The Life Scientific

Finding the wreck of the Titanic would be a career-defining achievement for most people. For oceanographer Robert Ballard, it's just one chapter in a life packed full of extraordinary marine exploration.

Bob located the world-famous shipwreck in 1985, but even before that, he’d helped prove the existence of hydrothermal vents: underwater formations surrounded by ecosystems flourishing in the ocean’s depths - without sunlight; a discoveyr that revolutionised our understanding of where and how life can flourish...

Over a career spanning six decades, Bob has pioneered revolutionary technologies, discovered some of history's most famous shipwrecks and...

What do the very first writhing movements of babies have in common with orangutans solving problems for food? Well, according to Gillian Forrester they may both offer clues about how we humans developed language.

Working with her great ape colleagues, Gilly Forrester – Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Sussex – has dedicated her career to finding out how we became the talkative, tool-using troop we are today.

Examining the link between movement, spoken language and social communication, Gilly’s research has looked at how brain organisation could affect the likelihood of being diagnosed with autism...

Although books and movies might suggest otherwise, catching criminals is of course less about hunches and gut instinct, and more about gruelling analysis of hard data - including when it comes to the psychological side.

David Canter is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, who took exactly this approach in the 1980s when he was asked to help police track down a serial killer. David had built his reputation as an environmental psychologist, studying how people behave in emergency situations and even advising the government on how to prevent disasters in football stadiums...

Imagine looking at a map of a city you thought you knew inside-out, only to discover a collection of tightly knit neighbourhoods that nobody had ever realised existed... Edith Heard has achieved something rather similar with DNA.

Edith is a leading expert in epigenetics: put simply, the science around how our bodies can turn particular genes on or off without actually altering our DNA. She’s spent her career studying the mechanisms that make us who we are and transforming our understanding of how X chromosomes are expressed; notably, how female cells turn off the spare X ch...

What do you do when your childhood dream of becoming an astronaut is grounded at the final hurdle?

If you’re physicist Ginger Kerrick, you go on to help run the missions instead.

After failing the medical of her astronaut application process, Ginger went on to become Nasa’s first non-astronaut CAPCOM and its first Hispanic female Flight Director. Across a remarkable three-decade career, she helped train the International Space Station’s first long-term crew, logged thousands of hours in Mission Control, and shaped future missions to the moon and Mars. All with her trademark determ...

Have you ever been told you aren't good enough to do something, then gone ahead and proved the naysayers wrong by doing it anyway - in glorious, headline-grabbing style?

That is the satisfying story of Dr Dean Lomax. Dean grew up in Doncaster with a passion for fossils but after failing various school exams, was told by teachers that he'd never make it as a palaeontologist. Undeterred by leaving school with no qualifications, Dean sold his childhood Star Wars collection to fund a fossil-hunting trip to America that changed his life - after which a chance discovery...

What if robots of the future weren’t just clever machines, performing tasks in isolation, but trusted teammates you could have a chat with? That could respond naturally to conversational cues and even explain their work?

Making this relationship a reality is a focus for Helen Hastie, Professor of Human-Robot Interaction and Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Helen’s career has taken her from developing early dialogue systems - the ancestors of today’s generative AI - to working on sophisticated bots that can serve coffee with a side of small-talk, teach...

Dr Seth Berkley is an epidemiologist and global health leader whose career has been shaped by one central problem: vaccines save lives, but only if people can actually get them.

His 40-year career has spanned the global, from helping to build Uganda’s first HIV surveillance system and founding the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; to leading Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance for more than a decade – overseeing the immunisation of hundreds of millions of children worldwide. And when COVID-19 struck, Seth co-founded COVAX, the global initiative designed to stop wealthy nations monopolising vaccines.

In conversation with Prof...

Hiranya Peiris is playing a starring role in a movie that promises to tell perhaps the greatest story of all time. However, it’s a movie with a difference – there’s no director and no script. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time is one of the most ambitious projects in the world of astronomy, with a mission to create a decade-long time-lapse movie of the visible universe, to answer fundamental questions about its origin, evolution and, ultimately, its fate.

Hiranya is Professor of Astrophysics 1909, the prestigious Chair at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. Over her ca...

As a child growing up on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, Washington Yotto Ochieng once watched a plane cross the night sky and told his mother he wished he could travel on it. But he remembers her encouraging him to dream bigger...

Today, Washington is a Professor of Engineering at Imperial College London, and President of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Over a career bridging industry and academia, he has helped shape the movement of urban transport; how satellites guide us and locate us; and how governments manage the technologies underpinning so much of...

