Past events

Our immune system is one of the great marvels of nature – and it holds the key to human health. In this talk, Professor Daniel Davis charts the ground-breaking scientific quest to understand how the immune system fights disease and enables the body to heal itself. 

The multitude of Annunciations existing today epitomise Gregory the Great's words "Illiterate men can contemplate in the lines of a picture what they cannot learn by means of the written word". 

Manchester is proud of Alan Turing but does it deserve to be?

In this talk based on this book Alan Turing’s Manchester, Jonathan Swinton explores the complexity of the city that Alan Turing encountered in 1948 and the remarkable men and women who surrounded him.

This guided tour, visiting the site of St Peter’s Field in Manchester city centre where the Peterloo Massacre took place, has been devised by Ed Glinert who brings his unique touch to this chilling story.

It's easy to imagine that plants don’t do much because of our powerful prejudice that equates action with movement. But plants literally build themselves out of thin air and water, which is pretty extraordinary.

Two hundred years on from Manchester's notorious Peterloo Massacre, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society will commemorate the victims of the Manchester Magistrates and Yeoman Cavalry's overzealous intentions to break up a peaceful gathering at St Peters Field.

Off the northernmost tip of Scotland lie the Orkney Islands; it is said that if you scratch its surface Orkney bleeds archaeology. This is nowhere truer than in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site that is renowned for some of the most iconic prehistoric monuments of Atlantic Europe.

In this lecture Professor Bill Newman will discuss the technological advances in genomic medicine that now allow us to undertake whole genome sequencing for an individual in a time frame and at a cost that make it feasible as a test within standard healthcare.

Many people think that polio is gone from the world. Only those now over 70 years old can remember the devastating paralysis it caused in childhood. The introduction of a vaccine was transformative and swept the disease out of most affluent countries of the world very quickly. Over time, the battle against the disease was won in low- and middle-income countries too.