The Life Scientific

Patrick Vallance is something of a rare breed: a game-keeper turned poacher; an academic who's moved over into industry. And not just any industry, but the pharmaceutical industry.At the time, Patrick Vallance was Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Head of the Department of Medicine at University College London. A pioneer of research into some of the body's key regulatory systems, he had also been publicly critical of BIG Pharma for "funding studies more helpful to marketing than to advancing clinical care". So what made him go over to "the other side"?His involvement with the industry was limited until one evening in 2006 when he was asked a question over a dinner, a question that would be pivotal to his life and career. Today, Patrick is head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies with annual revenues in excess of 20 billion pounds and nearly a hundred thousand employees worldwide. Whilst GSK is no stranger to scandal, since he joined, Patrick has attempted to tackle the culture of secrecy that pervades the industry. He's since reshaped the way GSK carries out its research and has been behind several radical initiatives in global healthcare, to produce a more collaborative approach to tackling major diseases like malaria.

Professor Robert Plomin talks to Jim Al-Khalili about what makes some people smarter than others and why he's fed up with the genetics of intelligence being ignored. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert sat countless intelligence tests at his inner city Catholic school. College was an attractive option mainly because it seemed to pay well. Now he's one of the most cited psychologists in the world. He specialized in behavioural genetics in the mid seventies when the focus in mainstream psychology was very much on our nurture rather than our nature, and genetics was virtually taboo. But he persisted, conducting several large adoption studies and later twin studies. In 1995 he launched the biggest longitudinal twin study in the UK, the TED study of ten thousand pairs of twins which continues to this day. In this study and in his other work, he's shown consistently that genetic influences on intelligence are highly significant, much more so than what school you go to, your teachers or home environment. If only the genetic differences between children were fully acknowledged, he believes education could be transformed and parents might stop giving themselves such a hard time. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Danielle George is a radio frequency engineer from the University of Manchester. She designs amplifiers that have travelled everywhere, from outer space to underground.Becoming a professor aged just 38, she talks to Jim about the challenges of age discrimination and working in a male dominated field.As presenter of last year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, she's passionate about DIY electronics and coding, and how to inspire the UK's next generation of inventors.

Carol Black was an overweight child who, aged 13, put herself on a diet. Now, as an expert advisor to the government, she's the woman behind recent newspaper headlines suggesting that obese people who refuse treatment could see their benefits cut. In the last decade, Carol has conducted several reviews on work and health, sickness absence and how best to help people with obesity, alcohol and drug problems get back into the workplace. In 2008 she suggested the Sick Note should be replaced with a Fit Note which states what people can do rather than what they can't. Later she recommended that an independent assessor should decide who is, or is not, Fit for Work. Dame Carol Black talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the challenges associated with advising government on these controversial issues; and how, despite relative adversity and several bad decisions, she achieved such a position of power and influence.Producer: Anna Buckley.

Jim al-Khalili talks to botanist Geoff Palmer, the UK's only professor of brewing and distilling, about revolutionising the malting industry and his unusual scientific career after arriving from Jamaica in 1955 as a 14 year old boy. When he went for an interview for an MSc in 1964 the representative from the Ministry of Agriculture suggested he go back home and grow bananas. Why? Because he didn't know the difference between wheat and barley. Undeterred he went on to become a world authority on barley, brewing and distilling and Scotland's first black professor. His research on how malt could be made more quickly saved the brewing industry millions. But he says, it's only through good luck and with the help of good Samaritans that his career took the course it did, helping him get to university and even to finish school. Now at the age of 75, he's still fighting to make education and a scientific career available to everyone, regardless of their background.

EO Wilson has been described as the "world's most evolved biologist" and even as "the heir to Darwin". He's a passionate naturalist and an absolute world authority on ants. Over his long career he's described 450 new species of ants. Known to many as the founding father of socio-biology, EO Wilson is a big hitter in the world of evolutionary theory. But, recently he's criticised what's popularly known as The Selfish Gene theory of evolution that he once worked so hard to promote (and that now underpins the mainstream view on evolution). A twice Pulitzer prize winning author of more than 20 books, he's also an extremely active campaigner for the preservation of the planet's bio-diversity: he says, "destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal".EO Wilson talks to Jim al-Khalili about his life scientific.

Forensic chemist Niamh Nic Daeid talks to Jim Al-Khalili about investigating fires and analysing legal highs.Her team were involved in studying the infamous Philpott case in Derby when six children tragically died in a fire set by their parents, Mick and Mairead. They devised experiments to find out why, despite having smoke alarms fitted inside the house, none of the children woke up.Chemistry has also been pushed to the limits to identify 'legal highs', or Novel Psychoactive Substances. Around 350 new drugs are released on to the market every month, with Europe a hotspot for buyers. Plus, Niamh talks about the serious problems facing the world of forensic science. The field, she says, is in crisis. With rock-bottom research budgets, and the list of miscarriages of justice growing, how can we fix forensic science?Producer: Michelle Martin.

