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This is the Old Bailey. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
Today, it's the central criminal court | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
but until the mid 19th century, this site was home to Newgate Jail, | 0:00:21 | 0:00:27 | |
the most notorious prison in Britain. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:29 | |
On the morning of the 18th of January, 1803, | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
George Foster was taken from his cell here in Newgate Jail | 0:00:38 | 0:00:41 | |
and led down this corridor. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
The reason this corridor narrows as you walk down it is that | 0:00:46 | 0:00:50 | |
as prisoners were led down here, they had a tendency to panic | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
and that's because this is the last walk they made of their life. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
This was the route to public hanging. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
Vast crowds had gathered outside the jail to witness | 0:01:08 | 0:01:11 | |
George Foster's last moments. | 0:01:11 | 0:01:13 | |
According to one contemporary account, | 0:01:21 | 0:01:23 | |
Foster died very easily as several of his friends | 0:01:23 | 0:01:27 | |
who were under the scaffold had | 0:01:27 | 0:01:29 | |
violently pulled his legs in order to put a more speedy | 0:01:29 | 0:01:33 | |
termination to his sufferings. | 0:01:33 | 0:01:35 | |
Now, Foster's hanging was an unremarkable event. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:39 | |
Public executions were common in 19th century London, but what | 0:01:39 | 0:01:43 | |
was unique was what happened to Foster's body after he died, | 0:01:43 | 0:01:48 | |
because it was taken directly from the gallows to an operating theatre. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
George Foster's corpse was to be the centrepiece of a public | 0:01:57 | 0:02:00 | |
demonstration by Professor Giovanni Aldini, a practitioner | 0:02:00 | 0:02:05 | |
of the latest field of scientific experimentation... | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
..galvanism. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:18 | |
Galvanism was the belief that electricity was the spark of life, | 0:02:26 | 0:02:31 | |
perhaps even the very essence of life itself, and this is what Aldini | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
intended to demonstrate by taking a pair of electrodes and in front | 0:02:35 | 0:02:41 | |
of the watching audience, thrusting them into George Foster's corpse. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:46 | |
To the audience's amazement, | 0:02:51 | 0:02:53 | |
the dead body in front of them twisted and contorted. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:57 | |
When current was applied to the face, the dead man opened his eye. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:02 | |
Aldini was hoping that, through these experiments, | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
he would one day be able to bring people back from the dead. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:11 | |
For many watching in the audience, this was a step too far. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
It was outrageous, immoral even, | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
and ultimately Aldini was forced to leave the country. | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
He's alive! He's alive! | 0:03:30 | 0:03:32 | |
He's alive! He's alive! | 0:03:32 | 0:03:35 | |
A few years later, Mary Shelley wrote her seminal work, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
Frankenstein, the story of a corpse brought back to life. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:45 | |
And it's said that the eponymous scientist | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
was based on Aldini himself. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:52 | |
This image of scientists as Frankenstein's, | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
meddling with powers beyond their control, | 0:03:57 | 0:04:00 | |
is a vivid one that colours the public's perception | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
of science to this day. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:04 | |
The idea of mad scientists creating dangerous monsters has haunted | 0:04:25 | 0:04:30 | |
the story of British science. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
In this film, I want to find out why. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:40 | |
I'm going to visit the locations where some of the most | 0:04:45 | 0:04:47 | |
controversial discoveries in British science were made... | 0:04:47 | 0:04:51 | |
..and examine the impact they had on the world. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
It provided a physical explanation or heredity. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
I'll be looking at scientists whose research horrified the public... | 0:05:05 | 0:05:10 | |
and I'll be meeting researchers | 0:05:10 | 0:05:12 | |
whose work remains controversial to this day. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:14 | |
I never had any doubts about the benefits that | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
accrued from the work that I was privileged to be involved in. | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
I'm not embarrassed about what I do. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:26 | |
Science is one of this country's great success stories. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
We punch way above our weight. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
I mean, just look at this view. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
Over there, in Paddington, lived Alexander Fleming, | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
whose discovery of penicillin transformed our treatment | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
of bacterial infections. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
There, on the other side of Regent's Park, lived Michael Faraday, | 0:06:12 | 0:06:16 | |
whose work in electricity and magnetism, electromagnetic induction, | 0:06:16 | 0:06:20 | |
made electricity a practical and useful thing. | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
And there, on Gower Street, lived Charles Darwin, | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
where he first formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection, | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
which transformed our view of the natural world. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:36 | |
It's these discoveries that shaped modern life. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
And this from just one tiny slice of the country. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:50 | |
Across the whole of Britain, | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
our contribution to global science has been enormous. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
But while Britain has been the location | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
for so many of science's important discoveries, | 0:07:28 | 0:07:31 | |
it's also been a place where discovery can be controversial. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:35 | |
A place where science, and scientists, | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
can still be treated with suspicion. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:43 | |
And to find the reasons for that, we need to go back | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
in time to when science caught the public imagination as never before. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:53 | |
In the early 19th century, | 0:07:56 | 0:07:58 | |
Regency London was at the centre of an intellectual revolution. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:02 | |
It was a place of great art and great architecture, | 0:08:02 | 0:08:05 | |
and the rock stars at the time were the Romantic poets - | 0:08:05 | 0:08:08 | |
mad, bad and dangerous to know. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:12 | |
But equally famous and arguably more dangerous | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
were the natural philosophers or, as we call them, the scientists. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:20 | |
