Rupert Beale worked with Artangel on Longplayer Assembly – joining 23 other participants in a non-stop 12-hour conversation relay presented live online on 26 September 2020, marking the twentieth anniversary of Longplayer.
Beale is a Clinician Scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, and an Honorary Consultant at The Royal Free Hospital. His laboratory works on influenza and SARS-CoV-2, especially focussing on cellular responses to infection by these viruses. As part of the Crick Covid Consortium, he helped set up diagnostics for Covid-19 in March when there was a critical shortage of tests. This demonstrated it was possible in a few weeks for academic institutes to set up a clinical testing pipeline to the same standard as public health and NHS laboratories.
He has written for the London Review of Books, the Spectator and the Guardian on the science, policy and ethics of the pandemic.