Carlos Frenk, Ogden Professor of Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham, studies the universe, but not by spending nights looking out at the dark skies through telescopes. Rather he creates the cosmos on computers. He is also one of the Gang of Four of astrophysics who thirty years ago came up with one of the most important theories in their field. They worked out that the universe is full of cold dark matter. In 2011 Carlos Frenk and his colleagues were awarded the Gruber prize, one of the leading accolades in astronomy, for their theory.Carlos Frenk discusses this mysterious missing mass, which is still mysterious and missing, with Jim al-Khalili. They talk about modelling the universe inside computers, and how Carlos persuaded his university to hire the architect Daniel Liebskind to design a building for creative thinking about the cosmos.

Dorothy Bishop is a world-leading expert in childhood language disorders. Since the 1970s, she has been instrumental in bringing to light a little-known language disorder that may affect around two children per class starting primary school.'Specific Language Impairment', or SLI, was originally deemed to be the fault of lazy parents who didn't talk to their children. But through her pioneering studies on twins, Dorothy found a genetic link behind this disorder, helping to overturn these widespread misconceptions. Dorothy talks to Jim Al-Khalili about how families react when they discover there's a genetic basis to their problems, and why this language impairment isn't as well known as other conditions, like autism and dyslexia.A critic of pseudoscience and media misreporting, Dorothy discusses her experiences of speaking out against folk psychology and bad science journalism.Producer: Michelle Martin.

Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh talks to Jim Al-Khalili about slicing through thoughts, hopes and memories. Brain surgery, he says, is straightforward. It's deciding whether or not to operate that's hard.The stakes are high and it's never clear cut. He often dreads having to talk to patients and their families. Damage to healthy brain cells can result in a dramatic change to someone's quality of life; but if a bit of a tumour remains, it's likely to grow back. "How do you tell someone that the best option may be to go away and die?"Once, against his professional judgment, Henry went ahead with surgery because the patient wanted him to operate. The patient died and he blames himself for not being stronger. He talks openly about the cemetery that all doctors inevitably carry with them; and why he would rather be seen as a fallible human being, than either a superhero or villain. Perhaps it's inevitable that doctors are put on a pedestal but it can be unhelpful.Despite a chronic lack of science at school and university, Henry decided to become a neurosurgeon, having found general surgery rather disgusting. Soon after, his three month old son had surgery for a brain tumour: an experience which, he says, helped him to appreciate the fog of anxiety and concern that descends on the people he treats.Getting the balance right between compassion and detachment is a constant challenge. And Henry admits, he pioneered brain surgery under local anaesthetic, in part as a way of confronting head on the almost 'Jekyll and Hyde like split' between being a surgeon in the operating theatre and a friendly consultant who talks to and cares for his patients. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Kate Jones is Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity at UCL and the Institute of Zoology. An expert in evolution and extinction, her special interest is in bat research and conservation.Bats make up one in five of all mammal species on Earth, from the miniscule bumblebee bat to the enormous megabat.As well as controlling harmful insects bats also pollinate a large variety of crops, from bananas to blue agave plants that are used to make tequila.Kate has pioneered ground-breaking technologies that allow the public to monitor bats, including the citizen science website Bat Detective.This work led her to investigate human infectious diseases, including those spread through animals. Together with a global team of researchers, they drew up a map of global hotspots to try and predict where the next 'zoonotic' disease will emerge.Producer: Michelle Martin.

Anil Seth is professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the Sackler Centre at the University of Sussex, where he studies consciousness.His research has taken him in all kinds of directions, from reading philosophy, to computing and virtual reality, and mapping the brain. As well as running the interdisciplinary centre and carrying out experiments that test ideas about consciousness, Anil Seth has co-written a popular book, The 30 second brain, and was the consultant on Eye Benders, the winner of the Junior Royal Society Book Prize in 2014.He talks to Jim al-Khalili about how scientists can study altered states of consciousness, such as sleep and coma. He explains how he uses virtual reality to understand conditions where our idea of ourselves is distorted, such as in the Alice in Wonderland syndrome.

Fat, sugar, salt - we all know we should eat less of them, and take more exercise, but as a nation with an ever expanding waistline we are becoming increasingly overweight.Jim al-Khalili talks to Professor Susan Jebb, the UK's authority on obesity, who has spent much of her career trying to help us put those good intentions into practice.Her challenge is not for the faint hearted. When she first got interested in obesity, as a research scientist, rates were already on the rise. Yet no one took the problem seriously. Today, with over sixty percent of adults overweight or obese, Susan remains unwavering in her commitment to ensuring we do.As Professor of Diet and Population Health at Oxford University and Chair of the government's Responsibility Deal Food Network, she wants all of us and the food industry to improve the nation's health by translating the science of what we eat into practice.And health is what it's all about. Obesity now poses such a danger that it's been dubbed the 'new smoking'.Produced by Beth Eastwood.

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University, believes in the power of open data. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee he persuaded two UK Prime Ministers of the importance of letting us all get our hands on information that's been collected about us by the government and other organisations. But, this has brought him into conflict with people who think there's money to be made from this data. And open data raises issues of privacy.Nigel Shadbolt talks to Jim al-Khalili about how a degree in psychology and philosophy lead to a career researching artificial intelligence and a passion for open data.

As a young woman, Stephanie Shirley worked at the Dollis Hill Research Station building computers from scratch: but she told young admirers that she worked for the Post Office, hoping they would think she sold stamps. In the early 60s she changed her name to Steve and started selling computer programmes to companies who had no idea what they were or what they could do, employing only mothers who worked from home writing code by hand with pen and pencil and then posted it to her. By the mid-80s her software company employed eight thousand people, still mainly women with children. She made an absolute fortune but these days Stephanie thinks less about making money and much more about how best to give it away. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Just twenty years ago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) would not allow women to camp in Antarctica. In 2013, it appointed Jane Francis as its Director. Jane tells Jim Al-Khalili how an intimate understanding of petrified wood and fossilised leaves took her from Dorset's Jurassic coast to this icy land mass. Camping on Antarctic ice is not for everyone but Jane is addicted, even if she does crave celery and occasionally wish that she could wash her hair. Fossils buried under the ice contain vital clues about ancient climates and can be used to check current computer models of climate change. The earth can withstand a great range of temperatures: Antarctica was once covered in lush forest. But the question is: can humans adapt? As the ice caps melt, sea levels will continue to rise. And, says Jane, the time to start planning for that is now.

Until recently, it was thought that human brain development was all over by early childhood but research in the last decade has shown that the adolescent brain is still changing into early adulthood. Jim Al-Khalili talks to pioneering cognitive neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore who is responsible for much of the research which shows that our brains continue to develop through the teenage years. She discusses why teenagers take risks and are so susceptible to influence from their peers as well as her childhood growing up with the constant threat of attacks from animal rights groups.

Matt Taylor talks to Jim Al-Khalili about being in charge of the Rosetta space mission to the distant comet, 67P. It is, he says, 'the sexiest thing alive', after his wife. He describes his joy when, after travelling for ten years and covering four billion miles, the robot, Philae landed on the speeding comet 67P; and turned the image tattooed on his thigh from wishful thinking into a triumph for science. Matt's father, a builder, encouraged him to do well at school. He wanted him to get a job in science and Matt didn't disappoint, joining the European Space Agency in June 2005. His charm and exuberance have brought competing teams together as they fight for their science to have priority on Rosetta. His enthusiasm has helped to spark and fuel a global interest in the mission and he deeply regrets his choice of shirt on one occasion. Producer: Anna Buckley.

John O'Keefe tells Jim Al-Khalili how winning the Nobel Prize was a bit of a double-edged sword, especially as he liked his life in the lab, before being made famous by the award. John won the prize for his once radical insight into how we know where we are. When he first described the idea of 'place cells' in the brain back in 1971, many scoffed. Today it's accepted scientific wisdom that our spatial ability depends on these highly specialized brain cells. A keen basketball player,John says, he has put this principle to the test by trying to shoot hoops with his eyes closed. But this belies the years of painstaking experiments on rats that John performed to prove that a rat's ability to know where it is depends not only on its sense of smell, but also on a cognitive map, or internal GPS, inside the rat's brain. He describes how he listened in on the unique firing patterns of individual rat brain cells using the tiniest electrodes: "You almost imagine they are singing to you", he says, as he imitates the different sounds made by individual neurons. And, he says, he misses them when they fall silent. It's important to John, and for his results, that his rats are happy and John welcomes the strong controls over animal experiments in the UK. Computer models are useful but, he says, they could never replace the need for experiments on animals, in the work that he does. And,while it need not necessarily have been the case, experiments on rats' brains have provided valuable insight into the workings of the human brain. John's research was entirely curiosity-driven but it could provide vital clues to understanding dementia and is already being used to develop a test for the earliest stages of Alzheimer's. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Professor Dave Goulson has been obsessed with animals since he was a child. He collected all kinds of creatures and went as far as doing home made taxidermy. He's now Professor of Biological Sciences at Sussex University where he specialises in bumblebees. Dave Goulson talks to Jim al-Khalili about how he took five years to work out how bees know which flowers to go to for the most nectar, and why he set up a charity to encourage the public and farmers to plant more flowers for bumblebees to feast upon.Recently Dave has found himself in a media storm as he's been studying the effects of pesticides called neo-nicotinoids on bumblebees. After he and others published research showing that the neo-nicotinoids have a detrimental effect on the foraging of bumblebees, the EU has brought in a temporary ban on some of them. But some farmers say that their harvests will be poor if they can't use these pesticides. Dave and Jim discuss the balance between conserving nature and feeding people.

