The Life Scientific

By BBC Radio 4

What's The Life Scientific about?

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 mankind

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Jonathan Ball on his arms r...

07.30.2019

Ebola, Zika, Sars, Mers - rarely a week goes by without a deadly virus stealing the headlines. For Jonathan Ball, getting to know a virus at its most basic level is crucial to mounting a defence. As the son of ...

The Life Scientific episodes:

07.30.2019 Jonathan Ball on his arms race against viruses Ebola, Zika, Sars, Mers - rarely a week goes by without a deadly virus stealing the headlines. For Jonathan Ball, getting to know a virus at its most basic level is crucial to mounting a defence. As the son of ...
07.23.2019 Robin Dunbar on why we have friends Maintaining friendships is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, according to Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar. So why do we bother? Robin has spent his life trying to answer this deceptively simple question. For most of ...
07.16.2019 Katherine Joy on moon rock Katherine Joy studies moon rock. She has studied lunar samples that were brought to earth by the Apollo missions (382kg in total) and hunted for lunar meteorites in Antarctica, camping on ice for weeks on end and travelling around on ...
07.09.2019 DNA detective Turi King When a skeleton was unearthed in 2012 from under the tarmac of a car park in Leicester, Turi King needed to gather irrefutable evidence to prove that this really was the body of Richard III, England's infamous medieval monarch. Under ...
07.02.2019 Ewine van Dishoeck on cosmic chemistry Ewine van Dishoeck has spent her life studying the space between the stars. Not so long ago, interstellar space was thought to be an empty, sterile void. The idea that there would be organic molecules in interstellar clouds was absurd. ...
06.25.2019 Plastic pollution with Richard Thompson A Professor of Marine Biology who was not particularly academic at school, Richard Thompson went to university after running his own business selling greetings cards for seven years. When the rest of the world was waking up to the harm ...
04.16.2019 Erica McAlister on the beauty of flies Dr Erica McAlister, of London's Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for which she is jointly responsible. According to Erica, a world without flies would be full of ...
04.09.2019 Richard Peto on why smoking kills but quitting saves lives When Sir Richard Peto began work with the late Richard Doll fifty years ago, the UK had the worst death rates from smoking in the world. Smoking was the cause of more than half of all premature deaths of British ...
04.02.2019 Irene Tracey on pain in the brain Pain, as we know, is highly personal. Some can cope with huge amounts, while others reel in agony over a seemingly minor injury. Though you might feel the stab of pain in your stubbed toe or sprained ankle, it is ...
03.26.2019 Paul Davies on the origin of life and the evolution of cancer Physicist, Paul Davies is interested in some of the biggest questions that we can ask. What is life? How did the universe begin? How will it end? And are we alone? His research has been broad and far-reaching, covering quantum ...
03.19.2019 Corinne Le Quéré on the global carbon cycle Throughout the history of planet Earth, the element carbon has cycled between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere. This natural cycle has maintained the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and has allowed life to exist for billions ...
03.13.2019 Ken Gabriel, Why your Smartphone is Smart. How insight with a stick and piece of string led to an engineering adventure taking in spacecraft, military guidance systems and the micro-mechanical devices we use every day in our computers and smartphones. Ken Gabriel now heads up a large ...
03.05.2019 2018 Nobel Prize winner, Donna Strickland, on laser physics When the first laser was built in 1960, it was an invention looking for an application. Science fiction found uses for these phenomenally powerful beams of light long before real world applications were developed. Think Star Wars light sabres and ...
02.26.2019 Gwen Adshead on treating the minds of violent offenders Whether it’s a news story or television drama, human violence appals and fascinates in equal measure. Yet few of us choose to dwell on what preoccupies the mind of a perpetrator for long. Professor Gwen Adshead, however, thinks about little ...
02.19.2019 2018 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner, Sir Gregory Winter In an astonishing story of a scientific discovery, Greg Winter tells Jim Al-Khalili how decades of curiosity-driven research led to a revolution in medicine. Forced to temporarily abandon his work in the lab when a road rage incident left him ...
02.12.2019 Sue Black on women in tech Sue Black left home and school when she was 16. Aged 25, she attended an access course to get the qualifications she needed to go to university to study computer science. It was a bit lonely being the only student ...
02.05.2019 Jim Al-Khalili on HIS life scientific In an ideal (quantum) world, Jim Al-Khalili would be interviewing himself about his life as a scientist but since the production team can’t access a parallel universe, Adam Rutherford is stepping in to ask Jim questions in front of an ...
12.19.2018 Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell Jim Al-Khalili talks to astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jocelyn Bell Burnell forged her own path through the male-dominated world of science - in the days when it was unusual enough for women to work, let alone make a discovery in ...
12.11.2018 Clive Oppenheimer on the volcanic offerings of our angry earth Clive Oppenheimer has, more than once, been threatened with guns (a Life Scientific first?). He's dodged and ducked lava bombs and he's risked instant death in scorching and explosive eruptions. He studies volcanoes; science that by necessity, requires his presence ...
12.04.2018 Sky at Night presenter Maggie Aderin-Pocock Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been fascinated by space since she was a young child. When she was six years old she caught the bug when she saw a picture of an astronaut on the front of a book in her primary ...
11.27.2018 Banning chemical weapons with Alastair Hay Alastair Hay, now Emeritus Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds, is a chemist who’s had a dual career as an academic researcher and an outspoken activist and campaigner. The common theme has been the application of his ...
11.20.2018 Formula One engineer Caroline Hargrove How do you convince Formula One racing drivers that they are speeding round the race track at Le Mans when, in fact, they are sitting in a simulator in the McLaren offices in Woking? Apparently it’s all about getting the ...
11.13.2018 Mike Stratton and cancer genes When Michael Stratton was a young doctor he would diagnose cancer by studying tissue samples under a microscope. However, over the past 30 years he’s been advancing our understanding of this disease down at the level of the genes themselves, ...
11.06.2018 Detective of the mind Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan Suzanne O'Sullivan has been described as “a detective of the mind”. She’s a neurologist who helps some patients with the strangest of symptoms, from so-called ‘Alice in Wonderland’ seizures to those suffering from temporary blindness or paralysis, and that turn ...
