Science is on the brink of changing your life.
Right now, men and women around the world
are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible!
Wow.
Our team of leading scientists
have chosen the discoveries they think matter most...
Whoa.
An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one
of the most important of all conservation enterprises.
From the car you will drive...
to medical advances that could save your life...
This miracle means we can replace surgery.
On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa...
I'm here to join the hunt, to find
one of the biggest threats to human survival.
To the quads of Oxford...
This is, arguably,
the most complicated thing in the universe.
We will show you how science is a force for good.
Prepare to see your future.
This is the beginning of that brave new world.
Tonight... life.
We have chosen the breakthroughs in biology
that we think will shape the future.
Discoveries that could cure disease,
deliver an endless supply of fuel
and unlock the secrets of a longer and healthier life.
It's science we think really matters.
'My name is Mark Evans. I'm in Panama, on the southernmost tip
'of Central America.'
'I'm heading to an isolated Pacific island, where scientists
'are hunting for a life form
'that could help defeat one of humanity's biggest killers.'
I trained as a vet
and I reckon we've got a lot to learn
from other life forms that share this planet.
Many of them have been around a lot longer than we have
and discovering the secrets of their survival
could well be critical to ours.
so it has remained largely uninhabited.
A pristine wilderness, which has survived almost intact.
It's a rich hunting ground for plants and micro-organisms
which are known to have medicinal properties.
This tree is called "cedron", in Spanish, and it is used
extensively by the Panamanians.
They boil up the seeds inside the fruit into a tea,
which they then use to treat a whole host of ailments,
from liver disease to malaria to snake bite.
It's also a pretty good insect repellent.
'It has taken us hundreds of years to uncover some of the secrets
'of the terrestrial environment,
'but now science is taking a harder look
at another part of the planet... 'the ocean.'
It is home to the broadest bio-diversity of life on Earth
and it is opening up new frontiers
in our hunt for cures for the diseases that kill us.
'Doctor Kevin Tidgewell is a research scientist
'with the ICBG, an international forum dedicated to investigating
'our oceans.
'Today, he is on the hunt for an underwater
'algae-like substance, called cyanobacteria.'
You can see it with your naked eye and it looks...
Sometimes it will be about the size of your finger...
That big?
And sometimes even longer.
Are they free floating about in currents
or are they attached to stuff?
No, they either grow on the reef or on the rock or on the sand,
sometimes on seagrass,
sometimes directly on sponges.
'Kevin is obsessed with cyanobacteria
'because it's known to have special biological properties.'
Is it always, kind of, slightly unexpected, what you will find?
We never really know until we dive, what's going to be there, because
they bloom and they die away and so conditions change so rapidly that
we can never be 100% certain we will find specific types of the bacteria.
One...two... three.
There is a much higher level of biological activity underwater
than on land.
For every litre of seawater, there are 20,000 types of bacteria.
Micro-organisms down here are fighting for habitat space
and they use toxic chemicals to battle it out.
It's these toxins that scientists hope will be equally aggressive
against human diseases.
- Good dive? - Oh, it was an amazing dive.
Yeah?
We got to see a whole lot of stuff,
but best of all, we got a whole bunch of cyanobacteria.
And this is it?
It looks like a lot of, just kind of, scrappy old weed.
It kind of does. Cyanobacteria tends to look a little bit like hair
and it feels a little slimy, even. So reach your hand in and grab some.
Oh, my God. There's nothing to it.
No.
It's... It's just stringy... It's like... marine snot.
Exactly. It's a little slimy,
a little gross.
'It's the properties in this "marine snot" that Kevin
'and his colleagues are studying.'
Cyanobacteria, kind of, turn into small chemical factories
and they are producing
the most potent and toxic things that they can.
'This really is
'scientific research at its most intrepid...
'the scientist as hunter-gatherer.
'But finding the samples is only part of the story.
'To discover just how useful
'the toxins in the cyanobacteria might be,
'they need to be tested back in a laboratory.'
