From the moment we're conceived to the day we take our last breath,
science, and the way we use it, touches every one of us.
Science has given immense power to save and nurture life.
But the pace of change is so great that we don't often take time
to stop and appreciate how far we've come.
That's why I want to share with you ten of the most important scientific advances of our time,
and reveal some of the things that might just lie ahead.
At the end of the programme I'll be asking you to vote
for the advance you think has done the most to change your world.
It's had a massive impact on our society.
It's really changed your life, hasn't it?
So you're the perfect bionic woman? Yeah!
And the winner? Well, it's up to you.
It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
The last 50 years has seen science transform our world.
In half a century, it's tackled countless diseases,
put men on the moon,
and completely changed the way we communicate.
These are my top ten advances.
Some things you may expect, others you may find more surprising.
The first advance to take place in my top ten almost didn't make it,
because it's very nearly too old!
There are some women who prefer at least to pretend they're not interested in it.
And who like to be approached by the man.
But for all its great age,
it's made a lot of people extremely happy.
Ah, how I lost my virginity!
Cor blimey. My mother would have had a fit.
We had a race, me and this girl, to see who could have it off first. It was terrible!
But we were having a wonderful time!
When I was a medical student, which is longer ago than I actually care to mention,
there was a revolution
which some people claim transformed our society. It was, of course, the contraceptive pill.
In 1961, the Pill was released in Britain.
The day is printed by the side of every pill.
And providing she can remember what day it is,
a woman can be quite sure whether or not she has taken today's pill.
The manufacturers do their best to make them foolproof -
they don't want to lose their reputation over what might be called "pilot's error".
Today we take it for granted, but for that first generation, it was revolutionary.
I was a student teacher
during that time, and, er,
it got round in college
that there was a certain doctor in Doncaster that would give the Pill,
so we all made a beeline for that.
Interestingly enough, all the patients, we were all called "Mrs"
when you were called in to see the doctor.
You weren't "Miss" even there.
We knew there was one private clinic, except you had to pay for it, so I had to take a paper round.
The Pill exploded onto the scene at a time of great social upheaval,
and itself became a huge part of that change.
I felt quite liberated. Just to be free of that fear of becoming pregnant was amazing.
I was aware that I was taking control of my own life.
There were lots of things in the newspapers about the Pill, "Oh, it'll make women tarty,"
and everything, you know. It wasn't like that for me.
I could plan my children and my career, which was so important to me.
But what nobody foresaw was that the Pill meant that more women
have tended to leave child-bearing later and risk infertility.
But that freedom to plan has, on balance, changed most people's lives for the better.
And for that reason, the Pill has to be in my top ten.
It's tiny but it's had a massive impact on our society.
Its liberating influence has been one of the most important advances in the last 50 years.
Just as the Pill transformed women's lives in the 1960s,
science is changing our relationship with contraception again.
Bill and Rachel are just about to start a trial
for a new contraceptive that doesn't need to be taken every day.
You've had three children, and you got pregnant when on the Pill each time?
Yeah. Nothing to do with the Pill, just to do with us.
You didn't take it properly? That's the one.
So what methods of contraception have you tried?
We've tried abstinence, cos he was in the Navy, so that worked for a while, with him going away.
We tried condoms briefly in the beginning.
And why didn't you want to take the Pill any more?
I'm really not good at taking it
and I'd be relieved to not have different chemicals, and the stress of knowing I'd forgotten.
And you didn't mind your husband having the chemicals? No. Bash on.
I think it would be great for him to take some responsibility.
The contraceptive they're about to try is actually for Bill, not Rachel.
Now, I know what you might be thinking -
and if I were a woman, I might not trust a man,
even a reliable fireman like Bill to take the Pill, either.
But this pill
is actually a course of injections which will leave Bill temporarily infertile.
So what on earth made you take part in this trial?
Mmm... For me, it's just about being able to take over
the role of contraception from Rachel, and me being responsible for that,
rather than it all being left to Rache.
And did the side-effects that they talk about
on the male contraception worry you?
There are a few side effects that they did warn us about, like weight gain,
acne, irritability.
Did they tell you you might develop breasts?
They did say that. Yes.
You're a fireman, aren't you? I am.
Did you discuss it with your mates at work?
Strangely, no.
Why? I mean... the ribbing I'll get, never mind...
It's a really macho environment.
Yeah. It is I suppose, it's fertility and a guy, like, you know, I'm really butch...
And do you understand the science of how it actually works? I don't.
