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Beth McKillop, Deputy Director, V&A;: The purpose of the Henry Cole lecture is to celebrate the legacy of the Museum’s founding director and to explore his legacy and its implications for museums, culture and society today. We are delighted to present the 2010 Henry Cole lecture in association with the 350th anniversary celebrations of the Royal Society. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is the academy of science for the UK and the Commonwealth. Over the course of its history it has played a leading role in the development of modern science. I have great pleasure in welcoming this evening’s speaker, Professor Uta Frith. Professor Frith was born in Germany and studied history of art at the Universität of Saarlandes in Saarbrücken. In 1964 she moved to London where she trained in experimental and clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry. She specialised in child development and its disorders, in particular autism and dyslexia. She’s been affiliated with UCL since 1968 and, with funding from the MRC, has worked as an independent research scientist. In 1996 she became one of the founding members of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and is now Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Professor Frith is currently interested in the impact of cognitive neuroscience in education and chairs a working group at the Royal Society that is preparing a report on this topic. Professor Frith has received many honours including degrees from the universities of Gotenburg, St Andrews, Palermo, Nottingham and York. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society and at the British Academy she currently chairs the Psychology Section. At the Royal Society she chairs the Library Committee. She is also a Trustee of the Sir John Soane Museum. Please join me in welcoming Professor Uta Frith. Professor Uta Frith Well, I think I do need to explain why it is me who is giving this third Henry Cole lecture. The lecture this year also celebrates the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society and there are connections between the V&A; and the Royal Society, in fact all over the place. Even when you just came this evening you might have noticed the little exhibit about chocolate. Did you notice it, just coming in here? Well, Sir Hans Sloane was, of course, a Fellow of the Royal Society and he brought a particular recipe to make – to add milk to chocolate – to make milk chocolate. So I’m very pleased that all of this is just casually mentioned here, but there are the British Galleries in the museum where there is quite a section around the time of 1660 which was the year when the Royal Society was founded. In fact, it was November in that year, so we have now November and in fact this is me here, pointing to a bust of Charles II who gave the Royal Charter to the Royal Society. So I’m here as a neuroscientist who might say something that’s interesting to museum education. What I’m really trying to do today is to answer a question that was put to me by Morna Hinton, the new Director of the Sackler Centre. She just said – I’m anticipating here – what goes on in the mind of people who visit the museum? Now first of all, I want to show you a really famous Fellow of the Royal Society. This is Albert Einstein, probably as you do not know him. He is in the Royal Society portrait collection and perhaps also you may not know that there is a marvellous collection of portraits and all sorts of other artefacts and wonderful archives that is always used for continuous exhibitions at the Royal Society and you can look at the website and come and have a look round. You may also perhaps not know that there is a Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. But the real reason why I choose this particular Fellow of the Royal Society to start this lecture with is because he has said this marvellous sentence. ‘I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.’ Now isn’t that a nice thing to say and perhaps quite a few of us, if it wasn’t presumptuous, would say ‘Yes, I feel like that as well’. Now there are connections, way back, between science and art at the V&A; when it was still called the South Kensington Museum. And I thought I should point out that the original entrance to this museum – and you can see this wonderful building just if you go into the garden – just look at the door, you will see a relief portraying science and another one portraying art. And it is science AND art, not, as we often see it, science versus art. And this was because the museum, the South Kensington Museum, was interested in both science and art and it took some time until the museums were split into science, across the road, and the art and design collections here. So this is the door and you can see these panels where indeed we see these nice pairs with twins – we have chemistry twinned with architecture – Da

• published: 14 Jul 2011
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