Pain, as we know, is highly personal. Some can cope with huge amounts, while others reel in agony over a seemingly minor injury. Though you might feel the stab of pain in your stubbed toe or sprained ankle, it is actually processed in the brain. That is where Irene Tracey, Nuffield Professor of Anaesthetic Science at Oxford University, has been focussing her attention. Known as the Queen of Pain, she has spent the past two decades unravelling the complexities of this puzzling sensation. She goes...
Apr 02, 2019•28 min
Physicist, Paul Davies is interested in some of the biggest questions that we can ask. What is life? How did the universe begin? How will it end? And are we alone? His research has been broad and far-reaching, covering quantum mechanics, cosmology and black holes. In the 1980s he described the so-called Bunch-Davies vacuum - the quantum vacuum that existed just fractions of a second after the big bang - when particles were popping in and out of existence and nothing was stable. As the chair of S...
Mar 26, 2019•29 min
Throughout the history of planet Earth, the element carbon has cycled between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere. This natural cycle has maintained the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and has allowed life to exist for billions of years. Corinne Le Quéré is a climate scientist who keeps track of where the carbon comes from and where it goes – all on a truly global scale. Corinne Le Quéré is the founder of the Global Carbon Budget, which each year reports on where carbon dioxi...
Mar 19, 2019•28 min
How insight with a stick and piece of string led to an engineering adventure taking in spacecraft, military guidance systems and the micro-mechanical devices we use every day in our computers and smartphones. Ken Gabriel now heads up a large non-profit engineering company, Draper, which cut its teeth building the guidance systems for the Apollo space missions, and is now involved in developing both driverless cars and drug production systems for personalised medicine. Ken himself has a career in...
Mar 13, 2019•28 min
When the first laser was built in 1960, it was an invention looking for an application. Science fiction found uses for these phenomenally powerful beams of light long before real world applications were developed. Think Star Wars light sabres and people being sliced in half. Today lasers are used for everything from hair removal to state of the art weapons. Working with her supervisor Gerard Mourou in the 1980s, the Canadian physicist, Donna Strickland found a way to make laser pulses that were ...
Mar 05, 2019•29 min
Whether it’s a news story or television drama, human violence appals and fascinates in equal measure. Yet few of us choose to dwell on what preoccupies the mind of a perpetrator for long. Professor Gwen Adshead, however, thinks about little else. As a Forensic Psychotherapist, she works with some of the most vilified and rejected members of society. They are the violent offenders who are detained in prisons and in secure NHS hospitals, like Broadmoor, whose actions have been linked to their ment...
Feb 26, 2019•28 min
In an astonishing story of a scientific discovery, Greg Winter tells Jim Al-Khalili how decades of curiosity-driven research led to a revolution in medicine. Forced to temporarily abandon his work in the lab when a road rage incident left him with a paralysed right arm, Greg Winter spent several months looking at the structure of proteins. Looking at the stunning computer graphics made the pain in his arm go away. It also led him to a Nobel Prize winning idea: to ‘humanise’ mouse antibodies. A v...
Feb 19, 2019•30 min
Sue Black left home and school when she was 16. Aged 25, she attended an access course to get the qualifications she needed to go to university to study computer science. It was a bit lonely being the only student in a mini- skirt surrounded by a sea of suits, but she came top of the class nonetheless. She signed up to do a PhD (not really knowing what a PhD was) and worked on the ripple effect in software. What happens when you change one bit of code? Does it mess up everything else? A lot of n...
Feb 12, 2019•28 min
In an ideal (quantum) world, Jim Al-Khalili would be interviewing himself about his life as a scientist but since the production team can’t access a parallel universe, Adam Rutherford is stepping in to ask Jim questions in front of an audience at The Royal Society. Jim and his family left Iraq in 1979, two weeks before Saddam Hussein came to power, abandoning most of their possessions. Having grown up listening to the BBC World Service, he had to drop his ts to fit in at school in Portsmouth whe...
Feb 05, 2019•36 min
Jim Al-Khalili talks to astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jocelyn Bell Burnell forged her own path through the male-dominated world of science - in the days when it was unusual enough for women to work, let alone make a discovery in astrophysics that was worthy of a Nobel Prize. As a 24-year old PhD student, Jocelyn spotted an anomaly on a graph buried within 100 feet of printed data from a radio telescope. Her curiosity about such a tiny detail led to one of the most important discoveries in 20t...
