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PODCAST

The Life Scientific

Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work, finding out what inspires and motivates them and asking what their discoveries might do for us in the future

science personal journals

All Episodes

28:01

Ewan Birney

The Life Scientific ·

2013/06/11

Ewan Birney talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his work on deciphering the human genome and the race to come up with the right number of genes that make us human. Ewan explains why he started a sweepstake to get fellow scientists to estimate the final number and why numbers were wildly wrong. He explains his role in the recent controversy over claims about the demise of 'Junk' DNA. He also talks about artificial DNA and whether it could be the future for information storage? With a colleague, he has

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27:47

Athene Donald

The Life Scientific ·

2013/06/04

When she started her career, physicist Dame Athene Donald took a decision that shocked her colleagues. She wanted to apply the strict rules of physics to the messy, complicated world of biology. Since then, she has taken the field of biological physics out of an unfashionable rut in the 1980s, and helped to turn into one of the most exciting and promising areas in science today. As Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University, she studies the microscopic

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28:01

Linda Partridge

The Life Scientific ·

2013/05/28

Will we ever be able to escape the diseases of old age?That's the aim of today's guest, Prof Dame Linda Partridge who studies the genetics of ageing. From fruit flies to nematode worms, she uses simple organisms to unmask the secret processes that cause our bodies to deteriorate as we get older.But her route into science was far from normal - growing up in a Catholic convent boarding school, the girls were encouraged to be good housewives rather than diligent scientists. However, the lack of science

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27:58

Lord John Krebs

The Life Scientific ·

2013/05/21

As a scientist, John Krebs made his name discovering that the brains of birds that store seeds are different from those that don't. But he gave up his successful research career and job as Professor of Zoology at Oxford University to move into science policy and management. After five years as Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, John Krebs became the first Chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he was embroiled in controversial questions such as is organic food better

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27:58

Sanjeev Gupta

The Life Scientific ·

2013/05/14

Geologist Sanjeev Gupta talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his love of exploring exotic terrains, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the red deserts of Mars. His research has taken him across the earth and now into space, working as a Long Term Planner on NASA's current Mars Curiosity Mission.But Sanjeev Gupta's big discovery lay at the bottom of the English Channel. Unearthing a 'wacky' theory from the 1980s, Sanjeev set out to prove that a series of megafloods caused Britain to separate from

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28:08

Nancy Rothwell

The Life Scientific ·

2013/05/07

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell is not only one of the UK's leading brain scientists and physiologists; for the last three years Nancy Rothwell has also run the country's largest university - as President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester. When Nancy Rothwell is not making decisions about the university's �800 million annual budget and 50,000 students and staff, she oversees a laboratory of researchers developing and trialling an experimental treatment to prevent death and disability

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27:32

Sue Ion

The Life Scientific ·

2013/02/26

Jim Al-Khalili talks to the former technical director of British Nuclear Fuels, Dame Sue Ion, about a lifetime of working in the nuclear industry. When Sue got her first job at a nuclear fuel fabrication plant in Preston, nuclear power was generally seen as force for good but, during the dark decades post Chernobyl, it was a hard sell. Still, Sue continued to push for investment and innovation in the industry and in 2006 persuaded Tony Blair to change his mind about nuclear power, insisting that if

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27:42

Alan Watson

The Life Scientific ·

2013/02/19

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Professor Alan Watson from the University of Leeds who has spent 40 years trying to unravel a mystery at the frontier of physics. Where do cosmic rays, subatomic particles with the highest known energies in the entire Universe, come from? And which violent astronomical events are producing these hugely energetic jets of particles that travel for light years to reach us? As many as a million of them pass through us every night as we sleep, the equivalent of having 2 chest x

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27:43

Valerie Beral

The Life Scientific ·

2013/02/05

Jim Al-Khalili talks to breast cancer pioneer, Professor Valerie Beral director of the cancer epidemiology unit in Oxford about her Million Women study and why she thinks a so-called 'vaccine' should be developed to prevent breast cancer. Jim finds out why the brilliant mathematician who became female Australia junior chess champion as a teenager and who got a first class degree in medicine decided she was unhappy with the uncertainties of diagnosis as a doctor, and turned her back on clinical

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27:36

Noel Sharkey

The Life Scientific ·

2013/01/29

Robots probably won't take over the world, but they probably will be given ever greater responsibility. Already, robots care for the elderly in Japan, and drones have dropped bombs on Afghanistan. Professor Noel Sharkey fell in love with artificial intelligence in the 1980s, celebrated when he programmed his first robot to move in a straight line down the corridor and , for many years, judged robot wars on TV. Now, he thinks AI is a dangerous dream. Jim al-Khalili hears how Noel left school at 15 to

