BA Festival of Science
Thursday 25 August 2005

Images from exhibitions that will be part of Science in the City

For a week in September, Dubliners will have the opportunity to experience many aspects of science in a huge array of formats and contexts. Debates and displays, readings and drama, walks and talks, exhibitions and entertainments, are all part of the Science in the City programme that runs from Sunday 4 September for a week, as part of the BA Festival of Science. The programme is co-ordinated by a DCU team of Brian Trench and Philip O'Reilly, based in the School of Communications.

The BA Festival of Science is based at Trinity College Dublin and comprises hundreds of lectures, seminars and debates. The DCU duo was given the brief to devise a programme of events and activities in venues outside TCD, and accessible to wider groups of the city population and to visitors.

Among the events in the Science in the City programme are:

• two international photographic exhibitions, Visions of Science and Images of Science (the Images show includes work by DCU lecturer Karl Grimes)
• a lecture and a debate on the possibility that robots could inherit the earth, featuring MIT professor Rodney Brooks
• a treasure hunt across Dublin in which participants use global positioning equipment to move from clue to clue
• a debate on Who Sets the Agenda for Science? featuring Ireland's chief science adviser Barry McSweeney
• an open-air screening of Gattaca, which depicts a future world in which genetic make-up determines a person's destiny (the screening will be introduced by DCU lecturer Pat Brereton)
• a dramatised reading, with scientific commentary, from Flann O'Brien's comic novel, The Third Policeman (the commentary will be given by DCU's Prof Dermot Diamond)
• debates on why we are still struggling to deal with alcohol abuse, and on science's answer to cancer (this one with participants from the National Institute of Cellular Biotechnology at DCU)
• and much, much more

Details on the BA Festival of Science can be found at the BA web site, where the Science in the City programme can be downloaded.

More information, and copies of the printed programme, from scienceinthecity@dcu.ie.