1 00:00:02,080 --> 00:00:07,640 'Man has taken his greatest stride towards turning light into day.' 2 00:00:07,640 --> 00:00:09,400 'The invention of microfilm has...' 3 00:00:09,400 --> 00:00:11,400 'This is the software...' 4 00:00:11,400 --> 00:00:13,600 'Identified as penicillium...' 5 00:00:13,600 --> 00:00:15,920 'The laser beam has an information capacity...' 6 00:00:15,920 --> 00:00:18,360 'The white heat of technology come to life...' 7 00:00:19,960 --> 00:00:23,120 This is D-4, one of eight hangars 8 00:00:23,120 --> 00:00:26,040 belonging to the UK's Science Museum, 9 00:00:26,040 --> 00:00:30,040 a mind-boggling collection of hundreds of thousands of inventions, 10 00:00:30,040 --> 00:00:32,360 all of which have changed our world. 11 00:00:33,920 --> 00:00:38,160 Everything from steam engines to some of the very first computers. 12 00:00:40,760 --> 00:00:45,960 I find this an inspiring place. A reminder of how inventive we can be. 13 00:00:47,800 --> 00:00:50,040 But I've come here to find out about 14 00:00:50,040 --> 00:00:53,000 some of the most exciting of today's inventions. 15 00:00:54,480 --> 00:00:58,120 I am going to meet the men and women who are the driving forces 16 00:00:58,120 --> 00:01:01,600 behind some of the inventions that are changing our world. 17 00:01:03,640 --> 00:01:08,480 They're pioneers in four areas of science that are shaping our future. 18 00:01:11,720 --> 00:01:14,440 But it's not just about the inventions themselves. 19 00:01:14,440 --> 00:01:18,120 I want to know how they go about it, what inspires them, 20 00:01:18,120 --> 00:01:20,680 how do they drive their ideas forward 21 00:01:20,680 --> 00:01:24,160 and ultimately end up with a ground-breaking invention? 22 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:29,440 I am hoping to get a sneak preview of tomorrow's world. 23 00:01:49,560 --> 00:01:54,600 For over a million years, this, a simple flint tool, 24 00:01:54,600 --> 00:01:57,400 was the pinnacle of human invention. 25 00:01:57,400 --> 00:02:02,320 It remained pretty much unchanged for 30,000 generations. 26 00:02:02,320 --> 00:02:04,600 But in the past 150 years, 27 00:02:04,600 --> 00:02:08,920 the pace of invention, from planes to rockets to smart phones, 28 00:02:08,920 --> 00:02:14,160 has been extraordinary and it shows no signs of slowing down. 29 00:02:14,160 --> 00:02:18,120 In the US alone, more patents have been filed 30 00:02:18,120 --> 00:02:23,080 since the year 2000 than in the previous 40 years combined. 31 00:02:23,080 --> 00:02:27,920 More scientific papers are being published globally year on year. 32 00:02:27,920 --> 00:02:31,200 And more countries than ever before are getting involved. 33 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:37,880 Today anyone can innovate, anywhere in the world, whether that's 34 00:02:37,880 --> 00:02:41,720 in the West in a garage or in Nairobi on a mobile phone. 35 00:02:41,720 --> 00:02:44,200 Google, two guys from Stanford University wrote 36 00:02:44,200 --> 00:02:47,560 a very simple algorithm that now is a multi-billion dollar company. 37 00:02:47,560 --> 00:02:51,280 I think we're only at the very beginning of our journey. 38 00:02:51,280 --> 00:02:54,080 If you like new ideas, and you like disrupting things, 39 00:02:54,080 --> 00:02:56,200 and you like change and doing the new, 40 00:02:56,200 --> 00:02:58,600 then there has never been a better time to be alive. 41 00:03:00,560 --> 00:03:03,080 'We have...we have lift-off.' 42 00:03:04,960 --> 00:03:07,520 I want to start with one area that has fascinated me 43 00:03:07,520 --> 00:03:10,160 since I was a child - 44 00:03:10,160 --> 00:03:12,640 the exploration of space. 45 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:17,280 It's an area which is being revolutionised 46 00:03:17,280 --> 00:03:20,760 by 21st-century inventors, 47 00:03:20,760 --> 00:03:23,160 like Peter Diamandis. 48 00:03:26,240 --> 00:03:30,280 He started out as an engineer and physician, 49 00:03:30,280 --> 00:03:35,120 but now he's an entrepreneur who's spearheading a new race to space. 50 00:03:36,320 --> 00:03:39,840 OK, sure. OK. 51 00:03:39,840 --> 00:03:41,320 Do you need me to draft... 52 00:03:41,320 --> 00:03:43,800 And he has some friends in high places. 53 00:03:44,920 --> 00:03:48,360 OK. It's the White House. 54 00:03:50,960 --> 00:03:53,720 If I had to put one thing that inspired me, 55 00:03:53,720 --> 00:03:55,480 it was the Apollo programme. 56 00:03:55,480 --> 00:03:58,520 You know, seeing humanity going to the moon 57 00:03:58,520 --> 00:04:02,400 and then seeing America stop going in 1972, 58 00:04:02,400 --> 00:04:05,840 that really said, OK, they're not going. 59 00:04:05,840 --> 00:04:07,880 What am I going to do to get us there? 60 00:04:10,120 --> 00:04:13,160 The lunar programme was brought to a halt in part 61 00:04:13,160 --> 00:04:15,160 because of the huge price tag. 62 00:04:16,800 --> 00:04:20,840 The equivalent of over $100 billion in today's money. 63 00:04:22,880 --> 00:04:27,200 Peter's challenge was to find a way to encourage the private sector 64 00:04:27,200 --> 00:04:29,800 to pick up where the state had left off. 65 00:04:33,400 --> 00:04:36,920 He found inspiration in one of history's great aviators, 66 00:04:36,920 --> 00:04:38,400 Charles Lindbergh, 67 00:04:38,400 --> 00:04:41,400 and his quest to be the first to cross the Atlantic solo. 68 00:04:43,600 --> 00:04:47,720 One day a very close friend of mine gave me a copy of Lindbergh's book 69 00:04:47,720 --> 00:04:49,400 and I read about the fact that 70 00:04:49,400 --> 00:04:52,360 Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927 to win a prize. 71 00:04:52,360 --> 00:04:56,360 I had no idea. He was going after a $25,000 prize 72 00:04:56,360 --> 00:05:02,720 and that $25,000 drove nine different teams who spent $400,000, 73 00:05:02,720 --> 00:05:05,760 16 times the prize money, going after that prize. 74 00:05:05,760 --> 00:05:08,320 The idea of creating a space prize 75 00:05:08,320 --> 00:05:10,680 for private space flight came to mind. 76 00:05:10,680 --> 00:05:13,880 I called it the X Prize cos I had no idea who would put up the money. 77 00:05:13,880 --> 00:05:17,600 The X was a variable to be replaced by the name of the sponsor. 78 00:05:19,160 --> 00:05:23,640 It's a pleasure to celebrate the launch of the Google Lunar X Prize. 79 00:05:26,280 --> 00:05:30,920 In 2007, Diamandis set up the Google Lunar X Prize. 80 00:05:32,960 --> 00:05:37,280 It offers a $20 million reward to the first private team 81 00:05:37,280 --> 00:05:41,920 that can successfully land a robot on the moon, 82 00:05:41,920 --> 00:05:44,800 get it to travel 500 metres across its surface... 83 00:05:46,560 --> 00:05:50,520 ..and send data and high-definition images back to earth. 84 00:05:52,280 --> 00:05:56,000 The Google Lunar X Prize is a competition that will demonstrate 85 00:05:56,000 --> 00:05:59,560 that small dedicated teams of individuals can do 86 00:05:59,560 --> 00:06:02,840 what was thought only once possible by governments. 87 00:06:05,920 --> 00:06:09,720 One of the front-runners for the prize is Moon Express. 88 00:06:12,120 --> 00:06:15,280 They're based here at Moffatt Field, California, 89 00:06:15,280 --> 00:06:19,080 where they're using some of NASA's surplus research facilities. 90 00:06:20,480 --> 00:06:23,040 Their CEO is Bob Richards. 91 00:06:25,080 --> 00:06:27,760 The Google Lunar X Prize is a master stroke. 92 00:06:27,760 --> 00:06:31,280 It's an inspiration and a motivation for small teams to try 93 00:06:31,280 --> 00:06:34,520 what was only accessible to superpowers in the past. 94 00:06:34,520 --> 00:06:36,840 What used to take thousands of people with slide rules 95 00:06:36,840 --> 00:06:40,440 can now be done with young engineers sitting in a room 96 00:06:40,440 --> 00:06:44,200 with desktop computers, and the spacecraft themselves can be 97 00:06:44,200 --> 00:06:47,800 so much smaller because micro-miniaturisation of technology 98 00:06:47,800 --> 00:06:50,640 has shrunk electronics and shrunk propulsion, 99 00:06:50,640 --> 00:06:55,040 and this brings the economics into the realm of the private sector. 100 00:06:55,040 --> 00:06:58,680 Moon Express's technology is already pretty advanced. 101 00:07:00,160 --> 00:07:03,200 So this is the lander test facility that we use 102 00:07:03,200 --> 00:07:07,280 to replicate the spacecraft and what it experiences on its journey to the moon, 103 00:07:07,280 --> 00:07:10,680 all the way from Mission Control to its landing on the surface, 104 00:07:10,680 --> 00:07:13,520 so we can actually make it think it's landing on the moon 105 00:07:13,520 --> 00:07:16,600 and we can watch how it behaves and adjust all the software 106 00:07:16,600 --> 00:07:20,400 so it just perfectly knows where it is and can land softly on the moon. 107 00:07:24,520 --> 00:07:27,120 Their work isn't open to the public... 108 00:07:28,360 --> 00:07:30,240 ..yet. 109 00:07:33,600 --> 00:07:36,720 The team have been designing unique landing gear 110 00:07:36,720 --> 00:07:39,720 and cutting-edge miniature radar systems. 111 00:07:48,280 --> 00:07:52,720 And the competition is attracting young scientists and engineers. 112 00:07:54,360 --> 00:07:58,000 The project manager, Mike Vergalla, is just 27. 113 00:08:01,080 --> 00:08:04,080 'What we're doing is taking commercial off-the-shelf parts 114 00:08:04,080 --> 00:08:07,440 'and we're able to make a full vehicle in a very tiny package.' 115 00:08:07,440 --> 00:08:10,560 Probably good to couple that with the RPMs. 116 00:08:10,560 --> 00:08:12,840 Oh, you're in the red zone. 117 00:08:12,840 --> 00:08:14,720 This is a small rover 118 00:08:14,720 --> 00:08:17,720 with HD cameras there 119 00:08:17,720 --> 00:08:20,200 and this little guy sits on the side, 120 00:08:20,200 --> 00:08:25,000 and we land, pop him off and it goes and it explores. 121 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:27,000 It roves around and we're able to map, 122 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:29,640 look at items of interest, do sample collection, 123 00:08:29,640 --> 00:08:33,560 try to do spectroscopy and learn about this new world. 124 00:08:37,200 --> 00:08:40,840 And these are some of the other entries... 125 00:08:40,840 --> 00:08:43,320 from all over the world. 126 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:52,040 To date, since the announcement, 127 00:08:52,040 --> 00:08:56,840 we've had 25 teams from round the world who have registered to compete 128 00:08:56,840 --> 00:08:58,480 from nearly a dozen nations. 129 00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:00,000 And if you think about it, 130 00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:03,400 there's only two countries have ever been to the moon - 131 00:09:03,400 --> 00:09:05,480 the United States and the Soviet Union 132 00:09:05,480 --> 00:09:09,520 and today any number of companies, individuals or countries 133 00:09:09,520 --> 00:09:11,720 could go to the moon privately. 134 00:09:16,080 --> 00:09:20,040 But private sector involvement means that these moon missions 135 00:09:20,040 --> 00:09:22,720 have a more commercial edge than the Apollo programme. 136 00:09:24,320 --> 00:09:27,600 We will be sending robotic landers initially to the surface of the moon 137 00:09:27,600 --> 00:09:29,840 carrying scientific and commercial payloads. 138 00:09:29,840 --> 00:09:32,120 Kind of a Fedex or a lunex model. 139 00:09:32,120 --> 00:09:33,680 It's a transportation model. 140 00:09:35,120 --> 00:09:39,040 Then we'll get into the era of exploring for resources and learning 141 00:09:39,040 --> 00:09:42,800 how to process those resources, and bringing them back to earth. 142 00:09:42,800 --> 00:09:45,600 After that we'll have the era of settlement, where people 143 00:09:45,600 --> 00:09:48,360 will need to go there, and we'll have people living on the moon 144 00:09:48,360 --> 00:09:52,360 and people will be born on earth to look up to the moon and to see 145 00:09:52,360 --> 00:09:56,840 lights up there, and the children will know that mankind is not 146 00:09:56,840 --> 00:10:01,160 limited to one planet, but we're actually now a multi-planet species. 147 00:10:03,240 --> 00:10:06,560 I think the people who are working on the Google Lunar X Prize 148 00:10:06,560 --> 00:10:08,440 are motivated by the dream, 149 00:10:08,440 --> 00:10:13,640 the idea that they're part of humanity's expansion into space. 150 00:10:13,640 --> 00:10:16,000 I mean, think about this - 151 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:19,600 millions of years from now, whatever humanity is, 152 00:10:19,600 --> 00:10:23,240 they'll look back at these next few decades as the moment in time 153 00:10:23,240 --> 00:10:28,120 when the human race irreversibly moved off planet Earth to the stars. 154 00:10:28,120 --> 00:10:33,800 And people want to be part of that significant epic adventure. 155 00:10:35,640 --> 00:10:38,920 Prizes in science have a long history, 156 00:10:38,920 --> 00:10:41,840 but today, they've staged something of a comeback. 157 00:10:41,840 --> 00:10:45,560 They're helping to drive innovation in areas from genetics 158 00:10:45,560 --> 00:10:47,800 to environmental science. 159 00:10:47,800 --> 00:10:50,480 Competition is really important when it comes to innovation 160 00:10:50,480 --> 00:10:54,920 because all inventors are people, and people like to get there first, 161 00:10:54,920 --> 00:10:57,760 they want to make all the money, and to do that, 162 00:10:57,760 --> 00:11:01,040 you need to have some drive, some reason, some deadline. 163 00:11:01,040 --> 00:11:03,600 People want to be known as the innovators. 164 00:11:03,600 --> 00:11:06,080 They want to be known as the Jobs or the Neil Armstrongs, 165 00:11:06,080 --> 00:11:09,920 and competition is a really good way of forcing people towards that. 166 00:11:11,960 --> 00:11:14,880 The best inventors are people who are motivated, 167 00:11:14,880 --> 00:11:17,880 not by making lots of money or building a business, 168 00:11:17,880 --> 00:11:19,120 but by solving a problem. 169 00:11:19,120 --> 00:11:21,640 And if the problem is well articulated in a prize, 170 00:11:21,640 --> 00:11:24,560 that can be a real rallying cry and can bring people together. 171 00:11:24,560 --> 00:11:29,040 What is striking is that today's private investors have ambitions 172 00:11:29,040 --> 00:11:32,000 that only governments once dared to have. 173 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:36,760 But are a few tens of millions of pounds of prize money 174 00:11:36,760 --> 00:11:38,760 really enough to be effective? 175 00:11:41,880 --> 00:11:45,520 Mariana Mazzucato is an economist at the University of Sussex 176 00:11:45,520 --> 00:11:49,640 who studies the economic forces that drive innovation. 177 00:11:51,000 --> 00:11:53,920 What's very interesting in space is that we see this role 178 00:11:53,920 --> 00:11:57,480 of the private sector today. They are calling themselves 179 00:11:57,480 --> 00:11:59,120 the big risk-takers, the mavericks, 180 00:11:59,120 --> 00:12:01,760 but the question is, would they be able to do 181 00:12:01,760 --> 00:12:05,240 what they are doing today if they were not actually riding the wave 182 00:12:05,240 --> 00:12:09,720 of major state investments in the early stages when space exploration 183 00:12:09,720 --> 00:12:12,400 was actually much more uncertain than it is today. 184 00:12:12,400 --> 00:12:15,400 So are there many other examples of industries that were 185 00:12:15,400 --> 00:12:19,920 initially funded by the state and the private sector moved in later? 186 00:12:19,920 --> 00:12:23,520 Yes. If you take, you know, one of the sexiest products out there, 187 00:12:23,520 --> 00:12:27,160 the iPhone, it's really interesting that many people use the iPhone 188 00:12:27,160 --> 00:12:29,800 to argue that this was created by the entrepreneurial spirit 189 00:12:29,800 --> 00:12:33,760 of Steve Jobs but, in fact, the sort of key technologies behind it 190 00:12:33,760 --> 00:12:37,600 that actually make it a smartphone were almost all state-funded. 191 00:12:37,600 --> 00:12:40,120 I mean, the most obvious example is the internet. 192 00:12:40,120 --> 00:12:43,040 The iPhone would not be as smart if it didn't have the internet, 193 00:12:43,040 --> 00:12:45,840 which was funded by part of the US Department of Defense. 194 00:12:45,840 --> 00:12:49,320 But even the nitty-gritty inside, and the microchips, were funded 195 00:12:49,320 --> 00:12:52,800 by the military and space departments of the US government. 196 00:12:52,800 --> 00:12:56,400 We have GPS, which is obviously also very important in the iPhone. 197 00:12:56,400 --> 00:12:59,160 That was actually created through their satellite programme. 198 00:12:59,160 --> 00:13:03,600 A multi-touch display was funded by two public sector grants, 199 00:13:03,600 --> 00:13:05,360 and one from the CIA, 200 00:13:05,360 --> 00:13:08,600 so, you know, all this great stuff inside the phone 201 00:13:08,600 --> 00:13:12,440 which actually makes it smart, were funded by the public sector. 202 00:13:12,440 --> 00:13:15,160 And without that, you would not have the iPhone today. 203 00:13:16,960 --> 00:13:21,960 In a year or so, we'll know who gets to the moon and gets the cash. 204 00:13:25,880 --> 00:13:30,360 The second area I want to explore is the world of materials. 205 00:13:30,360 --> 00:13:34,040 After all, they define our technology. 206 00:13:34,040 --> 00:13:37,640 From the mass-produced iron of the Industrial Revolution, 207 00:13:37,640 --> 00:13:40,680 to the complex alloys of the jet age 208 00:13:40,680 --> 00:13:44,760 and the silicon that underpins the information age. 209 00:13:44,760 --> 00:13:49,480 Now we could be about to enter a new age, based on our ability 210 00:13:49,480 --> 00:13:52,600 to manipulate matter at the smallest scale, 211 00:13:52,600 --> 00:13:55,840 based on nanotechnology. 212 00:14:00,200 --> 00:14:04,160 Not all inventions are a result of identifying a need 213 00:14:04,160 --> 00:14:06,040 and coming up with a solution. 214 00:14:06,040 --> 00:14:11,120 Sometimes, scientific discoveries are so radical and so unexpected 215 00:14:11,120 --> 00:14:13,960 that it can take a while to realise their potential 216 00:14:13,960 --> 00:14:15,600 for practical applications. 217 00:14:15,600 --> 00:14:19,880 These innovations often rely on the mavericks of invention 218 00:14:19,880 --> 00:14:22,960 who tend to look at the world in a very different way. 219 00:14:22,960 --> 00:14:26,880 Yeah, so I guess it's liquid hydrogen... 220 00:14:28,520 --> 00:14:30,640 'Like physicist Andre Geim. 221 00:14:30,640 --> 00:14:33,360 'He shared the Nobel Prize for discovering 222 00:14:33,360 --> 00:14:36,120 'one of the strangest new materials in the world.' 223 00:14:37,960 --> 00:14:41,440 All Nobel Prizes rely on luck. 224 00:14:41,440 --> 00:14:45,640 With a little bit more experience, you can drink liquid hydrogen. 225 00:14:45,640 --> 00:14:50,160 'The more you try, the more chance that you get lucky.' 226 00:14:50,160 --> 00:14:56,240 The best way to describe my approach is hit-and-run experiments. 227 00:14:56,240 --> 00:15:01,040 There's a very simple idea, we try it, it doesn't work. 228 00:15:01,040 --> 00:15:05,160 We go somewhere else. If it works, we carry on. 229 00:15:05,160 --> 00:15:09,840 He's a man who's made tomatoes, strawberries 230 00:15:09,840 --> 00:15:12,480 and even frogs levitate. 231 00:15:15,600 --> 00:15:19,200 And who has designed a sticky tape based on the feet of geckos. 232 00:15:22,840 --> 00:15:29,160 But for Andre, good inventions are about more than just good ideas. 233 00:15:29,160 --> 00:15:34,520 99% of good ideas lead to nothing or to mediocre results. 234 00:15:37,600 --> 00:15:41,960 What follows the idea - hard work, and what follows this idea - 235 00:15:41,960 --> 00:15:44,360 this is important. 236 00:15:44,360 --> 00:15:47,840 The journey that led Andre to the Nobel Prize 237 00:15:47,840 --> 00:15:53,520 began with pure scientific curiosity about the world of the very small. 238 00:15:53,520 --> 00:15:58,000 As a scientist, I was always interested in what happened 239 00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:02,440 with materials when they become thinner and thinner. 240 00:16:02,440 --> 00:16:06,960 Eventually, you reach the level of individual atoms and molecules, 241 00:16:06,960 --> 00:16:09,160 and this is a completely different world. 242 00:16:10,560 --> 00:16:15,120 Working with materials at these scales is a huge challenge. 243 00:16:16,280 --> 00:16:20,800 Conventionally, scientists use complex and expensive machines 244 00:16:20,800 --> 00:16:23,560 to manipulate atoms and molecules. 245 00:16:25,120 --> 00:16:28,320 But Andre thought there had to be a better way. 246 00:16:30,920 --> 00:16:35,160 It's very hard to move to a scale, OK, a thousand times smaller than 247 00:16:35,160 --> 00:16:40,160 the width of your hair, because materials oxidise, decompose, 248 00:16:40,160 --> 00:16:42,360 segregate, destroy themselves. 249 00:16:42,360 --> 00:16:47,760 Something new had to be invented to study materials at a smaller scale. 250 00:16:49,600 --> 00:16:53,640 For their experiment, they chose a widely available mineral - 251 00:16:53,640 --> 00:16:55,680 graphite. 252 00:16:55,680 --> 00:17:00,360 It's made up of sheets of atoms like the pages in a tightly-bound book. 253 00:17:02,400 --> 00:17:08,080 But up until then, there was no easy way of peeling the layers apart. 254 00:17:08,080 --> 00:17:13,440 We use a completely unorthodox, DIY, if you wish, approach. 255 00:17:15,160 --> 00:17:18,000 One that required no hi-tech machines. 256 00:17:21,040 --> 00:17:26,560 The easiest way to chop, we found, is to use Sellotape. 257 00:17:26,560 --> 00:17:32,280 You put Sellotape on top of graphite and peel it off. 258 00:17:32,280 --> 00:17:37,720 Then you put it together and make a fresh cut. 259 00:17:37,720 --> 00:17:41,400 Essentially, it gets twice thinner, 260 00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:45,040 so you make another cut and so on, 261 00:17:45,040 --> 00:17:49,280 and then you ask yourself a very simple question - 262 00:17:49,280 --> 00:17:55,960 how thin you can make graphite by repeating this twice, 263 00:17:55,960 --> 00:18:01,280 twice, twice, and so on. What the thinnest material can be. 264 00:18:05,560 --> 00:18:10,200 We looked at what is left on the Sellotape in a microscope, 265 00:18:10,200 --> 00:18:14,840 and found, to our great surprise, films of graphite which were 266 00:18:14,840 --> 00:18:17,960 in the range which we wanted to achieve. 267 00:18:22,520 --> 00:18:25,440 It was a perfect hexagonal lattice 268 00:18:25,440 --> 00:18:28,920 only one atom thick, called graphene. 269 00:18:28,920 --> 00:18:33,400 But this material couldn't be more different to the pencil you hold 270 00:18:33,400 --> 00:18:39,000 in your hand, because when you get down this small, everything changes. 271 00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:42,800 We started studying properties of graphene 272 00:18:42,800 --> 00:18:45,760 and then the real surprise came. 273 00:18:45,760 --> 00:18:51,560 The properties turned out to be unique, and it was my eureka moment. 274 00:18:51,560 --> 00:18:59,000 This material has 20, 30 superlatives to its name. 275 00:18:59,000 --> 00:19:03,680 It's the strongest material that has ever been measured. 276 00:19:03,680 --> 00:19:08,120 It's the most conductive material for electricity, for the heat. 277 00:19:08,120 --> 00:19:10,320 It's the most impermeable material. 278 00:19:13,080 --> 00:19:18,240 In fact, this nanomaterial is so different to anything we know, 279 00:19:18,240 --> 00:19:22,640 it's hard to get your head around quite how powerful it is. 280 00:19:22,640 --> 00:19:28,280 Graphene is so strong that if you take one-by-one metre of material 281 00:19:28,280 --> 00:19:32,280 and make a hammock out of graphene, 282 00:19:32,280 --> 00:19:36,560 it would sustain a cat, a one kilogram cat, 283 00:19:36,560 --> 00:19:41,800 lying on this hammock, despite this material being only one atom thick. 284 00:19:41,800 --> 00:19:45,520 It would be like a cat hovering in midair. 285 00:19:52,200 --> 00:19:56,800 The discovery of graphene may sound like the purest of pure science, 286 00:19:56,800 --> 00:20:00,320 but I want to find out from Andre's colleague, Sarah Haigh, 287 00:20:00,320 --> 00:20:03,760 how it will lead to inventions that we can use every day. 288 00:20:08,800 --> 00:20:11,920 So this is it, this is how you get graphene. 289 00:20:11,920 --> 00:20:16,800 Is it still the most effective way to get that one atom-thick layer? 290 00:20:16,800 --> 00:20:20,920 This really is still how we make the most perfect graphene sheets, 291 00:20:20,920 --> 00:20:23,040 which have the best electronic properties. 292 00:20:23,040 --> 00:20:26,520 And let's talk about, you know, those incredible properties. 293 00:20:26,520 --> 00:20:31,840 I mean, how can something so small, one atom in thickness, be so strong? 294 00:20:31,840 --> 00:20:35,640 it's to do with the bonds we have between the carbon atoms. 295 00:20:35,640 --> 00:20:38,080 So this is a model of the structure of graphene, 296 00:20:38,080 --> 00:20:41,320 and each of these black dots represents the carbon atoms. 297 00:20:41,320 --> 00:20:44,200 The white lines are the bonds between them. And you can see 298 00:20:44,200 --> 00:20:48,480 that each carbon atom is surrounded by three other carbon atoms, 299 00:20:48,480 --> 00:20:51,320 and the bond between those carbon atoms is really, really strong. 300 00:20:51,320 --> 00:20:54,960 And another very exciting property of course is its conductivity. 301 00:20:54,960 --> 00:20:57,440 Why is graphene so conductive? 302 00:20:57,440 --> 00:21:01,280 So the electrons inside graphene behave in a really unusual way. 303 00:21:01,280 --> 00:21:05,240 They behave like they have no mass, and that means they can travel really, really quickly. 304 00:21:05,240 --> 00:21:07,720 And do we know why that occurs? 305 00:21:07,720 --> 00:21:09,960 It's really difficult to understand, 306 00:21:09,960 --> 00:21:12,800 and there are still a lot of questions around exactly how 307 00:21:12,800 --> 00:21:14,960 graphene has such amazing properties. 308 00:21:14,960 --> 00:21:18,400 So when it comes to graphene's incredible conductivity, 309 00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:21,960 does it have potential to replace what was a wonder-material 310 00:21:21,960 --> 00:21:24,400 for conductivity, silicon? What's going on there? 311 00:21:24,400 --> 00:21:26,280 We know that silicon has its limits. 312 00:21:26,280 --> 00:21:29,080 We're going to reach a point where silicon transistors 313 00:21:29,080 --> 00:21:31,560 can't get any smaller, they can't get any faster, 314 00:21:31,560 --> 00:21:35,800 and graphene doesn't have the same limitations, and so it could be that 315 00:21:35,800 --> 00:21:38,800 the next generation of electronics could be made out of graphene. 316 00:21:38,800 --> 00:21:42,680 But rather like when we first had the original computer switches, 317 00:21:42,680 --> 00:21:44,160 like this one here, 318 00:21:44,160 --> 00:21:49,320 and now we're able to produce electronic chips that have 319 00:21:49,320 --> 00:21:52,400 thousands of these switches built into this tiny chip. 320 00:21:52,400 --> 00:21:55,400 That change required a whole new way of thinking, 321 00:21:55,400 --> 00:21:57,560 and using graphene in electronics 322 00:21:57,560 --> 00:22:00,760 is going to require the same sort of revolutionary new approaches. 323 00:22:00,760 --> 00:22:02,800 Are we being a little bit impatient? 324 00:22:02,800 --> 00:22:05,640 We are, but that's because graphene has such potential. 325 00:22:05,640 --> 00:22:08,480 And there are people working on graphene all round the world, 326 00:22:08,480 --> 00:22:11,720 thousands of different researchers who are trying to exploit 327 00:22:11,720 --> 00:22:14,600 the properties, so much so that there are hundreds of papers 328 00:22:14,600 --> 00:22:18,760 being published every single week, and they are continuing 329 00:22:18,760 --> 00:22:21,880 to throw up new ideas and new suggestions for applications. 330 00:22:24,520 --> 00:22:28,200 The speed at which ideas now move around the world 331 00:22:28,200 --> 00:22:31,960 is one of the defining characteristics of invention today, 332 00:22:31,960 --> 00:22:36,000 but another is the degree of specialisation it takes 333 00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:39,160 to make these advances in the first place. 334 00:22:41,400 --> 00:22:45,720 When you think about all the science that lies behind innovation today, 335 00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:48,520 it's so complex and so advanced, 336 00:22:48,520 --> 00:22:52,400 it seems impossible to be able to stay on top of everything 337 00:22:52,400 --> 00:22:55,960 that's happening, and so, to keep the pace of invention up, 338 00:22:55,960 --> 00:22:58,880 scientists have to work in a very different way 339 00:22:58,880 --> 00:23:01,280 to that of lone scientists in the past. 340 00:23:02,840 --> 00:23:05,760 Certainly, science has become so specialised now 341 00:23:05,760 --> 00:23:08,880 that it's impossible to be an expert in all areas. 342 00:23:08,880 --> 00:23:14,080 Once upon a time, there was just one science journal. 343 00:23:14,080 --> 00:23:16,920 Today, there are over 8,000. 344 00:23:19,640 --> 00:23:23,040 I reckon no scientist knows what other scientists are doing. 345 00:23:23,040 --> 00:23:25,920 They might have some basic idea of the background, 346 00:23:25,920 --> 00:23:29,280 but right at the cutting edge, there's no way they could keep up with each other. 347 00:23:29,280 --> 00:23:30,960 When I'm researching stories, 348 00:23:30,960 --> 00:23:34,200 sometimes I'll just see something and think, "What is that?!" 349 00:23:34,200 --> 00:23:36,880 Or I'll have a scientist on the phone, be talking to him and 350 00:23:36,880 --> 00:23:40,640 just be frantically Googling as he's saying things to try and keep up. 351 00:23:40,640 --> 00:23:42,920 Look at the Nobel Prize. 352 00:23:42,920 --> 00:23:46,200 When you read the citation for what somebody's done, it very often 353 00:23:46,200 --> 00:23:50,080 is totally non-understandable to the average person. 354 00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:55,360 Indeed, the simple categories we remember from school have now 355 00:23:55,360 --> 00:23:59,440 multiplied into a complex web of interconnected fields, 356 00:23:59,440 --> 00:24:02,840 each with their own highly specialised subject areas. 357 00:24:04,880 --> 00:24:08,320 Quantum optics in photonics in nanotechnology. 358 00:24:08,320 --> 00:24:12,600 Genomics, that's about genes, but I never did Biology O-level, 359 00:24:12,600 --> 00:24:14,600 so that's one of my weak areas! 360 00:24:14,600 --> 00:24:16,280 INTERVIEWER: Systems biology? 361 00:24:16,280 --> 00:24:19,920 Er, yeah, I think I could... Systems biology... No. 362 00:24:19,920 --> 00:24:22,960 Quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography. 363 00:24:22,960 --> 00:24:24,360 Neuroelectrodynamics. 364 00:24:24,360 --> 00:24:27,200 It seems to make sense but I've never actually... What does it do? 365 00:24:27,200 --> 00:24:30,280 I think that is using electric currents to make the studies 366 00:24:30,280 --> 00:24:34,040 of nerves, repair nerves, look at nerves, all that stuff. I think! 367 00:24:34,040 --> 00:24:38,600 Transcriptomics, never heard of it. INTERVIEWER: Bioelectrochemistry? 368 00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:42,640 I think it's the study of how you can use electro... OK, I have no idea. 369 00:24:42,640 --> 00:24:47,520 One thing is clear - in a highly specialised world, 370 00:24:47,520 --> 00:24:51,360 scientists and technologists have to collaborate to create 371 00:24:51,360 --> 00:24:54,280 the next generation of inventions, 372 00:24:54,280 --> 00:24:57,920 and one field where this is already happening with enormous success 373 00:24:57,920 --> 00:25:00,120 is biomedical engineering. 374 00:25:06,200 --> 00:25:09,120 Cambridge, Massachusetts. 375 00:25:09,120 --> 00:25:12,320 This is Professor Bob Langer, 376 00:25:12,320 --> 00:25:16,640 one of the most inventive scientists working today. 377 00:25:16,640 --> 00:25:20,920 Over a hundred million people have benefited from his innovations 378 00:25:20,920 --> 00:25:25,320 in cancer and heart research, so we spent a day with him 379 00:25:25,320 --> 00:25:30,160 at his lab at MIT to find out how he does it. 380 00:25:30,160 --> 00:25:33,040 This one is a National Medal Of Science. 381 00:25:33,040 --> 00:25:35,040 That's given to you by the President. 382 00:25:35,040 --> 00:25:38,080 That's the highest scientific award in the United States. 383 00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:41,400 And Draper Prize up there. 384 00:25:41,400 --> 00:25:45,000 That's often considered the Nobel Prize of engineering. 385 00:25:47,440 --> 00:25:51,400 With over 800 patents to his name, not surprisingly, 386 00:25:51,400 --> 00:25:54,160 Langer is a little hard to keep up with. 387 00:25:54,160 --> 00:25:56,400 Well, that's not open. 388 00:25:56,400 --> 00:25:59,640 Leon. So this is Dr Leon Bellan. What is the number? 389 00:25:59,640 --> 00:26:05,520 Can we go...? Yeah, we'll go to take a look at Leon's lab and... 390 00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:10,080 Dr Bellan is using some rather unconventional lab equipment. 391 00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:13,560 This is actually very cool stuff. 392 00:26:16,080 --> 00:26:18,320 Let's plug this guy in. 393 00:26:18,320 --> 00:26:22,160 What Leon's been able to do is convert a $40 cotton candy machine 394 00:26:22,160 --> 00:26:24,800 into something that can make all kinds of scaffolds 395 00:26:24,800 --> 00:26:28,280 for regenerative medicine and tissue regeneration. 396 00:26:28,280 --> 00:26:32,160 This will take a while to warm up, so this is just some sample 397 00:26:32,160 --> 00:26:38,240 cotton candy-like material that's used to make artificial capillaries, 398 00:26:38,240 --> 00:26:40,800 basically the smallest blood vessels in your body. 399 00:26:40,800 --> 00:26:43,760 This is extremely cheap micro-fabrication. 400 00:26:43,760 --> 00:26:46,400 Yeah, and it works. And a high throughput, yes. And it works. 401 00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:49,000 Langer's signature approach is 402 00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:54,160 to bring people from different scientific disciplines together. 403 00:26:54,160 --> 00:26:59,160 It all started for him with a search for new materials for medicine. 404 00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:01,960 Pretty much all the materials in the 20th century 405 00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:04,600 that have been used in medicine, when I looked at it, 406 00:27:04,600 --> 00:27:07,000 largely were driven by medical doctors 407 00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:10,680 who would go to their house and find an object that kind of resembled 408 00:27:10,680 --> 00:27:14,640 the tissue or organ they were trying to fix. So if you look at this, 409 00:27:14,640 --> 00:27:19,680 the artificial heart, that started actually in 1967 410 00:27:19,680 --> 00:27:23,200 with medical doctors saying "Well, what has a good flex life?" 411 00:27:23,200 --> 00:27:27,800 They actually picked a lady's girdle and used the material in that. 412 00:27:27,800 --> 00:27:30,200 But those materials can sometimes cause problems. 413 00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:32,560 For example, the material in the artificial heart, 414 00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:36,440 when blood hits that, it can form a clot, and that clot can go 415 00:27:36,440 --> 00:27:39,040 to the patient's brain and they could get a stroke and die. 416 00:27:39,040 --> 00:27:43,040 So I started thinking, could we have materials that we could specifically 417 00:27:43,040 --> 00:27:47,080 design for medical purposes rather than just taking them off the shelf? 418 00:27:48,560 --> 00:27:51,920 When Langer started over 30 years ago, 419 00:27:51,920 --> 00:27:55,920 his big idea was to design new materials - polymers - 420 00:27:55,920 --> 00:27:59,600 that could go inside the body and carry out all sorts of 421 00:27:59,600 --> 00:28:03,120 medical procedures before dissolving safely, 422 00:28:03,120 --> 00:28:08,000 like delivering drugs or acting as scaffolds for growing new skin, 423 00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:10,440 bone and cartilage. 424 00:28:10,440 --> 00:28:14,640 The problem was it had never been attempted before. 425 00:28:14,640 --> 00:28:16,160 When we first started this, 426 00:28:16,160 --> 00:28:18,920 people said that we wouldn't be able to synthesise the polymer. 427 00:28:18,920 --> 00:28:21,640 The chemists said it would be too difficult or couldn't work. 428 00:28:21,640 --> 00:28:25,080 They said the polymers will break in the body, they're fragile, 429 00:28:25,080 --> 00:28:27,760 and people said it wouldn't be safe. 430 00:28:27,760 --> 00:28:30,600 It involved polymer science, chemical engineering 431 00:28:30,600 --> 00:28:33,760 and chemistry and pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical science. 432 00:28:33,760 --> 00:28:36,040 It involved also neurosurgery and pharmacology, 433 00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:39,280 medicine and radiology, and toxicology. 434 00:28:39,280 --> 00:28:45,080 This collaboration turned out to be a success, and here's the proof. 435 00:28:45,080 --> 00:28:49,240 These are polymer wafers being put into someone's brain 436 00:28:49,240 --> 00:28:52,680 to treat a tumour with targeted drugs. 437 00:28:52,680 --> 00:28:58,000 Devices like these have now become a routine part of treating cancer. 438 00:28:58,000 --> 00:29:02,880 One of Langer's key collaborators is neurosurgeon Henry Brem. 439 00:29:02,880 --> 00:29:06,120 The patient goes home three days later. 440 00:29:06,120 --> 00:29:09,600 They're not sick from chemotherapy, they don't lose their hair, 441 00:29:09,600 --> 00:29:12,200 they don't throw up, they don't have 442 00:29:12,200 --> 00:29:16,280 any of the typical, sad side effects of chemotherapy, 443 00:29:16,280 --> 00:29:21,280 and yet they have a very effective drug that's working on their behalf. 444 00:29:21,280 --> 00:29:25,520 Langer's way of drawing people together is proving to be 445 00:29:25,520 --> 00:29:30,440 an immensely powerful way of driving innovation in 21st-century science. 446 00:29:30,440 --> 00:29:33,920 The way we have developed the interdisciplinary approach, really, 447 00:29:33,920 --> 00:29:35,760 is the people I have in the lab. 448 00:29:35,760 --> 00:29:38,440 We probably have people with about ten different disciplines. 449 00:29:38,440 --> 00:29:42,080 Hey, Chris, I'll look forward to seeing you later, but also, I gave you comments. 450 00:29:42,080 --> 00:29:44,320 Yes, I saw that. Thank you. OK, great. 451 00:29:44,320 --> 00:29:47,680 'I think the big advantage of trying to do interdisciplinary research is' 452 00:29:47,680 --> 00:29:50,800 you can take things that are, say, in engineering 453 00:29:50,800 --> 00:29:53,680 and apply them to medicine and vice versa. 454 00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:57,280 So, you have the possibility of going down avenues and roads 455 00:29:57,280 --> 00:29:59,720 that other people just wouldn't go. 456 00:30:02,640 --> 00:30:05,520 In fact it's hard to find anyone in this lab 457 00:30:05,520 --> 00:30:08,040 who's got just one area of expertise. 458 00:30:08,040 --> 00:30:09,400 Hey, I'll be right there. 459 00:30:11,120 --> 00:30:17,400 And Langer is always hunting for new collaborators, like Dr Gio Traverso. 460 00:30:17,400 --> 00:30:19,560 He's got incredibly neat stuff. 461 00:30:19,560 --> 00:30:22,280 He's actually the perfect example of somebody 462 00:30:22,280 --> 00:30:24,040 who's super-interdisciplinary. 463 00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:29,840 I'd say now he's got medicine, molecular biology, and engineering 464 00:30:29,840 --> 00:30:33,240 all in one person so he'll tell you a couple of things that he's doing. 465 00:30:33,240 --> 00:30:34,720 They're actually amazing. 466 00:30:34,720 --> 00:30:39,040 One of the things that we're working on, we're developing... And all these are inventions. 467 00:30:39,040 --> 00:30:42,160 We're developing a series of ingestible devices, 468 00:30:42,160 --> 00:30:45,240 which are actually coded with different needles. 469 00:30:45,240 --> 00:30:48,560 Here the needles are actually fairly long so they're getting smaller 470 00:30:48,560 --> 00:30:51,360 and shorter as we progress with the development. 471 00:30:51,360 --> 00:30:54,800 When devices like this can be sufficiently miniaturised, 472 00:30:54,800 --> 00:30:58,240 external injections might become a thing of the past. 473 00:31:04,760 --> 00:31:08,360 So, are you working on a vaccine, or on bubbles, or which? 474 00:31:08,360 --> 00:31:10,160 Right now on the bubbles. OK. 475 00:31:10,160 --> 00:31:13,480 Bob's mind works very differently than the rest of us. 476 00:31:13,480 --> 00:31:18,320 He sees the world as a song, as an orchestral piece 477 00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:20,800 and he is the ultimate conductor. 478 00:31:20,800 --> 00:31:25,960 He knows what it's supposed to sound like, and at the end of the day, 479 00:31:25,960 --> 00:31:28,480 he can have all of us play 480 00:31:28,480 --> 00:31:32,200 so that what we produce is not only harmonious, 481 00:31:32,200 --> 00:31:38,880 but each individual player, so much better than we could ever have done alone. 482 00:31:38,880 --> 00:31:42,160 You'll find something. If it works, that's a good thing, but obviously 483 00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:45,280 if it works according to theory, that's a better thing. Yeah, yeah. 484 00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:54,040 After almost four decades, Langer's method now provides 485 00:31:54,040 --> 00:31:58,760 something of a blueprint for the rest of the scientific world. 486 00:31:58,760 --> 00:32:02,000 I think the days of an individual working in a garage 487 00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:06,080 and coming up with major inventions that really make an impact are over. 488 00:32:06,080 --> 00:32:10,480 It's teams now of people with a unified purpose that work together, 489 00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:13,360 and you build on everyone's expertise. 490 00:32:14,640 --> 00:32:18,160 Eight hours later and Bob Langer is on his way home, 491 00:32:18,160 --> 00:32:20,880 but I don't think he's finished his work just yet. 492 00:32:24,640 --> 00:32:27,640 It seems that collectively we can do far more 493 00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:30,520 than even the most brilliant individual, 494 00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:32,720 and now a new breed of inventors 495 00:32:32,720 --> 00:32:36,560 is taking this interdisciplinary approach a step further 496 00:32:36,560 --> 00:32:40,400 by using the internet to develop a concept on a global scale. 497 00:32:42,240 --> 00:32:44,840 One of them is Cesar Harada, 498 00:32:44,840 --> 00:32:47,600 an inspirational young inventor who's been tapping 499 00:32:47,600 --> 00:32:52,320 into the true power of the internet, the power of the crowd. 500 00:32:57,680 --> 00:33:00,720 His invention came as a result of one of the biggest 501 00:33:00,720 --> 00:33:03,760 environmental disasters of the last decade - 502 00:33:03,760 --> 00:33:07,800 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion of 2010. 503 00:33:09,080 --> 00:33:13,600 Millions of barrels of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico 504 00:33:13,600 --> 00:33:16,160 and the race was on to clear up the mess. 505 00:33:19,600 --> 00:33:22,240 Cesar Harada wanted to help, 506 00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:25,720 but he'd just won a coveted place at MIT. 507 00:33:25,720 --> 00:33:28,880 As events unfolded, he faced a difficult choice. 508 00:33:31,240 --> 00:33:36,760 I was watching TV, and I was, er, terrified and sad, 509 00:33:36,760 --> 00:33:41,120 and my response was to leave my job, 510 00:33:41,120 --> 00:33:43,400 my dream job in MIT, and move to New Orleans 511 00:33:43,400 --> 00:33:46,400 and try to develop technology to clean up the oil spill. 512 00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:51,240 Cesar believed that the fishing boats adapted with skimmers, 513 00:33:51,240 --> 00:33:55,200 which were being used to clear up the spill, weren't up to the job. 514 00:33:56,560 --> 00:33:59,600 The tools they were using to capture it are these small fishing boats 515 00:33:59,600 --> 00:34:01,400 and they capture some of the oil, 516 00:34:01,400 --> 00:34:04,160 but imagine if you're swimming into an ocean of oil and you're just 517 00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:07,040 extending your arms like this, you're not going to catch very much. 518 00:34:07,040 --> 00:34:08,160 It's such a big surface. 519 00:34:10,400 --> 00:34:14,240 What's more, when seas were rough, no skimming could take place. 520 00:34:17,200 --> 00:34:20,480 So obviously there were many problems to cope with, 521 00:34:20,480 --> 00:34:23,320 but how did you go about it? What were you mainly focusing on? 522 00:34:23,320 --> 00:34:27,320 The first was to remove human beings from the...from the equation 523 00:34:27,320 --> 00:34:30,000 so how do you make a boat that is going to operate better? 524 00:34:30,000 --> 00:34:33,760 And I will use wind power, surface currents and the waves to actually 525 00:34:33,760 --> 00:34:37,600 navigate up the wind to capture the oil that is drifting down the wind. 526 00:34:38,840 --> 00:34:43,400 Cesar's plan was to create a fleet of unmanned remote-controlled 527 00:34:43,400 --> 00:34:47,160 sailing drones that could cover the sea surface more effectively. 528 00:34:48,680 --> 00:34:52,640 Each boat would tow behind it a huge absorbent sponge 529 00:34:52,640 --> 00:34:56,280 that would get heavier and heavier as it soaked up the oil. 530 00:34:59,160 --> 00:35:01,800 So how did you go about designing a sailing vessel 531 00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,040 that is able to tow something like that upwind? 532 00:35:05,040 --> 00:35:07,560 So imagine this is a conventional sail boat 533 00:35:07,560 --> 00:35:11,320 and a conventional sail boat has a rudder at the back. 534 00:35:11,320 --> 00:35:14,600 So imagine you have something very, very long behind, 535 00:35:14,600 --> 00:35:17,800 it's going to be really difficult and very ineffective to move that part here. 536 00:35:17,800 --> 00:35:19,920 You can't manoeuvre the boat? 537 00:35:19,920 --> 00:35:22,480 So what we did is that we took the rudder that's normally here 538 00:35:22,480 --> 00:35:25,760 at the back and brought it at the front, right here, 539 00:35:25,760 --> 00:35:28,600 and so you can imagine, if you have something long and heavy behind, 540 00:35:28,600 --> 00:35:31,640 you already have a lot more influence in controlling this part. 541 00:35:31,640 --> 00:35:34,880 And then we kept adding a rudder, and at some point we were like, 542 00:35:34,880 --> 00:35:37,000 what if we make the whole boat curve 543 00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:40,600 and the whole boat becomes the organ of control, so we have more control 544 00:35:40,600 --> 00:35:43,480 over something long and heavy, it would be a lot more. 545 00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:46,440 So the whole hull is flexible, the entire thing? 546 00:35:46,440 --> 00:35:50,320 It resembles some kind of skeleton of a dinosaur or something. Yeah! 547 00:35:53,760 --> 00:35:55,600 Cesar had a brilliant idea, 548 00:35:55,600 --> 00:35:59,880 but neither the technical skills nor the hard cash to bring it to life. 549 00:35:59,880 --> 00:36:04,520 So he did something which I think is pretty radical for an inventor. 550 00:36:04,520 --> 00:36:07,040 He shared his idea on the internet, 551 00:36:07,040 --> 00:36:11,040 opening it up to collaborators for free. 552 00:36:13,240 --> 00:36:16,120 I started posting it on a website and some scientists 553 00:36:16,120 --> 00:36:18,960 and engineers just started looking at this and thinking it has 554 00:36:18,960 --> 00:36:21,960 a lot of potential and people were really excited about it. 555 00:36:21,960 --> 00:36:26,280 Soon inventors from all around the world started to contribute 556 00:36:26,280 --> 00:36:30,800 their ideas to the project, and many others began to donate money. 557 00:36:32,680 --> 00:36:35,960 So we had 300 people give us ten, 15 dollars, 558 00:36:35,960 --> 00:36:39,080 $20, $100, and we collected more than $33,000. 559 00:36:41,920 --> 00:36:45,520 With this funding, Cesar was able to set up a workshop 560 00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:50,480 and he invited inventors from around the world to come and work with him. 561 00:36:50,480 --> 00:36:53,320 I'm Tu Yang-Jo, I come from China. 562 00:36:53,320 --> 00:36:56,360 I'm Logan Williams, I'm from the United States. 563 00:36:56,360 --> 00:36:58,760 My name is Roberto, I am originally from El Salvador. 564 00:36:58,760 --> 00:37:02,040 My name is Francois de la Taste, and I am from Paris, France. 565 00:37:02,040 --> 00:37:04,920 My name is Molly Danielson, I'm from Portland, Oregon. 566 00:37:07,080 --> 00:37:11,960 This free not-for-profit exchange of ideas through the internet 567 00:37:11,960 --> 00:37:14,040 is known as open hardware. 568 00:37:17,160 --> 00:37:19,880 Open hardware means that we can innovate a lot faster 569 00:37:19,880 --> 00:37:23,600 because we are not limited to a small number of people 570 00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:27,520 but the whole internet community is giving us feedback. 571 00:37:27,520 --> 00:37:30,080 The only condition for those participating 572 00:37:30,080 --> 00:37:32,720 is that they must credit other inventors' work 573 00:37:32,720 --> 00:37:35,840 and use the information to further the project. 574 00:37:35,840 --> 00:37:39,000 You're almost flipping the whole system on its side. 575 00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:42,640 It's not about profit first, environmental near the end. 576 00:37:42,640 --> 00:37:44,840 You're making the environment a priority, 577 00:37:44,840 --> 00:37:47,560 which means we all have to start thinking differently? Yep. 578 00:37:47,560 --> 00:37:51,600 The conventional way is that a scientist or an inventor has an idea. 579 00:37:51,600 --> 00:37:54,600 He goes to the office of patents and says, "OK, the idea is mine, 580 00:37:54,600 --> 00:37:57,560 "and I'm going to talk to a manufacturer and together 581 00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:01,360 "we're going to make a deal and we'll sell this as expensive as possible to people," 582 00:38:01,360 --> 00:38:04,400 and the thing is that this is really good for the manufacturer 583 00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:07,240 and the inventor but not really good for the people. 584 00:38:10,800 --> 00:38:14,160 Open hardware, open sourcing, crowd sourcing, 585 00:38:14,160 --> 00:38:18,200 releasing intellectual property freely on the internet - 586 00:38:18,200 --> 00:38:22,040 these are all part of a new culture of openness and sharing 587 00:38:22,040 --> 00:38:24,880 that's re-shaping how and what we invent. 588 00:38:33,000 --> 00:38:34,840 I think the biggest change 589 00:38:34,840 --> 00:38:38,240 is the fact that things now happen worldwide. 590 00:38:38,240 --> 00:38:42,960 You don't get the individual inventing things on his own. 591 00:38:42,960 --> 00:38:46,440 It's a worldwide collaboration on almost everything. 592 00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:49,960 The inventor today is a collaborator, a sharer. 593 00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:55,000 Somebody who isn't selfish and protective about their ideas, 594 00:38:55,000 --> 00:39:01,600 but wants to, er, throw them out there and see how they can be nurtured and grown by others. 595 00:39:01,600 --> 00:39:03,680 Today there's a really interesting 596 00:39:03,680 --> 00:39:05,200 tension going on between 597 00:39:05,200 --> 00:39:06,800 the open source movement 598 00:39:06,800 --> 00:39:10,320 and business, so on the one hand people having ideas 599 00:39:10,320 --> 00:39:13,600 and wanting them to go out into the public and flourish, 600 00:39:13,600 --> 00:39:17,960 and people to riff on them, I suppose, and then there's making money. 601 00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:20,160 And there's a battle between these two worlds. 602 00:39:20,160 --> 00:39:21,760 I love the idea of where an idea 603 00:39:21,760 --> 00:39:23,600 can come forward, where it can be 604 00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:25,160 shared, where there's no patents, 605 00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:28,280 where there's no copyright and where it's for the common good 606 00:39:28,280 --> 00:39:31,360 but underneath all that, it has to get delivered 607 00:39:31,360 --> 00:39:33,760 and somewhere, somebody has to earn something 608 00:39:33,760 --> 00:39:36,480 so it's a difficult balance but the concept is fantastic. 609 00:39:38,640 --> 00:39:40,920 At the heart of the open source movement 610 00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:44,520 is of course our ever-increasing connectivity. 611 00:39:44,520 --> 00:39:47,160 Today 2.3 billion of us are online. 612 00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:53,200 What the internet gives today is the chance for people 613 00:39:53,200 --> 00:39:56,680 to collaborate very quickly, to come up with the idea, 614 00:39:56,680 --> 00:40:02,000 the messaging to communicate the idea, and then 615 00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:05,560 the distribution platform to share the idea really, really quickly. 616 00:40:05,560 --> 00:40:07,480 It just makes such a difference 617 00:40:07,480 --> 00:40:10,400 to be able to suddenly send an e-mail to somebody 618 00:40:10,400 --> 00:40:14,760 that you've never met, never seen before, and ask them a question. 619 00:40:14,760 --> 00:40:16,120 How do you do this? 620 00:40:16,120 --> 00:40:19,200 And they know how, and I can get that back immediately. 621 00:40:19,200 --> 00:40:23,520 I think that more than ever now, the internet has reached 622 00:40:23,520 --> 00:40:26,200 a kind of mainstream so that it's more possible to connect 623 00:40:26,200 --> 00:40:28,920 with more people in a more profound way than ever before, 624 00:40:28,920 --> 00:40:32,640 and to create different products and services on a global scale. 625 00:40:40,480 --> 00:40:43,840 If you take a look at the patents currently being filed, 626 00:40:43,840 --> 00:40:46,880 you can get a very good sense of where the next generation 627 00:40:46,880 --> 00:40:48,920 of inventions is coming from. 628 00:40:48,920 --> 00:40:53,200 What's clear is that many inventors are concentrating on the area 629 00:40:53,200 --> 00:40:55,240 of alternative energy, 630 00:40:55,240 --> 00:40:58,440 joining the race to find a replacement for fossil fuels. 631 00:41:04,320 --> 00:41:08,800 Tapping the sun's energy is sometimes seen as the holy grail 632 00:41:08,800 --> 00:41:12,240 but it's not all about solar panels. 633 00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:16,200 In the deserts of New Mexico, 634 00:41:16,200 --> 00:41:19,280 one company is taking a different approach. 635 00:41:21,440 --> 00:41:25,680 Michael Glacken is on his way to their first ever production plant... 636 00:41:28,520 --> 00:41:32,760 ..a showcase for a new way of harvesting energy from the sun. 637 00:41:50,240 --> 00:41:51,800 Inside this plant, 638 00:41:51,800 --> 00:41:55,720 they've harnessed the power of one of the world's oldest organisms. 639 00:42:02,240 --> 00:42:07,000 So, welcome to south-eastern New Mexico and our new plant. 640 00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:08,560 You guys are pretty lucky 641 00:42:08,560 --> 00:42:12,200 because we've only been in operation now for less than 24 hours 642 00:42:12,200 --> 00:42:15,040 so you'll get to see everything as it happens. 643 00:42:22,560 --> 00:42:25,000 The company's founder is Noubar Afeyan. 644 00:42:29,320 --> 00:42:33,880 He's a biologist who's spent his life looking for alternatives to fossil fuels. 645 00:42:35,920 --> 00:42:38,160 His inspiration comes from nature, 646 00:42:38,160 --> 00:42:41,520 and one of the most common micro-organisms on the planet - 647 00:42:41,520 --> 00:42:43,040 called cyanobacteria. 648 00:42:45,320 --> 00:42:49,920 This is a piece of soil, and of course to the eye 649 00:42:49,920 --> 00:42:52,200 it just seems like dirt that you find 650 00:42:52,200 --> 00:42:54,280 in daily life in a lot of places, 651 00:42:54,280 --> 00:42:58,520 but in fact, if you were to take this soil and refine it 652 00:42:58,520 --> 00:43:01,960 and isolate from it all of the life forms, 653 00:43:01,960 --> 00:43:06,120 a substantial amount of the life forms in fact will be cyanobacteria. 654 00:43:06,120 --> 00:43:12,640 And these organisms have the basic capability of using sunlight 655 00:43:12,640 --> 00:43:17,800 and carbon dioxide to live, and to exclusively live on those nutrients. 656 00:43:21,600 --> 00:43:27,560 Cyanobacteria have remained almost unchanged for 3.5 billion years. 657 00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:37,040 They were the first organisms to evolve the process of photosynthesis 658 00:43:37,040 --> 00:43:38,920 that we see in plants today, 659 00:43:38,920 --> 00:43:42,720 converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into chemical energy. 660 00:43:45,880 --> 00:43:48,680 But Noubar's plan was to genetically modify them 661 00:43:48,680 --> 00:43:50,600 to take control of this process. 662 00:43:54,000 --> 00:43:56,880 The heart of the technology was to take that organism 663 00:43:56,880 --> 00:44:00,920 and to begin to engineer the capability of that organism 664 00:44:00,920 --> 00:44:06,480 to take the carbon from carbon dioxide and convert it into a fuel molecule. 665 00:44:08,600 --> 00:44:12,240 The fuel molecule he sought to produce was ethanol... 666 00:44:13,760 --> 00:44:16,200 ..a biofuel which is usually created 667 00:44:16,200 --> 00:44:18,920 by fermenting food crops such as corn. 668 00:44:20,720 --> 00:44:24,560 But making it from corn can divert land away from food production. 669 00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:32,320 At his labs in Bedford, Massachusetts, his team began 670 00:44:32,320 --> 00:44:36,560 to search for a way to genetically modify the cyanobacteria. 671 00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:44,120 When we entered the field, the tools that are needed to manipulate 672 00:44:44,120 --> 00:44:47,360 the genetic make-up of these organisms did not exist at all, 673 00:44:47,360 --> 00:44:50,480 and so there was a lot of inventing to do to transform them. 674 00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:53,760 After five years of research, 675 00:44:53,760 --> 00:44:57,520 the team managed to introduce the right combination of genes 676 00:44:57,520 --> 00:45:01,360 into the cyanobacteria so that they would produce ethanol. 677 00:45:04,040 --> 00:45:06,680 It was a remarkable achievement. 678 00:45:08,880 --> 00:45:11,600 But to make the process economically viable, 679 00:45:11,600 --> 00:45:13,360 all of the bacteria's energy 680 00:45:13,360 --> 00:45:16,840 would have to be channelled into producing the fuel. 681 00:45:16,840 --> 00:45:19,480 To do that, the team had to switch off 682 00:45:19,480 --> 00:45:21,880 what is the most basic function 683 00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:25,840 of every living organism on the planet - reproduction. 684 00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:28,200 And when you do that, 685 00:45:28,200 --> 00:45:32,080 you'll see a lot more carbon goes to making the product, 686 00:45:32,080 --> 00:45:37,560 and that allowed us to create a micro-scale, single-cell factory. 687 00:45:37,560 --> 00:45:40,440 It's a factory that does a very precise chemical conversion. 688 00:45:40,440 --> 00:45:45,720 Think of it as a micro-refinery that could convert carbon dioxide 689 00:45:45,720 --> 00:45:49,320 and solar energy into a fuel molecule. 690 00:45:51,920 --> 00:45:54,440 And so today in New Mexico, 691 00:45:54,440 --> 00:45:57,120 this plant is about to start harvesting fuel 692 00:45:57,120 --> 00:46:01,720 from genetically modified cyanobacteria for the very first time. 693 00:46:08,440 --> 00:46:11,720 So all these tanks, all this technology, all these valves 694 00:46:11,720 --> 00:46:14,920 have been designed and installed to do one thing 695 00:46:14,920 --> 00:46:18,360 and that is to use trillions and trillions of bacteria 696 00:46:18,360 --> 00:46:20,000 to make fuel from the sun. 697 00:46:21,640 --> 00:46:26,280 The first stage of the process is to make enough bacteria to produce the fuel. 698 00:46:31,120 --> 00:46:35,240 The green is actually the cells themselves. 699 00:46:35,240 --> 00:46:40,320 And last night we introduced them to this system. 700 00:46:40,320 --> 00:46:44,480 This is a large circulation unit, 4,000 litres, 701 00:46:44,480 --> 00:46:47,960 so what we want to see them do right now is get greener and greener, 702 00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:50,800 basically reproduce, make more cells, 703 00:46:50,800 --> 00:46:53,920 and increase in mass by about tenfold. 704 00:46:55,960 --> 00:47:00,040 It'll take just a few days to reach the right amount of cyanobacteria. 705 00:47:03,440 --> 00:47:07,920 The next stage is to make them stop reproducing, and shift them entirely 706 00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:13,000 towards producing fuel using just carbon dioxide and sunlight. 707 00:47:19,440 --> 00:47:24,000 And inside this can is the product of all that research. 708 00:47:26,040 --> 00:47:32,400 So this is it, 500ml of the world's very first ethanol fuel 709 00:47:32,400 --> 00:47:35,640 made by genetically engineered bacteria. 710 00:47:35,640 --> 00:47:39,800 Now there are still many technical challenges to overcome 711 00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:43,120 but this is a bold attempt to make a renewable fuel 712 00:47:43,120 --> 00:47:45,720 that has the potential to be greener than oil. 713 00:47:48,200 --> 00:47:52,240 Now, whether you like the idea or not, the technology that 714 00:47:52,240 --> 00:47:56,560 allows us to make another organism produce something it normally wouldn't, 715 00:47:56,560 --> 00:48:01,000 that can be of such value to us, is an incredible invention. 716 00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:06,640 What they're doing is effectively re-engineering nature for our benefit. 717 00:48:06,640 --> 00:48:10,960 It's part of a growing and important field called synthetic biology. 718 00:48:13,320 --> 00:48:17,400 So what nature has is billions of years of practice 719 00:48:17,400 --> 00:48:20,040 to perfect amazing solutions, 720 00:48:20,040 --> 00:48:23,320 and what inventors are trying to do today 721 00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:26,360 is to compress those billions of years into a few months 722 00:48:26,360 --> 00:48:29,120 that can bring around something really useful. 723 00:48:29,120 --> 00:48:30,640 If I had a billion pounds, 724 00:48:30,640 --> 00:48:33,440 I would invest it in synthetic biology companies 725 00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:35,480 because that area is so exciting. 726 00:48:35,480 --> 00:48:38,880 They're going to programme organisms to do everything from 727 00:48:38,880 --> 00:48:43,000 clean up oil spills to create new fuels, new drugs. 728 00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:46,120 It's going to be an entire platform of stuff. 729 00:48:46,120 --> 00:48:48,800 I think we've always taken inspiration from nature 730 00:48:48,800 --> 00:48:50,520 for the things that we've invented, 731 00:48:50,520 --> 00:48:53,160 but the point is that we're understanding the natural world 732 00:48:53,160 --> 00:48:56,160 so much more at the moment and every new breakthrough 733 00:48:56,160 --> 00:48:59,640 at a fundamental level I think leads to new technologies. 734 00:49:00,840 --> 00:49:05,160 Today, all over the world, we're seeing some incredibly complex 735 00:49:05,160 --> 00:49:09,360 and beautiful bits of science driving innovation. 736 00:49:09,360 --> 00:49:12,480 But even with all this increased collaboration 737 00:49:12,480 --> 00:49:15,720 and globalisation spurring on invention, 738 00:49:15,720 --> 00:49:19,880 the most important thing of all is still a simple idea. 739 00:49:22,280 --> 00:49:25,440 Michael Pritchard is a British inventor who decided 740 00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:29,280 to tackle a simple but devastating problem. 741 00:49:29,280 --> 00:49:32,400 How do you get clean water in a disaster zone? 742 00:49:33,800 --> 00:49:38,320 The crisis that spurred him on was the Asian tsunami of 2004. 743 00:49:41,120 --> 00:49:43,760 The initial tragedy of the wave's destruction 744 00:49:43,760 --> 00:49:46,960 rapidly turned into a greater human catastrophe, 745 00:49:46,960 --> 00:49:49,920 as drinking water supplies became polluted, 746 00:49:49,920 --> 00:49:52,480 spreading sickness, disease and death. 747 00:49:57,960 --> 00:50:01,400 The thing that struck me most was watching the tsunami, 748 00:50:01,400 --> 00:50:03,280 was that there was water everywhere. 749 00:50:03,280 --> 00:50:06,760 They were surrounded by water, the thing for life, 750 00:50:06,760 --> 00:50:09,960 and yet they couldn't drink it and all the wells had come up 751 00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:11,760 and they were contaminated, 752 00:50:11,760 --> 00:50:14,840 and I just...I don't know, it just touched a nerve. 753 00:50:14,840 --> 00:50:16,320 It just made me angry. 754 00:50:16,320 --> 00:50:18,480 And that was sort of my cue really. 755 00:50:18,480 --> 00:50:20,120 We don't need to ship water, 756 00:50:20,120 --> 00:50:23,120 we just need to make the water that's there safe to drink. 757 00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:27,200 Michael began looking at the membranes that are used 758 00:50:27,200 --> 00:50:32,120 in sewage plants to filter harmful pathogens out of water. 759 00:50:32,120 --> 00:50:37,360 He wondered if these nano-scale meshes could be used in a portable bottle. 760 00:50:39,400 --> 00:50:43,440 Was it fairly easy to get your hands on a mesh that had pores the right size? 761 00:50:43,440 --> 00:50:48,840 No, I had to work with people in the membrane world 762 00:50:48,840 --> 00:50:51,280 to transfer their technology, if you like, 763 00:50:51,280 --> 00:50:54,480 into a portable device, which is the lifesaver bottle. 