This is the cyanobacteria that we collected yesterday in Coiba,
preserved in a mixture of ethanol and seawater, to make sure it didn't rot.
So this is step one now?
Yes, we're going to filter off the seawater and ethanol,
so that then we can extract all the chemicals inside
with a different solvent.
'It can take over 48 hours to process and test the cyanobacteria,
'so Kevin shows me an earlier sample, to demonstrate exactly how
'effective the isolated chemicals can be.
'Kevin has been
'testing them on cancer cells.'
What we have here are live cancer cells.
'This is what living breast cancer cells
'look like under the microscope.'
It's amazing, isn't it?
It's kind of shocking, as well, isn't it,
when you look at cancer cells, to think of the damage these guys do?
'And this is what cancer cells
'look like after they've been exposed tooneof the chemicals
'from the cyanobacteria.
'In some cases, after only two days,
'the cancer cells have been completely killed off.'
It's very nice to think that the work we do here in these labs
can have a large effect on people all over the world.
Yeah, yeah, amazing. And how much more there is to potentially find.
I was really conscious when you were in the boat and diving,
you're looking at such a tiny, tiny part of the ocean.
We are a blue planet.
Yeah.
These results are really impressive, but there is a long way
to go from this sample to a new treatment for breast cancer.
There is no doubt, though, that for medical science,
the ocean is an expanding frontier and this is just the tip
of what might be out there.
Unlocking the secrets of our natural world has given us remarkable power.
Now, we are taking it one step further,
combining biology and engineering to take control as never before.
My name is Richard Dawkins and I'm an evolutionary biologist.
I'm here in Oxford on the banks of the River Cherwell,
doing what I've done for most of my life,
which is marvel at the complexity of the living world.
I'm trying to understand it.
I look at the river
and I don't see the teeming millions of micro-organisms,
but I know they are there, under the surface, reproducing away.
I look at a tree and I see thousands of solar panels.
Each leaf is a solar panel, gathering sunlight,
to drive the whole metabolism of the tree.
But what would it be like
if we could harness these extraordinary natural processes
and shape them to our own purpose?
If we could get these teaming micro-organisms to work for us
at our bidding? That is the inspiration
of a whole new area of science. It's called synthetic biology
and I think it offers exciting possibilities.
Some of the most groundbreaking work in synthetic biology
is being done here in the United States
where millions of dollars are being invested in an attempt
to create organisms that could generate billions in profits.
And one of the biggest challenges of synthetic biology
is to harness natural processes
to create something the world desperately needs more of...
Fuel.
It might sound like science fiction, but it's already happening here
at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in San Francisco's Bay area.
They are using a bacterium that can cause food poisoning
to make a very precious commodity instead.
Professor Jay Keasling is behind a project working with E Coli.
It's a bacterium that can naturally take in sugar
and transform it into other chemicals.
It's E Coli's transformative properties
that Keasling and his team recognised and wanted to harness.
We use E Coli as a model organism.
It's an organism that we can quickly manipulate,
we can make changes to its genetic make-up
and test whether it could produce a particular biofuel.
The team took E Coli and safely altered it
so it could feed off readily available plant cellulose,
turn that into sugar and then metabolise the sugar
into that most valuable of products, diesel.
It's a fantastically efficient process
which creates pure diesel fuel
that can be used in an ordinary car, without further refining.
In this tube here you can see the E Coli at the bottom.
And just on the side of the tube,
you can see the beginnings of the bio diesel.
And this here is the bio diesel produced from E Coli.
You can get bacteria which are widely available
and tell it what to do to produce bio diesel
or drugs or many kinds of medication.
It's like a little factory right here in this tube.
Around 150 years ago, the development of synthetic chemistry
revolutionised our ability to make paints, petrochemicals and plastics.
Now, synthetic biology looks set to produce a revolution
in our ability to produce everything from bio diesel to new medicines.
But this time, bacteria will do the work
and plants will provide the raw material.