Working on a remote tropical island in the Atlantic might sound like some sort of romantic idyll - but trying to conduct scientific research on a windy, isolated volanic outcrop is no picnic, as Lucy Carpenter can attest!

Lucy is an atmopsheric chemist and a Professor at the University of York, whose work has helped to transform understanding of how oceans shape the air above them. She was one of the founding scientists behind the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, established on São Vicente in 2006 and now a key global monitoring site. Measurements made there helped overturn a...

As recently as a few years ago, the idea of a self-administered injection that would deliver proven weight-loss results might have sounded fantastical. Today, these medications are a reality and a global phenomenon; hailed in many quarters as “miracle drugs" for their success in treating obesity and diabetes.

They do this by replicating a gut hormone called GLP‑1, which tells the brain you’ve eaten enough and nudges the pancreas to release insulin; and this hormone was discovered and decoded thanks to years of work by today's guest.

Jens Juul Holst is a Professor of Medica...

It's a rare thing to encounter a medical specialist who has experience of his field from the expert and the patient perspective - but not unheard of...

Jim Ashworth-Beaumont is an orthotist and prosthetist who spent years helping people adapt to life with artificial limbs and musculoskeletal supports, before a near-fatal accident left him relying on both.

This twist of fate might have derailed many - but Jim drew on reserves of resilience and determination forged long before his accident; initially in the army, then by returning to education to earn the qualifications he missed...

Ever heard of the unsuccessful Dutch painter who decided to humiliate his critics by forging Vermeers, which the artworld subsequently dubbed 'masterpieces'? Or the businessman who bought a Marc Chagall painting that he displayed with pride for years, before a television investigation revealed to his horror that it was a fake?

Today we're exploring the scientific techniques used to reveal forged artworks - and bring down scammers still trying to make millions from fake masterpieces.

Jehane Ragai is an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the American University in Cairo, with a passion for science matched...

Tony Juniper is an environmentalist who has worn many hats, over the course of his career.

After developing a passion for birds in childhood, his first job saw him working to save endangered parrots - including a successful effort to bring back the Spix's macaw from the edge of extinction. Tony went on to hold leading campaigning roles with some of the world's best known environmental organisations, from Friends of The Earth to the World Wildlife Fund. He also acted as an advisor to King Charles's International Sustainability Unit and co-authored three books with the monarch.

The COP30 climate summit is taking place in the Brazilian city of Belém, a gateway to the Amazon rainforest, which continues to face widespread deforestation. We all know that our climate is changing and that we are largely responsible for this, but we can’t tackle the problem unless we understand what’s going on.

One scientist who’s done more than most to rectify this is Professor Pierre Friedlingstein. He’s a prominent climate scientist and Chair in Mathematical Modelling of the Climate System at Exeter University. His models have transformed our understanding of climate change, r...

Imagine if you were listening to an opera or a Taylor Swift concert, and as the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the music was accompanied by a rainbow of colours only you could see. Perhaps while listening to your friends talking, you simultaneously experience a smorgasbord of tastes, with different words evoking different flavours, maybe a delicious ice cream, or something as disgusting as ear wax... This merging of the senses is known as synaesthesia, and it’s the rich research world of neuropsychologist Professor Julia Simner. Julia runs the Multisense lab at the University of Sussex and has pi...

Caroline Smith is passionate about space rocks, whether they’re samples collected from the surface of asteroids and the Moon and hopefully Mars one day soon, or meteorites, those alien rock fragments that have survived their fiery descents through our atmosphere to land here on Earth.

She is Head of Collections and Principal Curator of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum, home to one of the finest meteorite collections in the world. Her interest in rocks began while wandering the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, as a child, picking up the ones that caught her eye and ba...

From humble beginnings in his native Sri Lanka, to a more than 40 year academic career at Queen’s University Belfast, Prof. AP (Amilra Prasanna) De Silva’s research into molecular photosensors has led to a pioneering career in that’s evolved from chemistry to medical diagnostics on one hand, to information processing on the other.

Prof. De Silva challenged cultural expectations and overcame the lack of opportunities in chemistry that were available in Sri Lanka in the early 1970s. He first moved to Belfast to pursue research in photochemistry at Queen’s University. Inspired by his grandmother’s struggle...

There are problems and tasks so hard and complicated that it would take today’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack them. But in the next decade, we may well have quantum computers which could solve such problems in seconds.