At the time, science was transforming the way we understood the world | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
and the public were desperate to hear of the latest advances. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
Lectures given by the top scientists of the day would be sold out. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
And, in 1802, the hottest ticket in town was the Royal Institution... | 0:08:41 | 0:08:47 | |
..where the star attraction was their new professor of chemistry... | 0:08:50 | 0:08:54 | |
..Humphry Davy. | 0:08:56 | 0:08:58 | |
Humphry Davy was a Cornishman and a brilliant scientist. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
He became professor here at the Royal Institution | 0:09:05 | 0:09:07 | |
at the unlikely age of 23. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:09 | |
He was good-looking, charismatic and many said, arrogant. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:15 | |
He thought he was a genius and he was probably right. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:19 | |
As well as being a brilliant chemist, | 0:09:19 | 0:09:21 | |
Davy was also a passionate communicator of science. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:25 | |
Davy was a genuine star. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:31 | |
The Royal Institution theatre was packed with the great | 0:09:32 | 0:09:36 | |
and the good of the day. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:37 | |
They had come to witness Davy's spectacular demonstrations. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:42 | |
It had all the excitement of a magic show, | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
but what Davy was doing was better than magic... | 0:09:47 | 0:09:51 | |
..it was chemistry. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
Davy first carried out this experiment in Italy | 0:10:01 | 0:10:06 | |
and what he was interested in doing was setting fire to diamonds. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:12 | |
Now... | 0:10:12 | 0:10:14 | |
Hang on a second. | 0:10:16 | 0:10:17 | |
They're very hard to hold in the tweezers. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:21 | |
When it is white hot, as hot as I can get it, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:29 | |
then I'm going to drop it into liquid oxygen, | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
and what should happen is the diamond should catch fire. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
As the diamond burns, a single product is produced - | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
the gas carbon dioxide. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
Through this experiment, Davy was able to deduce that diamonds | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
are made solely of carbon. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:53 | |
That the most valuable gems were made of the same stuff as coal. | 0:10:54 | 0:11:00 | |
To Davy's audience, this was captivating. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
Here, in front of their eyes, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
he was demonstrating one of the latest scientific theories. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:16 | |
That everything is made up of a limited number of elements. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:23 | |
Davy was famous for doing spectacular experiments, | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
in particular for blowing things up. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
In fact, it's said that he was something of a pyromaniac. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
And this is one of the experiments. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
It's involving iodine, which is | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
in fact one of the elements Davy is famous for discovering. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
So, Davy mixed iodine with this liquid, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:52 | |
and what happens is a powerful contact explosive is made. | 0:11:52 | 0:11:57 | |
And, in one of his experiments, he temporarily blinded himself | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
by doing just what I'm doing now. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:04 | |
Now what Davy wanted to do was to educate his audience. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
He wanted to show them that chemistry was exciting and counterintuitive. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:20 | |
This idea that you can make compounds out of other substances that have | 0:12:20 | 0:12:24 | |
extremely surprising and, in this case, spectacular properties. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:29 | |
Nitrogen triiodide is a wonderful compound | 0:12:36 | 0:12:39 | |
for demonstrating those ideas. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
It's basically a nitrogen atom with three iodines stuck to it. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:45 | |
Now, nitrogen atoms want to interact, they want to bond | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
together into the very stable nitrogen molecule, but the | 0:12:48 | 0:12:52 | |
iodines keep them just far enough apart that they can't interact. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:58 | |
All you have to do to change that | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
and make them interact very quickly indeed, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:04 | |
is to give them a little tickle. | 0:13:04 | 0:13:06 | |
And it really is a very little tickle. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:12 | |
Whaa! Look at that! | 0:13:21 | 0:13:23 | |
And that purple vapour there is iodine, | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
so that was a very rapid chemical reaction. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:30 | |
Nitrogen is produced and iodine is released. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
Yeah, I can see why Davy liked that. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:38 | |
What Davy was demonstrating is that acquiring and applying | 0:13:47 | 0:13:52 | |
scientific knowledge gives us power over nature. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:56 | |
And his writings reveal how he believed our future | 0:13:59 | 0:14:02 | |
lies in exploiting this power. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
"Science has bestowed upon him | 0:14:09 | 0:14:11 | |
"powers which may be almost called creative, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:14 | |
"which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:19 | |
"And by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
"not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her | 0:14:23 | 0:14:27 | |
"operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments." | 0:14:27 | 0:14:33 | |
Here, Davy is echoing the language of the Romantic poets. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:42 | |
When he uses the word creative, he doesn't mean the qualities | 0:14:43 | 0:14:47 | |
required to write a novel, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
he's talking about being a creator in the Biblical sense. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
Of controlling nature. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:00 | |
Davy is claiming for science the territory previously occupied | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
exclusively by religion... | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
and not everyone was so enamoured | 0:15:12 | 0:15:14 | |
with the idea of scientists playing God. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:17 | |
Shortly after Davy wrote those words, | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
Mary Shelley wrote her famous gothic novel Frankenstein. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
And here, in the introduction to the second edition, she writes, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
"For supremely frightful were the effect of any human endeavour | 0:15:30 | 0:15:34 | |
"to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world." | 0:15:34 | 0:15:40 | |
I mean, here is science with a dark side. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:42 | |
Frankenstein becomes a stereotype, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
a view of science as darkness as well as light. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:51 | |
Scientists can also create monsters. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:54 | |
At the time, Mary Shelley's fears were not widely shared. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:08 | |
The majority of the public remained in love with | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
science for another century. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:12 | |
Just as Davy had predicted, we discovered more | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
and more about how the world works, and learned how to control it. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:22 | |
But as our scientific understanding increased, | 0:16:25 | 0:16:29 | |
so too did the potential for that knowledge | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
to reveal a dark side and unleash monsters. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
70 years ago, this nature reserve in North Wales was | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
the site of a top secret military facility... | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
..at the heart of both the war effort and British science. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:55 | |
This was the home of the chemical warfare project. | 0:16:59 | 0:17:04 | |
It's where mustard gas was manufactured. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
-CHURCHILL: -'We are ourselves firmly resolved | 0:17:09 | 0:17:11 | |
'not to use this odious weapon | 0:17:11 | 0:17:13 | |
'unless it is used first by the Germans. | 0:17:13 | 0:17:16 | |
'Knowing our Hun, however, | 0:17:18 | 0:17:20 | |
'we have not neglected to make preparation on a formidable scale.' | 0:17:20 | 0:17:24 | |
But the site housed another, more exciting, more dangerous project. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
Eileen Doxford was one of the handful of people who staffed it. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:38 | |
In 1942, Eileen was just 19 when she was assigned to | 0:17:40 | 0:17:45 | |
work as an instrument technician on a project codenamed Tube Alloys. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:50 | |
So, this was the main building? | 0:17:51 | 0:17:53 | |
Yes, it was. It was. | 0:17:53 | 0:17:56 | |
Lots of apparatus in it. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:59 | |
And how many people worked here? | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
Er, well, there were 70 men and ten girls. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:06 | |
-You met your husband here. -I did. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:08 | |
If I couldn't have found one out of those, | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
I would have been not much good, would I? | 0:18:10 | 0:18:12 | |
BOTH LAUGH | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
At one side of this building were offices and a laboratory. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:20 | |
Did you know about the importance of the work | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
you were doing here at the time? | 0:18:26 | 0:18:27 | |
Well, to be really honest with you, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
I didn't understand what we were trying to do here. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:35 | |
I quite happily did the job that I'd been given to do, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
but I didn't know. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:40 | |
Oh, no, I didn't know. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:41 | |
I was told that it would be helpful during the war... | 0:18:41 | 0:18:45 | |
..and it would also be helpful in peacetime, | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
but it would be particularly of help in wartime. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:53 | |
Eileen didn't know it, | 0:19:02 | 0:19:04 | |
but she was working on the project to | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
create the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:10 | |
The origins of this weapon lay not in military research | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
but in scientists' ongoing efforts | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
to understand the structure of the world, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
and from some brilliant experiments performed 30 years earlier. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:31 | |
The nuclear project began with this man, Ernest Rutherford... | 0:19:34 | 0:19:38 | |
..who worked at the greatest university in history | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
of civilisation, the University of Manchester, which is my university. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:48 | |
Back in 1911, only 28 years before the outbreak | 0:19:48 | 0:19:52 | |
of the Second World War, there was no nuclear physics because | 0:19:52 | 0:19:57 | |
we hadn't discovered the atomic nucleus - that's what Rutherford did. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
In a series of experiments, he found that the atom itself is made up | 0:20:01 | 0:20:09 | |
of a small, dense nucleus with electrons existing, or orbiting | 0:20:09 | 0:20:16 | |
in some sense, a large distance away. | 0:20:16 | 0:20:20 | |
But at that time, | 0:20:20 | 0:20:21 | |
the nature of the atomic nucleus was completely mysterious. | 0:20:21 | 0:20:25 | |
So Rutherford, one of the world's greatest experimental physicists, | 0:20:30 | 0:20:35 | |
set about designing the apparatus that revealed | 0:20:35 | 0:20:37 | |
the structure of the atomic nucleus. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:40 | |
With little more than some dry ice, a hot water bottle, | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
a squirt of alcohol and a radioactive source, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
he was able to visualise with the naked eye | 0:20:50 | 0:20:54 | |
things that the most powerful microscopes struggled to detect - | 0:20:54 | 0:20:59 | |
individual subatomic particles. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:01 | |
Well, this is the cloud chamber | 0:21:06 | 0:21:08 | |
full of supersaturated alcohol vapour. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:10 | |
And you see those cloud trails, | 0:21:10 | 0:21:14 | |
those are helium nuclei, alpha particles, single ones being | 0:21:14 | 0:21:19 | |
emitted off the thorium on the end of that welding rod. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:24 | |
It was these particle trails that Rutherford watched, | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
hoping to see what happened when atomic nuclei collided. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:35 | |
Now very occasionally, very rarely, they saw something extremely | 0:21:37 | 0:21:41 | |
interesting happen, and we have a graphic of that here. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
So, now this is a picture, a film, of a real cloud chamber and we've | 0:21:44 | 0:21:51 | |
superimposed, there, a graphic of what Rutherford and his team saw. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:57 | |
The reason we haven't shown a real one | 0:21:57 | 0:21:59 | |
is because these are extremely rare processes. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:02 | |
Rutherford observed over a quarter of a million tracks of helium | 0:22:02 | 0:22:07 | |
nuclei passing through the nitrogen, | 0:22:07 | 0:22:10 | |
and his team only saw eight of these particular collisions. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:15 | |
Now, at first sight, it looks unremarkable. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:17 | |
There's a helium nucleus coming in, bouncing off a nitrogen nucleus. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:21 | |
The interesting thing is what these two outgoing tracks | 0:22:21 | 0:22:25 | |
actually are, because they are no longer helium and nitrogen. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:29 | |
This one, it turns out, is oxygen, | 0:22:29 | 0:22:33 | |
and this one is a single proton, a nucleus of hydrogen. | 0:22:33 | 0:22:37 | |
This is an extremely important moment in the history of nuclear physics. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:41 | |
It says that nuclei are not indivisible. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:45 | |
Elements can be transformed from one type into another. | 0:22:45 | 0:22:49 | |
