Discovery

Jared Diamond

<p>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?</p><p>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. </p><p>Once a Professor of Physiology, he became increasingly fascinated by the birds of Papua New Guinea.</p><p>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. But can the history of humanity really be understood in much the same way as we might seek to explain the success or otherwise of a particular species of bird?</p>

The Life Scientific: Andrea Sella - Chemist

<p>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.</p>

Why do women outlive men

<p>Baby girls born today in the UK can expect to live to 82 years old, whereas boys on average will die 4 years earlier.</p><p>Evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong looks at the latest evidence suggesting that where ageing is concerned, men seem to be at a genetic disadvantage. From research on ancient Korean eunuchs to laboratory fruit flies, new studies seek the answer to why males across the animal kingdom live faster and die younger.</p><p>So, is the gender gap here to stay?</p>

Piltdown Man

<p>The most notorious fraud in the history of Science is the focus of this week’s Discovery. Exactly one hundred years ago, British scientists announced their discovery of fossilised skull and jaw bones of what appeared to be the earliest human – a species of humanity closer to our prehistoric ape ancestors than any found before it. In 1912 it was a sensational find. In 1953 it was revealed as a horrible hoax. </p><p>Jonathan Amos talks to palaeontologists and archaeologists about the case of Piltdown Man and asks, could anything as scientifically scandalous happen today? He visits Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at London’s Natural History Museum. The museum is putting the original fraudulent specimens on display after almost sixty years of being hidden in disgrace. </p><p>Archaeologists Miles Russell and Matthew Pope discuss the prime suspect in the case and ruminate on his motivations.</p><p>Could the world of human origins research be fooled by a hoaxer today?</p><p>Producer: Andrew Luck Baker</p>

Particle Physics

<p>Finding the Higgs boson on July 4th 2012 was the last piece in physicists' Standard model of matter. But Tracey Logan discovers there's much more for them to find out at the Large Hadron Collider. To start with there is a lot of work to establish what kind of Higgs boson it is. </p><p>Tracey visits CERN and an experiment called LHCb which is trying to find out why there's a lot more matter than anti-matter in the universe today. Dr Tara Shears of Liverpool University is her guide. </p><p>Tracey also talks to physicists who are hoping to find dark matter in the debris of the collisions at the LHC. Scientists know there's plenty of dark matter in the universe, from its effects on galaxies, but they don't know what it is. Tracey discovers that this fact isn't stopping the particle physicists carrying out experiments.</p><p>(Image: Scientists in front of a screen at CERN during the restart of the Large Hadron Collider in 2009, Credit: AFP/Getty)</p>

Last Man, First Scientist on the Moon

<p>Kevin Fong talks to one of the last two men on the Moon, 40 years after the final Apollo 17 mission blasted off on 7 December 1972. As an Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt was special. He was was the only geologist ever to explore the lunar surface. The field work Dr Schmitt did, and the rocks he and his fellow astronauts brought back, revolutionised our understanding of the Moon and the Earth. Dr Schmitt also shares the human experience of running around another planet and explains why he thinks we should go back, and beyond. </p><p>The conversation also features archive recordings of the two Apollo 17 moon walkers, Schmitt and Commander Eugene Cernan talking from the lunar surface and Challenger module to NASA’s mission control in Houston in 1972.</p><p>Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker</p>

Hallucination 2/2

<p>In this programme, Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Geoff visits Dr Dominic Ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and undergoes a stroboscopic experiment designed to induce hallucinations in subjects whilst their brains are being scanned. </p><p>We hear some of the vivid accounts from hallucinators, including Doris, who has macular degeneration. Over the last year, her failing eyesight has resulted in an array of objects and images appearing before her with startling clarity, from relatively benign baskets of flowers to the rather more distressing sight of dark, haunting figures sitting by her bed. Her condition is known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome and Dr Ffytche estimates that over two million people suffer from this in the UK alone, mostly in silence, due to the fear of being labelled as 'mad'. </p><p>Geoff also visits Kelly Diederen's lab at Cambridge University, which is investigating the origin of auditory hallucinations - hearing voices. Common in people with schizophrenia, Dr Diederen is instead, scanning the brains of so-called "healthy hallucinators," individuals who otherwise lead perfectly functional lives save for the fact that they hear voices on a daily basis. Could they hold the key to understanding and treating a key symptom of psychosis?</p><p>(Image: Close up of the face of an anonymous male. Credit: BBC)</p>

Hallucination 1/2

<p>Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Hallucinations aren't what they used to be. Time was when reporting a divine vision would bring fame or fortune. The Enlightenment changed all that and nowadays you'd be more at risk of being handed a prescription for a major tranquilliser for reporting what you saw or heard. </p><p>Hallucinating, in essence, the experience of seeing or hearing (and sometimes smelling or touching) something that by any objective measure, isn't there, has been linked to a wide variety of causes. But there are also examples of otherwise 'healthy' individuals who have experienced vivid and sometimes distressing hallucinations. With the advent of fMRI scanning, researchers can observe the hallucinating brain in action, it is these 'healthy' individuals who are beginning to open the doors of perception and which may provide new insights and treatments for psychosis and schizophrenia. </p><p>(Image: Coloured lights and dots, Credit: AFP/Getty Images)</p>

The Age We Made

<p>Gaia Vince concludes her journey through the geological age humans have launched. After climate change and mass extinction, she now explores moves how the world’s cities and manufactured artefacts (from mobile phones to plastic bottles) might become 'fossilised' and incorporated into the geological record. Some are bound to survive in crushed form for the rest of the Earth’s existence. Any distant-future geologist would recognise them as strange features unique in the planet’s 4 billion year rock record: chaotic rock layers preserving urban rubble and underground tunnels - mudstones unnaturally rich in zinc, cadmium and mercury – and the occasional crushed mobile phone or plastic bottle transformed from polymer to delicate coal. These rocks and artificial ‘fossils’ will be evidence of a planetary shift into the new time period, which today’s geologists call the Anthropocene.</p><p>(Image: A pile of mobile phones, Credit: Getty Images)</p>

The Age We Made - Part 3

<p>Earth scientists say humanity’s impact on the Earth has been so profound that we have started a new geological time period on the planet. They call it, the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince explores our fundamental changes to the biosphere. </p><p>The accelerating extinctions of animal and plant species: the rearing of agricultural animals in their billions: and, what some describe as, the general ‘macdonaldisation’ of life on Earth. All three factors will leave striking evidence in the fossil record in the limestones and sandstones, forming on the Earth’s surface today. Millions of years in the future, a geologist chipping at the rocks of our times might conclude that something in the world happened as big as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.</p><p>Are we responsible for the sixth great mass extinction in Earth history and forcing the planet down a different trouser leg of geological time, as one scientist puts it?</p>

The Age We Made - Part 2

<p>Humanity’s impact on the atmosphere with fossil fuel burning is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period, say geologists. They’ve named it, the Anthropocene.</p><p>In this part of her journey into the Anthropocene, Gaia Vince explores how fossil fuel burning will leave enduring marks in geological record forming on the Earth in current times. </p><p>Climate change and ocean acidification are in the process of transforming the planet on such a scale that humanity has shifted Earth history into a new geological epoch. Millions of years from now, scientists will be able to read the rocks forming now and see that something profound and unprecedently rapid – from sea level rise to dissolving coral reefs. </p><p>Drawing from similar episodes in Earth history, leading geoscientists warn of a global blanket of oxygen-starved muds, extinctions of much marine life and a sea level 20 metres higher than today’s.</p>

The Age We Made - Part 1

<p>Humanity’s impact on the Earth is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period. Geologists have named the age we’re making the Anthropocene. The changes we’re making to the atmosphere, oceans, landscape and living things will leap out of the rocks forming today to Earth scientists of the far future, as clearly as the giant meteorite that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs does to today’s researchers. In this four part series, journalist Gaia Vince looks at the impact of these planetary transformations from the perspective of geological time. When was the last time comparable events happened in Earth history, and are what are the key marks we’re making on the planet that define the Anthropocene?</p><p>In this first programme, Gaia hears how the hand of humanity on the surface of the continent is geological in its sheer scale and its imprint will remain for millions of years. Through mining and quarrying, we shift billions more tonnes rock and sediment annually than all of the planet’s great rivers and glaciers combined. We are creating new strata in patterns Mother Earth never intended. </p><p>By turning 40% of the land from wild habitat to food production and then discovering how to turn the atmosphere’s nitrogen into synthetic fertiliser, we’ve become the biggest thing to happen to the whole planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2 billion years. </p><p>That’s not only causing immediate and serious environmental problems such as oxygen-depleted dead zones in coastal areas and the acceleration of climate change, our rock-shifting and nitrogenous activities will be preserved in the rocks of the future geological record for posterity. Our sedimentary and geochemical signals are exactly the kind geologists use to mark where one period of Earth history ends and another begins.</p><p>Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker </p><p>(Image: Anthropocene data visualisation. Credit: International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Globaia)</p>

End of Drug Discovery

<p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>(Image: Pills in a jar, Credit: Getty Images)</p>

End of Drug Discovery

<p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>(Image: Pills and capsules. Credit: Science Photo Library)</p>

The sound of deafness

<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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? </p><p>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.</p>

Darwin's Tunes

<p>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? </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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?</p><p>Producer: Ania Lichtarowicz</p>

Frankenstein's Moon

<p>What can astronomy tells us about great literature? </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>(Image: Baron Frankenstein, played by Peter Cushing, leans over his monstor in the film The Curse of Frankenstein. Credit: Getty Images)</p>

Episode 3

<p>One hundred years ago, the first humans reached the South Pole of this planet. </p><p>More than 40 years ago, man first walked on the moon. </p><p>When will our species first set foot to explore the planet Mars? </p><p>Kevin Fong seeks a likely launch date. </p><p>He asks who will get us there and why we really need to explore the Red Planet.</p><p>(Image: An image, released by NASA, of the terrain of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover. Credit: AP Photo / NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)</p>

The Life Scientific : Lloyd Peck - Antarctic Scientist

<p>Jim Al-Khalili finds out about the life scientific of the British Antarctic Survey biologist Lloyd Peck. </p><p>Amongst other creatures he studies giant sea spiders. They and other small animals grow far bigger than usual in the extreme cold. </p><p>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. </p><p>And Lloyd talks about the difficulty of leaving his family behind in the UK while he spends months in the Antarctic.</p><p>Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald</p><p>(Image: A young woman studying a sea spider in the Science Museum in London. Credit: AFP / Getty Images)</p>

Episode 2

<p>One hundred years ago, Scott reached the South Pole.</p><p>Fifty years later, the first geologist briefly walked on the moon. </p><p>Kevin Fong asks if why we might want to return to the lunar surface and what will get us. </p><p>He talks to that first lunar geologist of Apollo 17, Harrison Schmitt and Nasa's Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, among others.</p>

The Life Scientific : Barbara Sahakian - Neuroscientist

<p>Jim Al-Khalili meets Cambridge University neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian. </p><p>She talks about her Life Scientific finding drugs to slow down the memory losses that happen in Alzheimer's disease. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>Jim and Barbara discuss the thorny ethical issues raised by these uses of these drugs.</p>

Episode 1

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

Saving the Ganges River Dolphin

<p>Discovery this week goes in search of the Gangetic River Dolphin, an extraordinary creature which inhabits the muddy waters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. </p><p>Not long ago, the dolphin was a common sight for people along these mighty water ways, but now it's one of the world's rarest freshwater mammals. </p><p>Andrew Luck-Baker joins Indian biologists studying the dolphins and the threats to them along the stretch of the Brahmaputra in the state of Assam. </p><p>In a joint project between Aaranyak, an Indian conservation organisation, and the Zoological Society of London, the scientists are also mobilising local communities to protect this special animal and the ecosystem they share with it.</p>

Nasa's Curiosity robot lands on Mars

<p>After the most daring and complex landing of a robot on another planet, the search for evidence of life on Mars enters a new era. </p><p>Nasa's Curiosity rover is now sitting inside Gale Crater, a vast depression close to the Martian equator. </p><p>Also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, the one tonne machine is the most sophisticated science robot ever placed on another world. </p><p>Over the coming years Curiosity will climb a mountain at the crater's heart, gathering evidence on one of science's greatest questions – was there ever life on Mars? </p><p>The $2.5 billion project will discover whether Mars once had conditions suitable for the evolution and survival of life. </p><p>BBC Space specialist Jonathan Amos talks to mission scientists about where Curiosity is going and what it will do as it trundles up Mars' Mount Sharp.</p><p>(Image: Nasa's Curiosity rover. Credit: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/PA Wire)</p>

Future Flight: Prog 2 of 2

<p>Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who are designing flying cars and green aircraft. </p><p>Gareth has a go at flying a personal aircraft in the flight simulator at Liverpool University. Doctors Mike Jump and Mark White explain that the EU-funded project MyCopter is seriously looking at the prospect of flying personal vehicles that are as easy to drive as a car. </p><p>Sophie Robinson, a Ph.D student at Liverpool University, explains how her research into the safety and stability of auto-gyros, flying machines that already exist for personal travel, could set standards for the flying cars of the future.</p><p>Prof Jeff Jupp, who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, talks about alternative fuels to kerosene and new designs for engines. These look rather old-school, as they have propellers, but they will make the aircraft more energy efficient. But there may be a downside in that they could be noisier and slower than jet engines. </p><p>Dr Will Graham describes the work he has done on the Silent Aircraft project, in which the engines are set inside the wings.</p><p>(Image: The SkyRider, one of the concepts of the MyCopter project. Image courtesy of Gareth Padfield, FS&amp;C)</p>

Future Flight: Prog 1 of 2

<p>Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who will transform the way we fly around the world and finds out what aircraft might look like in the future. </p><p>Gareth visits the flight gallery at the Science Museum in London with the curator, Dr Andrew Nahum, who shows him how the basic shape of aircraft has hardly changed in 70 years, since the days of the DC3. Andrew Nahum also talks about why Concorde was in service for such a short time. </p><p>David Caughey, Emeritus Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cornell University, points out that the blended wing shaped aircraft is more energy efficient. So Gareth asks why we don't see them in service today - the answer is that apart from the innate caution of the airline manufacturers, the passengers would have no windows and it could be hard to evacuate such a craft speedily in an emergency. </p><p>Gareth talks to Professor Jeff Jupp who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, about the technical challenges. </p><p>Professor Paul Weaver at Bristol University tells Gareth about his work on making wings that change shape like birds'.</p><p>And Colin Sirett, Head of Research and Technology at Airbus UK, discusses some ideas for planes of the future, such as see-through fuselages and pods that take passengers from the airport and attach to the aircraft.</p><p>(Image: The Douglas DC-3)</p>

Artificial Photosynthesis

<p>Chemist Andrea Sella explores the current race to do photosynthesis better than nature ever achieved. </p><p>In just a few hundred years mankind has burnt fossil fuels that had taken natural photosynthesis billions of years to create.</p><p>Now, around the world hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent on the race to develop a robust, cheap and efficient way to turn the light from the sun into fuels we can use. </p><p>At a time when politicians everywhere debate the economic and climatic burdens of our future energy needs, such a "solar fuel" would be a genuinely novel alternative energy.</p><p>(Image: Some beech leaves. Credit: Martin Dohrn /Science Photo Library)</p>

