The Life Scientific

By BBC Radio 4

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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 us in the future

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Sir Harry Bhadeshia on the ...

12.05.2023

The Life Scientific zooms in to explore the intricate atomic make-up of metal alloys, with complex crystalline arrangements that can literally make or break structures integral to our everyday lives. Professor Sir Harry Bhadeshia is Professor of Metallurgy at Queen ...

The Life Scientific episodes:

12.05.2023 Sir Harry Bhadeshia on the choreography of metals The Life Scientific zooms in to explore the intricate atomic make-up of metal alloys, with complex crystalline arrangements that can literally make or break structures integral to our everyday lives. Professor Sir Harry Bhadeshia is Professor of Metallurgy at Queen ...
11.28.2023 Cathie Sudlow on data in healthcare “Big data” and “data science” are terms we hear more and more these days. The idea that we can use these vast amounts of information to understand and analyse phenomena, and find solutions to problems, is gaining prominence, both in ...
11.21.2023 Sir Michael Berry on phenomena in physics' borderlands Professor Jim Al-Khalili meets one of Britain's greatest physicists, Sir Michael Berry. His work uncovers 'the arcane in the mundane', revealing the science that underpins phenomena in the world around us such as rainbows, and through his popular science lectures ...
11.14.2023 Professor Sarah Harper on how population change is remodelling societies. People around the world are living longer and, on the whole, having fewer children. What does this mean for future populations? Sarah Harper CBE, Professor in Gerontology at the University of Oxford, tells presenter Jim Al-Khalili how it could affect ...
11.07.2023 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on human evolution and parenthood Our primate cousins fascinate us, with their uncanny similarities to us. And studying other apes and monkeys also helps us figure out the evolutionary puzzle of what makes us uniquely human. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work brings a female perspective to ...
10.31.2023 Edward Witten on 'the theory of everything' The Life Scientific returns with a special episode from the USA; Princeton, New Jersey, to be precise. Here, the Institute for Advanced Study has hosted some of the greatest scientific minds of our time - Einstein was one of its ...
09.19.2023 Alex Antonelli on learning from nature's biodiversity to adapt to climate change With the world's biodiversity being lost at an alarming rate, Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has made it his life's mission to protect it. He is a bio-geographer revealing how changes to the Earth's ...
09.12.2023 Paul Murdin on the first ever identification of a black hole Astronomer Paul Murdin believes a good imagination is vital for scientists, since they're so often dealing with subjects outside the visible realm. Indeed, over a long and successful career his imagination has taken him on a journey through space, discovering ...
09.05.2023 Bahija Jallal on the biotech revolution in cancer therapies Some of the most complex medicines available today are made from living cells or organisms - these treatments are called biopharmaceuticals and in this episode of The Life Scientific Dr Bahija Jallal, CEO of Immunocore, shares her story of leaving ...
08.29.2023 Sir Colin Humphreys on electron microscopes, and the thinnest material in the world How much more of our world could we understand, if we could take stock of it, one atom at a time? If we could see the structure of individual molecules, understand the complex ways they interact with one another, and ...
08.22.2023 Chris Barratt on head-banging sperm and a future male contraceptive pill Reproductive science has come a long way in recent years, but there's still plenty we don't understand - particularly around male fertility. The reliability and availability of data in this field has become more of a concern in light of ...
08.15.2023 Gideon Henderson on climate ‘clocks’ and dating ice ages We’re used to hearing the stories of scientists who study the world as it is now but what about the study of the past - what can this tell us about our future? Gideon Henderson’s research focuses on trying to ...
08.08.2023 Deborah Greaves on wave power and offshore renewable energy If you’ve ever seen the ocean during a storm, you’ll understand the extraordinary power contained in waves. On an island nation like Britain, that power could well be harnessed to produce clean energy; so why have we barely begun to ...
06.27.2023 Harald Haas on making waves in light communication Imagine a world in which your laptop or mobile device accesses the internet, not via radio waves – or WiFi – as it does today but by using light instead: LiFi. Well, that world may not be as far away ...
06.20.2023 Anne Ferguson-Smith on unravelling epigenetics Our genes can tell us so much about us, from why we look the way we look, think the way we think, even what kind of diseases we might be likely to suffer from. But our genes aren't the whole ...
