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In 1967, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Ronald Reagan became governor of California and, towards the end of the Summer of Love, Colin Harris started work at the Bodleian Library.

Fifty years later, now superintendent of the Bodleian’s Special Collections Reading Rooms, Mr Harris has received a prestigious honorary degree from the University of Oxford.

At the ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre on 18 July, he was praised for his ”truly dedicated service to all types of library reader – from senior academics to masters' students, professional writers to amateur historians – whom he has advised with expertise and unfailing patience."

Mr Harris joined the Bodleian Library in 1967. He worked in the Duke Humfrey's Reading Room from 1968 and in the Modern Papers Reading Room in the New Bodleian from 1980.

Today, he holds the role of Superintendent of the Special Collections Reading Rooms in the Weston Library within the Bodleian Libraries.

Mr Harris, who will retire at the end of September, says the Library has been through some dramatic changes during his tenure.

‘We have gone from card index, handwritten and typewritten catalogues available only in the Library to online catalogues available worldwide on the Internet; from a typing pool serving all staff to everyone having a PC and able to type their own letters and now emails,’ he says.

‘Our readership has become much more international – for many years we were visited in great numbers from the US, Canada and Western Europe, but now researchers travel from all parts, especially from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, China and Japan.

‘We have also got an impressive social media presence and we promote wide-ranging activities such as lectures, exhibitions on diverse subjects show-casing the Library’s great wealth of collections and research opportunities such as fellowships that are available in the Bodleian Libraries.’

But he says the quality of service provided by the Bodleian has been continuous throughout his distinguished career there.

‘Throughout, the Library has gone to great lengths to further research, responding to the particular needs of the researcher and providing a very personal service’.

‘I am minded of the readers’ typing room used by researchers such as Denis Mack Smith, who died recently, and of the nascent inter-library loan system of the 1970s so efficiently established by my late wife Susan (then Susan James), which was used to great advantage by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin.’

In what was a landmark ruling, the highest court in the UK, yesterday declared employment tribunal fees to be ‘inconsistent to the access to justice.’

 The decision represents a humiliating defeat for the government, who have been forced to scrap the controversial fee system.

The Supreme Court voted in favour of the trade union Unison, which argued that fees of up to £1,200 were preventing workers - particularly people on lower incomes, from getting justice.

Associate Professor Abi Adams, from the Oxford Department of Economics, and Associate Professor Jeremias Prassl, from the Oxford Faculty of Law, welcome the gravity of the ruling and what it could mean for workers who make future claims.  In research published earlier this year, the two argued that the 2013 Order introducing Employment Tribunal Fees was a ‘clear violation’ of long-established UK and EU law. 

Access to Justice is the bedrock of the Rule of Law. Today’s unanimous Supreme Court judgement vindicates one of the most fundamental principles of our Constitution, dating back to Magna Carta: everyone has the right to be heard before the Courts.

 Everyone? Well, at least until 2013. Nearly four years ago, Chris Grayling (one of the most disastrous Lord Chancellors in recent history) introduced fees of up to £1,200 for employment tribunal claims. Even relatively straightforward claims (e.g. for unpaid wages, median value just under £600) cost £390 to bring – with no guarantee of recovery, even for successful claimants.

 The impact was swift and brutal: within months, claims had dropped by nearly 80%. And it was entirely predictable: when we crunched the government’s own numbers, it became clear that 35-50% of those who won their case risked losing out financially. Most workers with low-value claims simply gave up.

 Bad news for workers, of course – but also for employers. Without enforcement, employment rights are meaningless, as Matthew Taylor’s recent review of modern working practices acknowledged.  Rogue employers can get away with undercutting those who comply with the law. Both the High Court and the Court of Appeal, however, upheld the government’s fees in a series of challenges brought by Unison, the trade union.

 The Supreme Court’s powerful judgement could not have disagreed more strongly: the Fees Order, the Justices unanimously agreed, ‘effectively prevents access to justice, and is therefore unlawful.’ Their conclusion was built both on fundamental constitutional theory, ‘elementary economics’, and ‘plain common sense’.

 Constitutional theory first: ‘It may be helpful’ Lord Reed politely suggested, ‘to begin by briefly explaining the importance of the rule of law’. There’s little to add to his powerful analysis:

 Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade.

 Whilst the Lord Chancellor’s aims of deterring vexatious litigants and raising money for the Ministry of Justice may well be legitimate in principle, in practice they had achieved something different altogether: given the financial risks even when successful, ‘no sensible person will pursue the claim’.

