Pippa Goldshmidt, Stephen Oram and Geoff Ryman have collaborated with scientists in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology and the Department of Twin Research & Genetic Epidemiology, to turn current lab research into three fictional short stories. From the developing brain to the declining brain, from fruit flies to humans, from familiar to alien, they all revolve around the common theme of identity, consciousness and mental life.

Join us to hear the short stories and then stay as we use them as a springboard for what we hope will be an evening of lively and enlightening discussions between literature, life sciences, humanities, social sciences and medicine, followed by (and pursued in) a drinks reception.

Two panels will stimulate the discussions. One will be comprised of scientists from the participating labs. The second will bring perspectives from history, philosophy and the social sciences.
Our event is graciously hosted by the Gordon Museum of Pathology. It is part of the project 'Transforming Future Science through Science Fiction', a collaboration supported by the Cultural Institute at King's College London.

For more information, please contact Christine Aicardi.

About the authors:
Pippa Goldschmidt enjoys writing fiction about science. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space. In 2016, she was a winner of the MRC Suffrage Science award and her poem ‘Physics for unwary students’ was chosen to be one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems.

Stephen Oram writes science fiction, often in collaboration with scientists, and is lead curator for near-future fiction at Virtual Futures. He’s been a hippie-punk, religious-squatter and an anarchist-bureaucrat. He is published in several anthologies, has two published novels, Quantum Confessions and Fluence, and a collection of sci-fi shorts, Eating Robots and Other Stories.

Geoff Ryman: has won the Nebula Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award twice, the British Science Fiction Association award three times and 11 other science fiction or fantasy awards. He was the commissioning editor of When it Changed (Comma Press) an anthology of commissioned collaborations between scientists and writers. Currently he is publishing a series of interview on Strange Horizons: 100 African Writers of SFF.

Christine Aicardi's work is supported by the Human Brain Project, under European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Grant Agreement No. 720270 (HBP SGA1).

Photo credits: KayVee.INC, The Long Awaited - copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode.