Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

Pain is a deeply subjective thing. When it’s with us it’s all we can think about. So, what is life like then for someone for whom pain never leaves? Haider Warraich, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of 'The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain' joins Jonathan to discuss.

It can be easy to think poorly of humans. When we're not destroying the planet or starting wars, we're likely off somewhere making fools of ourselves on social media. We're not all bad though, as some people dedicate their spare time, and even their lives, to helping others. But can we say the same about other animals? (We're looking at you, cats.) Bob Pitman is a Marine Ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

We have covered the lives and behaviors of bees a few times here on the programme. So much so we thought we’ve seen and heard it all. Well, we may have been wrong about that…in particular, with something to do with the dance they perform in the hive and how it relates to their ability to communicate and navigate. Prof. Jürgen Tautz is a bee expert, animal behaviorist and Emeritus Professor at the Biozentrum, University of Würzburg and author of ‘Communication Between Honeybees: More Than Just a Dance in the Dark’ and he joined Jonathan on the show.

Yiddish author and playwright Sholem Aleichem; the man whose stories formed the basis for 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof once proposed that “life is a dream for the wise but a game for the fool”. So, is modern technology and more specifically “Gamification” making fools of all of us? Adrian Hon - CEO of Six to Start and author of You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All joined Jonathan on the show to discuss.

Average adults' heart beats 72 times a minute. In a lifetime it creates enough energy to drive the truck to the moon and back and generates astonishingly 2,5 gigajoules of energy. Yet, cardiac arrests and heart diseases are major causes of death worldwide, despite decades of research. How much further we'll have to go before we solve this problem? To discuss Jonathan was joined by Sian Harding, Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and author of The Exquisite Machine. The New Science of the Heart.

Drug development is notoriously slow and expensive to bring a new compound from the lab bench to market. A major cause of this inefficiency is the traditional reliance on testing drugs in animals before they are tested in humans. Animal models often do not accurately reflect human physiology, meaning that drugs that appear to be safe and effective in animals frequently turn out to be harmful or ineffective in humans. The solution could come from computer microchip manufacturing methods to create “Organs-on-Chips", microfluidic culture devices that recapitulate the complex structures and functions of living human organs. Dane Gobel, the Co-Founder and Operations Director of Methuselah Foundation joins Jonathan to discuss.

If you have acute migraines, your doctor might refer you to a neurologist. If your Asthma is really bad, maybe you’ll be sent to a respiratory specialist. They will then use their expertise to alleviate your symptoms but crucially they won’t be able to tell you what is causing your illness because frankly, they don’t know. So, what if the ultimate cause of these ailments isn’t happening in the brains or the lungs but elsewhere? Doesn’t that present a problem for how our medical system operates? The resounding answer is yes according to Professor Harald Schmidt who is Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Personalized Medicine at the University of Maastricht and author of 'The End of Medicine as We Know It and Why Your Health Has a Future'. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

Recently, the Chinese government has been testing a thorium nuclear reactor that uses molten salt as a coolant. Although this radioactive element has been trialed in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology. The Wuwei reactor is designed to produce just 2 megawatts of thermal energy, which is only enough to power up to 1,000 homes. But if the experiments are a success, China hopes to build a reactor that could power hundreds of thousands of homes by 2030. So could Thorium Nuclear Reactors be the answer to all of our current climate woes? Simon Middleburgh, Professor of Materials at the Nuclear Futures Institute in Bangor University joins Jonathan to discuss.

Depending on your social media proclivities you may or may not have noticed that your feed is awash with images from the JWST. Certainly science Twitter is very excited about it. And so they should be, it’s amazing to see what we can observe of the very big and very far away thanks to the increased resolution of our newest space telescope. In a similar vein the third run of the Large Hadron Collider is allowing us to peer ever further into the world of the very small. So what might we find? Amanda Donohue is a UCD Doctoral Student at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN Jon Butterworth is Professor of Physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

How do you eat an elephant? One spoon at a time, right? Well It's the same with living forever. No one is going to find a magic potion that will make you 20 again but over the years we are slowly, consistently and incrementally improving patient health and preventing diseases associated with ageing. We've nearly doubled life expectancy in just over a century. Doubled! Jonathan caught up with Author and Biomedical Gerontologist Aubrey De Grey at the Inaugural Longevity Summit in Dublin to hear why he thinks the first person to live to 150 has already been born.