Discovery

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicine to market.

In the second programme looking at the problem with drug discovery, Geoff Watts asks what can be done to get new pharmaceutical treatments to patients.

He discovers that the industry is risk averse and regulations to ensure that drugs are safe and effective are burdensome. But there are pilot projects to speed up the process.

Geoff finds out that the experts believe that there needs to be a fundamental change in the drug development process, and the key ingredient is collaboration - between industry and academia and between different drug companies. He also discovers that the medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, is putting money into the development of antibiotics, a field not of interest to many pharmaceutical companies.

(Image: Pills in a jar, Credit: Getty Images)

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st Century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicine to market - Geoff Watts asks what's gone wrong and what can be done to get new pharmaceutical treatments to patients.

Geoff talks to a number of researchers who have worked both within the pharmaceutical industry and publicly funded laboratories to get their views on why the source of drugs has dried up. These include Dr Patrick Vallance, of global pharmaceutical giant GSK, Professor Paul Workman of the Institute of Cancer Research, and Professor Chas Bountra of Oxford University's Structural Genomics Consortium.

They argue that the age of the blockbuster drug which can treat millions of patients is over and that we don't know enough science to be able to find treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease. Tilli Tansey, Professor of the History of Modern Medical Science at Queen Mary University in London puts the state of drug discovery in its historical context.

(Image: Pills and capsules. Credit: Science Photo Library)

Nine million people in the UK alone have significant hearing problems. The mechanisms in our ears that help us hear are incredibly sensitive and are easily damanged by environmental hazards such as loud noises and chemicals or simply the passage of time.

Despite the fact that many of us will gradually lose our ability to hear as we as a society grow older, many of us don’t actually know that much about the causes and consequences of deafness.

What does the world sound like to a deaf person? How do the brain and ears work together to make sense of sound? And how far have scientists come in helping to restore impaired hearing?

In this edition of Discovery, Dr Carinne Piekema speaks with Harry Thomas who has been deaf since birth along with experts in the field of auditory neuroscience to find out about what it is like living with hearing loss on a personal and scientific level. By recreating everyday sounds as if heard by someone like Harry wearing a hearing aid or with a cochlear implant, she will also try to give a sense of the experience of being a deaf person in our noisy environment.

Is our taste in music, and how it's changed over the centuries, governed by creative genius or simply by survival of the fittest sounds, chosen by us the consumer? Does Darwin's theory of natural selection apply to more than just life on the planet?

The idea of survival of the fittest and cultural evolution can be applied to many aspects of our lives; from fashion to the naming of our children.

In a world of digital sampling scientists have designed an experiment to see if they can create the perfect song by asking individuals to choose which tunes survive and reproduce to create new tunes and which ones die out.

If they can do this, where does that leave today's musical producers and composers? Do we still need a trained mind to compose truly amazing music?

Producer: Ania Lichtarowicz

What can astronomy tells us about great literature?

Forensic astronomer Don Olson tells Andrew Luck-Baker about two of his investigative cases. He explains how plotting the path of the moon in 1816 solved a controversy about Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein.

The Texas State University professor also outlines his theory that a star referred to in Shakespeare’s Hamlet was inspired by a spectacular supernova which blazed in sky one year during the playwright’s childhood.

(Image: Baron Frankenstein, played by Peter Cushing, leans over his monstor in the film The Curse of Frankenstein. Credit: Getty Images)

One hundred years ago, the first humans reached the South Pole of this planet.

More than 40 years ago, man first walked on the moon.

When will our species first set foot to explore the planet Mars?

Kevin Fong seeks a likely launch date.

He asks who will get us there and why we really need to explore the Red Planet.

(Image: An image, released by NASA, of the terrain of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover. Credit: AP Photo / NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)

Jim Al-Khalili finds out about the life scientific of the British Antarctic Survey biologist Lloyd Peck.

Amongst other creatures he studies giant sea spiders. They and other small animals grow far bigger than usual in the extreme cold.

Diving is an important part of Lloyd's job and Jim hears what it's like to play football under the ice. Studies suggest that the sea temperature is rising, and Lloyd investigates whether the animals he researches will be able to adapt and survive.

And Lloyd talks about the difficulty of leaving his family behind in the UK while he spends months in the Antarctic.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald

(Image: A young woman studying a sea spider in the Science Museum in London. Credit: AFP / Getty Images)

One hundred years ago, Scott reached the South Pole.

Fifty years later, the first geologist briefly walked on the moon.

Kevin Fong asks if why we might want to return to the lunar surface and what will get us.

He talks to that first lunar geologist of Apollo 17, Harrison Schmitt and Nasa's Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, among others.

Jim Al-Khalili meets Cambridge University neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian.

She talks about her Life Scientific finding drugs to slow down the memory losses that happen in Alzheimer's disease.

She worked in some of the first memory clinics that were set up in the US and the UK to help people who had problems remembering and has developed tests to find out if peoples' forgetfulness is the first sign of dementia.

More recently she has turned her attention to drugs that can improve the performance of surgeons or pilots or other professions where it is important to be alert for long times.

Barbara says that they could even be used to make us more entrepreneurial. And some students are taking them as they think they could be giving them an edge in exams.

Jim and Barbara discuss the thorny ethical issues raised by these uses of these drugs.

Kevin Fong looks beyond the failure of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole and focuses instead on the scientific legacy of Scott's explorations of Antarctica between 1901 and 1912.

In recent years, much has been written about Scott the polar loser and bungler. But that personalised focus ignores the pioneering scientific research and discoveries. The revelations transformed Antarctica from an unknown quantity on the map into a profoundly important continent in the Earth's past and present.

Before Scott and Shackleton trekked across the vast ice sheets in the early 1900s, no-one was sure whether there was even a continent there. Some geographers had suggested Antarctica was merely a vast raft of ice anchored to a scattering of islands. The science teams on Scott’s expeditions made fundamental discoveries about Antarctic weather and began to realise the frozen continent's fundamental role in global climate and ocean circulation. They discovered rocks and fossils which showed Antarctica was once a balmy forested place. They mapped the magnetism around the South Pole for both science and navigators. They found many new species of animals and revealed the extraordinary winter breeding habits of the penguins.

The dedication to scientific discovery is most poignantly revealed by fossils that Scott's party collected after their disappointment of being beaten by Amundsen and a few weeks before they froze to death trudging across the Ross ice shelf. They found a particular plant fossil which had been one of the Holy Grails on the early explorations of Antarctica's interior. Its discovery proved an hypothesis raised by Darwin among others that all the southern continents were once linked together by a landmass that would lain where Antarctica is today. The fossils were also important evidence to support the new and controversial theory of Continental Drift - a theory which now underpins the entirety of modern Earth science.

(Image: Captain Robert Falcon Scott writing at a table in his quarters at the British base camp in Antarctica. Credit: Press Association)