Happy Wallace Year 2013 - Welcome to Wallace100!

Museum Wallace News

• The 8th of this month sees Wallace's 190th birthday and on the 24 January the Museum will launch its Wallace100 events programme at an invitation-only evening function. During the event the Wallace Correspondence Project's digital archive of Wallace's correspondence, Wallace Letters Online, will be officially launched by comedian and natural historian Bill Bailey.
  
  Bill will also unveil a magnificent oil painting of Wallace which will hang on the wall to the right of the Darwin statue on the main stairs of the Museum's Central Hall. This portrait was actually donated to the Museum in 1923 to commemorate Wallace's 100th birthday, and it hung in that exact location for 50 years until it was put into storage.
• The first public Wallace100 event of the year will take place on the 25 January. It will be a Nature Live talk by myself and Caroline Catchpole about the Museum's unrivalled archive of Wallace's manuscripts.
• The next of the Museum's Wallace100 events will be a public lecture by the well-known geneticist and science writer Steve Jones on the 7 February. His talk is entitled "Wallace and the Joy of Sects: Rewriting the Bible as a scientific text"  and, although it is free, you will need to book a ticket to attend. Steve's talk is the first of 10 monthly talks in the Museum's Wallace100 Lecture Series.
• The campaign to raise funds for a life-size bronze statue of Wallace for the Museum unfortunately has to close at the end of this month. So far about £19,000 has been contributed by about 45 generous donors, which is enough to commission a twice-life-size portrait bust of Wallace *IF* the campaign fails to reach its £50,000 target. So, please consider donating (any sum large or small) and entering the Free Prize Draw

Other News

• Richard Dawkins suggests we should celebrate Wallace's birth in the same way that we celebrate Christmas.
• The Biological Journal of the Linnean Society has a FREE 'virtual' issue dedicated to Wallace - very appropriate given that the seminal paper by Darwin and Wallace on evolution by natural selection was published by the Society in 1858.

And Finally ...

• Please don't forget to check the Wallace100 Events Diary, which lists all the Wallace-related events worldwide which we know about. If you would like your event to be added then please send the details of it to me.