Wellbeing In The 21st Century: An Enquiry Into The Nation's Health

June 06, London: Three FREE public events run by the Wellcome Trust are set to explore the nation's health through happiness, music and medicine. Members of the public will be able to join experts from the arts, sciences and humanities in exploring how contemporary notions of wellbeing affect how we think, feel and function.

Issues that will be tackled in these fascinating and intimate evenings include; What makes us happy? Why does music move us? How healthy can we be?

The events are being run as a foretaste to the opening of Wellcome Collection, a major new public venue from the Wellcome Trust opening in summer 2007. Wellcome Collection will explore the relationships between medicine, life and art in a contemporary and experimental way, enabling visitors to think afresh about wellbeing and human identity.

The three free events are held at the Soho Theatre, Dean Street, London.

Each event includes short talks, chaired discussion, open floor debate and an informal drinks reception. Tickets must be booked in advance and are not available on the door. Tickets can be booked via the Wellcome Collection website – www.wellcomecollection.org – or from the ticket hotline: 020 7611 8442 or via email: events@wellcome.ac.uk.


What Makes Us Happy?
Tuesday 11 July, Soho Theatre, Dean Street, London: 1830 - 2030
What is happiness and why is everyone talking about it? We are healthier and wealthier than ever before, and the rising trend isn't over. We have choices and opportunities, access to education and healthcare that previous generations fought to achieve. Yet crime, depression and alcoholism are on the rise: are we happy now?

What Makes Us Happy? Will seek to address whether happiness changes with age, circumstance and culture and what the future might hold for our wellbeing.

Speakers:

• Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind, explains what is happening in our heads as our emotions take charge and explores a future where new pharmacological innovations will allow us to directly manipulate the brain to induce feelings of wellbeing.
  
  
• Richard Schoch, Professor of the History of Culture at Queen Mary College, University of London, challenges Western models of happiness as they are currently evolving. He traces the philosophical routes to wellbeing in both East and West and explores the role of history in our future.
  
  
• Sebastian Saville, Director of the drugs charity Release analyses the social forms and beliefs that shape our contemporary identity. He asks why in the West these are beginning to break down and what part addiction plays in the human psyche.
  
  
• Chaired by Madeline Bunting,The Guardian

Exploring the Rhythms of Life
Wednesday, 19 July, Soho Theatre, Dean Street, London: 1830 - 2030
Music has and always will play a key part in self expression, but only now are scientists beginning to understand the part it also plays in our development. Its power to affect us is well known - it can hurt and heal, motivate and move, inspire and empower us. But we are only beginning to understand how, when and why.

Exploring the Rhythms of Life will combine science, psychology and live performance to reveal what happens when music meets the mind.

Speakers:

• Susan Hallam, editor of Psychology of Music and Head of School, Institute of Education explores the brain mechanisms involved in our response to music and traces their development through infancy and teenage years to old age, to discover the emotional and cognitive effects that may be the key to the power of music to move us.
  
  
• Ian Cross, Director, Centre for Science and Music, University of Cambridge develops this theme with findings from his groups' experimental investigations into music as a cultural and biological phenomenon. He will discuss how both humans and animals make sense of sound, how culture shapes our responses to it, and whether in part our health quite literally depends upon it.
  
  
• Paul Robertson, Professor of Music and Medicine at the Peninsular School, Plymouth and past leader of the Medici Quartet will give a live virtuoso performance to bring together the brain, culture, emotion and feeling and demonstrate what happens when music meets the mind.
  
  
• Chaired by Natalie Wheen, Classic FM.
  
  

Full Life, Long Life?
Wednesday, 26 July, Soho Theatre, Dean Street, London: 1830 - 2030
What part does medicine play in the future of the nation's health? Can genetics cure heart failure and biology guard against ageing? As new aspirations to lifestyle and longevity push medical demands, are we witnessing changing patterns in the relationship between medicine and culture that promise new visions of public health?

Speakers:

• Tom Kirkwood, Director, Institute for Ageing and Health, University of Newcastle. Faced with an unprecedented population boom in the over 60s and upwards trends in life expectancy in the UK, Tom Kirkwood will focus on the key challenges facing the relatively new field of biogerontology. How do we understand the ageing process itself, and can we cure it? Do the exciting new leads in medical science promise a longer lived and more independent old age?
  
  
• Nick Bostrom, Director, Oxford Future of Humanity Institute is a philosopher with a particular interest in bringing rational and rigorous argument to the science and ethics of human enhancement and the philosophy of 'progress'. With a background in physics, neuroscience, logic and artificial intelligence, he is a provocative analyst of contemporary culture and of the consequences of the choices we make.
  
  
• John Martin, Director, The Centre for Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine, UCL is one of the country's leading researchers in heart disease. He will discuss his work which focuses on the use of innovative gene and stem cell therapies to repair muscle and arterial damage in the heart.
  
  
• Chaired by Gabrielle Walker, science writer and presenter
  

Lisa Jamieson, Events Manager, Wellcome Collection, said: "Complex factors influence our health and happiness, yet we casually answer the question "How are you?" with barely a second thought. Using happiness, music and medicine, areas of life familiar to everyone, the three events provide a chance to pause and consider what it really takes to make us happy and keep us healthy. This series, with its mix of speakers from science, the arts and humanities, provides a taster to the exciting and illuminating talks and events we will hold at the new Wellcome Collection when it opens in 2007."

Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection, opening in summer 2007, explores the relationships between medicine, life and art in a contemporary and experimental way, enabling visitors to think afresh about wellbeing and human identity. The venue itself will comprise three galleries of permanent and temporary exhibitions, flexible events space, the Wellcome Library, conference facilities, café, bookshop and a members' club. The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL will also be housed in the building. The Wellcome Collection website, www.wellcomecollection.org.uk, goes live from 6 June 2006.

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Press Contacts:
Kallaway Ltd (Public Relations, Wellcome Collection)
Will Kallaway: 020 7221 7883 william.kallaway@kallaway.co.uk
Anna Cusden 020 7221 7883 anna.cusden@kallaway.co.uk