It was known that, when some nuclei are split, energy is released... | 0:22:52 | 0:22:57 | |
..but no-one thought it would be possible to harness this energy, | 0:23:01 | 0:23:06 | |
until 1935 when a new element was discovered. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:11 | |
And this is a fissure, | 0:23:19 | 0:23:21 | |
a splitting of uranium 235 into krypton and barium. | 0:23:21 | 0:23:27 | |
Now, uranium 235 is a naturally occurring form of uranium, | 0:23:27 | 0:23:34 | |
but it has the property that if you hit it with a neutron, | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
then it immediately splits up into krypton and barium. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
And the mass of those decayed products | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
is less than the mass of the initial nucleus, so energy is released. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:50 | |
But also, in this reaction three neutrons are released, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:55 | |
and those neutrons can go on to hit further uranium nuclei, | 0:23:55 | 0:24:01 | |
which will in turn trigger those to split, releasing more energy | 0:24:01 | 0:24:05 | |
and more neutrons, and you get a chain reaction. | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
So, this is the principle behind a nuclear bomb. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:12 | |
But perhaps fortunately, this reactive isotope forms only | 0:24:13 | 0:24:18 | |
one percent of naturally occurring uranium ore. | 0:24:18 | 0:24:21 | |
So, you have to find a way of enriching the uranium, | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
of purifying it on an industrial scale, and that, at the start | 0:24:26 | 0:24:31 | |
of the Second World War, is what this place was designed to do. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
In the early years of the war, this site was used to develop | 0:24:40 | 0:24:44 | |
a technique to enrich uranium. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:46 | |
But in 1943, much of the work here | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
was transferred to America to become part of the Manhattan Project. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
Within two years, they had succeeded in building a bomb. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:02 | |
On the 6th of August, 1945, | 0:25:04 | 0:25:06 | |
the uranium-powered bomb was dropped over the city of Hiroshima in Japan. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:11 | |
As it detonated, the neutron-powered chain reaction | 0:25:22 | 0:25:26 | |
converted 0.6 grams of matter into energy. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:30 | |
The resulting blast flattened an entire city... | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
..killing over 100,000 people. | 0:25:42 | 0:25:44 | |
It was as though science had finally delivered on those fears | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
expressed by Mary Shelley over a century before. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
I mean, here, if ever there was one, is a Frankenstein's monster. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:03 | |
Science had delivered the power to destroy us all, | 0:26:03 | 0:26:06 | |
and there's every indication that the scientists | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
working on the bomb at the time knew precisely what they'd done. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:13 | |
After he witnessed the first nuclear bomb test, | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
felt moved to quote an ancient Indian text. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:28 | |
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
I suppose we all felt that, one way or another. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
It would be a couple of years afterwards I realised that | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
I contributed to the atomic bomb. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:51 | |
And I felt dreadful then, | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
when I thought about all the people that had been killed. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
But my brother, who was in the Royal Navy and was out in the Far East, | 0:27:00 | 0:27:06 | |
said, "Killed a lot of people, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
"but it would also save a lot of lives." | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
If it helped to finish the war, which was a dreadful thing, | 0:27:14 | 0:27:19 | |
yes, I feel pleased that I made a very minute contribution. | 0:27:19 | 0:27:24 | |
The development of the atomic bomb | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
was a watershed moment in human history. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:38 | |
For the first time, we demonstrated that the products of our own | 0:27:39 | 0:27:43 | |
ingenuity could destroy us... | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
..and it had a chilling effect on the public's attitude to science. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
Where once the public were broadly accepting of technological progress, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
they were now suspicious and even hostile, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:01 | |
some even taking to the streets to make themselves heard. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
It marked a change in attitude that's been felt ever since, | 0:28:07 | 0:28:10 | |
not just by physicists, but by all scientists. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:14 | |
If the first half of the 20th century was the Age of Physics and | 0:28:23 | 0:28:27 | |
exploring the subatomic world, then the second half of the 20th century | 0:28:27 | 0:28:32 | |
arguably was the Age of Biology, the exploration of the science of life. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:36 | |
And that surely brought us closer to Davy's vision of the scientist as | 0:28:40 | 0:28:44 | |
creator, as master of nature rather than merely dispassionate explorer. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:50 | |
And along with that came added dangers and controversy. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:55 | |
These potato plants growing in a field in Norfolk are considered by | 0:29:05 | 0:29:10 | |
some people to be dangerous... | 0:29:10 | 0:29:11 | |
..because they've been genetically modified. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
They were created here at the Sainsbury Laboratory, | 0:29:26 | 0:29:30 | |
just outside Norwich, by plant geneticist Jonathan Jones, | 0:29:30 | 0:29:34 | |
but he doesn't see these plants as monsters. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
Why would we, as a country, a civilisation, want to use GM crops? | 0:29:39 | 0:29:45 | |
You can put in genes that you could not put in by breeding, and so there | 0:29:45 | 0:29:49 | |
are certain genes that do something really useful, such as make | 0:29:49 | 0:29:53 | |
it much easier to control disease, much easier to control pests, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
and much easier to control weeds. | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
So, there's a legion of things | 0:30:00 | 0:30:01 | |
that are worth doing that you'd never be able to do by breeding. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:05 | |
These potatoes have been genetically modified to make them | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
resistant to a disease called late blight. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:16 | |
The hope is that yields will increase | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
and the quantity of chemicals currently used to treat | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
the disease will be dramatically reduced. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:24 | |
It's remarkable that we have the ability to precisely manipulate | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
and alter the genetic makeup of other living organisms, | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
and that it's even possible is thanks to a revolution in | 0:30:39 | 0:30:43 | |
biology that started in another part of East Anglia just 60 years ago. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:48 | |