Jim al-Khalili talks to Professor Dame Sally Davies about being a champion for patients and a champion for women.As Chief Medical Officer, the first woman to fill the post, she guides government decisions on pressing health issues such as antimicrobial resistance, mental health and, most recently, Ebola.Having spent many years working as a haematologist, focussing on sickle cell disease, Dame Sally now works tirelessly to put scientific evidence at the heart of Government decisions that affect out health. And it's this quest for evidence that has inspired much of her career.As Director General for Research and Development at the Department of Health, she saw the opportunity to overhaul health research in the National Health Service, focussing on the needs of patients. It was a hugely controversial idea which others had tried to implement, and failed. But she stuck to her guns and the National Institute for Health Research, which she created, is now the envy of the world.Named one of the most powerful women in the country, Dame Sally also has a powerful voice abroad. Through her work at the World Health Organisation, she's brought the world's attention to global threats like antimicrobial resistance.Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Richard Fortey found his first trilobite fossil when he was 14 years old and he spent the rest of his career discovering hundreds more, previously unknown to science.Professor of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, he talks to Jim Al-Khalili about why these arthropods, joint-legged creatures which look a bit like woodlice and roamed the ancient oceans for almost 300 million years, are so important for helping us to understand the evolution of life on our planet.These new trilobite fossils were found at an exciting time for the earth sciences because of the emergence of plate tectonics. The discovery of communities of trilobite fossils could be used to reconstruct the shape of the ancient world and Richard used the new discoveries to help map the geologically very different Palaeozoic continents and seas.He admits that he's a born naturalist, fascinated by all aspects of the natural world (he's a leading expert on fungi) with a powerful drive to communicate its wonders to a wider public. His books and TV programmes on geology, the evolution of the earth, fossils as well as the creatures that survived mass extinctions have brought him a whole new audience.And Richard reveals to Jim an earlier secret life, as a writer of humorous books, all written under a pseudonym.

Maggie Boden is a world authority in the field of artificial intelligence - she even has a robot named in her honour.Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, Maggie has spent a lifetime attempting to answer philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind, but from a computational viewpoint."Tin cans", as she sometimes calls computers, are information processing systems, the perfect vehicle, she believes, to help us understand, explore and analyse the mind. But questions about the human mind and the human person could never be answered within one single academic subject. So the long career of Maggie Boden is the very epitome of cross-disciplinary working. From medicine, to psychology, to cognitive and computer science, to technology and philosophy, Professor Boden has spent decades straddling multiple academic subjects, helping to create brand new disciplines along the way.

European Inventor of the Year, Chris Toumazou, reveals how his personal life and early research lie at the heart of his inventions.As Chief Scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, Chris inspires engineers, doctors and other scientists to create medical devices for the 21st century.Applying silicon chip technology, more commonly found inside mobile phones, he tackles seemingly insurmountable problems in medicine to create devices that bridge the electronic and biological worlds - from a digital plaster that monitors a patient's vital signs to an artificial pancreas to treat diabetes.His latest creation, coined a 'lab on a chip', analyses a person's DNA within minutes outside the laboratory. The hand-held device can identify genetic differences which dictate a person's susceptibility to hereditary diseases and how they will react to a drug like warfarin, used to treat blood clots.Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Jim al-Khalili talks to Professor Elspeth Garman about a technique that's led to 28 Nobel Prizes in the last century.X- ray crystallography, now celebrating its 100th anniversary, is used to study the internal structure of matter. It may sound rather arcane but it's the reason we now know the structure of hugely important molecules, like penicillin, insulin and DNA. But while other scientists scoop up prizes for cracking chemical structures, Elspeth works away behind the scenes, (more cameraman than Hollywood star), improving the methods and techniques used by everybody working in the field. If only it was as simple as putting a crystal in the machine and printing off the results. Growing a single crystal of an enzyme that gives TB its longevity took Elspeth's team no less than fifteen years. No pressure there then when harvesting that precious commodity.