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27:40

Annette Karmiloff-Smith

The Life Scientific ·

2013/01/21

Annette Karmiloff-Smith, from the Birkbeck Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development in London talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her Life Scientific. Starting out as a simultaneous interpreter for the United Nations she soon decided that not being allowed to express any thoughts of her own wasn't for her. After a chance encounter with Jean Piaget, one of the most renowned psychologists of all time, she decided to pursue psychology and over forty years later she is a world expert in brain development

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27:39

Prof Robert Mair

The Life Scientific ·

2013/01/15

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Robert Mair, professor of Civil engineering at Cambridge University about his life as an engineer in academia and industry and his expertise on finding innovative solutions to the problems of building tunnels under already congested cities.He talks about his innovative technique of 'compensation grouting' which prevented Big Ben from tilting and even cracking and coming away from the Houses of Parliament during Jubilee line extension. Crossrail is one of the biggest

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27:54

Amoret Whitaker

The Life Scientific ·

2013/01/08

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Amoret Whitaker, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Her intricate understanding of the life cycles of the flies, beetles and the other insects' which feed on decomposing bodies means she is regularly called by the Police to the scene of a crime or a murder investigation. There she collects and analyses any insect evidence to help them pin point the most likely time of death. In some instances, this can be accurate to within hours.She is just one of only

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27:10

John Gurdon

The Life Scientific ·

2012/12/18

Sir John Gurdon talks to Jim al-Khalili about how coming bottom of the class in science was no barrier to winning this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. We're familiar with Dolly the Sheep but many people find the idea of cloning humans rather disturbing. It seems to cut to the core of who we are; but, scientifically speaking, we are getting closer to a time when cloning people might be possible. John Gurdon gives it fifty years. After a famously bad school report for science, he won

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28:00

Jared Diamond

The Life Scientific ·

2012/12/04

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Jared Diamond about how his passion for the birds of Papua New Guinea overtook his medical interest in the gall bladder, and led him to undertake a scientific study of global history. Science polymath and celebrated author, Jared Diamond has tackled some of the big questions about humanity: what is it that makes us uniquely human not just a third species of chimpanzee; and why do some societies thrive and others struggle to survive, or collapse? Once a Professor of

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27:52

Monica Grady

The Life Scientific ·

2012/10/16

As the Curiosity rover ventures into previously unexplored territory on the surface of Mars and attempts to pick up and analyse rock samples for the first time, many hope that the NASA robot might find signs of life on the red planet. But, after so many false dawns and with such ambiguous evidence, how can we know for certain whether or not there was ever life on Mars? Jim al-Khalili and Monica Grady, Professor in Planetary Sciences at the Open University, discuss what life on Mars might look like;

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27:56

Hugh Montgomery

The Life Scientific ·

2012/10/09

Professor Hugh Montgomery is an intensive care physician and researcher at University College Hospital in London. His work has taken him to the Himalayas, where he and colleagues were studying the effect of oxygen uptake at high altitude. The findings were surprising and have implications for patients in intensive care. Jim al-Khalili talks to Hugh Montgomery about the gene for fitness and how mountaineers have influenced intensive care medicine.

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27:40

Sir Mark Walport

The Life Scientific ·

2012/10/02

Jim al-Khalili talks to the next chief scientific advisor to the government, Sir Mark Walport about how he thinks science can save the UK economy; how he plans to ensure that scientific evidence is taken seriously by an arts-dominated civil service and why he believes scientific research should be made available to everyone, free of charge. Sir Mark, who started his Life Scientific studying immune responses, has spent the last ten years in charge of one of the largest funders of medical research

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27:58

Sunetra Gupta

The Life Scientific ·

2012/09/25

Jim Al-Khalili meets Sunetra Gupta, a scientist and novelist. As a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology she studies infectious diseases such as flu and malaria and explains how a mathematical equation can be as beautiful as a Keats poem.

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27:56

David Nutt

The Life Scientific ·

2012/09/18

Professor David Nutt was sacked in 2009 as the government's chief drugs adviser after criticising its decision to reclassify cannabis. He is a psychiatrist and one of the country's leading experts on the effects of drugs on the brain. His latest research is investigating how psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, could be used to treat depression. He talks to Jim about his passion for science and his disputes with government over drug policy.

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351 results

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