Keasling predicts that in two to three decades from now,
his new bio diesel,
produced by modify E Coli fed on plant cellulose,
will have replaced up to 30% of the world's transportation fuels.
Synthetic biology has incredible possibilities.
Who could be against a clean environment
or greater food production?
Or better medicines produced inexpensively
so that everyone has access to them,
not just people in developed countries?
This could be a world-changing technology.
We have many medicines to help us when we are ill,
but in the future, perhaps our bodies can learn to heal themselves.
We want to tell you about two great advances
on this road to regeneration.
I'm Joy Reidenberg and I'm an anatomist.
I've come to Pittsburgh to find out about
an astonishing development in human healing.
The team here are isolating a substance called ECM,
or extracellular matrix.
It's a biological structure on which a body can build or rebuild itself
and it's found in all animals.
This is a pig bladder that's being opened up
and once it's laid out,
the cells are going to be scraped off the surface.
The idea is to mechanically remove as many cells as possible
so the only thing left is the framework
the cells were sticking to. That is, the matrix itself.
When we're in the womb, ECM is the scaffold
on which our bodies build themselves.
As very small children, it helps us heal ourselves if we're injured.
But after that, it seems to stop working.
By using the ECM structure from this pig's bladder,
the scientists here hope to trick the human body
into repairing itself.
This extraordinary footage shows ECM at work,
recruiting stem cells to build healthy tissue
rather than scar tissue.
It could transform the lives of patients with severe muscle injury.
The work on muscle regeneration has already started
and here in San Antonio, Texas,
is a man who's one of the first to receive this experimental treatment.
Corporal Hernandez was a US Marine serving in Iraq
when a mortar blew out the muscle from his right thigh.
Did they ever tell you that you would not walk again?
Yes.
How did they say that to you?
Pretty much just like that. "You might not walk again."
At first, they told me that, I guess cos of the damage,
that I should have been paralysed, at least from the waist down.
Then, that I should have had my legs amputated.
Then, Hernandez heard about ECM
and asked to have it inserted in his thigh.
ECM is this little round area you can see here,
it's kind of rounded off by the scars.
Right. I can see that this has more bulk to it than this area here.
That's a little bubble there.
Oh, yeah. You can see it bulging when you work out.
Yeah, I can see that.
After ECM, I can stand up and walk no problem,
even running and jogging a little bit now.
Really?! Running and jogging?
And working out on equipment like this?
Yes.
Corporal Hernandez is one of the first ever patients
to receive ECM for muscle regeneration.
The success of his treatment
shows the potential of this breakthrough
in regenerative medicine.
I'm Dr Roberta Bondar
and as an astronaut on board an international space mission,
I was also the first neurologist in the world to fly.
Roger, Endeavour.
'Orbiting Earth was an extraordinary experience
'and seeing our planet from such a privileged perspective
'made me appreciate our achievements as a species.
'But the discovery I want to tell you about excites me
'not because I was an astronaut,
'but because I'm a doctor.'
This is Dr Hesham Sadek of the University of Texas.
His speciality is regenerative cardiology.
We're looking at an image of the heart of a 50-year-old man
who's had a near-fatal heart attack.
He survived it but his heart will never function well again.
You can see that entire segment that has a scar is not moving.
I'd say about 25% of the heart
doesn't contribute to the pumping function of the heart any more.
And this is really the basis of heart failure.
We cannot return back the heart to what it was before injury.
But there are species that can spontaneously repair themselves.
The salamander is capable of self regenerating
damaged heart tissue.
But could biological science find a way to help humans do the same?
That's what Dr Sadek and his team are trying to do.
And their starting point is an extraordinary discovery
about a fellow mammal.
These are the heart cells of a newly born mouse.
They're outside the mouse's body,
but astonishingly, they are continuing to beat.
More than that, they are growing and replicating.
So, when they're outside the body like this,
they're still able to survive quite well?
Yes, and as you can see, they're beating by themselves.
What's really special about these cells is that
they will divide once or twice.
This is the basis of why we started this experiment.