Cambridge is a town with a rich scientific history. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
This was the university of Newton and Darwin... | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
..and it was here, in a building in the 1950s, that the worlds of physics | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
and biology came together to transform our understanding of life. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:20 | |
This is the old Cavendish Laboratory, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
an iconic building in the history of physics. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:28 | |
Thomson discovered the electron here in 1897. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
Chadwick discovered the neutron here in 1932. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
James Clerk Maxwell was professor of physics here. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
But the building is also famous for one of the great | 0:31:38 | 0:31:41 | |
discoveries in the history of biology. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
In the 1950s, this office was occupied by Francis Crick | 0:31:56 | 0:32:00 | |
and James Watson, so it might not look like much | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
but it was in here that the structure of the DNA molecule was discovered. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:09 | |
That is the molecule that passes information on from generation | 0:32:09 | 0:32:12 | |
to generation, the hereditary molecule, if you like. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
The DNA molecule itself had been isolated as far | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
back as the 1860s, but it wasn't until the early 1950s that it was | 0:32:23 | 0:32:28 | |
shown to be the carrier of genetic information in all living organisms. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:33 | |
And although it was known to be made of a combination of sugars, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:39 | |
phosphate groups and nitrogen-rich bases, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:42 | |
nobody knew how those components fitted together to form | 0:32:42 | 0:32:46 | |
a molecule that could hold the instructions for life. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:49 | |
Crick and Watson's approach to finding that structure was to build | 0:32:54 | 0:32:58 | |
physical models of the molecule... | 0:32:58 | 0:33:00 | |
..but it was proving unsuccessful. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
They desperately needed more and better data... | 0:33:07 | 0:33:10 | |
..and it came from a branch of physics called X-ray crystallography. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:17 | |
This is a very famous photograph, it's called Photograph 51. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:23 | |
It was actually taken by another scientist, Rosalind Franklin, | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
and it's what's called an X-ray diffraction photograph. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
So, Franklin shone X-rays through a sample of DNA molecules | 0:33:30 | 0:33:34 | |
and the way that they scatter or diffract off the molecules, | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
the pattern they leave on the photographic plate, | 0:33:38 | 0:33:41 | |
allowed you to deduce the structure of those molecules. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:45 | |
The key piece of evidence is the X. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
That allowed Franklin to suggest that the molecule must be | 0:33:48 | 0:33:51 | |
helical and, in fact, must have that famous double helix. | 0:33:51 | 0:33:57 | |
So, this photograph, along with Franklin's suggestions, | 0:33:57 | 0:34:01 | |
her interpretation of the pattern, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
allowed Watson and Crick to go away and build their model of DNA. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:08 | |
This is a half-scale copy of the model they constructed in 1953, | 0:34:21 | 0:34:26 | |
the first model of the structure of DNA. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
There are two strands of sugars that coil around each other, | 0:34:36 | 0:34:41 | |
they interlock to form that famous double helix shape. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:46 | |
They are the backbone of the molecule. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:48 | |
But the information carried in DNA, | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
the genetic code itself, is encoded into these pairs of molecules, | 0:34:52 | 0:34:58 | |
the cross-linked pairs, which are called bases. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:01 | |
There are four types of base in DNA - | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:15 | |
And it's the order of these bases that's used by the cell | 0:35:18 | 0:35:22 | |
as instructions to build strings of amino acids. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:26 | |
The sequence of amino acids together build up proteins, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:30 | |
and proteins build up the basic structure | 0:35:30 | 0:35:33 | |
of every living thing on Earth. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:35 | |
We used to occasionally just sit and look at the molecule, | 0:35:45 | 0:35:49 | |
and think how beautiful it was. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:50 | |
And I remember an occasion | 0:35:56 | 0:35:58 | |
when Jim gave a talk to a little bar physics club we had. | 0:35:58 | 0:36:01 | |
It's true, they gave him one or two drinks before dinner. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
It was rather a short talk because all he could say at the end was, | 0:36:04 | 0:36:07 | |
"Well, you see, it's so pretty. It's so pretty." | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
When Crick and Watson published their results in 1953, | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
they announced them with typical scientific understatement. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:23 | |
They said, "This structure has novel features | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
"which are of considerable biological interest." | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
But there's pretty good evidence that Crick and Watson knew exactly | 0:36:29 | 0:36:33 | |
what they'd done because they ran down this street here, from the | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
Cavendish just up there, into this pub here, The Eagle. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:39 | |
And when they arrived, Crick walked in and said, | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
"We have discovered the secret of life." | 0:36:42 | 0:36:46 | |
And then they had a pint. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
Crick was right. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:00 | |
The discovery of the structure of DNA was one of the great | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
moments in modern scientific history. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
By the early 1970s, the genetic code had been translated, | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
making it possible to identify individual genes | 0:37:17 | 0:37:20 | |
and study their function. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
We now had access to the workings of life itself. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:30 | |
What it did is it explained the physical basis of heredity, and... | 0:37:33 | 0:37:38 | |
At the time, Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winning geneticist and | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
now president of the Royal Society, was just starting his career. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:46 | |
Now you began working in the field in the 1970s, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:51 | |
so this is only 20 years after the discovery. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
Was there disquiet amongst the public, | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
but also amongst the scientists? | 0:37:59 | 0:38:01 | |
Well, there was because, you know, what these technologies were | 0:38:01 | 0:38:04 | |
bringing along was that you could now begin to control this | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