Jackie Akhavan, Professor of Explosive Chemistry, tells Jim al-Khalili all about the science of explosives. She explains exactly what explosives are and how to make them safer to handle.She started by working on how to make fireworks safer and has been involved in research with bees to see whether they can be used smell different types of explosives. Her current project involves testing the rocket fuel that will be used in Bloodhound, the British designed and built supersonic car that aims to reach a speed of 1,000mph.Her work involves finding out how to best detect explosives in airports and elsewhere, teaching security professionals how to differentiate between false alarms and the real thing. She also works on explosives used in warfare and discusses the ethical issues involved.Producer: Melissa Hogenboom.

Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University describes how he gave up appearing on Top of the Pops to study quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics. Although he describes himself as a simple-minded Northern bloke, he has acquired an almost God-like status on our TV screens; while the 'Cox effect' is thought to explain the significant boost to university admissions to read physics. He talks to Jim Al-Khalili about learning to be famous, his passion for physics and how he sometimes has difficulty crossing the road. In 2005 Brian was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship for his work on high energy particle collisions at CERN and elsewhere - an enviable academic achievement. In 2009, he was voted one of the sexiest men alive by People magazine. He has invented a new kind of celebrity - a scientist who's regularly snapped by the paparazzi.Brian wants everyone to be as excited as he is about the laws that govern our universe: the beautiful, counter-intuitive and often weird world of quantum mechanics that explains what happens inside the nucleus of every atom, right down at the level of those exotically named elementary particles - quarks, neutrinos, gluons, muons. Challenged by Jim to explain the rules of quantum mechanics in just a minute, Brian succeeds; while conceding that the idea that everything is inherently probabilistic, is challenging. Even Einstein found it difficult. Schrodinger's cat, or Brian Cox, for that matter, are simultaneously both dead and alive. That's a fact. What this is all means is another question. "Am I just an algorithm?" Brian asks. "Probably", says Jim. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Carol Robinson describes her remarkable journey from leaving school at 16 to work as a lab technician at Pfizer, to becoming the first female Professor of Chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge University, despite an eight year career break to bring up three small children.Getting back into the workplace wasn't easy. Carol was hired for a job for which she was over-qualified because she 'used to be good' and advised not to dress so smartly because people would think she was a secretary. She managed to negotiate a day a week to do her own research and secured much sought after Royal Society funding to support it.For decades, Carol felt insecure about having a degree from a further education college, which she achieved by studying part-time for seven years while working at Pfizer; but now Carol is proud of her unconventional route into academia and actively recruits students to her lab from a wide range of different backgrounds.In her hands, mass spectrometry has been transformed from a routine technique for checking what chemicals are present in, say an antibiotic, into a powerful research tool for drug development. Her motto when doing experiments is, 'it's not working yet' and she's happy to risk drilling into this hugely expensive machine to try and get it to do what she wants.Producer: Anna Buckley.

In October 2013, Jeremy Farrar was appointed Director of the Wellcome Trust - UK's largest medical research funding charity. The Trust funded �750 million's worth of health-related research - about the same as the government's Medical Research Council. This means Jeremy Farrar is a major figure in British science. Since 1996, the doctor and clinical scientist had run the Wellcome-funded Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam - a British-Vietnamese collaboration specialising in infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, TB and avian flu. He lost close friends and colleagues when the SARS pandemic took off in East Asia in 2003, and dealt with the first cases of the dangerous H5N1 bird flu when it arrived in Vietnam the following here. In conversation with Jim Al-Khalili, Dr Farrar talks about the personal and professional impact of those experiences and of his feelings of impotence as a doctor treating HIV/AIDS patients as a junior doctor in London in 1980s. With his international perspective and his hands-on experience of the deadly potential of infectious diseases, he talks to Jim about the great health challenges faced by the world in the coming decades.

Zoe Shipton's fascination with rocks started when she was a child and her father took her camping on a volcano. Now a professor of geology at Strathclyde University she talks to Jim al-Khalili about her research into the way that the earth faults. This has lead her to studying the aftermath of a major earthquake in Taiwan and drilling into rocks in remote parts of Utah. Recently she has been part of a Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering committee that has produced a report on the potential impact of fracking for gas on the UK.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith chats to Jim Al-Khalili about quarks, bosons, and running the biggest experiments in history.In the late 60s and early 70s Chris was one of the theoretical physicists who were busy sketching what would become known as the standard model of particle physics. An early believer in the physical reality of the "Quark Model", Chris's work helped confirm that the protons and neutrons at the centre of atoms are themselves made up of 3 quarks.He was also influential in showing that Peter Higgs' theory of mass was not just sufficient, but also necessary.So when later he was made Director General of CERN, he was well placed to know, and to explain to the heads of the member states, that investing in the construction of something called the Large Hadron Collider would be a scientifically fruitful thing to do. Indeed, it has been said that there would be no LHC without Chris' calm international scientific diplomacy.Since then, Chris has been influential in several other international big-physics collaborations, including the world's most ambitious nuclear fusion programme, ITER.

Botanist Sandy Knapp tells Jim Al Khalili about her adventures in the wilderness of South America collecting and studying many thousands of plants from a group vital for human nutrition. She talks about her time growing up in Los Alamos in New Mexico, surrounded by a "sea of physicists" and how her love of the outdoors inspired her to take up botany.

Astronomer and Sky at Night TV presenter Chris Lintott tells Jim Al Khalili about his "Citizen Science" project of crowd-sourced astronomy, Galaxy Zoo, and of working with Brian May and the late Sir Patrick Moore.

Janet Hemingway, the youngest woman to ever to become a full professor in the UK, talks about her career at the frontline of the war on malaria. Whilst many researchers look for vaccines and treatments to this global killer, Janet's approach, as a trained entomologist, has been to fight the mosquitoes - the vector - which transmits the malaria parasite.

Professor Sir Michael Rutter has been described as the most illustrious and influential psychiatric scientist of his generation. His international reputation has been achieved despite the fact that as a young doctor, he had no intention of becoming a researcher, nor interest in becoming a child psychiatrist. In fact he became a world leader as both.His career has spanned more than five decades and is marked by a remarkable body of high-impact research and landmark studies. The theme running through all his work has been child development, on the subtle interplay between nature and nurture and on the factors that make the difference between a child flourishing, or floundering.Evacuated during World War Two, to a Quaker family in the USA, Mike Rutter tells Jim Al-Khalili about the impact this move, aged seven, had on him. He describes the inspirational teachers who persuaded him that research and clinical work as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, was for him, and he admits that an early mentor insisted he mustn't receive any formal training in child psychiatry, something he hasn't received to this day!He was awarded this country's first ever professorship in child psychiatry in 1973 and he's credited with founding the field of developmental psychopathology. This involves the study, over time, of normal and abnormal child development. He's currently Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at King's College, London and still a practicing child psychiatrist.An early breakthrough was his discovery that autism, or infantile psychosis as it was then known, had a genetic basis, something barely suspected at the time.Beautifully designed studies of populations over time followed, many of them landmark studies still cited today. They established the framework for studying and investigating mental illness in the community. The Isle of Wight Studies (1964-74) surveyed the mental health of children living on the island and for the first time in such research, children themselves were directly interviewed and questioned. Before this, Mike Rutter tells Jim, the assumption had been that what children thought and said didn't really matter.In the 1970s, the Fifteen Thousand Hours study, delivered ground-breaking evidence about the combination of factors that affected the performance and behaviour of children in inner city secondary schools. Findings from this study were included by both the Labour and Conservative parties in their 1979 election manifestos."Maternal Deprivation Reassessed" was Mike Rutter's challenge to John Bowlby's hugely influential theory of maternal attachment. It was described as "a classic in the field of childcare" and it transformed the debate about the relationships that help babies to flourish.His fascination with the underlying reasons why and how children vary in their ability to weather and cope with adversity, led to the growth of resilience science. For more than 40 years Mike Rutter, "the intellectual father", has led this field of study.His name is particularly associated with "natural experiments" and one of the best known is the English Romanian Adoptees study that he set up in the early 1990s and still runs today. The children being followed are those rescued from the orphanages of Nicolai Ceausescu and adopted by families in this country. Because of the appalling conditions many of these babies and toddlers experienced in Romanian institutions, Professor Rutter understood that tracking and studying them as they grew up in loving homes here, would provide important insights into how early deprivation affects children's development.Producer: Fiona Hill.

Jim Al-Khalili's guest this week is Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. The conversation ranges from her childhood wonder of clouds to climate change's part in this winter's floods.Julia Slingo's fascination with meteorology began as she, as a sixth former, gazed out of her bedroom window and wondered what controlled the shapes of clouds and why the clouds usually came from the west. In the 1970s she was one of the few women scientists at the British Meteorological Office and worked in the early days of computer modelling of weather and climate. As the first female professor of Meteorology in the UK, she crusaded for greater computing power and capacity to improve both weather forecasting and global climate models.Julia Slingo took up the job of the chief scientist at the Met Office in 2009. Her profile has been high in the last few months following her remarks that the persistent heavy rains and storminess of Winter 2013 to 2014 were likely to be linked to anthropogenic climate change.