Hesham and his team wanted to know whether this phenomenon
would occur inside a living mouse.
The only way to find out was to perform open-heart surgery
on a one-day old mouse, remove a section of its heart
and see if it repaired itself.
If it worked, it might help unlock the secrets
of how to make a human heart regenerate.
Using ice to place a mouse into
a state of anaesthetised suspended animation,
this is a procedure that has never been filmed before.
Ahmed is going to dissect the muscles between the ribs
and enter the chest cavity to access the heart.
Very delicate work.
Yes. He is a good surgeon.
He exposed the heart, so the heart is outside the body.
That is incredible in itself.
Then he is using specialised scissors
to dissect the apex of the heart.
Ahmed is removing as much as 15% of the left ventricle.
Now he is closing the skin by skin glue,
just like the skin glue that is used for wounds in humans.
This is most amazing, the fact that you've even let us
see this operation, record it, is so impressive.
I see it moving now. A little arm out.
That's pretty impressive.
Only minutes after surgery, the mouse is already recovering.
But what happens to its now damaged heart
has never been seen in mammals before.
We found that within three weeks,
after cutting off the tip of the heart that it all grew back normally
and the function was normal and the heart went back
to pumping blood normally as if nothing had happened.
Although the mouse is only capable of regenerating
its damaged heart tissue like this for the first seven days of its life,
this is a discovery that could lead to harnessing
this regenerative power for humans.
What is the switch that turned on this process initially?
How did you do that initially?
How did the heart do that when it was younger?
How do the heart cells divide when they're younger?
What makes them stop dividing? And can we reawaken that again?
Can we make the adult cells divide again and heal themselves again?
It may be years before Dr Sadek's work reveals results
we can use in humans, but it's no less important for that.
This research really opens up the possibility
that we might be able to find a cure for cardiac disease
without a scalpel in sight.
That one day, we may have the power
to enable our bodies to heal themselves.
Next, our decoding of genetic secrets of a select few
could help us all lead longer and healthier lives.
I'm a geneticist, so I'm interested in how our individual genetic codes
can impact on every stage of our lives. Even our final years.
'Most research into human genes is focused on what's wrong with us,
'but what about what's right with us?
'What about the genes that help us to have a long and healthy life?
'This is San Diego, where the over-75s are thick on the ground.'
I'm here to meet Elsie Taylor. She's quite a special woman.
So special, in fact, that science has taken a keen interest in her.
'Elsie has never suffered from any serious disease
'and scientists would like to find out why.
'She's 91 and has an impressive fitness regime.'
I exercise Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I dance on Thursday.
Friday I have yoga as a rule.
I take Shagan and tai chi with Cherie.
Have you ever smoked?
My grandmother thought it was sinful for a woman to smoke.
What about your diet?
I have been fortunate enough that I haven't had to worry about my weight.
My weight hasn't changed really too much over the last 30 years.
'82-year-old Natalie is, in some ways, very similar to Elsie.
'Both are sociable.
'Natalie used to play a lot of hockey and tennis.
'But there the similarities end.'
I had a boyfriend who smoked.
I thought it was very cool to smoke as well.
My mother-in-law used to bribe me,
she used to say, "I'll give you so much money if you stop smoking."
I once stopped for about a month. That was it. I was back again.
What about things like your diet and exercise?
Do you eat particular foods?
I'm not a fussy eater but I don't eat everything.
I don't like fish, I do like hamburgers.
I can go to McDonald's and have a hamburger
or I can have a hamburger in a smart restaurant.
For breakfast I will often have frozen waffles.
And I just hope that I'll get through the day.
I climb steps, I go down to the laundry, which are steps.
I have 30 steps in my house and it's frequent up and downs.
I feel that's sufficient exercise.
Elsie and Natalie have lived very different lives,
but both of them are in a tiny minority,
because neither has suffered from any serious disease.
So scientists want to know if there is something that connects them.
Both women belong to an exclusive club dubbed the "Wellderly".