fundamental molecule of life, and people were worried about this. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:11 | |
They were worried, what if you can clone up | 0:38:11 | 0:38:13 | |
pieces of DNA in a bacterium? | 0:38:13 | 0:38:15 | |
Let's say you had a cancer-forming | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
gene and that escaped, the bacteria escaped, would that mean | 0:38:17 | 0:38:20 | |
everybody would catch cancer, just like an infectious disease? | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
And, frankly, these concerns are quite legitimate. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:28 | |
Everybody was imagining Frankenstein-type outcomes. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:32 | |
In a post-nuclear age, there was a widespread feeling that | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
scientists had once again taken a step too far. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
Now, you made the statement there's no known dangerous organism | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
-that has ever been produced by a recombinant DNA experiment. -Yes. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:48 | |
Now, just what the hell do you think you're going to do | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
if you do produce one? | 0:38:50 | 0:38:51 | |
In 1975, biologists took an unprecedented step. | 0:38:55 | 0:39:00 | |
Aware of the potential dangers, | 0:39:01 | 0:39:03 | |
they called a conference in California to decide for themselves | 0:39:03 | 0:39:07 | |
whether the technology was safe and how they should proceed. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
What was interesting is that it was the scientists themselves who | 0:39:14 | 0:39:18 | |
recognised this was an issue. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:20 | |
It was the scientists themselves who | 0:39:20 | 0:39:22 | |
actually put in place a level of restrictions, | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
depending upon the potential danger, so it could be kept under control. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:30 | |
So, it was very much led by the scientists | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
as what should be done, rather than, say, the politicians or the public. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:37 | |
But although the scientists took the initiative at the beginning | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
of the genetic revolution, | 0:39:43 | 0:39:44 | |
they haven't always been able to control the debate. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
And nowhere is that clearer | 0:39:49 | 0:39:51 | |
than in the controversy over GM crops in this country. | 0:39:51 | 0:39:55 | |
To many scientists, GM crops hold the key to more efficient, | 0:40:01 | 0:40:06 | |
more environmentally friendly agriculture, | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
but they've been unable to persuade a sceptical public | 0:40:10 | 0:40:13 | |
of the safety of the technique. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:14 | |
Instead, public opinion has been led by a vigorous anti-GM campaign | 0:40:19 | 0:40:24 | |
that started in the 1990s and which has left many | 0:40:24 | 0:40:28 | |
people dead set against GM crops. | 0:40:28 | 0:40:30 | |
There are fears that the crops may contaminate the environment, | 0:40:32 | 0:40:36 | |
or that they may be unsafe to eat. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:39 | |
And underlying it all is a feeling that there's something | 0:40:39 | 0:40:42 | |
fundamentally wrong about meddling with life at such a basic level. | 0:40:42 | 0:40:46 | |
What do you think of this label, Frankenfoods? | 0:40:51 | 0:40:56 | |
Yes, it's... I don't know who came up with it, | 0:40:56 | 0:40:58 | |
it was probably the Daily Mail in the mid '90s. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
The thing that's silly about it is that GM is just | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
a method for conferring an improvement on crops. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:07 | |
You know, the crops are basically the same, so to suggest | 0:41:07 | 0:41:10 | |
there's anything fundamentally different about them is just stupid. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
The suggestion is that | 0:41:14 | 0:41:15 | |
because we can now put genes from an animal, let say a cow or | 0:41:15 | 0:41:20 | |
a jellyfish or whatever it is, into a plant, there's something | 0:41:20 | 0:41:24 | |
unnatural and therefore potentially dangerous about that procedure. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:29 | |
Well, the word unnatural is a real weasel word. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
I mean, it's unnatural to treat your kids with antibiotics - | 0:41:32 | 0:41:36 | |
it's natural to let them die - I know which I'd prefer. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
Agriculture is fundamentally unnatural, | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
whether it's organic agriculture or high tech agriculture, | 0:41:42 | 0:41:45 | |
conventional agriculture. | 0:41:45 | 0:41:46 | |
We are eliminating all the trees and wildlife that used to be there, | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
and planting the plants that we | 0:41:49 | 0:41:51 | |
want to have there to provide the stuff that we eat. | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
So, the thing we have to ask ourselves is, what's the least | 0:41:55 | 0:41:58 | |
bad way of protecting our crops from disease | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
and pests for reducing the losses caused by weeds? | 0:42:01 | 0:42:05 | |
As a scientist working on GM crops, | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
you'd expect Jonathan to be a powerful advocate for the technology, | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
but his view is also backed up by a vast body of research that | 0:42:17 | 0:42:23 | |
shows it to be safe and effective. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
So, if GM crops is to have a future in this country, the scientists need | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
to find a better way to persuade the public to share their confidence. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
I think that sometimes many scientists, myself included, | 0:42:45 | 0:42:48 | |
are genuinely baffled by the public reaction to a new scientific | 0:42:48 | 0:42:53 | |
discovery or technique or piece of research. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
Because I want to believe, deep down, that if we present the evidence | 0:42:56 | 0:43:01 | |
and explain it properly, then that's all you have to do. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:05 | |
But, of course, it would be naive to think that that's the case | 0:43:05 | 0:43:08 | |
and I think there are good reasons for that. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:10 | |
One is that there is a genuine fear of the unknown, | 0:43:10 | 0:43:14 | |
but also I think the idea that science is dangerous. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
Frankenstein is deeply embedded in our culture. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
The way to combat that fear is through effective public engagement. | 0:43:25 | 0:43:30 | |
And perhaps surprisingly, one of the best examples of that | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
comes from over 200 years ago | 0:43:40 | 0:43:42 | |
and a scientist who, at the time, was perceived to be a dangerous villain. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:47 | |
In the lobby of the Royal College of Surgeons stands a statue | 0:43:50 | 0:43:53 | |
of John Hunter, a Scotsman and one of the fathers of modern medicine. | 0:43:53 | 0:43:59 | |
In the 1780s, he started performing surgical operations that were | 0:44:03 | 0:44:08 | |
decades ahead of their time. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:10 | |
This is the original documentation of the case of John Burley, | 0:44:14 | 0:44:19 | |
it's a really excellent example of Hunter's skill as a surgeon. | 0:44:19 | 0:44:24 | |
There's a picture of a tumour, | 0:44:24 | 0:44:27 | |
so that's what happens when you leave a tumour for too long. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:31 | |
Says here, "It was an increase to the size of a common head... | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
