Alle afleveringen van The Life Scientific – pagina 8 van 8

Colin Pillinger

27 december 2011 · 28 min

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On this day eight years ago, planetary scientist Colin Pillinger was still hopeful that the Beagle 2 Lander that he had spent years designing, building and publicising (with the help of Blur and Damien Hirst) might yet be found somewhere on the surface of Mars. But, as more time passed, it became clear that The Beagle 2 Lander would be forever lost in space. Jim al -Khalili talks to Colin Pillinger about studying moon rock and meteorites from Mars whilst running a successful dairy farm; broken space dreams and why, even if a space project fails, useful scientific lessons can still be learned. Lees meer

Lord Robert Winston

20 december 2011 · 26 min

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He's the man on the telly with the big moustache, famous for A Child of Our Time, The Human Body and Making Babies but Robert Winston is also a well respected scientist. He played a pioneering role in developing IVF technology, and has brought life to many hundreds of couples who had given up hope of ever having a baby . Jim Al-Khalili talks to Robert Winston about why he quit the theatre to become a medic, creating human life in a test tube and why he disagrees with Richard Dawkins about The God Delusion. Lees meer

Producer: Anna Buckley.

Tim Hunt

13 december 2011 · 27 min

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Tim Hunt is an experimental wizard, a flamboyant thinker and a stickler for scientific procedure. Lees meer

As a young man at Cambridge in the sixties, he heard Francis Crick (of DNA fame) ask questions "that made him sound rather stupid"; broke into workshops and performed experiments through the night with Bach and Pink Floyd playing at top volume.

True eureka moments are, in fact, quite rare in science but, at the age of 39, Tim Hunt performed an experiment on sea urchin eggs that changed both his life and our understanding of every living thing. He had very little idea what exactly it all meant but had a strong sense that he was onto something important. And he was.

Back in the early eighties, it just wasn't obvious that all life worked in the same way. But what Tim Hunt showed was that the process by which cells divide (and therefore live and grow) is the same in all living things and that this process is controlled by a protein that appears and disappears in the most startling fashion.

It was a most unexpected result that many believed was rather insignificant but Hunt pursued it. Accused by some of "wild speculation based on faulty logic": that same logic led to him winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2001.

In 1990, he joined Cancer Research. In theory his discovery should shed light on why cancerous cells multiply out of control but, in reality, he says, progress in cancer research has been disappointingly slow. In fact, he says all the money that poured into cancer research did more to help us tackle HIV than it did to help cure the big C.

Producer: Anna Buckley.

Uta Frith

6 december 2011 · 28 min

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Professor Uta Frith came from a grey post war Germany to Britain in the swinging sixties, when research into conditions such as autism and dyslexia was in its infancy. At the time many people thought there was no such thing as dyslexia and that autism was a result of cold distant parenting, but Professor Frith was convinced that the explanation for these enigmatic conditions lay in the brain. And she set out to prove this through a series of elegant experiments. Together with her students Francesca Happe and Simon Baron Cohen she developed the idea that people with autism find it hard to understand the intentions of others, known as theory of mind. Neuro-imaging experiments carried out with her husband Professor Chris Frith, meant she was able to show that there is a region in the brain which is linked to dyslexia. Uta Frith talks about her pioneering work that has changed how we view these brain disorders with Jim Al Khalili.
Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald. Lees meer

John Sulston

29 november 2011 · 28 min

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Jim al-Khalili talks to biologist John Sulston about sequencing the genome first of a worm and then of man. Lees meer

When, as a young man, John Sulston first decided to sequence the DNA of a worm, many of his fellow scientists thought he was wasting his time. It took twenty years of painstaking research but it paid off handsomely. Sulston's research on this humble worm led to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the modern age - the sequencing of the human genome. Jim al -Khalili talks to Sulston about the highs and lows of doing genetic research; fighting to keep scientific findings in the public domain; protecting human health against corporate wealth; and having his DNA portrait done.

Producer: Anna Buckley.

Nicky Clayton

22 november 2011 · 28 min

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Nicky Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition at Cambridge University. Her work challenges how we think of intelligence and she says that birds' brains developed independently from humans or apes. Members of the corvid family, such as crows and jays appear to plan for the future and predict other birds behaviour in her elegant experiments.One experiment she has designed was inspired by Aesop's fable of the hungry crow. Lees meer

Her work raises questions about the understanding of animal behaviour, including whether, as humans, we can ever interpret the actions of other species accurately.
But she says her research with birds and other animals can help illuminate young children's activities and how their brains develop.

Nicky Clayton is scientist in residence at the Rambert Dance Company and her latest collaboration with Mark Baldwin, the artistic director, is "Seven for a secret, never to be told" which takes concepts from childhood behaviour and reinterprets them choreographically.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Molly Stevens

15 november 2011 · 28 min

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Jim al-Khalili talks to a scientist who grows human bones in a test tube, Molly Stevens. Lees meer

Molly Stevens does geeky hard core science but her main aim is to help people. Twenty years ago, nobody thought it was possible to make human body parts in the laboratory, but today scientists are trying to create almost every bit of the body. Professor Molly Stevens grows bones. Towards the end of her PHD, a chance encounter with the founding father of tissue engineering and an image of a little boy with chronic liver failure, convinced her that this was what she wanted to do. Ten years on, she runs a highly successful lab at Imperial College London and has been photographed by Vogue.

