Café Scientifique

• Thursday 28 October 2021: Green concrete: Building a more sustainable future—Professor Ashraf Ashour
• Thursday 18 November 2021: Mass vaccination: The Bradford story—Dr Dinesh Saralaya and Faiz Ilyas
• Thursday 16 December 2021: Stories from the tooth fairy—Dr Julia Beaumont
• Thursday 27 January 2022: Caught on camera: Reflections on William Hope and the Crewe Circle spirit photographs—Dr Efram Sera-Shriar
• Thursday 17 February 2022: An apple a day keeps the AI away—Professor Christopher Yau
• Thursday 24 March 2022: Sermon on the soil—Professor Duncan Cameron
• Thursday 28 April 2022: Assessing foreign leaders—Professor Michael D. Young
• Thursday 19 May 2022: Ethnography in the city: Reflections from Bradford—Dr Yunis Alam
• Thursday 23 June 2022: Body fat: Is all fat created equal?—Dr Rebecca Dumbell
• Thursday 21 July 2022: The eye as a window to the listening brain—Dr Ronan McCarrigle

Mass vaccination: The Bradford story

To celebrate European Antibiotic Awareness Day on 18 November and in honour of the Professor Kevin Kerr Memorial Lecture, we have two speakers who will give different perspectives on vaccination in the Bradford area.

European Antibiotic Awareness Day promotes public awareness about antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is a global health and development threat. Antibiotic resistance can be reduced by using antibiotics sensibly when patients have bacterial infections, and preventing infection by measures such as infection control and vaccinations. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that vaccines save two to three million lives each year (excluding Covid-19).

Each speaker will share their personal experiences, followed by a panel Q&A session.

Speaker 1: Dr Dinesh Saralaya: Consultant Respiratory Physician, Associate Medical Director at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Associate Director for Research at the Bradford Institute for Health Research. He is also Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Bradford and Honorary Senior Lecturer at University of Leeds. Dr Saralaya will describe the theory behind vaccination, public health benefits, and local experiences of running mass vaccination campaigns in Bradford.

Speaker 2: Mr Faiz Ilyas: Student Survey Support Officer at the University of Bradford, Ilyas Cars Director, Councillor for Clayton Parish Council, and Clayton and Fairweather Green Labour Branch Youth Officer. Faiz has recently won an award for promoting vaccination for difficult-to-reach communities. Faiz will share his experiences of promoting vaccination in these communities.

Caught on Camera: Reflections on William Hope and the Crewe Circle Spirit Photographs

Dr Efram Sera-Shriar

During the opening decades of the 20th century, William Hope was a well-respected medium amongst the spiritualist community in Britain, with positive endorsements from major scientific figures such as the chemist William Crookes and the author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle. He was often seen as one of the few mediums to be able to produce authentic spirit photographs.

However, all that changed in late February of 1922 when a team of investigators led by the famous British psychical researcher Harry Price claimed to have caught Hope cheating during one of his sittings and discovered that he was swapping blank photographic plates with ones containing existing images on them that appeared to be depictions of spirit entities. Hope was publicly exposed as a fraud, and what ensued was a major debate between believers and sceptics over the legitimacy of the medium’s alleged spirit photography.

Using surviving materials from the Senate House Library and Science Museum Group collections, including photographs, private correspondence, published sources, and camera technologies, this talk will explore this story, and reflect on what makes for trustworthy evidence in investigations of extraordinary phenomena.