Professor Sir Peter Knight is a British pioneer in the realms of quantum optics and quantum information science. During his three decades as a researcher at Imperial College London, he has advanced our understanding of the physics which underpins how quantum computers work.

Quantum optics was a new field of physics at the st...

In July 1545, King Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle on England's south coast as his fleet sailed out to face the French - only to witness his prized warship, the Mary Rose, sink before his eyes.

Raised from the Solent in 1982, the ship is now the centrepiece of the Mary Rose Museum, along with thousands more artefacts that were recovered from the seabed. But keeping the 500-year-old ship and its associated Tudor relics in good condition is no small task, which is where Dr Eleanor Schofield comes in. As Director of Collections at the Mary Rose Trust...

"My ideas are often labelled as impossible, or useless, or both. Usually when people say that I'm on the right track."

George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and one of the pioneers of modern genomics. He's also someone who makes a habit of finding solutions to the seemingly impossible.

Over the course of his career so far, George developed the first method for direct genomic sequencing, helped initiate the Human Genome Project, and founded the Personal Genome Project: making huge quantities of DNA data publicly available for research. Today, as a professor at Harvard...

Movies might have us believe that bomb disposal comes down to cutting the right wire. In fact, explosive devices are complex and varied - and learning how to dispose of them safely involves intense training, as well as the ability to stay calm under pressure.

This was the world of Dr Gareth Collett, a retired British Army Brigadier General and engineer, specialising in bomb disposal; whose 32-year military career took him around the world, including heading up major ordnance clearance projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. After retiring from the army, Gareth became a university lecturer – but following hi...

Many people will be familiar with Parkinson’s disease: the progressive brain disorder that causes symptoms including tremors and slower movement, leading on to serious cognitive problems. You might not know that it’s the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world. Today it affects around 11.8 million people and that’s forecast to double by 2030.

Dr Sonia Gandhi is one of the scientists working to change that trend. As Professor of Neurology at University College London and Assistant Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute, her work involves using stem cells to build models of the human brain, helpin...

How do you feel about snakes? What about highly venomous ones?

For Mark O’Shea, close encounters with the world’s most rare and deadly snakes are not only his profession, but his passion. Mark is a Professor of Herpetology - the area of zoology focusing on reptiles and amphibians - at the University of Wolverhampton.

After dropping out of college in his teens, Mark's life could have taken a very different direction; but prompted by a fascination with reptiles that started with a childhood trip to the zoo, he's gone on to have a care...

There can't be many people in the world who've saved lives in hospital emergency rooms and also helped care for the wellbeing of astronauts in space – but Kevin Fong’s career has followed a singular path: from astrophysics and trauma medicine, to working with NASA, to becoming an Air Ambulance doctor.

Kevin is a consultant anaesthetist and professor of public engagement and innovation at University College London. He’s worked on the front line in hospitals, dealing with major incidents and helping shape policy; but he's also stayed true to his childhood passion for space, working on multip...

Chemical reactions are the backbone of modern society: the energy we use, the medicines we take, our housing materials, even the foods we eat, are created by reacting different substances together. If we zoom in, it’s the atoms within these substances that rearrange themselves to give rise to new substances with the properties we need.

However, chemical reactions are far from perfect. They're often inefficient and their waste products can be harmful to the environment. Getting to grips with what goes on at the scale of individual atoms has long been a sticking point.

Da...

Have you ever considered the lighter side of dark matter? Comedy has proved an unexpectedly succesful way to engage people with science - as today's guest knows first-hand.

Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and the current Astronomer Royal for Scotland. She’s spent her career studying dark matter and dark energy: the mysterious ingredients that make up an estimated 95% of our cosmos, but which we still know surprisingly little about. Using increasingly powerful telescopes, both on earth and in space, Catherine has spent years building detailed maps of dark matter - ev...

As a young man, traveling in Africa, Tim Coulson - now Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford - became seriously ill with malaria and was told a second bout would probably kill him. Aged only 20, this brush with his own mortality led him to promise himself he would write a complete guide to science: life, the universe and everything. His aim was to understand the existence of all living things - no mean feat!

Over the course of a colourful career, Tim's work has taken him all over the world: including researching wolves in Yellowstone...

Claudia de Rham has rather an unusual relationship with gravity.

While she has spent her career exploring its fundamental nature, much of her free time has involved trying to defy it - from scuba diving in the Indian Ocean to piloting small aircraft over the Canadian waterfalls. Her ultimate ambition was to escape gravity’s clutches altogether and become an astronaut, a dream that was snatched away by an unlikely twist of fate.

However, Claudia has no regrets - and says defying gravity for much of her life has helped her to truly understand it.

When you think of Artificial Intelligence, does it inspire confidence, or concern?

Although it's now generally accepted that this technology will play a major role in our future, a lot of conversations around AI and machine learning come back to the argument over us losing control and robots taking over.

Happily, Neil Lawrence has a more optimistic view of the power of AI, and how we might navigate the potential pitfalls. Neil is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and over the course of his career has been involved in...

A frozen, white world at the far-reaches of the globe, where you're surrounded by snow and silence, might sound rather appealing. Factor in temperatures that drop to -57°C and a few of us might be put off - but for glaciologist Liz Morris, that's very much her happy place.

Liz is an Emeritus Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, and was among the first British women scientists to work on the planet’s coldest continent, Antarctica. Over the course of her career, Liz has gathered vital data on polar ice sheets and h...

Welcome to a world where medicine meets politics: a space that brings together scientific research, government wrangling, public push-back and healthcare conspiracies…

Dr Anthony Fauci was the Director of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades, during which time he not only helped study, treat and prevent viruses such as HIV/AIDS and Covid-19; he also advised seven US Presidents, from Ronald Regan through to Joe Biden.

Along the way, Tony Fauci's picked up a public profile and taken a fair amount of flack; not least because of his comp...

Have you ever pondered the fact that the universe is expanding? And not only that, it's expanding at an increasing speed - meaning everything around us is getting further and further away?

If that isolating thought makes you feel slightly panicked, don't worry: this programme also contains wine!

Brian Schmidt is a Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics at the Australian National University, known for his work on supernovae: massive explosions that take place when stars come to the ends of their lives. They are among the most energetic events in the universe and incredibly difficult to...

How much information can you extract from a burnt fragment of human bone?

Quite a lot, it turns out - not only about the individual, but also their broader lives and communities; and these are the stories unearthed by Jacqueline McKinley, a Principal Osteoarchaeologist with Wessex Archaeology.

During her career, Jackie has analysed thousands of ancient burial sites across the British Isles, bringing to life the old traditions around death via often cremated human remains. She's also assisted criminal investigators with forensic analysis, and contributed to some of the UK's best-loved archaeological TV shows. And...

Surgeons often have to deal with the consequences of violent attacks - becoming all too familiar with patterns of public violence, and peaks around weekends, alcohol-infused events and occasions that bring together groups with conflicting ideals.

Professor Jonathan Shepherd not only recognised the link between public violence and emergency hospital admissions, he actually did something about it.

As a senior lecturer in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in the early 1980s, Jonathan started looking into this trend - and his research revealed that most violent assaults resulting in emergency hospital treatment are not reported to police. <...

Doyne Farmer is something of a rebel. Back in the seventies, when he was a student, he walked into a casino in Las Vegas, sat down at a roulette table and beat the house. To anyone watching the wheel spin and the ball clatter to its final resting place, his choice of number would’ve looked like a lucky guess. But knowing the physics of the game and armed with the world’s first wearable computer, which he’d designed, a seemingly random win was actually somewhat predictable.

Doyne is an American scientist and entrepreneur who pioneered many o...

Elephants are the largest living land mammal and today our planet is home to three species: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.

But a hundred thousand years ago, in the chilly depths of the Ice Age, multiple species of elephant roamed the earth: from dog-sized dwarf elephants to towering woolly mammoths.

These gentle giants' evolutionary story and its parallels with that of humankind has long fascinated Dr Tori Herridge, a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology at the University of Sheffield, where - as a seasoned science broadcaster - she's...

What does it take to earn the nickname, ‘The Leonardo da Vinci of heart surgery’?

That's the moniker given to today's guest - a man who pioneered high-profile and often controversial procedures, but also helped drive huge medical progress; carrying out around 2,000 heart transplants and 400 dual heart-lung transplants during his 60-year career.

Sir Magdi Yacoub is Emeritus Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Imperial College London, and Director of Research at Harefield Hospital’s Magdi Yacoub Institute. Inspired by a surgeon father and impacted by the tragic early death of his aunt from a heart condition, his me...

What's it like living underwater for two weeks? What's the trickiest part of training to be an astronaut? What are the most memorable sights you see from space? Several extreme questions, all of which can be answered by one man: Major Tim Peake.

After a childhood packed with outdoor adventures, via the Cub Scouts and school Cadet Force, Tim joined the British Army Air Corps and became a military flying instructor then a test pilot; before eventually being selected as a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut.

In 2015, Tim became the first British ESA astronaut to...