 There was more elementary economics and plain common sense to come, demolishing the Lord Chancellor’s insistence that ‘the higher the fee, the more effective it is’ and that no public benefits flowed from the justice system, amongst others.

 Where does this leave us? In the short term, things will get messy (and expensive) for the Ministry of Justice: in 2013, the Lord Chancellor undertook to repay all fees illegally levied, and there may well be further arguments about extending time limits for claimants who were deterred from bringing claims in the first place. Going forward, our rational choice model furthermore suggests that similar challenges could be brought to fees introduced in other areas of the civil justice system.

 For now, it’s time to celebrate: employment tribunals have already begun to scrap the fees, and claimants across the country will once more have access to the ‘easily accessible, speedy, informal and inexpensive’ system first set up nearly 50 years ago.

‘An unenforceable right or claim’, the late Lord Bingham reminded us, ‘is a thing of little value to anyone.’ The Supreme Court did well to heed his words, and restore the Rule of Law.

This article was first published on the Huffington Post

About the authors

 Abi Adams (@abicadams) is an Associate Professors in Economics at the University of Oxford, a research Fellow at the Institute of Fiscal Studies, and a Fellow of New College. She specialises in labour and behavioural economics with an empirical bent.

 Jeremias Prassl (@JeremiasPrassl) is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He writes on UK and European Employment Law, with a particular interest in the future of work in the gig economy.

Earlier today, the parents of terminally ill baby Charlie Gard ended their legal challenge for him to be taken to the US for experimental treatment.

His mother, Connie Yates, said that “to let our beautiful little Charlie go” is “the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do”.

Professor Julian Savulescu is director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He explores about the ethical lessons we can take from this tragic tale:

"At some point in all of our lives, we have to let go. One can only admire Connie Yates and Chris Gard who fought so hard for Charlie.

However, we should continue to question the original decision, and the way in which these decisions are made. Even if it is too late for Charlie now, we should improve how we make these decisions for the future.

Back in January, there was an option for a trial of treatment that had some chance of success, a world leading doctor willing and able to provide it, and, by April, the funds had been raised to achieve it without public funds.

There were also the means to control and minimise Charlie's suffering. I believe that a limited trial of treatment was in Charlie’s interests back then, given the only alternative for him was death.

Doctors opposed this because of the low chance of success combined with fears that the extra time in life support would be too painful.

Four months of the legal process has left us with no trial of treatment, and no chance now for Charlie. Yet Charlie had to go through all the suffering (and more) of being kept alive on life support.

No-one wanted this outcome. No-one believes this outcome was in Charlie’s best interests. There has got to be a better process. It has been traumatic for all the doctors, who have genuinely had Charlie's interests at heart, and Connie and Chris, but most of all Charlie.

It has also raised other issues.

Charlie would have been the first to receive this treatment and some have said it risked Charlie being used as a guinea pig. Medicine won't progress without experiment and innovation.

Over the years processes have been developed to protect patients and ensure the best scientific results. Double blind placebo controlled trials are the gold standard. I have argued that, for rare and deadly diseases with no existing therapies, it is in the patient's interests to access potential treatments earlier and without placebo, provided they have a reasonable scientific basis.

There is little to lose and much to gain for this group of patients, and the protections that are in place can cause more harm than good for them.

A second issue is that social media has given power to the people. Over the five court hearings, Trump and the Pope, and thousands of others have weighed in. We have had to have these discussions about how and who should decide on what makes life worth living and what kinds of chances are worth taking.

The question of who should decide is legitimate. Some people have wrongly concluded that these decisions should only be up to parents, but at the same time it is right that doctors, scientific experts and the Courts should not be considered almighty, beyond question or account.

How much should the decision–making be left to parents? While most parents want to do the best for their children, parents can abuse their children, or can be radically mistaken. We do need oversight to ensure children are protected.

If Connie Yates and Chris Gard had requested ongoing intensive care for a herbal treatment with zero scientific evidence or rationale, that would be abuse. But they weren't. They were asking for a treatment with a clear scientific rationale and some relevant evidence, with the support of a relevantly qualified medical expert.

There have to be protections. But doctors should not activate these legal mechanisms, or stop parents travelling for medical care for their child, unless there is disagreement between the parents, or they are going to an unsafe place, or they are very confident the parents' choice is unreasonable.

That requires doctors to think ethically, as well as having all the scientific evidence. The problem is not who has the power, it is how it is used and the need for robust, and humble, ethical deliberation.

