Cork 2005: Giving his contributors a "dying breath" brief, Dr William Reville of UCC admits that his Last Lecture series was designed with Dr Johnson's maxim in mind: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
With the last of the Last Lectures to be given by evolutionary paleobiologist Prof Simon Conway Morris on December 14th, Reville has the satisfaction of knowing that participants in the series accepted the brief in the spirit of famous last words - or last words at least.
Organised on behalf of the science faculty as part of UCC's programme for Cork 2005, the 17 lectures raised hackles in abundance, none more so than that given by Dr Edward Walsh, chairman of the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation and formerly founding president of the University of Limerick. Moving some way beyond the guidelines chosen for a discussion of innovative manufacturing, Dr Walsh instead developed his theme of social developments in the Ireland of the last 20 years. The resulting uproar mainly concerned his reflections on the sociological implications of single parenthood. The debate on this issue was joined by supporters and critics before the lecture (the gist of which was published in advance) was even delivered.
"He took the idea of the series fully on board," says Dr Reville. "He said he got bored with his actual theme so he broadened it to consider sociological issues which were of concern to him.There were a good few people in the audience that night who were ready to fillet him, but he's very skilled, like an actor getting across unpalatable facts, and they ended up applauding him."
When Dr Reville talks about capacity audiences, it has to be remembered that the largest lecture theatre in the Boole complex at UCC holds no more than 400 people. That number and more turned up for Dr Walsh, while another full house was recorded for the physicist, Prof John Polkinghorne, of Cambridge. His talk on the question of whether science has supplanted religion filled the room to overflowing despite Dr Reville's own contention that formal allegiance to religion is in a state of collapse in Ireland. As a practising Catholic himself - a position which some colleagues, as well as some of the readers of his weekly column in this newspaper, find contradictory - he enjoys ethical controversy, and was happy to stoke the coals further with the inclusion of Prof David McConnell, of the Smurfit Institute at TCD, who spoke on Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution from Cosmos to Culture.
For his contributors and subjects, Dr Reville drew on the science and medical departments of UCC, with the addition of speakers from other Irish institutions and from abroad. Nor was the programme constrained in terms of discipline: germs and genes, cattle and culture, the science of financial markets and the medical aspects of the assassination of John F Kennedy all featured.
But the most dramatic event was probably the lecture delivered by Prof Patricia Casey. Her paper's querying of the existence of mental illness met with such a robust response from a member of the audience that the lecture theatre had to be vacated temporarily, with readmission carefully monitored by security staff.