"..attended with no other inconvenience | 0:44:38 | 0:44:40 | |
"than its size and weight." | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
And then the second drawing here is after the operation, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:47 | |
and it's completely cured, essentially. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:50 | |
But for all his medical brilliance, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:55 | |
Hunter was treated with suspicion and even horror, | 0:44:55 | 0:45:00 | |
because to develop his remarkable surgical skills, | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
he had practiced on human corpses. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
In the 18th century, anatomists were legally entitled to corpses fresh | 0:45:13 | 0:45:17 | |
from the gallows, but even so demand comfortably exceeded supply, and so | 0:45:17 | 0:45:22 | |
they had to look to another source of bodies for experimentation. | 0:45:22 | 0:45:27 | |
And the easiest place to get hold of fresh corpses | 0:45:31 | 0:45:34 | |
was to dig them up from a graveyard. | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
Grave robbing wasn't made a crime until 1832, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:46 | |
partly because of legal difficulty in defining what the crime is. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:50 | |
You can't steal a body because it doesn't belong to anyone but, | 0:45:50 | 0:45:54 | |
even so, it was frowned upon to say the least. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:57 | |
So, it was a high risk profession. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
But anatomists were prepared to pay large amounts of money for corpses, | 0:46:01 | 0:46:05 | |
and that meant that there were hundreds of grave robbers | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
operating in gangs in London | 0:46:08 | 0:46:10 | |
who could dig up up to ten bodies per night. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
They were even called the resurrectionists | 0:46:13 | 0:46:15 | |
because they were so efficient at lifting dead bodies from the ground. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:21 | |
And the best customer of all was John Hunter. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:24 | |
Hunter was even known to lend a hand to the grave robbers. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:31 | |
On one occasion, he was even arrested with a gang of resurrectionists. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:36 | |
And these exploits made Hunter incredibly unpopular with | 0:46:36 | 0:46:40 | |
the man on the street. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:42 | |
Hunter revolutionised surgical techniques for the benefit | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
of everybody, but I suppose not unsurprisingly, | 0:46:46 | 0:46:49 | |
his work was controversial in public. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
So, even though he was working in the 18th century, I suppose | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
you could say, in the modern vernacular, he had a PR problem. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
Hunter was so afraid of the adverse public reaction | 0:47:05 | 0:47:07 | |
to his work that he was actually in fear of his life, but he reasoned | 0:47:07 | 0:47:13 | |
that fear was born of ignorance and therefore education was the answer, | 0:47:13 | 0:47:18 | |
and so he opened this museum to display his work to the public. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:23 | |
His collection is still on display today | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
in the Royal College of Surgeons. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:31 | |
In these exhibits, people could see how Hunter was using corpses | 0:47:31 | 0:47:34 | |
to learn about anatomy and physiology. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
You could even see his pioneering attempts | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
at opening new fields of medicine. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
What...? What's that? | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
These chicken heads were the recipients of some | 0:47:46 | 0:47:49 | |
of the first transplant operations. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
Human teeth. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:53 | |
What's he done that for? | 0:47:55 | 0:47:57 | |
Although some of these exhibits are gruesome, | 0:48:00 | 0:48:03 | |
they show how Hunter was using his knowledge | 0:48:03 | 0:48:05 | |
to move medicine out of the Dark Ages. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
This exhibit marks the beginning of the end | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
of the age or barbaric surgery. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:21 | |
What you see here is an aneurism in the popliteal artery, | 0:48:21 | 0:48:25 | |
so that's the artery that goes behind the knee. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:29 | |
It's essentially a sack of blood as the artery swells up and, | 0:48:29 | 0:48:33 | |
if this goes untreated then what will happen is that sack will | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
eventually burst and the patient will bleed to death. | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
Now, the treatment at the time for that was amputation. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:45 | |
They would saw your leg off in an age before antibiotics, | 0:48:45 | 0:48:50 | |
that was usually fatal in itself, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:52 | |
so that was a very serious thing to happen. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:55 | |
What Hunter noticed, through his work on animal physiology, | 0:48:55 | 0:49:00 | |
and indeed on the dissection of human specimens, | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
was that there are many other arteries in the leg. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:07 | |
And he reason that, if he tied off the affected artery, | 0:49:07 | 0:49:10 | |
ligated it, then the blood supply to the aneurism would be cut off, | 0:49:10 | 0:49:15 | |
and he hoped that the other arteries would expand to allow blood to | 0:49:15 | 0:49:20 | |
flow down the leg. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
Now, this was the leg of a coachman who had that operation | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
performed on him and survived for 50 years after the operation. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
He, in fact, outlived Hunter. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:32 | |
And he was so pleased with that extension of his lifespan | 0:49:32 | 0:49:36 | |
that he donated his leg to the Hunterian Collection. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:40 | |
As well as revolutionising medicine, | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
John Hunter's approach was a model for public engagement. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
By inviting people into his museum, he was able to address | 0:49:52 | 0:49:56 | |
and confront the moral objections to his work. | 0:49:56 | 0:50:00 | |
And although not everyone was convinced it justified grave robbery, | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
they could clearly see the benefits that his knowledge brought. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:10 | |
The controversy surrounding John Hunter was different to many | 0:50:13 | 0:50:15 | |
other scientific controversies, because this wasn't a scientist | 0:50:15 | 0:50:19 | |
exploring the unknown in a cavalier fashion. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
He had a specific goal in mind with which no one could disagree. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:27 | |
He wanted to advance medical science. | 0:50:27 | 0:50:30 | |
Rather, it was the morality of his methods that was | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
called into question, and today, 200 years later, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
doctors can face similar dilemmas. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
One of the most emotive issues in science today is not the use | 0:50:43 | 0:50:47 | |
of dead humans in medical research, but the use of living animals. | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
To many people, experimenting on animals is morally unacceptable, | 0:50:53 | 0:50:57 | |