Some have seen this as a further attack on ‘experts’, a current hot topic. But this case was more about disputed values than disputed facts. What has been absent, and is absent from society, is a sound secular ethical approach to these life and death issues.

I haven't seen any substantial ethical discussion of the deep ethical issues in this case like what makes a life worth living or what kinds of chance are worth taking.

Debate has been shut down in monosyllabic ethical argument: treatment is futile or it is not futile. And we have again closed our eyes to the elephant in the room: resources and justice. The NHS may not be able to afford such experimental treatments for everyone who needs them.

We should have had a debate about resources and justice. These are difficult questions but ones that must be addressed openly. It goes beyond accepting the expertise of someone else.

This has been a clash of medicine, science, politics, ethics and religion. Yes, there is always a clash of values because many people hold different values and weigh facts differently. What matters is that people's values are reasonable and they don't seek to impose them on others, or other families.

It would have been very reasonable for Charlie's parents to choose to withdraw treatment; it was also very reasonable to choose a small chance of some improvement. I wouldn't choose experimental treatment if I were Charlie's parents but that does not mean they are wrong or unreasonable to do so.

We need a bit of humility about our moral views about the good life, and about how and when to live. In Charlie's case, his parents have been accused of prioritising their own interests over Charlie's in choosing to take their child for experimental treatment that might give him a chance to live.

The courts have intervened and stopped them. However it is a reasonable view of Charlie’s interests that his parents held. I hope that there will be a review of the basis of these decisions, and how they are decided in the light of this case."

Marieke Oudelaar from the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine explains how complex folding structures formed by DNA enable genetically identical cells to perform different functions.

Our bodies are composed of trillions of cells, each with its own job. Cells in our stomach help digest our food, while cells in our eyes detect light, and our immune cells kill off bugs. To be able to perform these specific jobs, every cell needs a different set of tools, which are formed by the collection of proteins that a cell produces. The instructions for these proteins are written in the approximately 20,000 genes in our DNA.

Despite all these different functions and the need for different tools, all our cells contain the exact same DNA sequence. But one central question remains unanswered – how does a cell know which combination of the 20,000 genes it should activate to produce its specific toolkit?

The answer to this question may be found in the pieces of DNA that lie between our protein-producing genes. Although our cells contain a lot of DNA, only a small part of this is actually composed of genes. We don’t really understand the function of most of this other sequence, but we do know that some of it has a function in regulating the activity of genes. An important class of such regulatory DNA sequences are the enhancers, which act as switches that can turn genes on in the cells where they are required.

However, we still don’t understand how these enhancers know which genes should be activated in which cells. It is becoming clear that the way DNA is folded inside the cell is a crucial factor, as enhancers need to be able to interact physically with genes in order to activate them. It is important to realise that our cells contain an enormous amount of DNA – approximately two meters! – which is compacted in a very complex structure to allow it to fit into our tiny cells. The long strings of DNA are folded into domains, which cluster together to form larger domains, creating an intricate hierarchical structure. This domain organisation prevents DNA from tangling together like it would if it were an unwound ball of wool, and allows specific domains to be unwound and used when they are needed.

Researchers have identified key proteins that appear to define and help organise this domain structure. One such protein is called CTCF, which sticks to a specific sequence of DNA that is frequently found at the boundaries of these domains. To explore the function of these CTCF boundaries in more detail and to investigate what role they may play in connecting enhancers to the right genes, our team studied the domain that contains the α-globin genes, which produce the haemoglobin that our red blood cells use to circulate oxygen in our bodies.

Firstly, as expected from CTCF’s role in defining boundaries, we showed that CTCF boundaries help organise the α-globin genes into a specific domain structure within red blood cells. This allows the enhancers to physically interact with and switch on the α-globin genes in this specific cell type. We then used the gene editing technology of CRISPR/Cas9 to snip out the DNA sequences that normally bind CTCF, and found that the boundaries in these edited cells become blurred and the domain loses its specific shape. The α-globin enhancers now not only activate the α-globin genes, but cross the domain boundaries and switch on genes in the neighbouring domain.

This study provides new insights into the contribution of CTCF in helping define these domain boundaries to help organise our DNA and restrict the regulation of gene activity within the cells where it is needed. This is an important finding that could explain the misregulation of gene activity that contributes to many diseases. For example in cancer, mutations of these boundary sequences in our DNA could lead to inappropriate activation of the genes that drive tumour growth.

