Nota Bene

Drucilla Cornell to visit UCT this August

This week UCT welcomes to the campus eminent professor of law, women's studies and political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Drucilla Cornell. Cornell will visit from August 8 to 11 and will present a seminar in the philosophy department on August 11 at 13h30. The topic, Who Bears the Right to Die?, deals with constitutional jurisprudence and draws on the work of philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger and Levinas. Cornell was professor at the Cardozo Law School from 1989 to 1994 and played a key role in organising the conferences on deconstruction and the possibility of justice with the late Jacques Derrida, held at the Cardozo Law School in 1989, 1990 and 1993. She is an AD Whitehouse fellow of Cornell University and Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 2003 she delivered the prestigious Ryle Lectures at Trent University in Canada. She is the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of the Limit, At the Heart of Freedom and Defending Ideals. In addition, Cornell is a produced playwright and productions of her plays The Dream Cure and Background Interference, have been performed in New York and Los Angeles. Her dramatisation of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake runs every year in Dublin.

Second oath-taking ceremony

The second oath-taking ceremony for genetic counsellors in Africa took place in the health sciences faculty recently, and included students Christina Rybak from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, Malcolm Collins, a genetic counselling intern (and also a postdoctoral student from the Sports Science Institute), Awelani Mutshembele, a first-year MSc genetic counselling student and Kelly Loggenberg, another first-year MSc genetic counselling student. Mutshembele is the first black woman to register for this course. Rybak is registered for a master of science in genetic counselling in the United States, a similar course to the one presented at UCT. The Division of Human Genetics established the master's course in genetic counselling last year, enrolling two full-time and two part-time students. The first oath-taking ceremony was held in 2004 in what was believed to have been a first for South Africa. This year's ceremony was also attended by Professors David Dent, Raj Ramesar, Jacquie Greenberg and Lafras Steyn.

Scholefield takes award

Janine Scholefield won the best presentation by a young scientist at the recent South African Society for Human Genetics congress in Muldersdrift. Scholefield is an MSc student of Associate Professor Jacquie Greenberg, and is working on a project looking at the origin of the Huntingdon Disease gene in South Africa.