Would you like to know? Yes, please.
Let me explain it to you.
It's actually quite surprising, and in some ways
it's not dissimilar from the female pill, the oral contraception that women take.
And essentially, it really works in the brain, so if this is a body,
the brain sends out a signal
to make an egg or make a sperm, OK?
Now, the pill is a hormone which inhibits the brain by telling it the egg is already being made
when it's not being made, so the brain thinks the woman is ovulating so it stops sending the message,
and that's exactly what happens with the male contraception, too, so if you're given the male hormone,
that tells the brain, "I'm making lots of sperm,"
so it just shuts down. So it's quite an elegant idea,
and that feedback is
one of the most interesting examples in biology of how the body works.
The idea is that the injections will deal with Bill's biological feedback for months at a time.
This was his idea.
So the first entry on my list is the Pill - revolutionary in the '60s,
and still reinventing itself almost 50 years later.
Fantastic.
My next advance has also had a dramatic impact on our lives -
in fact, it's so significant that it's played a part in almost all of the other inventions on my list.
When I was a schoolboy, I worked in a radio factory.
I was being paid five pounds a week by Mr Benzimra,
a princely sum, to solder little components onto a printed circuit board like this.
Little did I realise that across the Atlantic, a man was going to revolutionise the whole process.
An engineer called Jack Kilby found a way to shrink all these components
into one extraordinary, and tiny thing.
It's this, the humble microchip.
And since its invention 50 years ago, there's been more medical
and scientific progress than in any other period in human history.
The microchip has to be in our top ten. From the moment we wake up
to the moment we go to bed, it affects every part of our lives.
Without the microchip, there would be no laptop,
no cash card, no mobile phone.
In short, without the microchip, we'd still be living in the 1970s.
It amazes me that today all those elements of the old electronic circuit board
I soldered together as a schoolboy can only be seen down a microscope.
And now the technology is set to make it even smaller.
I'm in the London Centre for Nanotechnology,
where they make the smallest particles that are possible to be made.
And the reason why I'm wearing the garb is because any skin cell
in the atmosphere would contaminate what they do.
And here on my fingertip
is a little electronic chip.
On this chip, they can fit 50 million transistors.
This, the next generation of mini-miracles,
is as small as it gets...for now.
Each electronic component in these circuits is smaller than a virus.
And that miniaturisation means that chips, like viruses,
are getting closer to us than we could have possibly imagined.
Now, here's a thing. This microchip is made of a substance which is entirely edible.
So when you swallow it, it gets dissolved by the acid
in your stomach, and it sends a signal to a plaster on your arm.
And the plaster on your arm - ow! -
has got this little device like a radio, and if you haven't taken your pill...
I get a message on my phone saying, "You haven't your pill today."
But there's a darker side to all technology.
The sheer proliferation of the microchip does bring some concerns.
It's worth considering that within 50 yards of where I'm standing in Piccadilly Circus,
there must be at least 50 surveillance cameras recording every movement we make,
amassing a huge amount of data over which we have no control.
How we deal with these issues is an increasing challenge.
Storage of personal data is largely unregulated, and fraud,
theft and loss of privacy in the virtual world worries many people.
But in spite of all this, the chip is on my list,
and we shouldn't forget that without it, many of the other advances wouldn't have been possible.
Including this next one.
At number three on my list is a device in whose story I,
or rather my rabbit Wilhelmina, played here by an actor, had a starring role.
Well, a role, anyway.
I met some physics friends in the bar having a beer one evening,
and they said, "We've just built this machine with lots of wire
"and string and ceiling wax and an old television screen
"and it's called a Magnetic Resonance Image machine,
"and would you like to put your rabbit in it?"
So we went down to the sub-basement of Hammersmith Hospital
and we put Wilhelmina gently into the machine.
I was a bit worried about it, and then after 20 minutes of cooking,
we got a photograph, and it looked a bit like this.
Just a blur.
And I didn't have the sense to realise that this was going to be quite revolutionary in its time.
I think my pet rabbit was one of the first living organisms to be photographed like this.
And the technology, which was then in its infancy, went on to become the MRI scanner.
For much of my career in medicine, X-rays were the most effective way of looking inside the human body.
But they didn't give a particularly clear image of all the organs beyond our bones.
MRI scanning changed all that.
Engineers first used MRI to look inside metals.
Now we're able see directly into living tissues
and that's given amazing new insights into the most complicated organ in the human body.
I find it really rather humbling that this space, this inanimate object,
this brain was once the place where somebody felt angry, felt sad, and loved.