it's a line we should not cross. | 0:50:57 | 0:51:00 | |
Such is the strength of feeling that there are regular protests against | 0:51:12 | 0:51:17 | |
the institutions and scientists who use animals in their research. | 0:51:17 | 0:51:21 | |
This is not a modern phenomenon. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:25 | |
In Britain, there's been a long history of animal rights activism. | 0:51:25 | 0:51:30 | |
The first Royal Commission into the use of animals in research | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
dates back to 1875. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:36 | |
But in the eyes of many doctors, it's a necessary evil | 0:51:41 | 0:51:45 | |
because of the medical advances animal testing brings. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:48 | |
13-year-old Sean Gardner had been paralysed for seven years | 0:51:56 | 0:52:00 | |
by a condition related to Parkinson's Disease called Dystonia... | 0:52:00 | 0:52:04 | |
..until in 2006 he underwent a pioneering procedure. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
By passing current through electrodes implanted deep in Sean's brain, | 0:52:12 | 0:52:17 | |
the surgeon Tipu Aziz was able to instantly relieve his symptoms. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:22 | |
He would be able to talk again. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
He would be able, hopefully, | 0:52:24 | 0:52:26 | |
to participate in activities that are absolutely critical, | 0:52:26 | 0:52:29 | |
like a normal education, and perhaps go out again and be a kid. | 0:52:29 | 0:52:35 | |
Within weeks, Sean was standing and walking again. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:42 | |
It is in many ways a miraculous achievement... | 0:52:42 | 0:52:45 | |
..but this procedure remains controversial | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
because Professor Aziz developed the technique by experiment | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
on macaques that had been deliberately given Parkinson's Disease. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:59 | |
How many primates were affected or were used in that research? | 0:53:03 | 0:53:10 | |
I would say, across the groups, | 0:53:10 | 0:53:12 | |
probably less than a 100 monkeys were used, | 0:53:12 | 0:53:16 | |
and to date, about 100,000 have had deep brain stimulation | 0:53:16 | 0:53:21 | |
for Parkinson's Disease. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:23 | |
So, I suppose a common, er, public criticism of research | 0:53:23 | 0:53:28 | |
in high primates is that it's somehow, um, a luxury. | 0:53:28 | 0:53:32 | |
It could be done in some other way. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:34 | |
It may take a bit more time, may be more expensive, but it could be done. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
So, how would you respond to that? | 0:53:38 | 0:53:40 | |
Well, my response to that would be it could not be done, | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
because you can't replace an animal model with a cellular culture | 0:53:43 | 0:53:48 | |
or computer modelling, or imaging. | 0:53:48 | 0:53:51 | |
And the advantage of using non-human primates is | 0:53:51 | 0:53:55 | |
that, like us, they're bipedal. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
They're wired the same as us. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:00 | |
And I never had any doubts about the benefits that | 0:54:00 | 0:54:04 | |
accrued from the work that I was privileged to be involved in, | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
because this problem was so pressing, you see. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:12 | |
These are patients who can't walk, fall over, drugs don't help them. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:16 | |
And what you see is quite miraculous, | 0:54:16 | 0:54:18 | |
that these folks who are sitting in a chair trembling, rigid, | 0:54:18 | 0:54:22 | |
unable to move, then you put electrodes into a target | 0:54:22 | 0:54:27 | |
in the brain, and see them suddenly getting up and walking | 0:54:27 | 0:54:30 | |
like a normal person, regaining their dignity as a human being. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:34 | |
It leaves you in no doubt about what you do, | 0:54:34 | 0:54:37 | |
and I'm not embarrassed about what I do. | 0:54:37 | 0:54:39 | |
The animal testing issue reveals an uncomfortable truth about science. | 0:54:49 | 0:54:54 | |
In order to generate the advances we want in areas like medicine, | 0:54:56 | 0:55:00 | |
there are downsides and difficult decisions to be made. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:04 | |
But it's my view that, in Britain, we get the balance broadly right, | 0:55:07 | 0:55:11 | |
partly because of our long history of dissent and protest. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:16 | |
The relationship between science and the public | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
has always been a complex one. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:26 | |
I mean, I think in general, this great endeavour to understand | 0:55:26 | 0:55:31 | |
the workings of the natural world is supported and why not? | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
I mean, I would argue that science is | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
the foundation of our technological civilisation. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:39 | |
It's given us modern medicine, it's given us telecommunications, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:43 | |
computing, air travel, the internal combustion engine, you name it. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:48 | |
But, even so, there seems to have been | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
an underlying suspicion that there's something sinister there. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:55 | |
Scientific progress is valuable, vital even. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:07 | |
It might be that occasionally we reveal a monster. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:15 | |
Understanding the atom did indeed give us the nuclear bomb, | 0:56:17 | 0:56:22 | |
but that knowledge also opened up so many other opportunities. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:25 | |
The thing about science, as with the acquisition of all knowledge, | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
is that once it's out there it can't be retracted, | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
and you never know where it's going to lead. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:35 | |
But, having said that, even some of the most controversial | 0:56:35 | 0:56:38 | |
discoveries have paid dividends in the end. | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
In 1805, Giovanni Aldini was hounded from Britain for trying to | 0:56:47 | 0:56:52 | |
resuscitate people using electricity... | 0:56:52 | 0:56:54 | |
..but now we find machines that can do exactly that all over the place. | 0:56:59 | 0:57:05 | |
This is a defibrillator, | 0:57:07 | 0:57:08 | |
you'll find them in many public places around the world, | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
and it's probably the best chance | 0:57:11 | 0:57:13 | |
you'd have of surviving a heart attack down here. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
It is essentially a battery connected to electrodes. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:20 | |
The idea is that administering an electric shock | 0:57:20 | 0:57:22 | |
can restart a stopped heart. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:24 | |
So, this is exactly what Aldini had in mind. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:28 | |
It uses electricity to bring people back from the dead. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:33 | |
Maybe he wasn't such a Frankenstein after all. | 0:57:33 | 0:57:37 | |
Next time, I'll be coming face-to-face with the visionaries | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
who laid the foundations of modern science. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
I'll be recreating some of their groundbreaking experiments... | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
..and exploring their impact on the scientific discoveries of today. | 0:58:06 | 0:58:12 | |
Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:31 | 0:58:34 |