Researchers here at Scripps Health are investigating
whether there is something in their genetic code that sets them apart.
They're comparing their gene sequences against those of people
who have died from age-related diseases before the age of 80.
They've identified one particular gene
that might play a crucial role in determining lifespan.
If they're right, this gene doesn't help you live longer,
it makes you die sooner.
This research has caught the attention of Andrew Dillin,
a professor at Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
He's an expert in ageing.
Ageing is a stress. Every day, day after day,
we're dealing with the environmental stresses
that are going to be placed on our cells.
Whether or not that's UV damage from the sun
or oxidative damage from our environment,
there is damage that is happening to our cells and our bodies
throughout all of our life.
And somehow, when we're young, we're able to deal with that very well.
We can protect ourselves and protect the damages that are caused by that,
but as you age, you start to accumulate more and more damage.
Andrew wants to put the gene
identified by the Wellderly Project to the test,
by seeing what happens if he disrupts its effect.
He can't tweak the genes of humans, so he's trying it out on worms.
What we do is we make the same gene disruption
in worms and flies and mice
and ask whether it will also increase the health span of those animals,
and make them appear like these... Wellderly population of humans.
It's still early days for the research on these Wellderly worms,
but in previous studies
Andrew has been able to disrupt other age-related genes
to create a breed of super-worms
that live far longer than their peers.
He is confident that we are narrowing in on the key genes
that affect lifespan.
Now that we know the different genes that are moduling the ageing process,
those are targets to make drugs against.
At the end of the day, you know, we are not doing the research
to make a person that's going to live to be 120 or live to be 250,
that's not our goal.
The whole goal here is to have a healthy lifespan
and die of natural causes,
rather than suffer through these age-related diseases.
It comes as no surprise to Elsie
that the secret of her long life might lie in her genes.
My father was 89, he was very active,
and his brothers all lived to be late 80s.
The oldest was 96 when he died.
On my father's side, definitely, longevity was there.
So that helps, I'm sure.
And my brother, in spite of problems that he's had with his health,
he is 91, he will be 92 in August,
so, um, it's continuing.
I hope to live a few years longer.
'But what is significant to the rest of us
'is that, if researchers like Andrew Dillin can identify these genes
'and turn them on and off,
'then we might all enjoy a healthy old age, like Elsie's.'
You've been doing exciting travelling and kayaking and dancing.
What's next for Elsie?
It's wonderful to have a young man in my life at this stage,
that likes to go places and do things,
so we dance together every Thursday
and we had this wonderful trip to Spokane,
and the Tetons and Yellowstone. Oh, it was just great.
Until recently, little was known
about the processes by which we grow old.
What's fascinating about this research is that it seems possible
that we may be able to alter those processes
and unlock the secrets of a longer and healthier life.
Er, I think it would be a selfish thing to say
that I'd like to live forever.
I am having a good time.
So why shouldn't I go on having a good time?
But the fact of the matter is that the world is overpopulated as it is.
Here I am in my 80s,
I have been living far beyond my natural span, I suspect,
and that means that the population of the world has grown and grown,
and what about young people coming on?
No, I think human lifespan has already been extended
and I don't think we ought to ask to live forever.
I would definitely like to live forever,
because my dream is to one day travel to the stars.
But to travel from our star to the next-door neighbour star
would take 76,000 years using current technology.
So to see the whole of the universe, I'd really need to live forever.
I personally would love to live forever.
I don't think it's a good idea for all humans to live forever,
cos we'd never have anybody new or any new ideas on Earth.
We always need an influx of new stuff,
but I personally am terrified of death.
Not dying, but being gone.
So I'd love to stick around and see what's happening in the future.
The more we discover about DNA, the more complex it becomes.
Now scientists are beginning to understand that we can affect
the health of future generations in ways that none of us ever imagined.
Let's suppose that I'd smoked heavily throughout my lifetime,
or indeed eaten far too much.
That would be my responsibility,
because my genes might well behave in a certain way
which would cause me to have diseases.