And the extraordinary thing is that until quite recently, we had no idea how it was really working.
Exciting research at the University of Cambridge is using the MRI scanner to see how the mind works.
Robert, hello. Nice to see you.
In the scanner next door is a willing volunteer I've never met.
I want you to face this way. And not to look in the window?
So I can't see your subject.
By asking some simple yes or no questions,
I'm going to try to find out a bit about him. Or her.
If the person in the scanner is trying to convey a yes,
you'll see a bright red area of activity around his pre-motor cortex,
right at the top, in the middle of the head.
If the person in the scanner is trying to convey a no,
you'll see the same area of the brain lighting up
but it will be a blue-green colour.
Are you a man?
There you go.
I'm pretty confident this person is conveying a yes at this stage.
Are you over six foot high?
He's now got a green area, so this is signalling a no answer,
which would mean that actually this man is shorter than six foot.
We can't actually see the brain think yes or no.
That would be too difficult even for an MRI machine.
What our volunteer was asked to do was to imagine playing tennis
when he wants to say yes, and when he does, the area of the brain
which deals with movement, his motor cortex,
shows increased activity, and that is easy for the MRI to see.
And this is our last question.
Do you have facial hair?
Again, pretty obvious activation.
I would say that this guy's either got a beard or a moustache.
Hi!
Thank you so much. I'm Robert Winston.
You're certainly not six-foot high, we got that right.
One recent study using this technique has given us an insight into communication
with some patients in what was thought to be a permanent vegetative state.
We've seen a patient recently, who'd actually been in that situation for five years
and he was able to use this technique to convey yes and no responses.
It's certainly not the case for all patients, but we now know there are a sub-group of these patients
who probably can do more than we think they can.
It's quite scary, isn't it?
Do you not find that really quite amazing,
but also very on the edge of our humanity?
It is and it is something that many people find quite difficult to think about,
the idea that you could be trapped inside your body and unable to communicate.
Hopefully we've found a way where some of these patients can get around that issue.
Essentially what you're measuring is changes in blood flow.
We're looking at the areas of the brain that are working hardest.
They're drawing blood, which is delivering oxygen and that's what we're measuring.
I couldn't look at somebody with this machine and say, "He thinks I am a complete moron."
No, that might be true, but at least you won't know that.
Undoubtedly, the MRI machine has been the most important way of seeing how our brain works.
And that alone qualifies it as one of the most significant advances in the last 50 years.
But what really makes it stand out for me is its extraordinary ability
to transform lives through its use in medicine.
17-year-old Elyse Westrip has had severe epilepsy since she was 11.
MRI scans have recently revealed that the seizures are due to a brain tumour.
This bright area here is the area that is abnormal.
What we need to do now is determine how close
that area to be removed is to parts that carry out vital functions.
Though it's been decided that the tumour can be removed,
the bad news is that it's dangerously close to her optic nerve.
The operation carries the risk of partial blindness.
But for Elyse, it's a risk worth taking.
I'm trying to forget the risks
and just think positive,
the good things about having the surgery.
I feel I'm going to get better.
I can change my life back to how it was before.
The epilepsy got so bad I decided to leave school early because I couldn't cope any more.
I just got upset a lot that I was different.
It did change my life a lot.
The tumour is buried five centimetres into Elyse's brain.
In the past, patients undergoing this operation
would have run a significant risk of suffering brain damage.
But thanks to MRI, the risk to Elyse is greatly reduced.
In a new use of MRI, the scans are mapped onto an image seen in the surgeon's microscope,
and that will help him navigate past the healthy brain to remove the tumour,
which is shown as a dotted line.
After nearly five hours of surgery, the tumour is finally removed.
This is the specimen that's come out so far.
It's the front four centimetres of the temporal pole, which is exactly where the brain tumour is.
I think the brain tumour is in this bit here, right at the very bottom.
And then Elyse is scanned again to ensure that none of the tumour remains.
The pictures look amazing. Fantastic.
Two months later and I'm off to visit Elyse on her 18th birthday.
Hello. Happy birthday. There's some flowers for you.
I'm delighted to see that she's made a full recovery.
It's amazing that only a few weeks ago before the operation, she was having up to eight seizures a day.
Are you having any seizures at all?
None. So it's really changed your life?
Yeah.
That's fantastic.
It's miraculous to see how the surgeons' skill and MRI technology
has totally transformed Elyse's life.