Charles Darwin described the eye as an 'organ of extreme perfection and complication'. How this engineering marvel of nature forms out of a few cells in the developing embryo has been the big question for Veronica van Heyningen, emeritus professor at the MRC's Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.Veronica is a world lead in the genetics of the development of the eye. She tells Jim Al Khalili about her part in the discovery of a gene called Pax-6 which turned to be a master builder gene for the eye, in all animals which have eyes - from humans to fruit flies.As she explains, further research on this gene may eventually help people with the genetic vision impairment, Aniridia. It was Veronica's research on patients with this condition which led to the gene's final discovery. She tells Jim about why it's important for scientists to engage in public discussion on the ethical implications of their work.Veronica also talks about her arrival in Britain as an 11 year old. Her family escaped from communist Hungary in 1958. Both of her Jewish parents had been sent to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.

Alf Adams FRS, physicist at the University of Surrey, had an idea on a beach in the mid-eighties that made the modern internet, CD and DVD players, and even bar-code readers possible. You probably have half a dozen 'strained-layer quantum well lasers' in your home.

Anne Glover is currently one of the most influential scientists in Europe. She advises the President of the European Commission on the research behind issues ranging from nuclear power to genetically modified foods. She talks to Jim al-Khalili about how she makes an impact working across the many countries in Europe with different ideas about science. For example, Germany and France have very different attitudes to nuclear power.Anne Glover is also a Professor at Aberdeen University where she uses glow in the dark microbes to solve problems such as polluted land. It's a technique she developed after seeing minute glowing creatures while swimming at night in the Algarve.She tells Jim about her life in the lab, setting up a company to exploit her bioluminescent microbes and how she gets on in the world of politics.

Mark Miodownik's chronic interest in materials began in rather unhappy circumstances. He was stabbed in the back, with a razor, on his way to school. When he saw the tiny piece of steel that had caused him so much harm, he became obsessed with how it could it be so sharp and so strong. And he's been materials-mad ever since.Working at a nuclear weapons laboratory in the US, he enjoyed huge budgets and the freedom to make the most amazing materials. But he gave that up to work with artists and designers because he believes that if you ignore the sensual aspects of materials, you end up with materials that people don't want.For Mark, making is as important as reading and writing. It's an expression of who we are, like music or literature, and 'everyone should be doing it'. To this end, he wants our public libraries to be converted into public workshops, with laser cutters and 3 D printers in place of books.

Jim Al-Khalili talks to psychiatrist Vikram Patel about the global campaign he is leading to tackle mental health. He reflects on his early career working in Zimbabwe, when he doubted any western diagnoses or treatments for peoples' distress would be of much use. However, his subsequent research made him question this and come to the realisation that some conditions, like depression and psychosis, could be tackled universally. Now based in India, Vikram's research guides the public health approach he is taking. Yet critics question the application of Western categories for diagnosis and treatment to other parts of the world.Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black began her career with a Saturday job working in a butcher's shop. At the time she didn't realise that this would be the start of a lifelong fascination with anatomy.Her job has taken her to some extreme and challenging locations to identify human bodies, such as Kosovo, where she uncovered evidence used in the UN's War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.Back home, Sue has been integral in solving many high-profile criminal cases, including cracking Scotland's biggest paedophile ring in 2009.In The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili asks how she deals with the emotional pressures of the job, and why she is so fascinated by the inner workings of the human body.In her spare time, Sue Black also advises crime fiction authors like Val McDermid, providing inspiration for new plotlines and characters.In return, Val and a group of writers have offered to help with Sue's latest challenge - fundraising for a mortuary. This facility will use new techniques to embalm bodies and promises to revolutionise the way surgeons are trained.Producer: Michelle Martin.

