Life Fantastic with Dr Alison Woollard

Dr Alison Woollard from the University of Oxford plans to excite the nation’s inner-scientist with her fantastic tales of developmental biology as she delivers this year’s RI Christmas Lectures.

Are you excited about delivering this year’s Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution? Yes! I am incredibly excited and proud to presenting this year’s Christmas Lectures. This is partly because my area of science, developmental biology, tends to be under-represented in the media and in science communication, but mainly because Life Fantastic is such an interesting story to share. I think these lectures are a wonderful opportunity to ignite people’s interest in biology. I want to get people thinking about how one tiny cell is the building block for an entire organism and to understand the incredible potential this concept holds for future medical discoveries that could completely change how we recognise, treat and prevent hundreds of different diseases. Everyone has an inner scientist and I hope my lectures will get people excited by the idea of doing science themselves and, most importantly, encourage people to join the debate around the complex issues thrown up by advances in biomedicine, because these are issues that affect everyone in our society.

Without giving too much away, can you tell us what Life Fantastic will cover? Extraordinary life!  We will start by thinking about where we come from - about the everyday miracle by which an embryo is formed, takes shape, gets bigger and eventually emerges as a perfect animal, with all its bits (cells) in the right place doing the right thing.  This is no mean feat because all the animal's cells (even our own) contain exactly the same genes, so how on earth do cells end up doing such shockingly different things?  How does it work - what are the rules?  And how do we know how it works?

In the second lecture we will move on to thinking about how our knowledge of cells, genes and DNA takes us back in evolutionary history.  The ultimate interconnectedness of all things, in other words the notion that, genetically speaking, humans are not so very different from mushrooms, allows us to trace back our evolutionary history, and that of every animal that has ever walked the earth.  But how does it work?  How do organisms change over time?  What causes the change?  We will see that the very same mechanism that makes cells different from one another in one animal, the interpretation of genetic instructions, can be responsible for making organisms different from one another (very slowly!) over huge expanses of time.  It is the slight chance differences in gene sequences, and in the switching on and off of particular genes (a bit more eye gene here, a bit less leg gene there...) that eventually gives rise to whole new species - hopeful monsters - as they are tested by the environment to see what forms pass muster and succeed.  This ultimate interconnectedness also has massive ramifications for biomedical research, as it becomes self-evident that understanding a biological process in one organism enhances our understanding of all organisms.  Thus, work in very simple organisms such as yeast, or the nematode worm C. elegans can tell us a huge amount about human diseases such as cancer.

By the time we reach the third and final lecture we will understand a huge amount about cells and genes and how they work and so the next step is to explore the ramifications of this knowledge.  How do we use our genetic knowledge to develop new diagnostic skills, new medicines and new ways of doing things. How might we cheat death?  Are there dangers associated with all this knowledge and new technologies? Should we be alarmed?  How do we handle it? How do we handle the future?

Which do you think will be your favourite lecture to deliver? It’s difficult to separate the three lectures because they all tell one part of a much bigger story. The first lecture, which focuses on how a fertilised egg develops into a full organism with all the cells instinctively knowing what they each have to do, is my home territory because it relates most closely to my own research. The second lecture, which explores the mechanistic detail behind evolution, the ‘nuts and bolts’ as it were, is one I find equally fascinating and challenging because it takes me slightly out of my comfort zone. The third lecture is also challenging but in a different way because this is when we start asking the tricky ethical and moral questions about what we should and shouldn’t do with our rapidly increasing understanding of how cells work and the mutations and related diseases that occur when they don’t function or develop you’d expect.

You are also a lecturer in Genetics at the University of Oxford, can you tell us more about your work here? I'm a University Lecturer in Genetics in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor in Biochemistry at Hertford College (where I also serve as College Dean).

My research examines the molecular mechanisms of cell fate determination during development, and studies of the genetic control of ageing. I try to understand how key biological processes such as cell division are controlled, and in particular the process of asymmetric cell division where the molecular composition of each daughter guides it to develop in a different way. One daughter may end up forming intestine, the other skin, and what I’m trying to figure out is how these cells know what their role is and how to fulfil it; what’s the decision-making process behind it all?

The best way to do this at present is to study the development of model organisms and I've chosen to use the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans because it represents the perfect compromise between simplicity and complexity coupled with a striking genetic similarity to "higher" organisms such as ourselves. If we can identify the full set of instructions each cell has and how each cell knows which instructions to follow and which to disregard in their development, then we can apply this knowledge to the treatment and prevention of a whole range of diseases.

I also find the teaching part of my work incredibly satisfying. I love that as a lecturer in genetics I can honestly say to my students that their studies will involve looking at problems and testing theories that no one else has ever done and that every day they have the opportunity to discover something that no one else has ever seen or known. We really are at the rockface of new discovery!