The past 50 years has seen innovation, invention and discovery on an unprecedented scale.
I'm choosing what I think are the very best, the top ten scientific advances of the past half century.
So far we've seen how the pill has revolutionised women's
and indeed everybody's lives.
We've looked at the almost miraculous effect of the microchip on, well, more or less everything,
and we've marvelled at our godlike ability to peer into the mind, thanks to MRI scanning.
There are still seven of my top ten to come
and after the programme, you'll get a chance to vote on which is your favourite,
the best of the best.
Meanwhile, on with the list.
My fourth choice, which though rather familiar, has the potential to save the planet.
I certainly wouldn't be without this.
It's one of my favourite inventions. It's the electric torch.
But the great advance in the use of light came 50 years ago
with the invention of the laser, which concentrates the light down a very narrow beam, very precisely.
It's the greatest advance in the technology of light since mankind lit its first candle.
A laser produces light that's so concentrated it can burn, cut and destroy.
From the very beginning, this destructive power
has sparked the imagination of science fiction writers.
He has chosen his own death!
But the force can also be used for good and that's why it's in my top ten.
Here's a laser of a power of one watt.
If you don't want to use your energy to strike your match, you can just hold it in the beam of light.
A one-watt laser can light a match.
Imagine, then, the power
of a 500 trillion watt laser.
That's exactly what they've built here at the National Ignition Facility in California,
where engineers have just finishing constructing the laser to end all lasers.
In fact, 192 of the world's most powerful lasers,
all focused on a tiny hydrogen target.
If they can be made to strike at the same time,
and when I say the same time, I mean within one billionth of a second,
then the energy inside the atoms will be released,
creating in one moment 500 times more energy
than the entire American National Grid.
This incredible energy release is from nuclear fusion.
What is fusion power? Fusion power is what's going on inside the sun.
When we crush hydrogen together, we get this fusion to happen,
we turn mass into energy
and that energy comes out and if we can collect it,
and turn it into electricity, that's what we want to power our civilization. That's fusion power.
That's what we hope to make happen in this target chamber.
What is so exciting about this energy, we have no issue of pollution
and we have no issue of global climate warming.
That is the dream. That has always been the dream of fusion energy
and hopefully, we'll be able to do it here. And no nuclear waste?
No nuclear waste. Right.
I just know that in this facility in the next couple of years,
hopefully one, we will find out that we can do it.
Effectively, within this chamber, Ed and his colleagues
are trying to create and capture the power of a star
by fusing protons in an atom.
A source of energy so powerful that if it could be harnessed,
it would provide the Holy Grail of cheaper, cleaner renewable energy
and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
What's utterly extraordinary is that all this energy
that you're generating from this vast machine is actually in that.
Just show me that little capsule.
That capsule is where the hydrogen fuel resides.
It resides there at near absolute zero and the laser light comes in and it heats up this can.
When the shell explodes, that hydrogen implodes at nearly 1.5 million kilometres per hour
and that's how we get that fusion to happen.
The idea of using the laser to solve one of the great problems of physics,
the production of green energy, which might save the planet
using nuclear fusion. That seems to be a really important reason for developing lasers.
It's interesting to remember that when lasers were invented,
no-one imagined how many uses we'd have for them.
It's unfortunate but true that war is when we make some of our greatest advances.
And my next owes much to conflict.
I was in southern Afghanistan on patrol at night and stepped on an IED.
I remember seeing the flash, the feeling of going through the air, landing,
and I got blown about 15 feet away from the lads.
I knew what happened straightaway cos I checked myself
to see if I had all my fingers, my hands.
I got to my leg, and I thought, "That ain't there. Fair enough."
I checked the other leg and that was bleeding badly.
All shattered bones and everything else, so I knew that probably wouldn't be there when I woke up.
There you go.
Until recently, Sam would have never walked again,
but now the science of biomechanics is getting closer than ever before
to mimicking the complexity and sophistication of our own bodies.
At Headley Court Military Rehabilitation Centre,
doctors are helping hundreds of injured soldiers like Sam.
Sam, when were you injured?
Beginning of August.
So you're already walking.
So that's what? Five months?
About that, yeah. Which is rather impressive. Yeah.
Has that been a massive effort for you? Presumably, it must have been.
More of a challenge, really. Been trying to beat some Para friends of mine.
Do you compete amongst yourselves?
There's a lot of competition between us to see who can be out quickest.
Being soldiers, you tend to be competitive. Definitely.
The amazing thing about Sam's artificial legs is that they're controlled by a computer.
Where is the computer in this?
It's just behind the knee joint.
In the shin we've got some strain gauges
and they give 50 readings per second back to the computer, which then regulates the hydraulics.
That's really what makes this knee so stable in normal walking.
In the early days, an injury would have resulted in what for Sam?
He'd have probably been sat in a wheelchair for most of his life.
Now he spends pretty much all his time on his legs, walking about.
So it's life-changing? Absolutely. Yeah.
There isn't anything that you can't do now that you used to be able to do.
Skiing, swimming, running, going on the bike.
You'd expect to get back on the ski slopes? Absolutely.
If you've got the right stuff, the right attitude, you can pretty much carry on with everything
as good as before. Nothing stopping you.
And it is isn't only wounded soldiers that are benefiting from this new technology.
From head to toe, biomechanics is finding ways to repair and replace nature's finely-tuned machine.
The ambition for biomechanics is for prosthetics to be truly integrated.
And for that, they would need to be controlled by the user's mind.
But until recently, interfering with the workings of the brain just wasn't an option.
But today, that's all starting to change.
The ability to delve into and manipulate the brain has
many potential benefits, not only for the control of prosthetic limbs.
Diane Hire suffered from depression for more than 20 years.
Her illness was so crippling that it even drove her to attempt suicide three times.
So tell me what it's like to be depressed.
It's awful, it's like being in a dark cave.
Nobody around, cold, lonely.
If you have depression, you have absolutely no desire to live
and it just is like that day after day after day.
Actually, I guess I felt dead inside,
I was like a living, talking dead person.
I tried several medications and I also tried ECT, electroconvulsive therapy.
That was pretty awful too!
In a last-ditch attempt to control her depression, Diane underwent
groundbreaking surgery in the hope of controlling her devastating depression.
In a five-hour operation, electrodes were directly inserted eight centimetres into her brain.
To check the electrodes were in the correct position, Diane was woken up
during the procedure, so that the impulses could be adjusted.
You know, when I woke up, they said,
"We're going to turn this on now and you let us know how things are feeling."
And at first I felt pretty warm, and then they turned it to another setting, and my heart was galloping.
How you feeling? Starting to smile.
I feel happy. Then all of a sudden, I got this great big grin on my face.
And after that, they put me back to sleep
to finish up the surgery.
So you immediately felt happy suddenly?
Oh yes, for me it was instantaneous. What was that like?
Amazing.
It was almost like my brain was doing gymnastics.
You know it's how I used to feel when I would go to work
and...and...
you know, have good weekends and do things.
Three years later and Diane lives with the system wired into her own body, much like a pacemaker.
And where do the wires run?
The control box is in your chest, isn't it?
Right. They start here, and then they go down the back of my skull,
down the back of my neck and around and plug into
a battery pack on my chest.
Does it worry you that you have a totally experimental thing inside your brain?
No. No, because it's been worth it.
From the very moment the electrodes were switched on, Diane's depression disappeared.
And of course your life has changed totally.
180 degrees.
I wake up every day, and I think, "What's today going to bring?"
I have an excitement about living that I didn't ever have.
So you're the perfect bionic woman?
Yeah. Yes.
Even as a last resort, it seems utterly terrifying to think of
thrusting an electronic device deep into the centre of the brain in the way that has happened with Diane.
But you can't knock it, because it's completely changed her life.
Because of its power to transform lives and potential to touch many others,
bionics definitely has a place in my top ten.
Is it the most significant advance of the last 50 years?
That's up to you to decide at the end of the programme.
Or maybe you'll go for my next choice - a remarkable invention
that more than any other, perhaps, has caused change.
It's changed the way I work.
It's changed the way I find out about new art.
Keep track of what my kids are doing.
Compare prices. Look up football scores.
Talk to friends. Chat up girls!
Raise money for charity. Watch the news.
It's changed the way I do my research.
In fact, it's changed our lives in a thousand ways.
I, for one, couldn't do without it.
It is, of course, the World Wide Web!
It's astonishing to think that the majority of us went on-line for the very first time just ten years ago.
My first contact with the Internet was one day when I went into the lab
and saw my Chinese PhD student typing on her screen.
And there she was, typing,
and then suddenly she took her hands off the keyboard
and some other letters appeared just underneath.
She was communicating with somebody in Hong Kong.
I thought, "This will never take off!"
The World Wide Web required all the computers in the world
to be able to talk to each other using one common language.
But that was impossible until 1990, when a British scientist called Tim Berners-Lee
figured out a way to link everybody up.
# Welcome to my world... #
He created a code allowing computers to share information.
And suddenly, we could speak to each other.
# Welcome to my world... #
And a new age of communications began.
# Built with you in mind... #
Because the Web was never patented, it is free and open to anyone to use.
Today, 1.7 billion people use the web globally.
Hi, everyone, today we're going to be doing a Hollywood lip look.
When you're poaching eggs without an egg poacher, it can get messy.
So if you can dance like this...
Not since the invention of the printing press
have we seen such a leap forward in the amount of information freely available to everyone.
And never before has there been such a platform for ordinary people to make their voices heard.
This is just my opinion, you disagree, feel free!
It's how we communicate with friends.
One billion of us using social networking sites
and 300 million meet people in a virtual world.
Our children use it to interact, to learn and play.
It's transformed news and information.
In business, we've all become traders, buying and selling at the click of a button.
For all the risk of exposure to violence and pornography, worrying issues we have to face,
the Internet is one of the most significant advances of the past 50 years.
And for me, the Web is exciting,
because it allows all of us to participate in science like never before.
Dr Chris Lintott has the task of classifying
over a million galaxies from photos taken by robotic telescopes.
He was so overwhelmed by the amount of data that he enlisted thousands of on-line volunteers to help him.
But the really exciting thing is that these armchair scientists made a new discovery.
A couple of years ago, a group of our volunteers noticed that
in the background of some of the images, there were these small, round, green objects.
They called them peas. They found a couple of hundred of them and said, "What are these?"
We've looked at these with some of the world's largest telescopes.
They are galaxies undergoing a dramatic burst of star formation.
These are the most efficient makers of stars anywhere in the local universe.
They'd been missed by professional astronomers.
It was only thanks to a quarter of a million people, their armchairs
and their Internet connections that they came to our attention.
Galaxy Zoo is just one of a host of projects inviting the public to get involved in science.
Who knows what progress we could make through
collaborations like these, made possible by the Internet?
This massive progress
in how humans exchange information
undoubtedly makes it one of the defining advances in the last 50 years.
Does the far-reaching impact of the World Wide Web on all our lives
make it the most significant advance?
Or does the revolutionary joining of man with machine mean that biomechanics gets your vote?
Could it be the promise of clean energy for us all that makes the laser your number one?
Before you decide, there are four more advances to consider.
The next one has the potential to change everything we've ever believed in.
What distinguishes us from all other creatures?
It's human inquisitiveness.
Why are we here? Where are we going?
What's our place in the universe?
Looking down on the world from above, you realise just how insignificant we are.
Since the dawn of time, people have marvelled
at the vastness around us and wondered, "How did it all begin?"
In the 1920s, American astronomer Edwin Hubble
showed that the universe was expanding,
and from this simple observation,
it was calculated that if you run the clock back...
..everything must have exploded into existence nearly 14 billion years ago in a big bang.
For me, I suppose what I find so exciting about big bang is the ambition of the idea.
Here is an idea that is not just about our planet or our solar system
but unifies our whole notion of the universe.
And it tells us about our beginnings, about where we came from and possibly to where we are going.
But the big-bang theory also predicted that the entire universe,
all the planets and galaxies we see around us, exploded from nothing.
Which sounds crazy.
When it was first proposed almost 100 years ago, the idea was controversial,
but in the last 50 years, science has started to gather hard evidence
that the big bang might not be such a crazy idea after all.
In 1965, two radio astronomers working on this satellite antenna
in New Jersey started to pick up a strange signal.
This radiation was coming from somewhere
in really deep cosmic space,
beyond any radio sources that any of us
knew about or even dreamed existed.
The daring explanation for the radiation was that it might be
the last remnant of the big bang echoing through space and time.
Perhaps.
In 2001, the WMAP spacecraft analysed this radiation
and even produced a map of the early universe
that seemed to more or less prove the big-bang theory.
But unfortunately, as yet, it doesn't explain why the big bang banged in the first place.
High in the Californian hills at Lick Observatory, astronomers are trying to calculate
how fast the universe is expanding, in the hope that they will be able shed some light on the problem.
And in doing so, they've made a surprising discovery.
Everyone anticipated that gravity would slow down
the expansion of the universe.
So we were trying to measure how much the universe has been slowing down
in order to predict whether it will expand forever, though more and more slowly or re-collapse.
Instead, we found that it's actually speeding up. Not slowing down at all.