06.13.2023 Anne-Marie Imafidon on fighting for diversity and equality in science Anne-Marie Imafidon passed her computing A-Level at the age of 11 and by 16, was accepted to the University of Oxford to study Maths and Computer Science. She's used to the 'child prodigy' label that's followed her throughout her career, ...
06.06.2023 Bruce Malamud on modelling risk for natural hazards From landslides and wildfires to floods and tornadoes, Bruce Malamud has spent his career travelling the world and studying natural hazards. Today, he is Wilson Chair of Hazard and Risk and Executive Director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and ...
05.30.2023 Gillian Reid on making chemistry count How often do you think about chemistry? The chances are, not often - but it is vital to every part of our lives, from the air we breathe, to the processes that take place inside our bodies and the materials ...
05.23.2023 Andre Geim on levitating frogs, graphene and 2D materials The world around us is three-dimensional. Yet, there are materials that can be regarded as two-dimensional. They are only one layer of atoms thick and have remarkable properties that are different from their three-dimensional counterparts. Sir Andre Geim created the ...
03.28.2023 Julie Williams on Alzheimer’s disease There are almost a million people in the UK living with dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common form. But the disease actually starts long before any noticeable symptoms appear, and over the past decade, studies have shown that it ...
03.21.2023 James Jackson on understanding earthquakes and building resilience Since 1900, our best estimates suggest that earthquakes have caused around 2.3 million deaths worldwide; we saw the devastating effects of one just recently, in Turkey and Syria. And as scientists have been at pains to point out over the ...
03.14.2023 Marie Johnston on health psychology and the power of behavioural shifts Marie Johnston is a pioneer in the field of health psychology: the discipline that seeks to understand how psychological, behavioural and cultural factors contribute to our physical and mental health. Today an emeritus professor in health psychology at the University ...
03.07.2023 Julia King on manipulating metals and decarbonising transport Professor Dame Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, is an engineer whose fascination with metals, and skill for handling both research projects and people, has taken her from academia to industry to the House of Lords. She tells Jim Al-Khalili ...
02.28.2023 Danny Altmann on how T cells fight disease Jim Al-Khalili talks T cells, our immune response and Long Covid with Prof Danny Altmann. Danny Altmann joined ‘team T cells’ in his twenties and has been studying how these killer operate ever since. How do they know which cells ...
02.21.2023 Haley Gomez on cosmic dust Jim Al-Khalili talks to astrophysicist Haley Gomez about defying expectations and becoming a world expert on cosmic dust. For centuries, cosmic dust was a major source of irritation to optical astronomers because, like smog, it stopped them from seeing the ...
02.07.2023 Adrian Smith on the power of Bayesian statistics How a once-derided approach to statistics paved the way for AI. Jim Al-Khalili talks to pioneering mathematician, Professor Sir Adrian Smith. Accused early in his career of ‘trying to destroy the processes of science’, Adrian went on to prove that ...
01.31.2023 Clifford Johnson on making sense of black holes and movie plots Clifford Johnson's career to date has spanned some seemingly very different industries - from exploring quantum mechanics around string theory and black holes, to consulting on some of Hollywood's biggest movies; but it makes sense once you understand his ambition ...
01.24.2023 Rebecca Kilner on beetle behaviours and evolution A fur-stripped mouse carcase might not sound like the cosiest of homes – but that’s where the burying beetle makes its nest; and where Rebecca Kilner has focused much of her research. A Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University ...
01.17.2023 Pam Shaw on the research battle against motor neurone disease Motor Neuron Disease (MND) is a degenerative disease that relentlessly attacks the human nervous system, deteriorating muscle function to the point where patients can no longer move, talk, eat, or even breathe. To date there’s no cure, and until fairly ...
01.10.2023 Chris Elliott on fighting food fraud Professor Chris Elliott is something of a ‘food detective’. A Professor of Food Safety and Microbiology at Queen's University Belfast and a founding director of its Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS), his work is all about developing scientific solutions ...
10.18.2022 A passion for fruit flies What use to science is a pesky organism that feeds on rotting fruit? Professor Bambos Kyriacou has spent fifty years observing the behaviour of fruit flies. He keeps them in the lab and in his garden in their thousands, has ...
10.11.2022 Why study sewage? Leon Barron monitors pollution in our rivers, keeping tabs on chemicals that could be harmful to the environment and to our health. He’s also gathered intelligence on the behaviour of millions of Londoners by studying the water we flush down ...
