By Zara Talbot, Year 10 Journalist Leader

Pandemic: Engineering Death! (Da Vinci Programme)

I was very intrigued by the Da Vinci session last week as, to be honest, I wasn’t really sure it was going to be something I would be interested in, however, I was pleasantly surprised.

Dr Pearce made the Pandemic session interactive, academic and most importantly, fun.

It was about how to take over the world and become the richest and most powerful super villain by poisoning everybody!

“How?” you ask.

We discussed the issue in our groups and decided we would supply the only drug that could help someone who had been poisoned by the disease and therefore we would become very rich! However, at the same time, we had to be careful not to kill anyone, or else that would mean less money for us! In the session we looked at which were the best diseases to spread that did not have an obvious cause. For example, malaria is caused by mosquitoes and therefore people would figure that out and kill the mosquitoes, so our plan for global domination would be ruined.

Thankfully it was reassuringly difficult to find a perfect disease that would strike the balance between poisoning people but not kill them off, that could be controlled and for which we could create a unique, perfect drug!

Overall, this was a fun experience and I am looking forward to the next one!