An accelerating universe.
How does that work? Why should it do that?
Well, we think the universe is filled with some weird substance, we call it dark energy,
but we know essentially nothing about it.
So it's there and in a sense, it's gravitationally repulsive,
causing space to expand faster and faster with time.
It's all very well to say the universe is expanding,
but one of the questions that will puzzle a lot of people is, what are we expanding into?
That actually puzzles all of us.
We may be expanding into a bigger hyperspace, one with more dimensions.
And there could be all sorts of universes expanding within this bigger space.
And ours is just one of these universes in the multiverse.
I accept that you're doing is incredibly interesting, but it's useless, isn't it?
In a sense, it's useless, but the accelerating nature of the universe
is important in part because it may help us understand the big bang.
So it's the birth of the universe and so we should try to understand
how it is that it happened and how the universe has evolved since then.
But that the data are indicating something weird is, I believe, not controversial at this stage.
Why is big bang in my ten great ideas?
Well, it's symbolic.
It's symbolic of something that makes us uniquely human -
our inquisitiveness.
And it's that which drives us, through science, forward.
We've had the audacity to tackle outer space,
but we've had the nerve to take on inner space too.
My final three advances are all about understanding us...
..starting with a remarkable book published in the year 2000.
115 volumes like this
contain the print-out of the human genome, from just one individual.
Three billion letters.
It's the recipe for what makes you who you are.
It will revolutionise the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.
Ten years ago, decoding the human genome
was hailed by many as as significant as putting a man on the moon,
a symbol of the hope for the new millennium.
The reason for all the hope - and some would even say "hype" -
was because of the enormous potential of gene therapy.
Until recently, medicine could do nothing to restore
broken or malfunctioning genes, but today, there are some procedures which can offer hope.
Ten-year-old Abdullahi is about to undergo an operation which might change his genetic destiny.
Abdullahi has poor vision, particularly poor night vision,
because he lacks one of the genes
essential for converting light energy into a nerve impulse,
so the idea of this operation
is to provide his retina with the correct, functioning copy of that gene.
In order to do that, we package the genes themselves into a harmless virus.
But to get the virus to the right place,
we need to inject the virus underneath the retina.
Though his surgeon isn't certain how effective this cutting-edge treatment will be,
without intervention, Abdullahi could eventually become totally blind.
But what this remarkable procedure hopes to achieve
is nothing less than delivering a new, undamaged section of DNA to do the work
of Abdullahi's faulty gene.
The good news is that, since the operation, Abdullahi's vision has improved.
It's a small step on the gene therapy journey, but its champions believe
it could eventually have benefits for a great number of us.
It's got hundreds and thousands on it, hasn't it?
Like about ten per cent of children in the UK, Millie and Ruby suffer from asthma.
But while both girls have the condition,
Millie responds a lot better to medication than her sister.
RUBY COUGHS
You've got a bit of a cough, haven't you? Do you always have a cough?
'For Ruby, attacks result in endless dashes to hospital and could be fatal.'
RUBY COUGHS
There is nothing you can do to help your child.
You think, "At some point, is she going to stop breathing?"
They are coughing so much that they are being sick,
their breathing becomes worse and then you are going to hospital,
it is the worst feeling you can imagine.
But Ruby's quite a resilient character, isn't she?
Absolutely.
She's amazing. Even when she's at her worst, she'll give you a smile.
Millie and Ruby are taking part in a research project
which is trying to discover why some patients are easier to treat than others.
Over 100,000 children
in the United Kingdom with asthma
carry a particular gene change
which seems to make them much less responsive
towards the commonest asthma-reliever inhaler, the blue inhaler that we use.
Swabs are taken so that the girls' DNA, their genes, can be examined.
The hope is that medicines can be matched to genes,
and that the current trial-and-error approach
to treating people like Ruby will be a thing of the past.
The dream is that, eventually, we'll all be treated with medicines
that are a perfect match for our own unique DNA.
The technology that's developed since the human genome project means
that decoding an individual's genome is becoming easier and affordable.
Genetic knowledge is a new frontier and our understanding of how genes work
is one of the most significant medical advances since the time of Ancient Greece.
The methods it employs have applications that will revolutionise the treatment of disease.
Scientists working in this lab at Imperial College
are trying to find a cure for a devastating human disease.
But they're not developing medicines, they are trying to understand how to grow new tissues.
My colleague Michael Schneider is a world leader in this research,
and he and his team have made a remarkable advance.
They've created beating-heart cells from scratch.