Dec 19, 2018•28 min
Clive Oppenheimer has, more than once, been threatened with guns (a Life Scientific first?). He's dodged and ducked lava bombs and he's risked instant death in scorching and explosive eruptions. He studies volcanoes; science that by necessity, requires his presence at the volcanic hotspots of the world. It was at the lip of a bubbling lava crater on one of the earth's most active volcanoes, Mount Erebus in Antarctica, that he met the film and documentary maker Werner Herzog. The two became frien...
Dec 11, 2018•29 min
Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been fascinated by space since she was a young child. When she was six years old she caught the bug when she saw a picture of an astronaut on the front of a book in her primary school library. As a teenager she built her own telescope. After studying physics and mechanical engineering, Maggie worked in industrial research before returning to her first love, astronomy, when she managed the building of an instrument on a giant telescope in Chile. Now, she spends her time p...
Dec 04, 2018•28 min
Alastair Hay, now Emeritus Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds, is a chemist who’s had a dual career as an academic researcher and an outspoken activist and campaigner. The common theme has been the application of his knowledge to how chemicals affect our lives, in the workplace and during conflicts. Alastair Hay is best known for his work to rid the world of chemical weapons, a concern about this horrific form of warfare that goes back to the use of Agent Orange in ...
Nov 27, 2018•37 min
How do you convince Formula One racing drivers that they are speeding round the race track at Le Mans when, in fact, they are sitting in a simulator in the McLaren offices in Woking? Apparently it’s all about getting the vibrations right. Racing drivers really do drive by the seat of their pants. They’re also highly attuned to the sound f the engine and instinctively associate different sounds with different speeds. When Caroline Hargrove started trying to build a driveable model of a Formula On...
Nov 20, 2018•28 min
When Michael Stratton was a young doctor he would diagnose cancer by studying tissue samples under a microscope. However, over the past 30 years he’s been advancing our understanding of this disease down at the level of the genes themselves, so that we are now able to read the DNA of a cancer. This had led to new diagnoses and treatments. Mike Stratton’s first foray into genetics culminated in the discovery of the BRCA 2, one of the main genes involved in hereditary breast cancer. Following this...
Nov 13, 2018•28 min
Suzanne O'Sullivan has been described as “a detective of the mind”. She’s a neurologist who helps some patients with the strangest of symptoms, from so-called ‘Alice in Wonderland’ seizures to those suffering from temporary blindness or paralysis, and that turn out to originate in their subconscious minds. By the time these people get to see Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan they’ll often have been to many specialists, undergone a range of tests and given a variety of diagnoses. Suzanne’s an expert on epile...
Nov 06, 2018•28 min
For all his success as a Supervet on TV and as a pioneering orthopedic surgeon, Noel Fitzpatrick insists that his life has been full of failures. He didn’t enjoy studying for his specialist vet exams and spent ten years working as an actor before setting up his veterinary practice, Fitzpatrick Referrals. Determined to offer animals access to medical treatments and facilities that are more commonly reserved for humans, he has pioneered several new surgical procedures for small animals, specialisi...
Oct 30, 2018•28 min
An ecologist who fell in love with computing, Jacqueline McGlade pioneered the use of satellites study the state of the global environment. Today thanks to programmes like Google Earth, we can see the surface of the earth in great detail. But when Jacqueline was a student, earth observation satellites were used for weather forecasting and not much else. Early in her career, she used satellite images to study fish populations, thinking it would be useful to know not only how many fish were in the...
Oct 23, 2018•28 min
Professor Rachel Mills is a marine geochemist who studies the sea floor and hydrothermal vents, where water erupts from the earth's crust at 360 degrees. The thick plumes emit many metals such as copper, gold, iron and rare earth minerals that are deposited on the sea bed. Rachel's career has taken her all over the world and 4km deep under the ocean in small submersibles. These journeys are exciting and terrifying as samples are taken to understand how the metals travel many thousands of miles. ...
Jun 19, 2018•28 min
Frank Close is a theoretical particle physicist and a pioneer of popular writing about physics. His first book aimed at a non-specialist audience, The Cosmic Onion, was published 35 years ago. His latest, Half Life, is the story of physicist and spy, Bruno Pontecorvo. Frank has also had a distinguished research career studying the fundamental structure of matter. It was during his PhD in the late 60s that quarks were discovered. These are the fundamental entities we now know make up particles su...