Peter Higgs opens up to Jim Al-Khalili, admitting that he failed to realise the full significance of the Higgs boson and to link it to the much celebrated Standard Model of Physics. An oversight he puts down to a string of missed opportunities, including one night at physics summer camp when, most regrettably, he went to bed early.Working alone in Edinburgh in the sixties, Peter Higgs was considered 'a bit of a crank'. 'No-one wanted to work with me', he says. In 1964, he predicted the possible existence of a new kind of boson but, at the time, there was little interest in his boson. And in the years that followed, Peter Higgs says, he was 'looking in the wrong place for the application'.Three years later, the Higgs mechanism was shown to be central to the new Standard Model of Physics, which brings together three of the four fundamental forces of nature and has dominated physics ever since. Higgs met one of the key architects of the Standard Model several times, but they failed to realise they were working on the same thing. He particularly regrets one night at physics summer camp when he decided to go to bed early. The others meantime stayed up all night working up The Standard Model.The seventies was an exciting time for particle physics but Higgs says he 'struggled to keep up'. His PhD was in a different field and he says he 'lacked technical competency'. He says work pressure contributed to the breakdown of his marriage and that perhaps he suffered a personality change in the mid-sixties when he realised his research might be on to something good and started working harder.Four decades and several billion pounds on, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN confirmed that the Higgs boson had indeed been found and Peter Higgs shot to fame.This ephemeral speck of elusive energy is now so well-known it's featured in car adverts and countless jokes. There's even song by Nick Cave called the Higgs Boson Blues. But Higgs has always called it the 'scalar boson' and remains embarrassed that it is named after only him.Three different research groups, working independently, published very similar papers in 1964 describing what's now known as the Higgs mechanism. And Higgs remains surprised that another British physicist, Tom Kibble from Imperial College, London didn't share the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics along with him and Belgian physicist, Francois Englert."[Kibble] wrote a longer paper which was really very important in generalising the sort of thing I had written in '64 ", says Higgs.Peter Higgs found physics boring, as it was taught at school. He was going to be an engineer, like his father, but was clumsy in the lab and, he says, became a theoretical physicist 'by default'.When the 2013 Nobel Prize winners were announced, many assumed Higgs was blissfully unaware that he might win or just not that interested. In fact, he left the house quite deliberately that morning fully expecting the Nobel Committee to call.These days, he's constantly stopped in the street and asked for autographs and photographs which, he says, is 'nice but a bit of a nuisance'.Producer: Anna Buckley.

Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, has spent a career at the forefront of developments around the web and digital media. Trained as a mathematician, she moved to the fledgling department of computer science in the mid 1980's, a time of great change and great excitement in the field.She talks to Jim Al Khalili about the rate that things have changed, how the web is still not quite what it should be, and about the new discipline she has helped to found known as Web Science.

Australian geneticist Jenny Graves discusses her life pursuing sex genes in her country's weird but wonderful fauna, the end of men and singing to her students in lectures.

Jim Al-Khalili talks to neuroscientist and occasional stand up comedian, Professor Sophie Scott about how she is using brain imaging techniques to reveal secrets of the complexity of brain activity when we speak and when we hear others speak. And Sophie Scott explains why laughter is such an important human social tool. But why is it that if we're laughing hard it can completely override our ability to speak? Also why it's not just humans who have a funny bone: even rats laugh.

Ian Stewart, Professor of Maths at Warwick University, has had a dual career as a research mathematician and as a populariser. He wrote his first book for a general audience - on chaos theory - over thirty years. He's also the author of short stories and novels of science fiction, and of the Science of Discworld series.Ian Stewart talks to Jim al-Khalili about his life, including his research into applying mathematics to problems of biology and how he communicates the ideas of number and maths to the general public.

Life on earth has gone through a series of mass extinctions. Mike Benton talks about his fascination with ancient life on the planet and his work on the Bristol Dinosaur Project.

Professor Mark Lythgoe created and runs the largest medical imaging research facility in Europe - the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging at University College London. That is quite an achievement for someone who spectacularly failed his A levels because he was dancing on the podiums of Manchester clubs or tuning the engine of his motorbike. Now the Centre does everything from testing new treatments for cancer, stroke and heart disease to probing the homing sense of pigeons. Mark Lythgoe's team develops new techniques to image the living body and its biochemical activities in ever-minute detail, with radio, light and ultrasound waves.In The Life Scientific, Mark Lythgoe talks about the frontier research at his centre and the thrill he gets from it. As well as a scientist, he is also an intrepid mountain climber and believes there are parallels between the experiences of a mountaineer and those of an inventor of new views of the human brain and body. Professor Lythgoe talks candidly about his unconventional journey and struggle to make a successful career in science which took him through making plastic pipes in a factory, training Israeli attack dogs and working with Australian Aboriginal people. He describes the deep sense of failure which powered with his progress once he had a foot in the laboratory door. Mark also discusses his collaborations with artists on sci-art projects. He says one film project about a young girl with a severe brain condition helped to make him the scientist he is today.

Joanna Haigh, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College, London, studies the influence of the sun on the earth's climate using data collected by satellites. She talks to Jim al-Khalili about how she got started on her career in climate physics: she can trace her interest in it back to her childhood when she built herself a home weather station.Jo Haigh explains why we need to know how the sun affects the climate: it's so scientists can work out what contribution to warming is the result of greenhouse gases that humans produce, and what is down to changes in the energy coming from the sun.She has sat on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and discusses with Jim how it delivers its reports. And as a prominent scientist who speaks out about the dangers of increasing man made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, she explains how she responds to climate change deniers.