When you first looked down the microscope
and saw a heart cell beating,
what was your reaction?
When you see a cluster like this,
beating vigorously in the dish, it obviously stimulates your thinking
about how to apply that information to the complicated task of cardiac muscle repair in a clinical setting.
Ten days ago, those kinds of cells
were undifferentiated embryonic stem cells
that can become any cell in the body without restriction.
Stem cells are among the first cells produced when an egg is fertilised.
Though they start off looking the same,
they soon turn into very different things -
bone, muscle, hair, teeth, nerves,
all the different cell types that make up a human being.
By understanding how these transformations work,
scientists like Michael are trying to find out how to repair damaged or diseased organs.
So how important is this work in the field of stem cell biology?
40% of the people watching this programme will die of cardiovascular disease.
Taking that together with the fact that heart disease boils down to cell death without cell replacement,
that makes cardiac repair by stem cells
one of the most important and promising areas
for stem cell research.
So far, there have been few treatments developed
because of work on stem cells, but some researchers even hope that eventually they'll be able
to grow replacement organs, or at least help the body repair itself.
A tiny minority are opposed to human embryo research because it damages human embryos.
They have a point, but to my mind it's actually an ethical imperative
to try to save lives and this is one way of doing it.
'My final scientific advance is very close to my heart.
'It's something to which I've devoted most of my career.
'Every single one of these children's lives began in a test tube
'or a dish. They are IVF children. They come from eggs fertilised not in the womb but in the laboratory.'
That was really frightening!
'None of them would be here if it wasn't for scientific research into the earliest stages of life.'
Well, it is sort of pink. It's not really red.
Would you allow pink, then? No? You're very particular!
'And although I was involved in that research,
'I have to confess that, at the time, I didn't appreciate its significance.'
I didn't think it was really going to be very important.
I didn't think that IVF was a technology
that would really make any difference to infertility treatment.
Look how wrong I was...
all these babies. There are about a million IVF babies around the world.
In the 1980s, my colleagues and I developed an experimental IVF technique
to screen for genetic diseases in the developing embryo.
Christine Munday's first son Justin was severely handicapped,
and it was discovered that she carries a genetic condition
which means it is very likely that any of her male children
would inherit the same problems.
We've been trying for nine years
for this breakthrough to come so that we could have another chance.
In 1990, we screened her fertilised embryos to ensure that she had a girl.
Rebecca is now 19.
Your mum was wonderfully brave. I don't know if you realise that,
because what we were doing was
a very, very experimental procedure and we had no idea if it was going to
work or not. As you remember, we couldn't guarantee that you wouldn't have a child who wasn't affected.
No. To us, it wasn't brave, you know, the baby could have been damaged
in some way but I never, ever worried about that side of it at all.
I had my whole confidence that you would actually get it right.
Yeah, funny, isn't it? I don't think that I had that confidence.
Does having been born as a result of in vitro fertilisation make you feel any different?
I'm quite humbled.
For our family, it's been quite crucial for this breakthrough.
You know? Of course, of course.
I wouldn't have Rebecca today if it wasn't for that. She doesn't always say that.
For me, it's genuinely a very moving occasion actually to meet you.
Very special for me.
'20 years ago, there was considerable opposition from people hoping to stop such work.'
What's that?
Was that you?
'But in the UK, legislation was hugely positive.
'And it has enabled us give hope, not just to people like Christine, but also to hundreds of thousands
'of families who otherwise couldn't have had children.'
ALL: Cheese!
Well, that concludes my list. Now it's time for you to have your say.
Which of the ten scientific advances we've looked at do you think is the most important?
Is it the millions of lives created by IVF, or the huge promise of stem cell research?
Is your favourite the life-saving MRI machine?
Or the mighty microchip?
Do you think the contraceptive pill has done more for us than the giant laser ever will?
Or is it our ability to rebuild ourselves with bionics that inspires you the most?
Can you say the global power of the Internet beats the huge potential of understanding more about our genes?
Or does the mind-boggling big-bang theory trump them all?
Go to our website to vote for the scientific advance
you think has been the most significant. Visit...
There's a reminder of the top ten advancements on the website.
Before you vote on-line, I feel I should put my cards on the table.
I'm reluctant to say which of these ten advances is my greatest,
but just possibly, I might plump for the research on big bang.
It might seem useless, yet the knowledge it brings
will almost certainly have unforeseen consequences for humanity.
Just possibly, understanding the universe a little better
will help our species to continue to flourish.
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