Celebrate on the last night of the Conference with a ‘Wimbledon Tennis’ theme. Your hosts ‘The Two Chris’s’ will review the week’s events both official and unofficial, humorous and serious, so any snippets of gossip you know who to inform! A chance to say farewell to new colleagues and friends.

The Natural History Museum is pleased to host the WCSJ gala evening, offering science journalists an opportunity to see the Museum after hours.

Delegates will have the chance to unwind in the Museum’s iconic central hall, visit After Darwin: Contemporary expressions, as well as get a sneak preview of our new Darwin Centre, ahead of it opening in September.

Relax at our first evening party, discuss the themes of the opening day of the Conference with new friends and colleagues and make plans for the week to come. Guest speaker(s) to be announced.

Enjoy a traditional English Tea whilst meeting journalists from around the world. The UK’s Science Minister, Lord Drayson, will host this opening event and Pallab Ghosh, President of the WFSJ, will officially open the Conference with some inspirational thoughts for the week ahead.

This pre-conference reception will be held exclusively for journalist delegates of the conference, and for those involved in skills building workshops on Monday 29th June and the morning of Tuesday 30th June.

The relationship between the media and the academic science community is seldom easy.

The media, academics argue, do not engage with ‘proper’ science and when they do, they over-simplify and distort the research. Academics, retort the media, cannot communicate clearly, do not understand how the media works, and are unwilling to engage with journalists in real time.

The truth lies somewhere in-between.

What scientific, ethical and legal issues will we be reporting and how will science journalists work with non-scientific colleagues on these subjects?

Multimedia files

Security, conflict and justice are linked. Security operates at multiple levels, from the individual to the global and covers a wide range of issues. The Research Councils’ Global Uncertainties programme will integrate and support multidisciplinary research across the science and engineering base on conflict, crime, terrorism, environmental stress, and global poverty to:

Since the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS some 25 years ago, a vaccine to prevent people from infection with this formidable virus remains elusive. One of the main reasons is HIV itself. The virus is able to outsmart and cripple the defense systems that ought to prevent an infection, and has developed some stellar tactics to do so. The challenge for scientists: how to develop a vaccine that outsmarts the virus and stimulates a better-than-natural immune response. What have scientists learned about HIV? Can it be beaten at all?

Multimedia files

Audio clip: 

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Lunch Session 06.MP3

A rare opportunity for member associations of the WFSJ to meet and talk about their challenges and successes.

Organized by the Canadian Science Writers Association (CSWA) and the Association des communicateurs scientifiques du Québec (ACS) thanks to support from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Multimedia files