Dreams and dilemmas - Confronting the big issues
Global warming: will we sink or swim?
Wednesday 7 June, 7.30pm
 Stephen Tindale, Executive Director of Greenpeace UK, is one of our most
prominent ecological campaigners. A government adviser-turned- activist
and former Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy, Tindale is
a powerful advocate for individual commitment to global issues. With the
benefit of some twenty years' personal research into climate change
issues, he presents an urgent case for action, at personal and political
levels, to limit the damage modern living has wreaked on the planet.
Tortured souls: who really cares about the victims?
Wednesday 14 June, 7.30pm
Helen Bamber, OBE, is an internationally renowned human rights activist
and expert in the field of trauma and rehabilitation. In a career
spanning half a century, Bamber has worked in situations ranging from
the relief of Belsen to the provision of mental health care in Gaza. In
1987 she established the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of
Torture, the only organisation in Britain dedicated solely to providing
medical treatment and psychological and practical help to survivors of
torture and their families. As world attention is focused once more on
the issues of internment and rendition, Helen Bamber offers her unique
perspective on a problem that governments prefer to ignore.
Dying with dignity: is assisted suicide desirable?
Wednesday 21 June, 7.30pm
Baroness Warnock of Weeke, DBE, is one of our most influential
philosophers and policy-makers. A former mistress of Girton College,
Cambridge, Warnock chaired the government inquiry that framed modern
legislation on human embryology and revolutionised the provision of
'special needs' education. She has written extensively on ethical
issues, and her latest, controversial publication, 'A Good Life: The
Ethics of Life and Death' demands a compassionate view of euthanasia,
raising questions – what does living mean? what is the value of life? –
which challenge us all.
Changing the world: is the pen still mightier than the sword?
Wednesday 28 June, 7.30pm
Award-winning novelist and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg is one
of Britain's best known cultural commentators. A Labour peer and
President of the National Campaign for the Arts, Lord Bragg of Wigton
is a passionate 'populariser of ideas', broadening public horizons
through programmes such as LWT's 'The South Bank Show' and Radio 4's
'In Our Time'. His 1999 novel, 'The Soldiers' Tale', won the WH Smith
Literary Award, while his non-fiction work includes 'The Adventure of
English' and 'On Giant's Shoulders', a history of science. His most
recent book and television series 'Twelve Books That Changed The World'
encompasses everything from 'the Origin of Species' to the 'First Rule
Book of the Football Association' and argues that books, far from being
the preserve of the 'bookish', are, in themselves, epoch-making events.
Scientific dreams, moral dilemmas: who draws the line?
Tuesday 11th July, 7.30pm
Professor Lord Robert Winston is an internationally renowned fertility
expert and founder of the first NHS In Vitro Fertilisation programme.
Currently Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College School of
Medicine and Head of Reproductive Medicine at the Hammersmith Hospital,
he combines pioneering research in the fields of human reproduction and
organ transplants with a high-profile media career, presenting award-winning TV programmes such as 'The Human Body', 'The Superhuman' and,
most recently, 'The Story of God'. On a parliamentary level, Professor
Winston has chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and
Technology and comments widely on medical, scientific and ethical
issues.
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