Producer: Anna Buckley.

Colin Blakemore

8 november 2011 · 28 min

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Colin Blakemore is a neuroscientist who nearly became an artist. He specialised in vision and the development of the brain, and pioneered the idea that the brain has the ability to change even in adulthood contrary to the popular view at the time. Lees meer

Professor Blakemore, the youngest ever Reith Lecturer, is an influential science communicator and is committed to raising the profile of brain research. Because of his work he was targeted by animal rights campaigners for over a decade, but rather than keeping a low profile as advised, he decided to work with the activists and explain his point of view about the need for animal testing in medical research. He was appointed head of the Medical Research Council in 2003 but threatened to resign shortly after when he was refused a knighthood, because of his defence of animal research. He has been equally outspoken on many issues including classification of drugs and GM foods. His current areas of research include how the brain develops which has implications for many conditions including autism and schizophrenia.

He talks to Jim Al-Khalili about why he's not been afraid to stand up to his critics.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Sir Michael Marmot

1 november 2011 · 28 min

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When Professor Sir Michael Marmot was a junior doctor he decided that medicine was failed prevention.
To really understand disease you have to look at the society people live in. His major scientific discovery came from following the health of British civil servants over many years. The Whitehall studies, as they're known, challenged the myth about executive stress and instead revealed that, far from being 'tough at the top', it was in fact much tougher for those lower down the pecking order. This wasn't just a matter of rich or poor, or even social class. What Marmot showed was the lower your status at work, the shorter your lifespan. Mortality rates were three times higher for those at the bottom than for those at the top. The unpleasant truth is that your boss will live longer than you. Lees meer

What's more, this social gradient of health, or what he calls Status Syndrome, isn't confined to civil servants or to the UK but is a global phenomenon. In conversation with Jim Al-Khalili Michael Marmot reveals what inspires and motivates his work.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Steven Pinker

18 oktober 2011 · 28 min

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Cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, has been dubbed "science's agent provocateur". Lees meer

Pinker studies how the mind works. Presenter Jim al-Khalili wants to find out how his mind works. Pinker replies: "as a psychologist you look at your own life as data and say geez that's what I'm like".

From verbs to violence, he's author of several books that many say are mind-changing.

He's now something of a science superstar, but his early experiments with electrodes on rats didn't quite go according to plan: "I realised then that that kind of science required a level of meticulousness that I just didn't have". So instead of studying neuroscience, he became a cognitive psychologist.

Now perhaps better known for his writing than his science, he shot to fame with his book The Language Instinct, based on his early studies of how children tackle irregular verbs, for example saying "holded" not held, and "digged" instead of dug. These cute sounding mistakes are proof that three year olds are grammatical geniuses, he says. And he met his wife Rebecca Goldstein over an irregular verb.

Later, Pinker set the cat among the social science pigeons by stressing the importance of nature rather than nurture: an assertion that led to some bitter arguments with, among others, the psychologist Oliver James.

He readily admits that genes aren't everything: he's decided not to have children and says "if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake". But he says, "there's a phobia of genetics that it's time to get over". Our failure to even think about genetic influences has given us a false impression of the amount of influence parents have over their children: it's skewed the science.

Parents like to think that they mould and shape their children in certain ways but Pinker argues, as long as children are not abused, parenting makes little difference to how they turn out at 18.

His most recent book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' is about the decline in global violence from 8500 …

Paul Nurse

11 oktober 2011 · 28 min

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Their work is changing the world we live in, but what do we really know about their lives beyond the lab? Lees meer

Each week on The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at Surrey University, invites a leading scientist to tell us about their life and work. He wants to get under their skin and into their minds; to find out what first inspired them towards their field of research and what motivates them to keep going when the evidence seems to be stacking up against their theories. And he'll ask what their ideas and discoveries will do for us.

He'll talk to Nobel laureates as well as the next generation of beautiful minds, finding out what inspired them to do science in the first place and what motivates them to keep going. The programme will also feature short drop-ins from fellow scientists. Some will comment on our guest's early career, the implications of their discoveries, or offer alternative perspectives.

In this first programme, Jim talks to geneticist Paul Nurse, arguably the most powerful scientist in Britain today. Nurse's interest in science was sparked by the early days of the space race, when one night as a boy, he chased Sputnik down the road in his pyjamas, in a vain attempt to catch up with the Russian satellite as it passed overhead.

Nurse, a Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society is now firmly part of the science establishment but his upbringing and early academic life was far from conventional. Brought up by working class parents, in North London, Nurse struggled at first to even get accepted by any University. According to one of his tutors (who we'll hear from in the programme) Nurse didn't exactly shine as an undergraduate, either. But these experiences taught him to be self reliant, determined and not afraid of failure.

It was a attitude that paid off. In 2001, Nurse shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on how cells divide, a process which is not only fundamental to all living things but ha…