Discovery

What if we could stay young forever? It may be a fantasy, but age management is big business and some people will stop at nothing to roll back the years. Pills, scans, injections, extreme diets and brain training - there's a vast array of apparent solutions on the market - but do they work and are they safe? Is age "reversal" possible? Peter Bowes investigates.

(Photo: A woman is covered with sheets of 24-carat gold, said to be effective for anti-aging care. Credit: Getty Images)

As part of the BBC World Service’s “What if…?” season, biologist Dr Andrew Holding meets some of the people straddling the line between man and machine.

Over 50 years ago the term cyborg was first used to describe a person whose capabilities are augmented by mechanical or cybernetic parts.

Today, mechanical or electronic prosthetic limbs and organs are rapidly changing more and more of our lives. But how far can it, and will it, go?

Andrew meets some of those who might describe themselves today as a cyborg. Our bodies are not permanent, and if we lost a limb or an organ, and if we could afford it, we might well think about replacing it with a new device.

But what about replacing a perfectly healthy part of your body with a device to give you superhuman powers?

What if we could all become cyborgs?

When a couple are expecting a baby, the big question is: girl or boy? Adam Rutherford explores the many ways Nature decides that question. If you’re a human, a kangaroo or a komodo dragon, it’s in the sex chromosomes. If you’re a crocodile, it’s the temperature of your egg. And if you’re a fish, it can be one sex first and, later in the life, the other.

Adam’s investigation includes conversation with Professor Jennifer Graves, a leading authority on sex determination, at La Trobe University in Australia. She explains what the weird nature of the platypus’ sex chromosomes tells us about how human gender is decided.

Adam also meets one of London Zoo’s Komodo Dragons, the world’s largest and fiercest lizard. Female dragons can produce young without mating with males, but all their babies are males. How so?

Sex is one of Nature’s great forces of change. Yet it is one of life’s great mysteries. Adam Rutherford investigates how and why living things first invented sex about 1.5 billion years ago. He begins by exploring why so many animals and plants have carried on doing it, given that sex has some big disadvantages compared to asexual reproduction.

The oldest known sexual beings, a 400 million year old fish sex movie and the prehistoric turtles which were fossilised in the act of copulation. Discovery this week is strictly adults-only as we begin a three-part natural history of sex. Adam Rutherford talks to the scientists studying the world’s most revealing fossils.

(Image: Two carettocheylid turtles, fossilised in mating position. Credit: The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences)

From smell to navigation, it seems that some of the hardest problems in biology could be solved with the insights from theoretical physics.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book in the 1940s called “What is Life?” in which he speculated on the role of quantum mechanics on the life sciences. Almost 70 years later, both quantum mechanics and biology have moved on a long way.

But are the two fields converging?

Avian navigation, light harvesting in photosynthesis and even olfaction – the science of smell, all provide hints that nature may have been making use of some of quantum mechanics’ weirder tricks for quite some time.

Jason Palmer looks at the emerging field of quantum biology.

(Music: ©Will Lenton @Mu_Mech)

A decade ago, the Human Genome Project revealed that only 1% of our DNA codes for the proteins that make our bodies. The rest of the genome, it was said, was junk, in other words with no function. But in September another massive international project, called ENCODE, announced that the junk DNA is useful after all. Adam Rutherford reports on the significance of this major discovery.

He visits the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute outside Cambridge where the vast amount of data about our genome is produced and analysed. And he finds out how this new information is beginning to give insights into the origin and treatment of diseases, such as cancer.

Adam also discovers that the study of genomes has changed dramatically since he finished his PhD: it's now all done in machines and not at the lab bench.

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 the Nobel Prize for cloning a frog, decades before Dolly the Sheep. Here he talks to Jim about his pioneering work on cloning and where it all might lead.

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?

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.

Once a Professor of Physiology, he became increasingly fascinated by the birds of Papua New Guinea.

Now Professor of Geography at University of California in LA, he stresses the vital importance of the environment in determining the success or otherwise of a society. He argues first that it was settled agriculture that enabled the white man to develop guns, germs and steel and later that abuse of the environment is often responsible for their collapse.

Andrea Sella is a science showman, whose theatrical demonstrations of chemistry are filling theatres up and down the country. He talks to Jim al-Khalili about his life scientific. Andrea is also Professor of Materials and Inorganic Chemistry at University College London and he and Jim discuss whether he would rather be known for his research into rare metals than for his whizz bang displays.