10.30.2018 Noel Fitzpatrick on becoming a supervet For all his success as a Supervet on TV and as a pioneering orthopedic surgeon, Noel Fitzpatrick insists that his life has been full of failures. He didn’t enjoy studying for his specialist vet exams and spent ten years working ...
10.23.2018 Jacqueline McGlade on monitoring the environment from space An ecologist who fell in love with computing, Jacqueline McGlade pioneered the use of satellites study the state of the global environment. Today thanks to programmes like Google Earth, we can see the surface of the earth in great detail. ...
06.19.2018 Rachel Mills exploring the sea floor Professor Rachel Mills is a marine geochemist who studies the sea floor and hydrothermal vents, where water erupts from the earth's crust at 360 degrees. The thick plumes emit many metals such as copper, gold, iron and rare earth minerals ...
06.12.2018 Frank Close and particle physics Frank Close is a theoretical particle physicist and a pioneer of popular writing about physics. His first book aimed at a non-specialist audience, The Cosmic Onion, was published 35 years ago. His latest, Half Life, is the story of physicist ...
06.05.2018 Sheena Cruickshank on the wonders of the human immune system Traditional descriptions of the human immune system bristle with military analogies. There are "lines of defence" against "enemy invaders"; "border guards" at "strategic points. And when barriers are breached, there's "a call to arms". That's before you mention Natural Killer ...
05.29.2018 John Taylor on being an inventor John Crawshaw Taylor is a prolific inventor who specialises in designing and manufacturing thermostatic controls. His ingenious integrated control system is found in in one billion electric kettles worldwide, enabling kettles to switch off automatically when the water boils, stopping ...
05.22.2018 Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes Dr Catherine Hobaiter studies how apes communicate with each other. Although she's based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she spends a lot of her time in the forests of Uganda, at the Budongo Research Centre. There, she's ...
05.15.2018 Caroline Dean reveals the genetic secrets of flowering As a girl, Caroline Dean would watch the cherry trees in her childhood garden unfurl their pink and white blossom and wonder how it was that they all flowered at exactly the same time. She tells Jim Al-Khalili that the ...
05.08.2018 Carlo Rovelli on why time is not what it seems Carlo Rovelli first became interested in the nature of time when he took LSD as a young man. Later he became curious about the world of the almost absurdly small, where time has no meaning and space is grainy. He ...
05.01.2018 Callum Roberts on the urgent need for marine conservation Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of York, learnt to dive in a leaky wet suit in the North Sea when he was a boy. As a student, he was introduced to the extraordinary diversity of marine ...
03.13.2018 Stephen Reicher on the psychology of crowds Stephen Reicher is a social psychologist at St Andrews University who has spent decades understanding how people behave when in a group. To do so, he's often had to immerse himself among the subjects of his studies, from the Bristol ...
03.06.2018 Clare Grey on the Big Battery Challenge Next time you swear at the battery in your mobile phone, spare a thought for the chemist, Clare Grey. Having developed a new way of looking inside solids (using nuclear magnetic resonance), her interest in batteries was sparked by a ...
02.27.2018 Ailie MacAdam on the biggest construction project in Europe. Ailie's first engineering challenge was working out how to get the solids to settle in a mixture of raw sewage at a treatment plant in Stuttgart. Years later, she worked on the Boston Big Dig and realised that large scale ...
02.20.2018 John Burn and the genetics of cancer Professor Sir John Burn, has made Newcastle on Tyne a centre for research on genetics and disease. He was one of the first British doctors to champion the study of genes in medicine back in the 1980s. More recently his ...
02.13.2018 Richard Henderson zooms in on the molecules of life What once took decades, now takes days, thanks to an astonishingly powerful new technique invented by Richard Henderson, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Richard grew up in a remote village in the Scottish borders exploring the countryside ...
01.30.2018 Wendy Barclay and the flu virus 2018 is having the worst flu season for seven years. Influenza continues to make a lot of us feel very ill, and it can of course be fatal. Wendy Barclay, Professor Virology at Imperial College London, has spent many years ...
01.23.2018 Eugenia Cheng on the mathematics of mathematics Nothing annoys Eugenia Cheng more than the suggestion that there is no creativity in mathematics. Doing mathematics is not about being a human calculator, she says. She doesn't spend her time multiplying big numbers in her head. She sits in ...
01.16.2018 Eben Upton on Raspberry Pi When Eben Upton was in his twenties, he wanted to get children thinking about how computers think, to boost the number of people applying to read computer science at university. He dreamt of putting a chip in every classroom. The ...
10.31.2017 Adrian Thomas on the mechanics of flight As a young man Adrian Thomas took to the skies in order to better understand the mechanics of flight. He's a paragliding champion and a Professor of Zoology who specialises in the dynamics of insect flight. On a typical day, ...
10.24.2017 Ellen Stofan on being NASA chief scientist When Ellen Stofan was just four years old, she witnessed the worst rocket launch-pad disaster in NASA's history convinced that her father, (who was a rocket engineer) was on board. He wasn't. Nonetheless, for many years NASA was not her ...
10.17.2017 Tim Birkhead on bird promiscuity Professor Tim Birkhead talks to Jim Al Khalili about his 40 years of research on promiscuity in birds, his love of Skomer Island and its guillemots, and the extraordinary musical talent of the male bullfinch. Tim Birkhead is an evolutionary ...
10.10.2017 Steve Cowley on Nuclear Fusion Steve Cowley has said that "fusion is arguably the perfect way to power the world". But he's had to add that "it is hard to make fusion work. Indeed, after more than 60 years of fusion research, no device has ...
10.03.2017 Lucie Green on the sun Lucie Green studies the sun - that giant, turbulent ball of burning gas at the centre of our solar system. Her first ambition was to become an art therapist, but she soon switched from art to astrophysics, and before long ...
09.26.2017 Tracey Rogers on leopard seals and Antarctica Marine ecologist Tracey Rogers talks to Jim Al Khalili about her research on one of Antarctica's top predators. This is the leopard seal - a ten foot long killer which glides among the ice floes in search of prey ranging ...
09.19.2017 Jennifer Doudna Jennifer Doudna's research has transformed biology. And this is not an understatement. Her work has given us the tools to edit genes more precisely than ever before. Her scientific career began with work to understand the actions of RNA, part ...
05.30.2017 Tamsin Mather on what volcanic plumes reveal about our planet To volcanologist Tamsin Mather, volcanoes are more than a natural hazard. They are 'nature's factories', belching out a rich chemical cocktail of gases. It's these gases or 'plumes' that fascinate her the most. She likes nothing more than crouching on ...