The full study, ‘Tissue-specific CTCF–cohesin-mediated chromatin architecture delimits enhancer interactions and function in vivo’, can be read in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

The 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen has been marked by her face being put on the new £10 note.

But fewer people know that another prominent writer died in July 1817 – Germaine de Staël, who was arguably the most famous woman in Europe at the time.

Catriona Seth, Oxford University’s Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, looks at the contrasting lives of the two women:

'Germaine de Staël travelled widely and her work had been translated into several languages. She was the only daughter of wealthy Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who became finance minister to Louis XVI, and was brought up in the stimulating environment of Parisian society.

She published major treatises on the influence of passions on individuals and nations, on literature and its relationship to society, not to mention on Germany (1813). She wrote on Marie Antoinette’s trial, on peace, on translation, on suicide.

Her novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne or Italy (1807) were bestsellers throughout Europe. She was also a commentator on, and historian of, the French Revolution in texts which only appeared after her death. Most periodicals felt that anything she penned, fact or fiction, political or philosophical, was worthy of a mention – whether to praise or to condemn it.

Unlike Staël’s father, George Austen encouraged his daughter Jane’s literary pursuits: he bought her notebooks for her early stories, gave her a mahogany writing desk and attempted (unsuccessfully) to get her work into print in 1797.

Jane Austen’s first published book, Sense and Sensibility, “a new novel by a lady”, which came out in 1811, bore no author’s name on its title page.

The same would go for the other novels published in her lifetime – all sold well and brought a welcome income but, to the outsider, nothing could connect them with the discreet woman who, through her richer brother’s generosity, lived with her mother and sister in a cottage on his estate.

Staël’s death in Paris was widely reported. The Monthly Magazine, before commenting at length on the funeral arrangements, opened a “Further Notice of Madame de Staël” with the following assertion:

To speak of the literary celebrity of Madame de Staël, of the elevated talent which distinguished her, of all the talent which placed her among the first writers of the age, would be to speak of all things known to all France and to all Europe … To speak of her generous opinions, her love for liberty, her confidence in the powers of intelligences and of morality, confidence which honours the soul which experiences it, would be, perhaps, in the midst of still agitated parties, to provoke ill-disposed impressions.

Staël had been reviled for her political ideas, caricatured by the gutter press for her unconventional looks and lifestyle, exiled by several regimes, and treated by Napoleon as a personal enemy, to the extent that it was said that the emperor recognised three powers in Europe: England, Russia and Madame de Staël.

When the unmarried “Miss Jane Austen” died in Winchester four days after Staël, the announcement her family (probably) wrote recalled she was the daughter of a clergyman and acknowledged that she was the author of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It added:

Her manners were most gentle, her affections ardent, her candour was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.

To this day, in the only authenticated portrait of her – a sketch by her sister Cassandra – she looks the part in her simple cap and dress, so unlike Staël’s flamboyant turban and scarlet gown.

More than “Miss Austen”, she is “Jane Austen”, someone to whom we feel we can relate. Her admirers, readers but also cinephiles who have enjoyed the adaptations, come from all the corners of the earth, are known as “Janeites”.

Many of Staël’s works have long been out of print or available only in pricey scholarly editions. She is recognised as one of the forerunners of 19th-century liberalism but does not have the common appeal and widespread recognition that time has brought to Austen.

The seeds for the “fickle fortunes” – to borrow the title of the current exhibition at Chawton House (the “Great House” lived in by her brother Edward Austen-Knight which is now home to a library of early women’s writing) – of the international literary superstardom of Austen and the waning of Staël’s fame are partly present in these obituaries.

Austen’s family cleverly crafted a reputation for demureness and devotion to both God and family as a way of deflecting from the sometimes ambiguous contemporary attitude towards women authors.

Her life was presented as quintessentially English and uneventful and her character as modest and self-effacing – in many ways the opposite of Staël’s.

In a late addition to his biographical sketch about his sister, 15 years after the death of both women, Henry Austen claimed that when invited to a party Staël was due to attend, Austen “immediately declined”.

This probably imaginary anecdote illustrates an essential reason for Austen’s success: yes, she is a great writer, but so too is Staël. Austen’s existence threatened nobody.

Staël’s championing of republican ideals, consideration of the role of emotion in politics and use of fiction to promote geopolitical and societal reflections meant her life could be discussed and her works forgotten.

Considering them jointly can help us question what shapes our canon of great writers.'

A full version of the article appears in The Conversation.