BY Annabel Darby

Professor Uhlin is the Director of Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), and is also a professor at the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University. He was elected by the Partnership’s Steering Committee at the eighth annual Nordic EMBL Partnership meeting, hosted by the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) in Helsinki this September.

On his new appointment as speaker, Professor Uhlin said: “It is both an honour and a pleasure for me. Now in its tenth year, the four Nordic partners include more than 500 scientists and staff that are joined in an effort to foster scientific excellence and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations, as well as to share state-of-the-art research infrastructures, in a great partnership with EMBL.

“As our first speaker, Kjetil Taskén has represented the partnership indoom, and the ship owners could pocket the profits if the ships went down. These ships were known as coffin ships and Lord Shaftesbury, Plimsoll’s great friend and social reformer, called this “one of the most terrible, the most diabolical systems that ever desolated mankind’.

Apparently some 500 sailors were drowned unnecessarily every year, and in 1871 a Board of Trade report said that 856 ships went down within 10 miles of the British coast in conditions that were no worse than a strong breeze. Clearly ships were setting sail that should never have set sail and a cycle of avarice and neglect was on the increase.

Matters were further complicated by the fact that if sailors who signed on for a ship, and when they saw it thought it