Older episodes

The Life Scientific

What's The Life Scientific about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Life Scientific episodes:

Jonathan Ball on his arms race against viruses

Robin Dunbar on why we have friends

Katherine Joy on moon rock

DNA detective Turi King

Ewine van Dishoeck on cosmic chemistry

Plastic pollution with Richard Thompson

Erica McAlister on the beauty of flies

Richard Peto on why smoking kills but quitting saves lives

Irene Tracey on pain in the brain

Paul Davies on the origin of life and the evolution of cancer

Corinne Le Quéré on the global carbon cycle

Ken Gabriel, Why your Smartphone is Smart.

2018 Nobel Prize winner, Donna Strickland, on laser physics

Gwen Adshead on treating the minds of violent offenders

2018 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner, Sir Gregory Winter

Sue Black on women in tech

Jim Al-Khalili on HIS life scientific

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Clive Oppenheimer on the volcanic offerings of our angry earth

Sky at Night presenter Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Banning chemical weapons with Alastair Hay

Formula One engineer Caroline Hargrove

Mike Stratton and cancer genes

Detective of the mind Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan

Noel Fitzpatrick on becoming a supervet

Jacqueline McGlade on monitoring the environment from space

Rachel Mills exploring the sea floor

Frank Close and particle physics

Sheena Cruickshank on the wonders of the human immune system

John Taylor on being an inventor

Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes

Caroline Dean reveals the genetic secrets of flowering

Carlo Rovelli on why time is not what it seems

Callum Roberts on the urgent need for marine conservation

Stephen Reicher on the psychology of crowds

Clare Grey on the Big Battery Challenge

Ailie MacAdam on the biggest construction project in Europe.

John Burn and the genetics of cancer

Richard Henderson zooms in on the molecules of life

Wendy Barclay and the flu virus

Eugenia Cheng on the mathematics of mathematics

Eben Upton on Raspberry Pi

Adrian Thomas on the mechanics of flight

Ellen Stofan on being NASA chief scientist

Tim Birkhead on bird promiscuity

Steve Cowley on Nuclear Fusion

Lucie Green on the sun

Tracey Rogers on leopard seals and Antarctica

Jennifer Doudna

Tamsin Mather on what volcanic plumes reveal about our planet

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