About the Tanner Lecture – ‘What does history have to do with prophecy? Past and Future in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism’ by Professor David Nirenberg, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, USA: Our political vocabulary, even at its most secular, is filled with the sense that history has a direction, that its “progress” reveals truths (“the judgement of history,” “the right side of history,” “the arc of history”). That conviction has animated movements of diverse ideological stripes—liberal, Marxist, fascist and many others—and continues to do so today. Why has so much of humanity come to share a prophetic sense of history, and at what cost? Those are the questions of this lecture, which will begin with the twentieth century and its World Wars, and then seek connections with ancient and medieval debates between Christians, Muslims, and Jews over the meaning of history. About the Ashby Lecture – ‘Creating Paradigm Shifts in Medical Diagnostics’ by Professor Y. M. Dennis Lo, Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China: The invasive sampling of tissues within the body is an established approach in many branches of medicine. Examples include amniocentesis for prenatal testing, and biopsy of tumour tissues in oncology. In this lecture, a non-invasive approach, so-called “liquid biopsy”, will be discussed. My journey in this field started with development of a non-invasive approach for obtaining fetal DNA for prenatal testing. This approach was made possible through my discovery of the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood in 1997. This discovery has now been translated into a non-invasive platform for testing fetal chromosomal disorders that have now been used by over 100 million pregnant women around the world. I have also developed a similar approach for the detection, monitoring and prognostication of multiple types of cancer. Liquid biopsy thus provides a non-invasive window into our health.