Jun 12, 2018•42 min
Traditional descriptions of the human immune system bristle with military analogies. There are "lines of defence" against "enemy invaders"; "border guards" at "strategic points. And when barriers are breached, there's "a call to arms". That's before you mention Natural Killer Cells. But Professor of Immunology and Public Engagement at the University of Manchester, Sheena Cruickshank, tells Jim that as well as the war-like descriptions, our immune system is now being understood in terms of its ca...
Jun 05, 2018•28 min
John Crawshaw Taylor is a prolific inventor who specialises in designing and manufacturing thermostatic controls. His ingenious integrated control system is found in in one billion electric kettles worldwide, enabling kettles to switch off automatically when the water boils, stopping the element from boiling dry and preventing plastic kettles from catching fire under a worst case scenario. 600 million of his safety controls for the small electric motors have been sold to date, and are used mainl...
May 29, 2018•28 min
Dr Catherine Hobaiter studies how apes communicate with each other. Although she's based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she spends a lot of her time in the forests of Uganda, at the Budongo Research Centre. There, she's endlessly fascinated by the behaviour of great apes. Cat Hobaiter tells Jim al-Khalili about the difficulties of carrying out research on chimps in the wild. It can take years to win the trust of the apes. She says that her approach is to adopt the attitude of a moo...
May 22, 2018•28 min
As a girl, Caroline Dean would watch the cherry trees in her childhood garden unfurl their pink and white blossom and wonder how it was that they all flowered at exactly the same time. She tells Jim Al-Khalili that the flowering synchronicity she observed was to spark a life-long fascination with the timing mechanisms of plant reproduction, in particular with a process called vernalisation - how plants respond to extreme cold. Professor Dame Caroline Dean of the John Innes Centre in Norwich has ...
May 15, 2018•28 min
Carlo Rovelli first became interested in the nature of time when he took LSD as a young man. Later he became curious about the world of the almost absurdly small, where time has no meaning and space is grainy. He took seven years to complete his undergraduate degree, having spent a lot of time protesting against the political establishment, falling in love and travelling. An extended hippy trip across north America was, he says, perhaps the most useful time of his life. All this rebelling taught...
May 08, 2018•28 min
Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of York, learnt to dive in a leaky wet suit in the North Sea when he was a boy. As a student, he was introduced to the extraordinary diversity of marine life on a coral reef in the Red Sea. His job was to count different species of fish but he also noticed several different species of fish working together to defend a common resource, lurid green algal lawns. Life on coral reef is notoriously competitive and collaboration on this scal...
May 01, 2018•28 min
Stephen Reicher is a social psychologist at St Andrews University who has spent decades understanding how people behave when in a group. To do so, he's often had to immerse himself among the subjects of his studies, from the Bristol riots in 1980 to the millions of Hindu pilgrims who go to the Magh Mela. Stephen Reicher talks to Jim al-Khalili about the positive and the negative sides to a crowd and the role of a leader of a crowd. He explains how he gave up a place to read medicine, to the anno...
Mar 13, 2018•28 min
Next time you swear at the battery in your mobile phone, spare a thought for the chemist, Clare Grey. Having developed a new way of looking inside solids (using nuclear magnetic resonance), her interest in batteries was sparked by a man from Duracell who asked her a question at an academic conference, and charged up by some electrochemists she met playing squash. For the last twenty years she has sought to understand the precise chemistry of the rechargeable lithium ion battery. And her insights...
Mar 06, 2018•29 min
Professor Sir John Burn, has made Newcastle on Tyne a centre for research on genetics and disease. He was one of the first British doctors to champion the study of genes in medicine back in the 1980s. More recently his research with families with a propensity to develop certain cancers has shown the benefits of taking aspirin as a prevention against the disease. John Burn was part of the team that set up the Centre for Life on derelict industrial land near the River Tyne, where the public can wa...
Feb 20, 2018•29 min
What once took decades, now takes days, thanks to an astonishingly powerful new technique invented by Richard Henderson, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Richard grew up in a remote village in the Scottish borders exploring the countryside and reading the weekly bundles of comics sent by his great aunt, as part of a care package for his family. When he started work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a string of Nobel Prizes had been awarded for x-ray crystallograph...
Feb 13, 2018•30 min
