August 17, 2023

Corrupted thinking and cancerous co-option

50 minutes

The conversation this week starts off on corruption. There are allegations of political or corporate malfeasance in the news regularly throughout the world. But can science bring anything to the investigators? We look at some efforts to bring empirical rigour to the fight.

But corruption of sorts is also a big thing in our online lives. Algorithms can deliver duff results, maybe because they are poorly conceived, or perhaps because they are fed corrupt data.

So when our cellular biological algorithms are corrupted, our health is affected. Can cancerous tumours be considered corrupt organs, co-opting healthy cells to assist in their nefarious ends? Dr Ilaria Malanchi of the Crick Institute in London muses on the commonalities.

Also, a look at the politicisation of pre-human palaeontology and how our stories of human origins have been, and in some ways still are, connected with nationalist geographical identities that mainstream science doesn't recognize.

Presenter: Caroline Steel, with Yangyang Chen and Meral Jamal

Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins, Ben Motley, and Sophie Ormiston

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By BBC World Service

4.5