{"id":2120,"date":"2014-09-16T20:24:22","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T20:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=2120"},"modified":"2014-09-16T20:24:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-16T20:24:22","slug":"one-hundred-years-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2014\/09\/16\/one-hundred-years-old\/","title":{"rendered":"One hundred years old"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a few years back it seemed unlikely that we would ever celebrate our centenary. We were to be rejuvenated<\/span> exterminated<\/span> absorbed into a new Institute. \u00a0Back in 2007\u00a0when this project was announced<\/a>\u00a0we expected that 2013 would be the beginning of the new, and the end of the old Institute just shy of its 100 years. But\u00a0the\u00a0awesome immensity of the project to\u00a0design and build the Francis Crick Institute\u00a0meant\u00a0its\u00a0opening date was pushed a little further into the future. Now it is anticipated that the official transfer of staff from NIMR to the new Institute will take place in 2015 (though physical relocation to the new building will take a bit longer). Hence, NIMR will cease to exist as an entity having reached\u00a0the Adrian Mole-esque age of 100 and three-quarters.<\/p>\n

The Centenary<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like anniversaries so I’m glad we made it to 100. \u00a0Just over three years ago I remarked to those in power\u00a0that 2014 would be our 100th anniversary. A consensus quickly formed that we should mark this centenary. A variety of ideas were floated, and we prioritised\u00a0three of them: a book about the history of the Institute, a film about the Institute, and a scientific symposium\/celebration. These all came to fruition, though some had a more tortuous path than others.<\/p>\n

The date of foundation\u00a0of the Institute is not clear-cut. Many people assume that we started life in 1950 – when we moved into our present purpose-built accommodation\u00a0in Mill Hill. Some think\u00a0we began in 1920 – which is when\u00a0the Institute moved into its first home at Hampstead and when it first acquired the name of National Institute for Medical Research. I have also seen the date given as 1918 – I am not sure why. There is some\u00a0rationale for giving the start date as\u00a01913, when the MRC was created and when it decided, in one of its first meetings, to create a “Central Institute”.<\/p>\n

I examined the first annual report of the MRC, for 1914-15, in hope of finding an answer. I learnt that the MRC purchased the building in Hampstead in early 1914, and that the first Institute staff commenced MRC employment on 1 July 1914. This – the beginning of research work – seemed like a reasonable criterion for determining the first existence of the Institute, even though the staff were not housed\u00a0in the Hampstead building at that time.\u00a0\u00a0So we agreed to settle for 1 July 2014\u00a0as our anniversary date.<\/p>\n

The Symposium<\/strong><\/p>\n

The speakers were a mixture of current staff and alumni, covering all areas of science from infectious disease and immunology to structural biology, developmental biology and neuroscience. I\u00a0attended all the talks and \u00a0pushed out tweets for two\u00a0days from the Institute Twitter account, using hashtag #100NIMR. Some talks were pitched better than others, so listening could be\u00a0hard work and\u00a0extracting something meaningful to tweet about was challenging for a non-specialist like me.\u00a0Luckily I had help from some fellow Institute tweeters. If you really want to read all about it\u00a0see the\u00a0Storify for the symposium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After the main symposium there were two further events. Julie Clayton, author of the new book on the history of the Institute, gave a talk on Institute history, and a film\u00a0about the Institute made by Taslima Khan\u00a0was shown.<\/p>\n

The Book<\/strong><\/p>\n

The book about the Institute history was my main contribution to the centenary. I gave shape to the idea, I created an outline, I pushed for it to happen, I made plans, I suggested sources, I oversaw the project and was involved at all stages. \u00a0I even drafted a couple of chapters and did some editing. \u00a0I also had to make sure that the project\u00a0was delivered on time, meant we had to be\u00a0realistic about what we could achieve in the time available. \u00a0How we wished we could have included more material, spoken to more people, added further chapters, but that would have needed more time than we had. Our primary target audience was current and past staff of the Institute, and we wanted to deliver something that was readable and enjoyable. (See my\u00a0previous post <\/a>\u00a0about our thought processes in defining the book’s scope).<\/p>\n

It was 18 months of hard work, both for the writer we engaged, Julie Clayton, and for me. We were lucky to have a summer assistant in 2013 – Sophie Hopkins – who analysed several\u00a0printed sources (Annual Reports mostly) to extract lists of names, Divisions, and associated dates and affiliations. The master spreadsheets that Sophie produced, covering 100 years, proved invaluable. \u00a0My workload increased as we\u00a0gradually got closer to the final form with round after round of editing and rewriting. Colleagues in the PhotoGraphics department put the book together into its final shape, and scanned\u00a0the hundreds of photos that were included in the book.<\/p>\n

\"historycover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I think the result is everything that we hoped it might\u00a0be but a lot better than I dared hope it would be. It would have been easy to write something quite dry and factual. It would have been fun to focus on amusing anecdotes.\u00a0Julie steered a careful path between these two extremes, managing to tell the institutional story alongside several human stories. She also\u00a0lowered\u00a0the level of technical detail so that the text would be\u00a0accessible to non-specialists. Each of the 22 chapters is a good read in itself but put together they add up to a\u00a0great book.<\/p>\n

All staff have been given a copy. The book is also published online as a series of PDFs, on a special History of NIMR<\/em>\u00a0blog<\/a> created for the purpose. \u00a0We will be adding more material there in due course. I aim to post most\u00a0of the images used in the book to Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n

The Film<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1964 the BBC’s Horizon series made\u00a0a film about NIMR. We wanted\u00a0to make a fresh film, about the Institute in 2014, one that captured the essence of the place and the people who work there today. I grabbed this ball and ran with it for a bit, having discussions\u00a0with a group\u00a0of interested ex-staff including two who were in\u00a0the film-making business. We thought we could\u00a0make a commercially viable film, something for BBC4 say, but\u00a0it became apparent that the kind of film that could be made for that market would not fit with our ambitions – just to reflect the reality of the Institute and its life. So the idea was abandoned. Disappointment was tempered\u00a0with relief\u00a0– I needed to focus on the book project.<\/p>\n

However, one of the group\u00a0– a past PhD student who still lived locally – held on to the idea and eventually she was given approval\u00a0to make a film on her own initiative. \u00a0She interviewed various past members of staff and a few current staff, and assembled these interviews very skilfully into a coherent whole. The result was magnificent – a funny and informative and revealing film.<\/p>\n

She is doing\u00a0a little more work on the film and hopes\u00a0to produce a version that can be shared more widely by the end of this year. The film is a great complement to the history book, with some overlap as well as some fresh material.<\/p>\n

The Memory<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really enjoyed the final session\u00a0of the Symposium on Wednesday afternoon, with the history talk, film, cake-cutting and party all going off splendidly. I hope that an awareness of the Institute’s past is now fixed in the minds of the present staff, and that the foundations of NIMR’s research culture and achievements are now writ large for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a few years back it seemed unlikely that we would ever celebrate our centenary. We were to be rejuvenated exterminated absorbed into a new Institute. \u00a0Back in 2007\u00a0when this project was announced\u00a0we expected that 2013 would be the beginning … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,46,26],"tags":[114],"class_list":["post-2120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film-and-music","category-history","tag-100nimr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}