10.04.2022 The sounds of coral reefs Tim Lamont is a young scientist making waves. Arriving on the Great Barrier Reef after a mass bleaching event, Tim saw his research plans disappear and was personally devastated by the destruction. But from that event he discovered a novel ...
09.27.2022 Can computers discover new medicines? Daphne Koller was a precociously clever child. She completed her first degree – a double major in mathematics and computer science – when she was just 17 and went on to become a distinguished Professor at Stanford University in California. ...
09.20.2022 Emily Holmes on how to treat trauma Emily Holmes is a distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at Uppsala University and a neuroscientist who struggled to learn to read and write as a child. She tells Jim Al-Khalili about her work as a mental health scientist and her ...
09.14.2022 Judith Bunbury on the shifting River Nile in the time of the Pharaohs Think Sahara Desert, think intense heat and drought. We see the Sahara as an unrelenting, frazzling, white place. But geo-archaeologist Dr Judith Bunbury says in the not so distant past, the region looked more like a safari park. In the ...
09.06.2022 Frances Arnold: From taxi driver to Nobel Prize Nobel Prize-winning chemist Frances Arnold left home at 15 and went to school ‘only when she felt like it’. She disagreed with her parents about the Vietnam War and drove big yellow taxis in Pittsburgh to pay the rent. Decades ...
06.28.2022 Sir Martin Landray on saving over a million lives Who could forget the beginning of 2020, when a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Soon, other countries were affected and deaths around the world began to climb. Perhaps most alarmingly of all, there were no ...
06.21.2022 Vlatko Vedral on the universe as quantum information Vlatko Vedral describes himself as a quantum information practitioner, who believes that our universe is made up of quantum bits of information. It is information, he tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili, rather than energy or matter, the traditional building blocks of ...
06.14.2022 Adam Hart on ants, bees and insect burgers Ant-loving professor, Adam Hart, shares his passion for leaf cutting ants with Jim Al Khalili. Why do they put leaves in piles for other ants to pick up? Talking at the Hay Festival, Adam describes the experiments he designed to ...
06.07.2022 Jacinta Tan on anorexia nervosa and the mind When a person with severe anorexia nervosa refuses food, the very treatment they need to survive, is that refusal carefully considered and rational, as it can appear to those around them? Or is it really the illness that’s causing them ...
05.31.2022 Pete Smith on why soil matters Pete Smith is very down to earth. Not least because he’s interested in soil and the vital role it plays in helping us to feed the world, mitigate climate change and maintain a rich diversity of species on planet earth. ...
05.24.2022 Chi Onwurah on why engineering is a caring profession. Chi Onwurah tells Jim Al-Khalili why she wanted to become a telecoms engineer and why engineering is a caring profession. As a black, working class woman from a council estate in Newcastle, she was in a minority of one studying ...
03.29.2022 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 construction ...
03.22.2022 Ben Garrod on conservation and extinction Ben Garrod is an obsessive bone collector and wild animal behaviourist. He was destined for a career in medicine but a chance encounter with primatologist Jane Goodall reignited his life long passion for conservation and led to him managing and ...
03.15.2022 Steve Brusatte on the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals Steve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How did dinosaurs evolve into birds? If you met a Velociraptor today you’d probably mistake it ...
03.08.2022 Shankar Balasubramanian on decoding DNA Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is responsible for a revolution in medicine. The method he invented for reading, at speed, the unique genetic code that makes each one of us who we are, is ten million times faster than the technology that ...
02.22.2022 Julia Shaw on memories that aren't true Early in her career, Julia wanted to know if it was possible to get someone to believe they committed a crime (when they hadn’t)? In a bold experiment she showed how students created false memories of criminal events in their ...
11.02.2021 Sharon Peacock on hunting pandemic variants of concern Microbiologist Sharon Peacock has led one of the genuine science success stories of the pandemic. Professor Peacock is the founding director of COG-UK, the COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium. COG-UK is the network of 600 scientists and labs around the country ...
10.26.2021 Tim Clutton-Brock on meerkats, red deer and evolution The huge popularity of meerkats is in no small part down to Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, zoologist and evolutionary biologist of the University of Cambridge. ‘Meerkat Manor’ and many natural history TV documentaries that have followed the lives of these small ...

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