Some of the projects at Wellcome Trust

And again for one reason and another I thought I would pull together some of couple of the larger projects my team commissioned at Wellcome Trust over the seven years I was there.

We did a whole series of things to mark the Darwin bicentenary including a Darwin inspired experiment for every schoolchild in Britain. The primary school one was called the Great Plant Hunt and the secondary Survival Rivals and around three quarters of the schools in Britain used the kits.

We also commissioned with Channel 4 an online alternate reality game and associated collateral called Routes including the trivial and disgusting Sneeze game that had over 15 million plays online and was written up in the New York Times. There were some amazing young poets in Evolving Words and we were honored to collaborate with David Attenborough on the Tree of Life video and interactive.

For London 2012 we did another series of schools experiments, also taken up by around 75% of the schools in Britain, called In the Zone. This featured Sir Steve Redgrave and you can see a video and read the evaluation here.

Pulling together some videos

For one reason and another I thought would gather together some of the talks and discussions I've done that are available online.

• There's a very informal one I did as part of a SameAs meetup on education and neuroscience.
• And I did this one called "Is finding art useful a problem?" in an Art and Mind dinner at the lovely GV Art
• I did quite a long lecture "Are we all interdisciplinary now?" as part of the University of Salford's As Yet Impossible series.
• Here's a brief and esoteric contribution to Treats on Elasticity organised by the Pars Foundation at Wellcome Collection
• Here's a thing on Culture in a changing context about Cultural leadership
• And finally as host of TEDxAlbertopolis at the Albert Hall, I pop up at the end of this talk from Roland Lamb

Olympic legacy and 1851

Was invited to comment on the UCL V&A announcement for the olympic park at Stratford Waterfront by the Evening Standard, and here's the letter they published yesterday:

5 December 2013

BEFORE the 1851 Great Exhibition, as before the 2012 olympics, naysayers worried about foreign pickpockets flooding the city, finances that didn’t add up, construction delays and  whether anyone would actually come. Both events turned out to be dramatic successes. Now with plans for a new “Albertopolis” in the east, the legacy of the Games has the potential to  emulate 1851 in promoting Britain’s status as a country of innovation.

A series of TEDx talks I hosted at the Albert Hall this autumn updated Prince Albert’s vision for Britain. Ideas described and bounced around included novel uses for seaweed; the first musical keyboard that spans digital and analogue; the educational value of the crossword puzzle; the challenge of antibiotic resistance. The plans for Stratford Waterfront  place academic research alongside world-class culture in exactly the configuration required to advance thinking of this kind. In this space where science and the arts collide, enterprises such as computer games  design thrive and Britain can be a global leader.

Dr Daniel Glaser, director, Science Gallery London, King’s College London