Public talk: Tuberculosis: from Victorian fashion to citizen science

Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion and Disease
During the first half of the 19th century, there was a tubercular moment in which cultural ideas about beauty increasingly intertwined with the disease process of tuberculosis to allow for the ravages of the illness to be presented in an aesthetically pleasing light. As a result, there was a dynamic interaction between fashion and disease, one that defined beauty practices and fashion in Britain during the period.

Tackling the TB pandemic by reading its DNA
Dr Tim Walker will explain how the study of TB genetics is changing the way we diagnose and treat the disease, and how it might help control the spread of TB. But can it help eliminate the disease completely?

Enlisting citizen scientists to help classify M. tuberculosis strains
BashTheBug.net is a Citizen Science project that invites everyone to help us measure how well a large number of M. tuberculosis strains grow when exposed to different concentrations of 14 different antibiotics. It was launched on the Zooniverse platform in April 2017 and since then over 10,000 people have done over 750,000 classifications helping us build an accurate and consistent picture of how genetic variation confers resistance to different antibiotics.