Pod Academy

Class is not only one of the oldest and most controversial of all concepts in social science, but a topic which has fascinated, amused, incensed and galvanized the general public, too. But what exactly is a ‘class’? How do sociologists study and measure it, and how does it correspond to everyday understandings of social difference? Is it now dead or dying in today’s globalized and media-saturated world, or is it entering a new phase of significance on the world stage? In this podcast, first published on Ideasbooks.org, Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Will Atkinson, author of the book Class  to explore these questions.  They take us through theoretical traditions in class research, the major controversies that have shaken the field and the continuing effects of class difference, class struggle and class inequality. Class:    Class is published by Polity Press and is part of their Concepts in Social Sciences series. You may also be interested in our BookPod on Tony Atkinson's book Inequality- what can be done? in which Prof Tony Atkinson talks to Fran Bennett.

The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection,  But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local.  And then there is the larger architecture of the internet.  This podcast looks at at how this architecture, specifically the Domain Name System (DNS) has been used and developed in China to localize control there. In this podcast, Adriene Lilly talks to Séverine Arsène, a researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China in Hong Kong and Chief Editor of China Perspectives – a journal dedicated to cultural, political and economic trends in China. She is also author of the recent article Internet Domain Names in China: Articulating Local Control with Global Connectivity part of a special feature of China Perspectives 'Shaping the Chinese Internet' The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection, bringing together people of different cultural, political and economic backgrounds. Understood as a horizontal network and a community that is structurally decentralized. But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local. Beyond social constraints, there is the larger architecture of the internet to take into account. Essential structures that hold the internet in place, yet remain mostly unknown. Today, we're looking at how this architecture has been used and developed in China to localize control there. Understanding the Domain Names System is a big step in understanding the architecture of the internet. The Domain Names System, or DNS, is the global addressing system for the internet. You can think of the DNS like a phonebook. It takes numbers (IP addresses) and attributes them to names (domain names). When you type in an address in your browser (i.e.podacademy.org) your using the DNS to look up and call the number in this global phonebook. This global system is coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. China was a major pioneer in using the DNS as a political tool, creating a vast web of regulation, censorship and blocking. This has been an evolving system since the early days of the internet, and continues to change to this day. Only last month,a new draft law was reported that could force website owners operating in China to apply for China-base domain names – this means websites ending in .com or .net must also register with .cn or Chinese character domain names like .中国(meaning “.China”) or .公司 (meaning “.Corporation”). Like many similar regulations, the draft of this law is vague in its wording and its exact implications are yet to be seen. In this episode Séverine discusses how laws like this have evolved over time and what they might really mean. “The very point of using the DNS to block particular websites, or using keyword filtering, is to have a selective blocking or a selective connection to the global internet. It enables the Chinese state to have the best of both. The best of the global internet: access to trade, to fashion trends, to self-expression in a certain way - it helps people to vent off, express their identities, their wills, without necessarily being critical about the state of their own country. And, at the same time is allows a certain amount of political control...” This selective access has become known as 'The Great Firewall of China.' The term can be misleading, implying an internet that is structurally isolated from the rest of the world when, in reality, it is more a 'selective' access. “...the term “Great Firewall” was invented at the end of the 1990s/2000s, it is a very powerful image to represent a separated network that would be really very different than the rest of the...

