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2009 Keynote speaker
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| Entrepreneur |
| BJ Cunningham |
BJ Cunningham established the Enlightened Tobacco Company PLC, and then marketed a brand of cigarettes called ‘DEATH’ as ‘the honest smoke’. This act of heresy, though enormously successful with consumers, didn’t go down at all well with the tobacco industry. It eventually landed him in the European Court of Justice fighting against not only every member state in Europe but also the might of the established tobacco industry.
BJ uses this experience to illustrate his straightforward brand thinking. Be sure of who you are and what you mean before you try to say anything. |
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2009 Opening Address
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| Nature, Nurture Or Neither? The view from the genes |
| Prof. Steve Jones |
| Genetics is a remarkable science in many ways, some obvious and some less so. As I say to my students in their first lecture on the subject, “My job is to make sex boring” and, after thirty lectures on DNA structure and the like they tend to agree. To cheer them up, at the end of the course I tell them that two out of every three of them will die for reasons connected to the genes they carry – and, with so much mortality coming from cancer, heart disease, diabetes and the like (all of which have an inherited component) I am right again. To the public, genetics brings exaggerated fears about inborn fate and over-optimism about gene therapy and “designer babies”. I will talk about the most dangerous word in genetics: the idea of a gene “for” a particular attribute, from alcoholism to religious belief and how DNA and way of life nearly always work together to determine our health, our mood and – perhaps – even our willingness to take risks, go shopping or buy shares. |
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