The Life Scientific
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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
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Sonia Gandhi on building model brains to tackle Parkinson’s disease
Many people will be familiar with Parkinson’s disease: the progressive brain disorder that causes symptoms including tremors and slower movement, lead...
Mark O'Shea on close encounters with venomous snakes
How do you feel about snakes? What about highly venomous ones?
For Mark O’Shea, close encounters with the world’s most rare and deadly snakes ar...
Kevin Fong on medical planning for Mars and Earth-based emergencies
There can't be many people in the world who've saved lives in hospital emergency rooms and also helped care for the wellbeing of astronauts in space –...
Dame Pratibha Gai on training atoms to do what we want
Chemical reactions are the backbone of modern society: the energy we use, the medicines we take, our housing materials, even the foods we eat, are cre...
Catherine Heymans on the lighter side of the dark universe
Have you ever considered the lighter side of dark matter?
Comedy has proved an unexpectedly succesful way to engage people with science - as tod...
Tim Coulson on how predators shape ecosystems and evolution
As a young man, traveling in Africa, Tim Coulson - now Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford - became seriously ill with malaria and was to...
Claudia de Rham on playing with gravity
Claudia de Rham has rather an unusual relationship with gravity.
While she has spent her career exploring its fundamental nature, much of her...
Neil Lawrence on taking down the 'digital oligarchy' and why we shouldn't fear AI
When you think of Artificial Intelligence, does it inspire confidence, or concern?
Although it's now generally accepted that this technology wil...
Liz Morris on Antarctic adventures and the melting polar ice sheets
A frozen, white world at the far-reaches of the globe, where you're surrounded by snow and silence, might sound rather appealing. Factor in temperatu...
Anthony Fauci on a medical career navigating pandemics and presidents
Welcome to a world where medicine meets politics: a space that brings together scientific research, government wrangling, public push-back and healthc...
Brian Schmidt on Nobel Prize-winning supernovae and the joys of making wine
Have you ever pondered the fact that the universe is expanding? And not only that, it's expanding at an increasing speed - meaning everything around...
Jacqueline McKinley on unearthing bones and stories at Britain's ancient burial sites
How much information can you extract from a burnt fragment of human bone?
Quite a lot, it turns out - not only about the individual, but also t...
Jonathan Shepherd on a career as a crime-fighting surgeon
Surgeons often have to deal with the consequences of violent attacks - becoming all too familiar with patterns of public violence, and peaks around we...
Doyne Farmer on making sense of chaos for a better world
Doyne Farmer is something of a rebel. Back in the seventies, when he was a student, he walked into a casino in Las Vegas, sat down at a roulette table...
Tori Herridge on ancient dwarf elephants and frozen mammoths
Elephants are the largest living land mammal and today our planet is home to three species: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, an...
Sir Magdi Yacoub on pioneering heart transplant surgery
What does it take to earn the nickname, ‘The Leonardo da Vinci of heart surgery’?
That's the moniker given to today's guest - a man who pioneere...
Tim Peake on his journey to becoming an astronaut and science in space
What's it like living underwater for two weeks? What's the trickiest part of training to be an astronaut? What are the most memorable sights you see f...
Anna Korre on capturing carbon dioxide and defying expectations
As the famous frog once said, it's not easy being green. And when it comes to decarbonising industry, indeed, reducing emissions of all sorts, the tas...
Rosalie David on the science of Egyptian mummies
Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using t...
Peter Stott on climate change deniers and Italian inspiration
In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced its most intense heatwave on record - one that saw more than 70,000 people lose their lives.
Experien...
Ijeoma Uchegbu on using nanoparticles to transform medicines
Imagine a nanoparticle, less that a thousandth of the width of a human hair, that is so precise that it can carry a medicine to just where it’s needed...
Darren Croft on killer whale matriarchs and the menopause
Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their predator...
Bill Gates on vaccines, conspiracy theories and the pleasures of pickleball
Bill Gates is one of the world's best-known billionaires - but after years at the corporate coalface building a software empire and a vast fortune, hi...
Kip Thorne on black holes, Nobel Prizes and taking physics to Hollywood
The final episode in this series of The Life Scientific is a journey through space and time, via black holes and wormholes, taking in Nobel-prize-winn...
Vicky Tolfrey on parasport research and childhood dreams of the Olympics
It's summer - no really - and although the weather might have been mixed, the sporting line-up has been undeniably scorching - from the back-and-forth...
Dawn Bonfield on inclusive engineering, sustainable solutions and why she once tried to leave the sector for good
The engineering industry, like many other STEM sectors, has a problem with diversity: one that Dawn Bonfield believes we can and must fix, if we're to...
Raymond Schinazi on revolutionising treatments for killer viruses
In recent decades, we've taken huge steps forward in treating formerly fatal viruses: with pharmacological breakthroughs revolutionising treatment for...
Janet Treasure on eating disorders and the quest for answers
From anorexia nervosa to binge-eating, eating disorders are potentially fatal conditions that are traditionally very difficult to diagnose and treat -...
Anne Child on Marfan syndrome and love at first sight
Marfan syndrome is a genetic disorder that makes renders the body’s connective tissues incredibly fragile; this can weaken the heart, leading to poten...
Conny Aerts on star vibrations and following your dreams
Many of us have heard of seismology, the study of earthquakes; but what about asteroseismology, focusing on vibrations in stars?
Conny Aerts is...
Mike Edmunds on decoding galaxies and ancient astronomical artefacts
What is the universe made of? Where does space dust come from?
And how exactly might one go about putting on a one-man-show about Sir Isaac New...
Hannah Critchlow on the connected brain
With 86 billion nerve cells joined together in a network of 100 trillion connections, the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe...
Fiona Rayment on the applications of nuclear for net zero and beyond
The reputation of the nuclear industry has had highs and lows during the career of Dr Fiona Rayment, the President of the Nuclear Institute. But nowad...
Nick Longrich on discovering new dinosaurs from overlooked bones
We are fascinated by dinosaurs. From blockbuster hits to bestselling video games, skeleton exhibitions to cuddly plushies, the creatures that once roa...
Sheila Willis on using science to help solve crime
Dr Sheila Willis is a forensic scientist who was Director General of Forensic Science Ireland for many years.
She has spent her life using scie...
Sir Charles Godfray on parasitic wasps and the race to feed nine billion people
Professor Charles Godfray, Director of the the Oxford Martin School tells Jim Al-Kahlili about the intricate world of population dynamics, and how a h...
Jonathan Van-Tam on Covid communication and the power of football analogies
Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, or ‘JVT’ as he's arguably better known, first came to widespread public attention in his role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer du...
Michael Wooldridge on AI and sentient robots
Humans have a long-held fascination with the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a dystopian threat: from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through to...
Mercedes Maroto-Valer on making carbon dioxide useful
How do you solve a problem like CO2?
As the curtain closes on the world’s most important climate summit, we talk to a scientist who was at COP 2...
Sir Harry Bhadeshia on the choreography of metals
The Life Scientific zooms in to explore the intricate atomic make-up of metal alloys, with complex crystalline arrangements that can literally make or...