The received wisdom has always been
that that genetic message could not be passed on,
but there's some new evidence
that what we do to our genes can affect not only our children,
but our children's children.
We first started to unlock some of the secrets of our DNA
nearly 60 years ago,
but recently science has begun to focus on
an additional layer that sits above our genes...
a layer of multiple switches that may be turned on and off
as a result of our lifestyle.
This field of study is called epigenetics,
and I think that epigenetics, and the study of the way genes function,
will be one of the most significant advances in health care
in the next decade.
This is Professor Marcus Pembrey.
He's one of the key proponents
of what is still a controversial theory.
As a paediatric geneticist,
he's been fascinated for years by the idea that a parent
could pass on their life experience epigenetically to their children.
He began to look for evidence
with the help of a unique database at Bristol University.
Beginning in 1990, 14,000 pregnant women and their partners
agreed to take part in a study
which would follow the development of their children.
This study is called Children of the 90s.
And for the last two decades it's been collecting a detailed store
of biological samples and lifestyle information from the families.
Marcus focused on the pre-adolescent experiences of the study fathers.
The theory was that, as boys at the age of around nine or ten
began developing sperm,
what they experienced in life at that stage
might then be passed on to the next generation.
But what life experiences could they look at?
The only thing that we could come up with
was when the study father started smoking.
You mean the age he started smoking?
The age he started smoking.
So it was the onset of smoking before puberty, before about the age of 11.
Boys in Bristol were already smoking before puberty?
Indeed they were.
Because we are a big study,
we had over 5,000 who smoked, fathers who had smoked,
but 166 reported that they were smoking before the age of 11.
And what did smoking cause?
What it did for the future sons, but not the daughters,
they had increased obesity at the age of nine,
and indeed that's been shown to go right through, er, puberty.
This result may seem extraordinary,
but the correlation between early smoking fathers and obese sons
held true even when they took all other social factors into account.
Marcus is convinced that this is an inherited epigenetic effect...
and the phenomenon isn't just smoking-related.
A remarkable study in Sweden had previously shown
that boys who over-ate at the pre-adolescent stage
fathered sons whose health was affected.
But, most significantly,
they have male grandchildren who are much more likely to die early.
So the inheritance is not just the DNA,
but these additional layers of information
that is placed on the DNA... so... called epigenetics.
But if an epigenetic effect can pass down through the male line,
what about the female line?
Scientists started to study the experiences of women during pregnancy
and wondered if stress could cause an epigenetic effect.
There was just one problem.
Obviously, you can't subject a pregnant woman to massive stress
in order to find out what's happening to her babies.
But occasionally scientists can really benefit
from a massive natural disaster,
and in 1998 a huge ice storm hit eastern Canada.
Electricity pylons buckled under the severity of the freezing rain
and the weight of the ice.
For over a month,
thousands of families had to endure sub-zero temperatures without power.
Marie-Claude LeBlanc was seven months pregnant with her son Samuel
when the storm struck.
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
(TRANSLATION) We lived each day as a survival exercise.
It wasn't exactly a camping trip, it really was survival.
Even in a brick-built house,
the cold and the damp seeped in and we felt it to be -35, -40.
We couldn't let the fire go out.
There's no doubt that living through the ice storm would have been
a stressful experience for anyone,
but especially so for a pregnant woman
concerned about her unborn baby.
Yet could the stress that the women experienced
have a long-term effect on the health of their children?
Psychologist Dr Suzanne King
experienced the ice storm first-hand and wondered exactly that.
My family was without power for seven days,
not all that long compared to people in the region we're studying,
but a few days after the ice storm I went to give blood
and found that my blood pressure was abnormally high.
I realised that this was probably due to stress,
and it also occurred to me that
there were probably hundreds, if not thousands,
of pregnant women out there, also being stressed by the ice storm.
Dr King and colleagues at McGill University
recruited more than 150 women who were pregnant during the storm
and is studying their children.
We're looking really at development in the child in terms of
their cognitive development, their IQ and language and so on.
Their behavioural development in terms of depression, anxiety,
aggressiveness.
Also, their physical development. So in very general terms,
what it looks like is that
for women who had the highest levels of stress from the ice storm,
the worse the outcome in the child.
This suggests that the extreme hardship
experienced by the pregnant women during the ice storm
has resulted in some of their children having a lower IQ
and greater emotional difficulties.
In the womb, we develop hundreds of thousands of brain cells a day.
And perhaps exposure to high levels of stress hormones
has an epigenetic effect.
We have to wait for the ice-storm mothers to have grandchildren
to see if this epigenetic effect is passed on to the next generation.
In the past, people thought the slate was wiped clean
between a generation... only DNA mattered.
Now we know it's not destiny, there is other things.
What you choose to do, the lifestyle you choose to have,
for good or bad,
not only sets an example
to your offspring and grandchildren,
but actually biologically can affect the way their genes work
and the way they develop and their health.
You know, we humans are really arrogant.
We think, with science, that we control our environment,
but actually, our environment controls us.
And unless we learn that message,
we, our children and our children's children
will always have a battle for our health.
In this series, we have given you a glimpse into our future.
We have shown you the discoveries and inventions we think matter most.
Perhaps the most astonishing...
the power of genetics... how our understanding
of the genome is creating a revolution in human health.
Like the cancer treatment that has saved the life of Tina Miranda.
We couldn't be more pleased about how well you're doing.
You're feeling well, your cancer has been shrinking away.
It's just wonderful to see that.
Yes.
A new understanding which is also ensuring
a future for endangered animals...
A vet is now taking a blood sample from this lovely old creature.
It will preserve genetic information that will last for hundreds,
if not thousands, of years.
And has led to the new science of optogenetics,
which might reveal at last the inner workings of our brains.
In there were once thoughts, memories, dreams,
perceptions of colour, sounds, melodies, language.
There are perhaps 100 billion nerve cells... neurons... in there,
and maybe 200 trillion connections between them.
These discoveries have inspired us.
I think the most interesting aspect of all the biological sciences
is actually how the brain thinks,
and I think we're just beginning now, for the first time, to understand
the physiology of human emotion, human love, human anger and so on.
Really fascinating.
I think if I were starting my career all over again,
I might be very tempted to work in biology,
because with our knowledge of genetics now,
the world really seems to be our oyster.
I think the most significant discovery in the last decade or so
has been the recognition that genetics is not just a matter of chromosomes.
The breakthrough that is just on the verge of becoming reality
is understanding our own genetic make-up enough
to be able to predict what diseases we might get,
and be able to beat the disease to the punch
and stop that disease from happening.
But our future is not just about flesh and blood.
We revealed a new machine age where lasers built a world around us...
and cars drive themselves.
We've just gone driverless? Absolutely, yeah.
Show me your hands!
(LAUGHS)
And there is public transport to dream of.
It's all a bit James Bond.
It's a time where there are rockets for hire,
an era where robots learn like us...
Do you want me to play alone?
Operate to save our lives,
and even help the paralysed to walk again.
I'm massively optimistic about the future.
You only have to see what's coming out of scientific research institutes
around the world to think the future's going to be a fabulous place to live.
But science is not just about the practical.
It allows us to understand the world...
it gives meaning to life.
Everybody knows science is useful,
so they run away with the idea that useful is all that science is.
Of course science is useful... it's very useful...
but you have to remember science is almost an aesthetic pursuit as well.
It's inspirational.
How we know that the Earth is not flat, but round.
How we know that the Sun doesn't go round the Earth,
but the Earth goes round the Sun... these fundamental understandings
are crucial to understanding our place in the universe.
Trying to unlock and understand the secrets of nature
and the universe is a part of being curious, and a part of being human.
And we know from the past that this kind of fundamental science
has the potential to change the world.
I've lived with the prospect of death for many years,
but I'm in no hurry to die.
I want to see the future, and the wonders it will bring.
Magic is going on inside there!
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