Autism is a condition that affects about one in a hundred of us.  But few people understand or can recognise it.  This can have serious implications when people with autism encounter the criminal justice system. Recent research by City University and the University of Bath suggests that most people with autism, and about 75% of their parents,  are left very upset after dealings with the police.  April is Autism Awareness Month, and Pod Academy's Lee Millam  went to talk to Dr Laura Crane of City University London, to find out more. Lee Millam:  Autism is a complex condition for which there is no cure.  The main features are problems with social communication and interaction. Laura Crane:   Everyone with autism is very different, but people with autism all show the same key features - impairment in interacting with people socially and repetitive behaviours, interests and activities. These really vary so you could have one persion with autism who is very verbally and intellectually able, whereas others may not speak, they may have intellectual disabilities and may need full time care to meet their needs. Autism can affect anybody, we don't know what causes it and it is sometimes quite hard for people to be diagnosed because some signs can be very subtle.  But it can affect anybody.  One in a hundred means 700,000 people in the UK. Because we don't know what causes autism there are no treatments, but there are lots of interventions available to enable people with autism to lead rewarding and fulfilling lives - in schools, in the community - to help people with autism get jobs or help them learn in the classroom. But there is no cure.  If you have autism you live with it throughout your life. There have been lots of high profile cases in the media where  people with autism have come in contact with the police and the outcomes haven't been very positive. We wanted to see whether these experiences were rare, but actually they were very common.  It wasn't just these extreme cases we hear about.  We did a survey of 400 police officers and 100 member of the autism community (parents and autistic adults) and we asked them about the experiences of autism within the criminal justice system - what they think worked well and not well. The police were generally fairly satisfied with how they worked with individuals with autism but the autistic adults and their parents were not.  69% were dissatisfied.  It shows there is a disparity between the views of the police and the view of people with autism themselves. That is something that needs to be addressed. One of the key problems is that the police often direct their resources towards people with quite classic signs of autism - difficulties with language, intellectual impairment, very clear social impairments.  And on the other end of the spectrum you have individuals who are very articulate, very verbally and intellectutally able and they're often termed as having 'high funtioning autism' or Asperger's syndrome.  When the police come into contact with someone with a diagnosis of high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrom, they might see that their symptoms aren't very obvious.  They can verbalise what happened and give a fairly good account of what's gone on, but actually they need a lot of help and support as well and I think the police might overlook that because they'll over estimate the capabilities of that person. I think one of the key issues is autism awareness.  Lots of people have heard of autism, they may be aware of a friend or family member who has an autism diagnosis, but few people know exactly what that means.  They wouldn't necessarily know if someone they met had autism.  It is a hidden condition unlike other conditions (eg Down's Syndrome where people have a characteristic appearance). Training police officers about the characteristics of autism - so when they encounter someone with autism they can identify that this person is vulnerable a...

This podcast is the second in our series on new concert music.   New music can be unfamiliar and challenging - this series, written and presented by composer Arthur Keegan-Bole, is designed to present new music in a non-scary way or at least to explain that composers are making logical music - not trying to make weird, 'difficult' music to confound the listener. The sublime music in this podcast, I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spiritum Meum’, is a newly composed piece by Benedict Todd relating to the lost sounds of a ninth century Iberian liturgy.  It was composed as part of Bristol University's exciting Old Hispanic Office project. Now over to Arthur to introduce this podcast....... Arthur Keegan-Bole:  Hello, you’re listening to I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spritum Meum’, a podcast about how a newly composed piece of music relates to the lost sounds of a unique liturgy called the Old Hispanic Office which was first sung on the Iberian Peninsula before the 9th Century. Hold on, stay there, stay with me. It’s not as niche-an-episode as you might think. No working knowledge of early medieval Spanish church-going is necessary… I promise. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer the purpose of these podcasts is to explain ways that new music relates to music of the past. In this episode we are going way back to music first written down in the Tenth Century and how musicological research into this repertoire has directly inspired the piece of music you’re hearing. The piece was written in 2015 by Benedict Todd (hello Benedict!). You’ll hear much more from him as we discuss then interaction of music and text and how the medieval notation greatly influenced his piece of music. We’ll also hear from Dr Emma Hornby who leads the cross-disciplinary research team investigating the Old Hispanic Office and whose project spawned the call for new works. All this to come, but for now lets just enjoy this really good bit… Before getting onto the new stuff, lets explore what the Old Hispanic Office actually is by first hearing what it is not. It’s not the familiar sound of Gregorian chant which forms the Roman Catholic liturgy and which could be said is the genesis of the entire Western tradition. Emma Hornby:  The old hispanic office is what was sung across most of Iberia until about the year 1080 when there was a big suppression of it by the pope. [AKB] This is Dr Emma Hornby, an early music specialist and reader in music at the University of Bristol. She heads up the Old Hispanic Office project. [EH] It’s a Western, Latin, Christian church but it’s not the Roman liturgy - that’s the Gregorian chant. [AKB] Okay, so brass tacks - ‘liturgy’ we’re talking about how the church goes about structuring services through the day [EH] Exactly so, yes. So the Office is the way that monks and clerics go around and around singing the Psalms, singing chants, readings, prayers and the shape of how they do that in medieval Iberia was unique, different from anywhere else in western Europe. It’s not just that the melodies are different and that the texts are different, it’s that the whole shape of the liturgy is different, so you get through the day in different ways and it’s almost entirely un-studied. [AKB] Interesting stuff to an early musicologist or historian maybe but what has this got to do with composers? That stems from Emma’s novel response to a problem with the sources for this music - the notation does not give enough information for the sound to be fully recreated. We can’t know what it sounded like. [EH] As I was planning this research I kept coming against the sticking point that I want to share my research with the widest possible audience and that’s not just… I mean, there aren’t many other scholars interested in Old Hispanic chant before you start. There aren’t even that many scholars interested in Gregorian chant, it’s a niche interest.

How did we transition from candles to kerosene? or kerosene to electricity? What and when were the conditions ripe for energy transitions of our past? and what lessons do they have for us in the 21st century as we make a transition from high carbon intensity fossil fuels to renewable energy.. In this podcast Chaitanya Kumar from Sussex University talks to Roger Fouquet from the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics. The podcast was first broadcast on The Shift, a great new on-line platform for conversations on energy and climate This is a short version of the transcript Chaitanya Kumar:  What are the key patterns that you've seen emerge from your study of historical energy transitions? Roger Fouquet  Under every single energy transition like biomass to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas etc, is a disaggregation of a number of sectors and services. Services like heating, lighting and every sector like transport, housing etc; each one of those needs to make a transition of its own. The technology needed for this transition potentially differs from each sector and service and the result of which is a very slow transition. In energy transitions, technology or new energy sources that emerges and eventually becomes dominant always start as a niche product. There are a small group of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for the energy services attached to the new technology. Economies of scale subsequently improve the technology and drive down its cost, making it competitive with the incumbent energy technology/source. For instance, kerosene was used for lighting in the late 1800's largely by the poor population that couldn't afford gas lighting. But it never dropped cheap enough to compete with gas lighting. C. What was the trigger for energy transitions and what parallel can we draw to the modern energy transition that we need? R. First people used candles, gas lighting came in in early 1800's which involved the infrastructure of pipes and was originally available to the wealthier populations. 1860's introduced kerosene which was able to compete and was much cheaper to candles. Gas for the rich and oil for the poor was the way things were for decades till electricity came around. Electricity became a competitor for gas at which point gas companies became alert and started providing the poor population with gas to capture a greater market. Companies in this case invested in piping infrastructure and charged consumers later for gas. Electricity therefore was subdued by market forces and took over 6 decades to compete with gas lighting and in the 1930's we saw the explosion of electricity provided lighting. C. What were the infrastructure support structures to make this transition happen? R. It was very much led by industry and which we are partly anticipating today. But it is important to note that the state played the role as an observer and as a regulator for energy pricing etc. There are more lessons to draw from that regulation aspect than suggesting that Government's encouraged a certain technology or energy source. C. What are the key differences between the modern day transition and past energy transitions? R. We are currently concerned about environmental pollution and climate change. We are now looking at the public paying a premium for a public good i.e. improvement in environmental quality and climate stabilisation and there is a market failure here. Unlike previous transitions where people adopted new sources of energy for better energy services for private benefit as opposed to public good. Ultimately we are seeking Governments to create the incentives for a valuation of that environment quality and climate stabilisation through regulation and influence prices. C. How do you factor the use of information in energy transitions? R. I think information can be helpful. Make people more aware, smart technologies help improve efficiency but I suspect that will allo...

The films of truly outstanding director Spike Lee take a special niche in American cinema. More than that, they especially enrich so-called Black cinema. Lee’s oeuvre includes a great number of films. To mention just some of them: She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), Love & Basketball (2000), Bamboozled (2000), Red Hook Summer (2012), finally, his recently released Chi-Raq (2015). This podcast is presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova a Doctoral Candidate in American Studies at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. Lee’s works have received a lot of acclaim from their audience as well as from film critics due to the issues raised by the director and the way these problems are formulated and presented to us. African American director Spike Lee manages to present to America racial problems the country has wallowed in in the most authentic and explicit way. Houston A. Baker, Jr., comments: “Lee’s first films are low-budget, minor masterpieces of cultural undercover work. They find the sleeping or silenced subject and deftly awaken him or her to consciousness of currents that run deep and signify expensively in Black America” (166). The scholar continues, shrewdly pinpointing the peculiarity of Spike Lee’s cinema: “Now, it is not that Lee’s films are devastatingly original, telling us always things we do not know. What is striking about his work is that it is, in fact, so thoroughly grounded in what we all know, but refuse to acknowledge, speak, regret, or change” (167, author’s emphasis). Dan Flory contends that the main goal of Lee’s works is “to make the experience of racism understandable to white audience members who ‘cross over’ and view his films” (40). In this respect, one can even talk about particular types of characters or images created by this director, like, for example, “‘sympathetic racists,’” defined as “[white] characters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts”; or “unsympathetic black characters with whom many audience members might feel little or nothing in common” (40-41). At the same time, Baker singles out another aim that Lee seeks to fulfill in his films: “His [Lee’s] mission is freedom – that monumental and elusive ‘it’ that Black folks have always realized they gotta have” (175). Spike Lee’s new film, Chi-Raq, however, stands out of the long row of Lee’s previous works due to the problems raised as well as the projected urgency of doing something about these issues. The director starts his film reporting shocking details about the death rate in one of America’s largest cities – Chicago. While in its most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has lost 2,349 and 4,424 Americans respectively, during the same period, 7, 356 people were murdered in Chicago, which, shockingly displays that it has been safer for Americans in war-torn countries in the Middle East rather than in this American city. Thus, calling Chicago Chi-Raq, Lee claims that it is America’s second Iraq. The film later criticizes U.S. foreign and domestic policy that arguably led to the criminal activity in Chicago. For example, when a priest, being overwhelmed by the numbers and age of the recently killed people, exclaims: “Where was their freedom? Where was their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” He overtly refers to America’s mission in the Middle East to liberate the oppressed; however, he implicitly argues that while fighting far away, the United States does not notice the growing problems on its own territory, among its own citizens, specifically among “young black males”. The issue is later touched upon again by one of the heroines (Angela Bassett) who openly blames America for what is happening in Chicago: “The U.S. spends money on the Iraqi people – to train them, govern them, help them build an economy.

Science Fiction can often help us understand realpolitik in the real world. Is Tyrian Lannister a realist or a liberal? What would Mr. Spock have to say about rational choice theory? And what did Stanley Kubrick read to create Dr. Strangelove? Stephen Dyson is the author of Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica(Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) and associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. In this interview with Heath Brown (originally made for the New Books Network) he takes on these questions with an enjoyable exploration for how the classic theories of International Relations have been played on our television and movie screens. Heath Brown: Even those of us who don’t study International Relations know about the classic divide between ‘realists’ and ‘liberals’.  You look to the fictional world of Game of Thrones to explain this.  So, who are the realists and who are the liberals in the world of Westeros? SD:  I think the whole first season of Game of Thrones is an excellent illustration of this whole liberal/realist divide.  The liberals are the idealists, of course, people who believe politics should be about values and ethics, and human nature is fundamentally good, and the way you promote peace in the world – and peace is achievable – is that you act in accordance with your values and you trust other people.  I think they were represented, especially in the first season, and later, by the Starks in Game of Thrones, the Guardians of the North.  People like Ned Stark, an extremely stubborn individual, very moralistic, someone who always wanted to do the right thing, but who was (as many liberals are, as idealists are) pretty bad at the down and dirty work of politics.  In Game of Thrones Ned is doing well in the North, he is among his own people, and he understands its politics and is able to make a virtue of his idealism.  Then the king, his old friend, comes to see him and says, ‘I need you in the South’.  But Southern politics is very different, the realm of Real Politique, the realm of the Stark’s great antagonists the Lanisters, who represent the realist point of view. Ned, very unwisely, follows his friend down south.  It is the right thing to do, he gave his word to his friend, he owes duty to his friend, the king, and he meets a sticky end in the south because he is out manoevered by realists. HB: And we can say, for those who haven’t watched the show….. SD: ……yes, spoiler alert….. HB: that you haven’t yet been spoiled!  You write in the book about Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Gallactica, but not about Star wars - so no Star Wars spoilers, either! One of the central concerns of scholars in lots of fields is the extent to which rationality is an abstract idea, or something that really drives decision making.  Trekkies have their own ways to express this debate…..how does Star Trek use Mr Sock’s rationality? SD: Mr Spock is probably the greatest fictional representative of what is, in academic circles, in danger of being the pretty boring and bloodless theory of rational choice.  When you try to explain it, eyes glaze over but if you can dramatise it in the figure of someone like Mr Spock you can keep them interested.  Spock, on Star Trek, was a Vulcan, someone committed to making decisions from a logical standpoint calculating the costs and benefits.  The greatest example was in the movie The Wrath of Khan, my favourite movie.  Again, spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it, Spock applies his utilitarianism, his rationality throughout the movie to help his friend Kirk (the embodiment of feeling and emotion) – Spock is cool and Kirk is hot – and when they work together they can be really successful.  And they ARE successful.  They beat Kirk’s nemesis, Khan, and it is Spock’s rationality and Kirk’s emotion that work together, but at a huge cost!

‘Lock them up and throw away the key!’ is something that is often heard.  But does locking someone up for committing a crime really work to punish an individual? What about having them come back into society a changed person, asks presenter and producer Lee Millam in this podcast. Prisons, why do we send people there?  Does it work?  Should it work?  This was the subject of a recent lecture at Gresham College in the City of London.  It is one lecture from a series on Law and Lawyers at Gresham College, presented by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC.  He explains why we lock up criminals….. Geoffrey Nice:  …..for a range of reasons, many of them not fully articulated.  You could look back and say thata there are some coherent lines of justification – deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation (those are the standard ones).  But does it really explain our attitude towards imprisonment.  I rather doubt it. Not only are people complex, but our reactions to people are complex too.  Take those who, on some objective calculation, would be less culpable but get more opprobrium and heavier sentences than those who are in one sense guiltier but get lesser sentences.  The most obvious examples are those who really cannot control themselves because of their upbringing - such as sex offenders who have themselves been formed by childhood, have been victims of sex offences and may become sex offenders themselves. They draw the maximum opprobrium from society, and not the understanding that they themselves are victims. So we are complicated in the way we respond to crime. There is no great political dividend in rehabilitating people, at least there doesn’t seem to be in our country. Interestingly there are changes around the world. Norway is rather leading the way.  Its prisons are so shockingly liberal that people from America and England can’t probably recognise them as prisons at all!  Their purpose is to enable people to rejoin society.  And these prisons have a recidivist rate of 20% whereas the US and England have recidivism rates of about 70%.  Why aren’t we spending more time looking at that/ Lee Millam: If other countries are more successful at rehabilitating prisoners, then there must be lessons to learn from other systems in other parts of the world.  But there are some crimes where prison is the only answer. GN: There are some people who are so dangerous they do have to be restricted so that is one justifiable expense – though whether it has to be done in this way, given modern technology, is another issue. I think it is really a desire to punish people that justifies what we do.  I may not be on that wing of public opinion, but what is clear is that you have to carry public opinion with youon an issue like this.  Change from where we are to something more humane, or rather more liberal (as it would now be described) is going to take some time. It is also going to be more difficult to do that in a society where so many of the other structures, in their own way, almost require punishment and offenders.  The rich need the poor, the good need the bad, the apparently lawful need criminals. You could argue, in a rather nasty way, we don’t actually want to live in a crime free society.  So if you’ve got an aggressively capitalist society with great divergence of wealth, it is probably inevitable that you are going to want to punish, or will punish, those who offend the implied values of such a society.  Maybe as long as you’ve got a society that , since the 1960s has believed in all aspects of sexual liberalism, it is in some curious and perverse way particularly hard on those who transgress what is left of the law on sexual control.  Mary Whitehouse may well be shown, in due course, to have been right.  More and more people may be thinking it wasn’t quite so good to create a sexually liberal society, one of the consequences of which is that people had to do more thing to temper it.

This is a podcast about music.  A podcast about Nocturne.  A podcast of a Nocturne inspired by the BBC's nightly Shipping Forecast.  Produced and presented by composer, Arthur Keegan-Bole A K-B:  Oh dear, I crashed the pips. In the world of radio, crashing the pips - that is, talking over the six sine tone beeps that mark the hour on BBC radio - is a serious faux pas. So, please, let me start again. Hello you are listening to Nocturne, a podcast about music, its relationship with the night. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer. The music you’re hearing is a piece I finished at the start of this year. It is called Nocturne and Nocturne is what this podcast is about. In it you will hear about the music’s materials and meaning, especially the role of radio extracts in the sound-world of the music which includes the BBC pips and, everyone’s favourite sedative, the Shipping Forecast. The piece was written and premiered in America so we will also discover how a non-U.K. audience without knowledge of these niche British sounds might understand this music. Let’s start by thinking about what a nocturne is. This is musicologist David Fay… David Fay:  As you can probably tell from the words relationship with the English adjective ‘nocturnal’ a nocturne is a piece of music suggestive of the night. Although the Italian form of the word ‘notturno’ had been used frequently in the 18th Century as a name for pieces that were designed to be performed at night, it was Irishman John Field who first coined the French word ‘nocturne’ to describe a particular musical genre in a set of piano pieces published in 1815. Thereafter the Nocturne became a popular genre of composition for romantic pianist-composers most famously Frederick Chopin whose twenty-one Nocturnes remain the pinnacle of the genre. Field’s Nocturnes and many of those composed by others subsequently are lyrical in nature, with the pianist’s right hand playing a graceful, singing melody over broken chords in the left. The relationship with the night in these piano Nocturnes is usually in their evocation of a tranquil atmosphere which can be associated with the nocturnal ambience of a calm, still night… presumably in the countryside. However, despite the quietly lyrical, pianistic connotations of the word ‘Nocturne’ it has been used as a title for pieces written for other instruments and ensembles particularly from the Twentieth Century onwards. Some of these explore other aspects of the nocturnal environment - whether the natural sounds we hear at night or the world of dreams, or, perhaps, nightmares to which we succumb nightly. A K-B  I hope my piece simply has the sound of a nocturne - unspecifically yet unequivocally conjuring night-time. However, we all like a story to guide us, and a narrative of some kind helps the composing process a great deal. So, let me ask you… have you ever fallen asleep to the sound of the Shipping Forecast? Between 12:40 and 1:00am a magical series of sounds are broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This is Closedown. A tune called Sailing By kicks it off, this is what is known in the trade as an ‘identifier’ so those trying to tune in can easily find the station, it is also a ‘buffer’ filling time so that the Shipping Forecast (which follows) starts exactly the scheduled time. I’ve always wondered why they use Ronald Binge’s light orchestral tune. Would it not be clearer to continually repeat the name of the station? Perhaps, but that is certainly not good radio. So, to an extent at least it’s an aesthetic choice. For a long time I struggled to sleep, from time-to-time I still do but I can always count on this bit of radio to help me drift. It is about drifting between one state and another all sorts of strange, ‘in-between’ landscapes and seascapes. This is the narrative behind the first half of this music. It is a strange lullaby, drifting between the real and the unconscious, lingering in a penumbral state.

Translational medicine is collaborative science that translates work in the laboratory into practical medical treatments - it is sometimes termed 'bench to bedside medicine'. Because it often includes trials on animals it can be controversial.  So can animal testing be justified? Scarlett MccGwire put on her wellies and met up with Francis Henson to find out. Dr Frances Henson:  I'm Frances Henson, Research Fellow in the Division of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Addensbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and I am also Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge Veterinary School. What I do is work in the lab with basic scientists to generate treatments for various orthopedic diseases.  I am interested in lame animals and lame people and we use a large animal model - a sheep - to try our experiments before we take them on to use them either to treat human patients or veterinary, animal, patients. Our current research is looking at a novel bio-material.  I have colleagues in Newcastle who have made a brand new bio material, they have put two special materials together and they are going to be using those to treat large surface defects in joints - knee joints in people - that will also be applicable to our veterinary species. Scarlett MccGwire:  You are trialing this on sheep? FH:  Yes, we are.  What we do with these osteochondral plugs, as we call them, is we take our sheep, make little holes in the joints and we fill those holes with our novel treatmentt to prove that treatment is both safe and really offers a significant improvement in the expected outcome.  If you didn't put the scaffold in, the joints wouldn't heal. SM: What are you finding out so far? FH: We are finding that these new products are very good at treating joint surface defects.  Within our group, we have developed a novel way of looking at this.  We don't want these animals to suffer pain, so we monitor their pain, immediately after surgery and through the experiment because we do data analysis, recording the amount of weight bearing on the leg that has been operated on.  Interestingly we can show no difference in the animals we have operated on, compared to animals that have not been operated on, very quickly - within a matter of hours after the surgery.  The surgical procedures are very benign and the osteochondral plugs really allow the joints to heal very well. SM: What does this mean for humans?  Will knee replacement surgery be much easier?  Is this the end of the pain of arthritis? FH: Let's take these in two parts.  First, the early osteoarthritis.  Arthritis occurs when you have a defect in the joint, the joint is very ppor at healing itself and at the current time, if we have pain in our joint, the doctor give us painkillers and we limp around for a while until it is too painful and you go for a joint replacement (which is not a cure, it is amputation and putting in a prosthesis. The joint surface defects we want to cure with the scaffold are big lesions in joint, due to sports injuries and trauma in road traffic accidents. These cause big damage in the joint and currently there is no treatment for that.  Left untreated it will go to arthritis.  We have the ambitious hope that using these scaffolds we can stop osteoarthritis before it starts, cure the joint and get it back to a healthy environment. SM: We are using sheep to make incredible progress for humans? FH: We are using our sheep to make incredible progress, I hope, in curing joint disease in both humans and animals.  I am a veterinary surgeon, I spend half my time in the lab, but the other half in my surgery with animals, particularly horses and the treatments we are developing are all part of a 'one health' agenda. If we can treat joint defects in man, we can also treat them in animals.  So, while the sheep is being used, it is for the benefit of animals in veterinary medicine and in human medicin...