Artificial Blood

<p>Could creating "blood" in the laboratory make infections passed on through blood transfusions a thing of the past? Vivienne Parry investigates.</p><p>The drive behind the quest for creating a blood substitute was originally from the US Military - during the Vietnam War a clean, reliable and portable alternative to donor blood would have helped to save many lives. </p><p>Donated blood can only be kept for a limited time, needs refrigerating and has to be cross matched according to which ABO group people belong to. The "universal donor" - O negative blood - can be used on accident victims before a match is found. But it's in very short supply and often many units of blood are required.</p><p>The history of creating blood has had a chequered past - with some products abandoned because of side effects and others proving too costly to produce. One analysis of clinical trials on blood substitutes in 2008 revealed a higher incidence of heart attacks in patients who'd been given them, compared with those who received human blood.</p><p>Some scientists have tried using the pigment found in oxygen-carrying red blood cells - haemoglobin. This molecule is normally packed into the cells, so that it can "grab" oxygen breathed in by the lungs and release it in minute capillaries, providing the body with the oxygen needed to surivive. But "free" haemoglobin is toxic to the body - presenting researchers with a technical challenge.</p><p>Another approach has been to grow human red blood cells from cells extracted from umbilical cords - known as blood pharming. But with the average blood transfusion containing 2.5 million million red blood cells the scale of production would have to be enormous. A special cocktail of growth factors coax these stem cells into becoming red blood cells just like those the body produces naturally.</p><p>(Image: A syringe filled with blood)</p>

Gene Therapy

<p>Gene therapy - repairing malfunctioning cells by mending their DNA - offers an elegant solution to diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, caused by a single flawed gene. </p><p>It's a very simple concept to describe - simply insert a 'normal' gene to do the job - but it's this process, the delivery of the gene, that's proving to be so difficult and time consuming. Since the first human study began in 1990 the field has struggled with various technical challenges and set-backs.</p><p>But over a decade on, researchers are beginning to report successes in treating several devastating diseases. Geoff Watts finds out about some of the new techniques for gene therapy, and discovers how these are now being used in a trial of a new method of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis. </p><p>Twelve years ago, a group of scientists from Imperial College in London, Oxford and Edinburgh formed the Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium. This year they started the world's biggest trial of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis.</p><p>Funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the Medical Research Council and The National Institute for Health Research , the trial will treat 120 CF patients with either a placebo or a healthy copy of the gene that causes CF. The gene is wrapped up in a fat globule, or liposome and delivered in aerosol form directly to the lungs.</p><p>(Image: Eric Alton)</p>

Legacy Of Alan Turing - Episode Two

<p>Alan Turing, born 23 June 1912, is famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his greatest work was on the invention of the computer. </p><p>Alan Turing's brilliance at maths was spectacular. Aged 22, just a year after his graduation, he was elected a fellow of King's College Cambridge. And it was just a year after that, that he turned his attention to problems in the foundations of mathematics and ended up showing that a simple machine, set up to read and write numbers and to run a few basic functions, could in principle do all the things that are do-able in mathematics. His 'universal' machine was just a concept - a paper tape that could be read, interpreted and acted on robotically. But the concept was profound. </p><p>World War II shortly afterwards took Turing's talents into other directions, but even while designing machines at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes, he was wondering how much more a computing machine might do - play chess for example.</p><p>And although the war work might have delayed Turing's academic work, it greatly accelerated progress in electronics, so that in 1945 he returned to his first love, creating a complete design for what he expected to be the world's first fully programmable computer, the National Physical Laboratory's ACE - the Automatic Computing Engine. In the end, beset by hesitation and bureaucratic delays, the ACE was overtaken by a rival team in Manchester, whose Small Scale Experimental Machine first ran on 21 June 1948. But the Manchester Baby as it became known, fulfilled the requirements laid down in Turing's seminal 1936 paper, and in a handful of instructions had the power to do any kind of maths or data processing, like a computer of today does. </p><p>Turing soon joined the Manchester team, and again with remarkable prescience started work on artificial intelligence, wondering whether electronic machines could be programmed not just to do maths, but to think in the way human minds do - a hot topic of debate even now. </p><p>Those explorations were cut short by his death in 1954, two years after he’d been prosecuted for his homosexuality. His death at a time when official secrecy still hid his code-breaking work, and when the history of computing was already being written meant that few appreciated his central role in today's dominant industry. But some enthusiasts hope they can write him back in where he belongs.</p><p>In this second of two episodes devoted to Turing, the BBC's Roland Pease follows the events following Turing's design for the ACE machine at NPL, and the race against the Baby Computer in Manchester.</p><p>(Image: Alan Turing. Credit: Bill Sanderson/Science Photo Library)</p>