764 00:50:54,480 --> 00:50:58,920 And if I break it down, I can show you its sort of constituent parts. 765 00:50:58,920 --> 00:51:00,920 That's the first level of filtration, 766 00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:05,200 that's kind of a sponge, and that will stop an elephant to a twig. 767 00:51:05,200 --> 00:51:10,120 But the...the real clever bit, if you like, is in this filter here. 768 00:51:10,120 --> 00:51:15,080 I don't know whether you can see inside there, but there's windings. 769 00:51:15,080 --> 00:51:19,360 Yes. There's actually... that's a hollow fibre membrane 770 00:51:19,360 --> 00:51:23,440 so now, with a pump, I can build up the pressure that I need, 771 00:51:23,440 --> 00:51:27,120 and that will force the water through the membranes, 772 00:51:27,120 --> 00:51:30,160 leave the contamination on the dirty side 773 00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:33,320 and just let the sterile clean water come up. 774 00:51:33,320 --> 00:51:35,680 I suppose what remains to be seen is if it works, 775 00:51:35,680 --> 00:51:38,440 which is why I presume this tank of water is here? Yeah. 776 00:51:38,440 --> 00:51:40,160 That looks fairly benign. 777 00:51:40,160 --> 00:51:44,440 In the middle of a flood zone, your water doesn't look like this 778 00:51:44,440 --> 00:51:47,920 so I've gone and got some bits and pieces to put in it 779 00:51:47,920 --> 00:51:50,760 to try and recreate what's going to happen in a flood zone. 780 00:51:50,760 --> 00:51:52,120 Bits and pieces, you say? 781 00:51:52,120 --> 00:51:55,160 Bits and pieces, so let's start off with something pretty simple, 782 00:51:55,160 --> 00:51:59,520 some detritus, some leaves, twigs, that sort of thing. 783 00:51:59,520 --> 00:52:01,240 Nice organic matter, it's all good. 784 00:52:01,240 --> 00:52:03,280 Nice organic matter, that's pretty fine. 785 00:52:03,280 --> 00:52:05,320 But that's not bad enough. 786 00:52:05,320 --> 00:52:08,120 So, I've gone and got some water from the pond. 787 00:52:08,120 --> 00:52:10,200 I'm just going to put that in as well. 788 00:52:12,120 --> 00:52:14,560 What kind of pond do you have?! 789 00:52:14,560 --> 00:52:16,080 THEY LAUGH 790 00:52:16,080 --> 00:52:19,720 But what happens in a disaster is, the water surges 791 00:52:19,720 --> 00:52:21,760 and up come the drains, OK, 792 00:52:21,760 --> 00:52:25,960 so you've got all sorts of stuff going on in the drains. 793 00:52:25,960 --> 00:52:29,400 So, I've gone and got some run-off from a sewage plant 794 00:52:29,400 --> 00:52:32,840 and I'm just going to pop that in there, as well. 795 00:52:32,840 --> 00:52:34,560 So... 796 00:52:34,560 --> 00:52:36,600 Toilet roll and everything! 797 00:52:36,600 --> 00:52:39,440 Yes! The whole nine yards. 798 00:52:39,440 --> 00:52:42,800 But what I've also gone and got, 799 00:52:42,800 --> 00:52:46,120 is a little gift from my dog, Alfie. 800 00:52:46,120 --> 00:52:47,200 HE LAUGHS 801 00:52:47,200 --> 00:52:48,960 And it's genuine. 802 00:52:48,960 --> 00:52:51,000 It looks very real! 803 00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:52,760 OK, so just let's put that in there. 804 00:52:52,760 --> 00:52:54,320 Oh, good grief. 805 00:52:54,320 --> 00:52:56,640 People don't believe this stuff. 806 00:52:56,640 --> 00:52:58,120 And you're going to drink it. 807 00:52:58,120 --> 00:53:01,480 This is not a smile of happiness. I smile when I'm nervous! 808 00:53:01,480 --> 00:53:03,240 This is not good. 809 00:53:03,240 --> 00:53:06,960 So, now, when you look at that, that is more like the water 810 00:53:06,960 --> 00:53:09,880 that you're going to be faced with in the middle of a disaster. 811 00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:11,880 So, what we're going to do is, 812 00:53:11,880 --> 00:53:15,400 we're going to scoop up a jug of this water. 813 00:53:15,400 --> 00:53:20,920 And let's just stir that up a bit. OK, let's get some of that... 814 00:53:20,920 --> 00:53:24,120 Oh, look. We know where that came from, don't we? 815 00:53:24,120 --> 00:53:25,760 Exactly. Those bigger bits. 816 00:53:25,760 --> 00:53:28,000 All we're going to do is pop it in here 817 00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:30,440 and make it safe to drink. Mm-hm? OK? 818 00:53:30,440 --> 00:53:33,480 So, we chuck it in here like that. 819 00:53:33,480 --> 00:53:37,320 That's it. It just goes everywhere. OK? 820 00:53:39,360 --> 00:53:42,080 Put the base on. Give it a few pumps. 821 00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:46,360 OK? 822 00:53:46,360 --> 00:53:48,480 And then... 823 00:53:48,480 --> 00:53:49,920 Are you ready? Yeah. 824 00:53:49,920 --> 00:53:52,120 Do you want to hold it? Sure. OK. 825 00:53:52,120 --> 00:53:55,200 Get it in. There we go. That's it. 826 00:53:56,360 --> 00:54:00,160 And that is clean, sterile drinking water. 827 00:54:01,560 --> 00:54:05,080 I am going to just check for those little bits of... 828 00:54:05,080 --> 00:54:06,360 Have a smell. Have a smell. 829 00:54:08,280 --> 00:54:10,840 OK? It smells perfectly fine. Have a taste. 830 00:54:15,080 --> 00:54:17,960 What's it taste of? Water. Clean water. 831 00:54:17,960 --> 00:54:20,160 Because that's all it is. OK? 832 00:54:20,160 --> 00:54:22,000 It's fantastic. It's just brilliant. 833 00:54:22,000 --> 00:54:23,880 And that is sterile, clinically sterile. 834 00:54:29,560 --> 00:54:33,600 This filtration system is now being used by thousands of people 835 00:54:33,600 --> 00:54:35,040 all around the world. 836 00:54:35,040 --> 00:54:37,480 It's being used in Haiti and Pakistan 837 00:54:37,480 --> 00:54:40,320 in the wake of devastating earthquakes. 838 00:54:40,320 --> 00:54:43,960 And, to me, it shows that having a bold vision and the drive 839 00:54:43,960 --> 00:54:48,040 to implement it are sometimes the most important part of invention. 840 00:54:54,960 --> 00:54:57,600 Small, dedicated teams of individuals can do 841 00:54:57,600 --> 00:55:01,000 what was once thought only possible by governments. 842 00:55:01,000 --> 00:55:04,000 We've seen some inspirational inventors. 843 00:55:04,000 --> 00:55:07,040 Together, they and thousands of others like them 844 00:55:07,040 --> 00:55:09,760 are helping to create tomorrow's world, 845 00:55:09,760 --> 00:55:13,800 and I've been intrigued to see what makes these men and women tick. 846 00:55:15,720 --> 00:55:17,200 I think the one attribute 847 00:55:17,200 --> 00:55:22,320 that all scientists and engineers and innovators need is curiosity. 848 00:55:22,320 --> 00:55:27,360 Being curious about the world, asking questions that no-one else has asked. 849 00:55:27,360 --> 00:55:30,880 I think you'll probably find that all inventors have 850 00:55:30,880 --> 00:55:35,560 kind of darting and volatile minds. 851 00:55:35,560 --> 00:55:39,400 Not regularly proceeding from A to B to C. 852 00:55:39,400 --> 00:55:44,840 I think that, if you want to be an inventor, have good ideas, 853 00:55:44,840 --> 00:55:47,960 then you can't get away with not doing the hard work. 854 00:55:47,960 --> 00:55:50,920 The more challenges we have in life, the more exciting life is. 855 00:55:50,920 --> 00:55:52,600 That's what it's like to be a human being. 856 00:55:52,600 --> 00:55:55,200 Some people like to sit on the sofa and do bugger all. 857 00:55:55,200 --> 00:55:57,360 Most of us like to rise to the challenge. 858 00:55:59,760 --> 00:56:01,960 Innovative people and great ideas 859 00:56:01,960 --> 00:56:04,600 have always been at the heart of invention. 860 00:56:04,600 --> 00:56:07,600 But, what I find fascinating is how, today, 861 00:56:07,600 --> 00:56:10,880 these inventions become a reality in a very different way. 862 00:56:15,160 --> 00:56:18,800 We've seen how scientific prizes are making a comeback. 863 00:56:21,120 --> 00:56:24,520 The importance of collaboration across different fields. 864 00:56:26,720 --> 00:56:30,480 But there will always be a place for blue-sky thinking. 865 00:56:30,480 --> 00:56:34,840 How we're starting to re-engineer nature itself. 866 00:56:37,960 --> 00:56:41,000 And how the internet is changing everything. 867 00:56:51,320 --> 00:56:55,360 Pretty much anyone today, if you have an idea, 868 00:56:55,360 --> 00:56:58,360 you can actually make it, you can make it happen 869 00:56:58,360 --> 00:57:00,840 and you couldn't do that 10 years ago, 870 00:57:00,840 --> 00:57:02,200 let alone 100 years ago. 871 00:57:03,760 --> 00:57:06,640 As human beings, we are really pushing boundaries at the moment 872 00:57:06,640 --> 00:57:09,360 and that's what we're here for, and that's why 873 00:57:09,360 --> 00:57:11,600 I never worry about the future of the human race, 874 00:57:11,600 --> 00:57:13,240 because I think we're totally capable 875 00:57:13,240 --> 00:57:15,040 and have shown, historically, 876 00:57:15,040 --> 00:57:17,680 that we're totally capable of solving problems. 877 00:57:19,760 --> 00:57:23,280 I think we're on the cusp of being able to create more things 878 00:57:23,280 --> 00:57:26,600 in more innovative ways than ever before in history. 879 00:57:33,360 --> 00:57:38,040 The process of invention is becoming a global conversation 880 00:57:38,040 --> 00:57:41,480 with many minds interacting, sharing ideas, 881 00:57:41,480 --> 00:57:45,120 making the seemingly impossible possible. 882 00:57:45,120 --> 00:57:47,400 And the speed at which this is all happening 883 00:57:47,400 --> 00:57:49,960 means that these inventions are changing our world 884 00:57:49,960 --> 00:57:52,080 more quickly than ever before. 885 00:57:52,080 --> 00:57:54,480 It's an exciting time to be alive. 886 00:58:26,080 --> 00:58:28,400 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd