The Life Scientific

Jim Al-Khalili talks to the pioneering health services researcher, Iain Chalmers, who was one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration. Once described by one writer as 'The Maverick Master of Medical Evidence'. Iain Chalmers trained as a doctor, eventually specialising in obstetrics. But early in his career, he started to question the basis of everything he was trained to do and this set him on a very different path: to champion treatments based on the best available evidence, first in his own field and then across healthcare. It's a journey that has at times challenged the foundations of medical practice. In 1992, he was appointed Director of the Cochrane Centre, which led to the foundation of the Cochrane Collaboration, dedicated to ensuring that patients, doctors and researchers have access to unbiased information about the effectiveness of healthcare interventions, across the world. Iain wants to reduce uncertainty in medicine so that patients can make sensible choices about their care. There are now 30,000 Cochrane members world wide, from Brazil to Belgium, Spain to South Africa. He's been hugely influential both within medicine but across all areas of social policy and the inspiration for a generation of evidence-based, sceptical enquirers such as Ben Goldacre. A frequent irritant of the medical establishment Iain become one of them when he was knighted for services to healthcare in 2000.Having spent his career trying to change the mindset of the medical community from the inside, he's now pushing from the outside, arguing that patients' concerns should drive the medical research agenda. Producer: Rami Tzabar.

What do miniature solar cells, making clothes that dissolve in the rain and new treatments for motor neurone disease all have in common? Chemistry - according to Professor Tony Ryan of Sheffield University. He develops innovative materials with nanotechnology. In this week's, The Life Scientific, Tony Ryan talks to Jim Al-Khalili and explores issues around the still controversial science of nanotechnology, including how safe it is and how scientists need to learn to talk to the public.Much of Tony's work involves unlikely collaborations to discover novel ways of solving problems and of communicating science. He argues that chemistry can solve today's global challenges such as supporting the needs of 7 billion people in terms of food and power.Clothes that absorb a dangerous greenhouse gas and sheets of plastic solar cells are just a few of his ongoing projects. He says chemistry needs to learn how to recycle every atom, whilst still providing all the things that people want - energy, food, electronics, clothing, and drugs. Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Jim Al-Khalili meets leading paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer to find who our ancestors were. As a post graduate Chris went on a road trip with a difference, driving round Europe in an old Morris Minor measuring Neanderthal skulls. After being thrown out of several countries, the results of his analysis led to a controversial theory which ran counter to what many people thought at the time. Chris suggested that our most recent relative originated in Africa. He also reveals how genetics has transformed his work and talks about his own unconventional origins.That there were cannibals in Somerset is one of the more surprising findings of Chris' work on early man in Britain and Jim discovers what it's like to work on an archaeological dig.Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Jim al-Khalili talks to psychiatrist, Robin Murray about his life's work trying to understand why some people have schizophrenia and others don't. As a young man, Murray lived in an Asylum in Glasgow for two years, mainly because it offered free accommodation to medical students. Struck by how people's minds could play tricks on them and the lack of proper research into the condition, he resolved to put the study of schizophrenia on a more scientific footing. Fifteen years ago he believed schizophrenia was a brain disease. Now, he's not so sure. Despite decades of research, the biological basis of this often distressing condition remains elusive. Just living in a city significantly increases your risk (the bigger the city the greater the risk); and, as Murray discovered, migrants are six times more likely to develop the condition than long term residents. He's also outspoken about the mental health risks of smoking cannabis, based both on his scientific research and direct experience working at the Maudsley Hospital in South London. Producer: Anna Buckley.

On this day eight years ago, planetary scientist Colin Pillinger was still hopeful that the Beagle 2 Lander that he had spent years designing, building and publicising (with the help of Blur and Damien Hirst) might yet be found somewhere on the surface of Mars. But, as more time passed, it became clear that The Beagle 2 Lander would be forever lost in space. Jim al -Khalili talks to Colin Pillinger about studying moon rock and meteorites from Mars whilst running a successful dairy farm; broken space dreams and why, even if a space project fails, useful scientific lessons can still be learned.

He's the man on the telly with the big moustache, famous for A Child of Our Time, The Human Body and Making Babies but Robert Winston is also a well respected scientist. He played a pioneering role in developing IVF technology, and has brought life to many hundreds of couples who had given up hope of ever having a baby . Jim Al-Khalili talks to Robert Winston about why he quit the theatre to become a medic, creating human life in a test tube and why he disagrees with Richard Dawkins about The God Delusion. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Tim Hunt is an experimental wizard, a flamboyant thinker and a stickler for scientific procedure. As a young man at Cambridge in the sixties, he heard Francis Crick (of DNA fame) ask questions "that made him sound rather stupid"; broke into workshops and performed experiments through the night with Bach and Pink Floyd playing at top volume. True eureka moments are, in fact, quite rare in science but, at the age of 39, Tim Hunt performed an experiment on sea urchin eggs that changed both his life and our understanding of every living thing. He had very little idea what exactly it all meant but had a strong sense that he was onto something important. And he was. Back in the early eighties, it just wasn't obvious that all life worked in the same way. But what Tim Hunt showed was that the process by which cells divide (and therefore live and grow) is the same in all living things and that this process is controlled by a protein that appears and disappears in the most startling fashion. It was a most unexpected result that many believed was rather insignificant but Hunt pursued it. Accused by some of "wild speculation based on faulty logic": that same logic led to him winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2001. In 1990, he joined Cancer Research. In theory his discovery should shed light on why cancerous cells multiply out of control but, in reality, he says, progress in cancer research has been disappointingly slow. In fact, he says all the money that poured into cancer research did more to help us tackle HIV than it did to help cure the big C. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Professor Uta Frith came from a grey post war Germany to Britain in the swinging sixties, when research into conditions such as autism and dyslexia was in its infancy. At the time many people thought there was no such thing as dyslexia and that autism was a result of cold distant parenting, but Professor Frith was convinced that the explanation for these enigmatic conditions lay in the brain. And she set out to prove this through a series of elegant experiments. Together with her students Francesca Happe and Simon Baron Cohen she developed the idea that people with autism find it hard to understand the intentions of others, known as theory of mind. Neuro-imaging experiments carried out with her husband Professor Chris Frith, meant she was able to show that there is a region in the brain which is linked to dyslexia. Uta Frith talks about her pioneering work that has changed how we view these brain disorders with Jim Al Khalili. Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Jim al-Khalili talks to biologist John Sulston about sequencing the genome first of a worm and then of man. When, as a young man, John Sulston first decided to sequence the DNA of a worm, many of his fellow scientists thought he was wasting his time. It took twenty years of painstaking research but it paid off handsomely. Sulston's research on this humble worm led to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the modern age - the sequencing of the human genome. Jim al -Khalili talks to Sulston about the highs and lows of doing genetic research; fighting to keep scientific findings in the public domain; protecting human health against corporate wealth; and having his DNA portrait done. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Nicky Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition at Cambridge University. Her work challenges how we think of intelligence and she says that birds' brains developed independently from humans or apes. Members of the corvid family, such as crows and jays appear to plan for the future and predict other birds behaviour in her elegant experiments.One experiment she has designed was inspired by Aesop's fable of the hungry crow. Her work raises questions about the understanding of animal behaviour, including whether, as humans, we can ever interpret the actions of other species accurately. But she says her research with birds and other animals can help illuminate young children's activities and how their brains develop. Nicky Clayton is scientist in residence at the Rambert Dance Company and her latest collaboration with Mark Baldwin, the artistic director, is "Seven for a secret, never to be told" which takes concepts from childhood behaviour and reinterprets them choreographically. Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.