Discovery

Jim al-Khalili talks to professor Elspeth Garman about a technique that has led to 28 Nobel Prizes in the last century.

X- ray crystallography, now celebrating its 100th anniversary, is used to study the internal structure of matter. It may sound rather arcane but it is the reason we now know the structure of hugely important molecules, like penicillin, insulin and DNA. But while other scientists scoop up prizes for cracking chemical structures, Elspeth works away behind the scenes, (more cameraman than Hollywood star), improving the methods and techniques used by everybody working in the field.

If only it was as simple as putting a crystal in the machine and printing off the results. Growing a single crystal of an enzyme that gives TB its longevity took Elspeth's team no less than 15 years. No pressure there then when harvesting that precious commodity.

(Photo: Professor Elspeth Garman)

Addictions researcher, Dr Sally Marlow, investigates fears that easy access to powerful painkillers could be creating a large, but hidden problem of addiction. Painkillers are widely available over the counter, and combinations containing codeine, which is addictive, can be purchased from pharmacists and on the internet.

Teenager, Alice, tells Sally about secretly buying huge numbers of painkillers on her way to school while she was wearing her school uniform. She used her lunch money to buy multiple packs from several stores, switching shops when she was questioned by pharmacists. And Steve describes how his serious codeine addiction began after treating tooth pain with the drug. The side effects helped his anxiety and for years he was doctoring tablets in order to increase his codeine intake.

Some health professionals believe easy access is fuelling a potential health crisis and say those with serious dependency problems, are hidden below the healthcare radar. Only a tiny percentage of people with an addiction to painkillers find their way to traditional substance misuse services, fuelling concerns that there is a large, but hidden group, who are not getting help with their dependency.

David Grieve, who set up the charity Over-Count, 21 years ago, after his own serious addiction to over-the-counter cough mixture, believes the number of people dependent on painkillers is growing, fuelled by easy availability on the internet. Between 30-35% of visitors to his website say when they are refused purchases by pharmacists, they buy online instead.

Fabrizio Schifano, professor of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Hertfordshire and a member of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, demonstrates how easy it is to buy potent painkillers online and Dr Paolo DeLuca, a senior research fellow in addictive behaviour at King's College, London, tells Sally about a three year international study - the Codemisused Project - which aims to discover the scale of codeine use and misuse. Dr DeLuca is leading the British arm of the study and he hopes that research will fill the current gap in knowledge so that if action is needed to reduce the risk to individuals, it can be based on evidence.

(Photo: Medicinal pills and tablets)

European Inventor of the Year, Chris Toumazou, reveals how his personal life and early research lie at the heart of his inventions.

As chief scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, Chris inspires engineers, doctors and other scientists to create medical devices for the 21st Century.

Applying silicon chip technology, more commonly found inside mobile phones, he tackles seemingly insurmountable problems in medicine to create devices that bridge the electronic and biological worlds - from a digital plaster that monitors a patient's vital signs to an artificial pancreas to treat diabetes.

His latest creation, coined a 'lab on a chip', analyses a person's DNA within minutes outside the laboratory. The hand-held device can identify genetic differences which dictate a person's susceptibility to hereditary diseases and how they will react to a drug like warfarin, used to treat blood clots.

(Photo: Chris Toumazou, BBC copyright)

It is the nearest and most dominant object in our night sky, and has inspired artists, astronauts and astronomers. But fundamental questions remain about our only natural satellite. Where does the Moon come from?

Although humans first walked on the Moon over four decades ago, we still know surprisingly little about the lunar body's origin. Samples returned by the Apollo missions have somewhat confounded scientists' ideas about how the Moon was formed. Its presence is thought to be due to another planet colliding with the early Earth, causing an extraordinary giant impact, and in the process, forming the Moon. But, analysing chemicals in Apollo's rock samples has revealed that the Moon could be much more similar to Earth itself than any potential impactor. Geochemist Professor Alex Halliday of the University of Oxford, and Dr Jeff Andrews-Hanna, Colorado School of Mines – who is analysing the results from Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar mission – discuss the theories and evidence to-date.

Are we Going Back?

As the Moon's commercial prospects are considered, who controls conservation of our only natural satellite? If commerce is driving a return to the Moon, who owns any resources that may be found in the lunar regolith? Dr Saskia Vermeylen of the Environment Centre at Lancaster University is researching the legality of claiming this extra-terrestrial frontier.

(Photo: Presenter Lucie Green. BBC copyright)

They call them 'The Unexpected Survivors'. The casualties from the war in Afghanistan whose injuries were so severe that they were not expected to survive, but who survived nevertheless. In October, after 13 years Britain and the United States officially brought their combat operations in Helmand Afghanistan to an end. Camp Bastion, the coalition stronghold – once one of the largest military bases in the world – has been dismantled leaving a handful of buildings that will now be handed over to the Afghan National Army.

