Monthly Archives: November 2019

University of Exeter, University of Sanctuary Award Presentation, 20 November 2019

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Welcome everyone, I’m Janice Kay, of the University of Exeter. It’s wonderful to see so many of you for this award ceremony. It is a moment of celebration, and one that has a very deep and important meaning. On behalf of the senior management team and our whole university community, we are absolutely delighted to have achieved University of Sanctuary status. This award is a clear marker of our commitment, our progress and our success in creating a welcoming and supportive environment for refugees and asylum seekers.

I quote directly from the Universities of Sanctuary organisation: Universities, as key institutions within our society, have a responsibility to support people from all walks of life to reach their potential. The notion of sanctuary fits with the values and strategic plans of most universities; it contributes towards progress in inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability. It means taking a practical, public step towards inclusion, and countering discourses of xenophobia and racism both within and outside university life.

The idea of Universities of Sanctuary has grown from the Cities of Sanctuary scheme. Exeter has had an active and engaged City of Sanctuary group since 2014 with a thriving network of supporters. I am extremely proud that our students and staff instrumental in setting up the City of Sanctuary group. Not only that, they have gone on take action here at the university to enable us to become a University of Sanctuary, a university that welcomes refugees into our community and actively supports them.

This award recognises the efforts of many members of our community. I would particularly like to  recognise the work of last year’s Guild and specifically the former Students’ Guild President Grace Frain and previous Vice-President for Welfare and Diversity Rose Ahier. They championed and drove forward our activities to become a University of Sanctuary. It is wonderful to see Grace here today. Working alongside them has been our Sanctuary Scholars, our academic lead Dr Nick Gill and our Head of Student Immigration Services Jim Price, as well as many others.  Our ongoing thanks go to all of our local partners who work with the university to provide advice, guidance and support to our scholars. I would especially like to thank Refugee Support Devon and our local City of Sanctuary group.

This is a moment for celebration but I want to reflect for a moment on how important it is that we provide a safe and welcoming university community for refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees come to our country to seek safety from fear and persecution, be it for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Latest government figures indicate that there have been over 32,000 applications for asylum in the last 12 months. These numbers include people for whom a higher education in their country of birth may have been an unattainable goal. For some, exploring and fulfilling their potential through academic exploration would never have been an option. Universities in our country can help. Higher education has a longstanding tradition of providing sanctuary to academics and students. We are proud to be able to continue this tradition. The University of Sanctuary status shows we are doing this, and our commitment to going further. Equal Access to Higher Education is of course a universal right under Article 26 of the Declaration of Human Rights.

We have very many initiatives at Exeter to support refugees either directly through education and training or indirectly through our research which contributes to the evidence base and body of knowledge about forced migration and frail and failed states. Our academics and students have set up language exchange programmes, they conduct outreach activities using drama as a medium of engagement and have set up new information resources. Dr Nick Gill will share more about these later.

One of our most fundamental initiatives is the Sanctuary Scholarship programme which started in 2017. The scholarships enable the cost of tuition to be waived and provide support for living costs. We have now supported nine studentships and we are fortunate to have one of our Sanctuary Scholars with us today.

One of our Sanctuary Scholars has taken part in a video project called Lost in the Noise, which has been pioneered by Harry Bishop, a former student and Vice President for Community and Welfare at our Cornwall campus and who is now a member of staff in Cornwall. This project has sought to profile individuals and students whose voices may otherwise indeed have become ‘lost in the noise’. It is vital that we hear these stories and that we start to understand the experiences of others. This is a powerful route to becoming a more diverse, compassionate, progressive and culturally competent community. Thank you to the scholar for sharing their experiences so candidly in this film and to Harry for your project which has enabled this to happen. This film extremely impactful and brings to life the importance of universities as a place of sanctuary.

So once again, thank you for joining us to mark our award as a University of Sanctuary. It is an important milestone for us as an institution and one from which we will continue to build.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

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The year is 2050, the stench of plague fills the air and 10 million people are dying from cuts and grazes due to an enemy that cannot be seen. You would be forgiven for believing that we had entered a dystopian, parallel future, but alas not. This is the current future of mankind if we do not address the ever-growing threat: antibiotic resistance.

Whether we want to face it or not, our antibiotics are failing. Drugs that we have relied upon to so effectively treat bacterial infections are no longer working due to these crafty bugs becoming resistant to them. Over time, bacteria have evolved to survive antibiotics, with this “survival of the fittest” process resulting in populations of menacing “superbugs”. No matter how many different antibiotics we throw at these resistant microbes, some can no longer be killed and so what were once minor infections become fatal.

So how can we fight back!?

One avenue is to discover and develop new antibiotics. However, this has proven to be extremely costly and difficult, so alternative options are being explored. Mankind’s possible saviour: bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages, or simply phages, are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Just as humans get viruses like flu, bacteria suffer from their own invaders which hijack the bacterial cell and turn it into a virus making factory, before killing them. With their large bulbous head and spindly legs (think War of the Worlds alien invader fighting ships), they are perfectly adapted for attaching to bacteria. Phages are the optimal killing machines. Currently, phages are not widely used to treat infections in the Western world as not enough is known about them. If we want to be able to harness the power of these microscopic bacteria killers, then we need to know more about how they work.

Most research studying bacteria and phages use methods that involve growing billions of cells in a test tube, and looking at how fast the population grows and dies on average. But this is not always the most informative. Imagine you want to know how fast humans run 100m. Someone tells you the average time is 15 seconds. Although all humans, not everyone would take 15 seconds. Clearly if Usain Bolt ran the race he would be much quicker, and the man who decided to hop all the way much slower! This also applies to bacteria. Even though they should all be identical, individual bacteria can behave very differently.

My work lets us identify the Usain Bolts and the Hop-Alongs of the bacteria world, as well as many others in between. I want to know which responses occur when we expose bacteria to phages and how this may affect the killing ability of these viruses.

Erin Attrill, Living Systems Institute

I use technology called ‘microfluidics’ that allows me to isolate and experiment on individual bacteria. With ‘micro’ meaning small, and ‘fluidics’ relating to the movement of liquids, I perform experiments on bacteria with equipment no larger than a postage stamp. Using networks of thousands of tiny channels, I can trap single bacteria in their own tiny chamber under a microscope and watch what happens when I add phages. Over the course of a day, I can continually monitor and photograph the same cells and record whether they are growing, dividing and even the exact point at which they lyse – that is, when they burst open releasing hundreds more phages.

I have observed that although all identical, some bacteria die instantly, but others grow much faster and divide multiple times before finally lysing hours later. Perhaps most importantly, some bacteria in the experiments are not killed by the phages at all. These bacteria survive the exposure and fill their chambers with more bacteria offspring. What makes these cells special and able to survive is unclear, and one aim of my work is to use microfluidics to try and understand why.

It is important to understand these differences to be able to optimise how many phages would be needed to eradicate the bacteria in a human as a potential treatment. If most bacteria are killed with two hours of phage treatment, a person may begin to look healthy, but if the “Usain Bolt” variants survive, then they could cause the infection to return. A longer dose or a higher concentration of phages may be required to eradicate the entire population so we need to fully understand how the different cells behave.

There is no need to be afraid of the word ‘virus’ – the good news is that phages cannot infect human cells. These minuscule invaders are the enemy of bacteria and so we should harness their power to defeat our bacterial foes. As stated, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So let’s welcome in the age of the phage.

Erin Attrill, Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter

This article was the runner up in Max Perutz Science Writing Competition 2019.
Read all the shortlisted articles here https://mrc.ukri.org/documents/pdf/max-p-shortlist-articles-2019/