First established eight years ago in 2006, Camp Bastion came to host to one of the most extraordinary and successful trauma medical systems ever seen. Amongst the medics that went to and served in Afghanistan were doctors who trained with me in civilian hospitals. With the mission nearly at an end I had to see them and their system for myself, to try and understand just how it came to be and why it worked so well.

Photo courtesy of Ministry of Defence

Dr Kevin Fong explores the development of modern trauma medicine and discovers how the lessons from conflict and catastrophe have equipped us to deal with even the worst disasters, providing a system that could save lives that would otherwise have been lost. First of two programmes.

Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University describes how he gave up appearing on Top of the Pops to study quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics.

Although he describes himself as a simple-minded Northern bloke, he has acquired an almost God-like status on our TV screens, while the ‘Cox effect’ is thought to explain the significant boost to university admissions to read physics. He talks to Jim al-Khalili about learning to be famous, his passion for physics and how he sometimes has difficulty crossing the road.

In 2005 Brian was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship for his work on high energy particle collisions at CERN and elsewhere – an enviable academic achievement. In 2009, he was voted one of the sexiest men alive by People magazine. He has invented a new kind of celebrity – a scientist who is regularly snapped by the paparazzi.

Brian wants everyone to be as excited as he is about the laws that govern our universe - the beautiful, counter-intuitive and often weird world of quantum mechanics that explains what happens inside the nucleus of every atom, right down at the level of those exotically named elementary particles – quarks, neutrinos, gluons, muons.

Challenged by Jim to explain the rules of quantum mechanics in just a minute, Brian succeeds; while conceding that the idea that everything is inherently probabilistic, is challenging. Even Einstein found it difficult. Schrodinger’s cat, or Brian Cox, for that matter, are simultaneously both dead and alive. That’s a fact. What this is all means is another question. “Am I just an algorithm?” Brian asks. “Probably”, says Jim.

Producer: Anna Buckley

(Photo: Brian Cox, BBC copyright)

You have a headache and take a pill. The headache is gone, but what about the pill? What we flush away makes its way through sewers, treatment works, rivers and streams and finally back to your tap. Along the way most of the drugs we take are removed but the tiny amounts that remain are having effects. Feminised fish in our rivers, starlings feeding on Prozac-rich worms, and bacteria developing antibiotic resistance - scientists are just beginning to understand how the drugs we take are leaving their mark on the environment.

The compounds we excrete are also telling tales on us. Professor of Chemistry, Andrea Sella, gets up close and personal with music festival toilets to find out what the revellers are swallowing, and hears from scientists who are sampling our rivers to learn about our health.

Producer: Lorna Stewart

(Photo: Laboratory technician, testing a urine sample for traces of any banned substances or stimulants. BBC copyright)

Patient power is on the rise. But is it rising too far? Frustrated by the time it takes to develop new drugs, the ethical barriers to obtaining clinical data or the indifference of the medical profession to obscure diseases, patients are setting up their own clinical trials and overturning the norms of clinical research.

A DIY clinical trial sounds like a joke – and a dangerous one at that. But as Vivienne Parry discovers, it's real and on the rise as greater access to medical data allows more patients to play research scientists and medics at their own game.

Patients lie at the very heart of clinical research – without them there is none. Yet they come way down the food chain when it comes to transparency about their own health, blinded as they usually are to what pills they are taking and whether they are actually doing them any good. Even after the trial is published they are left with little understanding of whether the treatment could work for them and licensing is usually years away. So it is perhaps hardly surprising that patient networks have sprung up to redress the balance. Much of this current patient led research now takes place through online communities, with activists and the articulate ill demanding more say in their treament.

Vivienne Parry looks at some examples of patient led research which have challenged the medical establishment. She also asks how far can this go: should patients be prevented from experimenting with proceedures or drugs that might kill them?

(Photo: Medicinal pills)

Diseases devastate livestock around the world. In chickens for example the deadly strain of bird flu and the lesser known bacterial infection Campylobacter, not only harms the chickens but is also a real threat to human health.

Melissa Hogenboom visits one of the world’s leading genetics institutions, the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh in the UK and hears about new genetic techniques to combat diseases in our livestock. In chickens, professor Helen Sang uses a subtle form of genetic modification, called genome editing. Her team is trying to find the genetic components of natural resistance in a wide group of chicken breeds, which they can then insert into the genome of livestock fowl in the hope of breeding healthier, safer chickens. They are close to making disease resistant birds but they are aware that GM animals are still a long way from entering the market in Europe.

Similar research is going on in cows for TB resistance, but here instead of genetically modifying they are cross-breeding which may take ten or more generations to complete. Melissa hears from Professor Liz Glass who studies the genetics of disease resistance in cattle. Her work has applications in the design of better vaccines for infectious diseases and understanding how disease spreads.

Melissa also hears about a team creating a frozen bio-bank of bird stem cells - cryopreserving them so that they could one day resurrect entire breeds. This technique could provide hope against losing these valuable genes forever.

Producer and presenter: Melissa Hogenboom

(Photo: Chickens. BBC copyright)