Medicine

We now know that the brain - the organ that more than any other makes us human - is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied. The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires. And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all - whether we realise it or not - carrying out science from the moment we are born.

Dr Adam Rutherford shows how decoding the genome has led us to begin to understand the very process by which our DNA makes us different; how it makes each one of us on earth unique and influences who we are and the traits we have. He reveals how, as we try and understand the relationship between who we are and our genes, we stand at the beginning of the most exciting scientific journey of all time.

Autistic minds provide windows into how we all think, feel, and behave. A complete brain science should be able to account for all kinds of minds and brains. As long as some minds remain a mystery, so too will all minds.
Michael Stevens travels to London to meet a blind, autistic savant with astonishing musical abilities, and volunteers to have his brain's function temporarily disrupted at UCLA's Neuromodulation Lab.

Heart disease is the number one cause of deaths worldwide, killing more than eight million people each year. Cardiac infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, can happen without warning, killing heart muscle cells immediately. Even if the patient recovers, the damage to their heart may not.
But there are researchers frantically working to change that. Meet the people inventing the future of cardiac health, from new ways of imaging the body, to the possibility of 3D printing a functioning heart.

A single microscopic brain cell cannot think, is not conscious, but if you bring in a few more brain cells, and a few more, and connect them all, at a certain point, the group itself will be able to think and experience emotions and have opinions and a personality and know that it exists. How can such astonishing things be made from such simple ingredients? Well, answering that question means learning not only who we are but, more importantly, how we are.
Today, using what neuroscientists know so far, we are going to make a town function like a brain, using people as neurons.

Dr Chris van Tulleken, Dr Hannah Fry and Michael Mosley examine the latest research and explore some of the big questions about Covid-19 and the pandemic it has created. Michael visits the UK government's high-security laboratory Porton Down, where vaccines are being tested. He also uncovers what the experience of the 2002 SARs epidemic reveals about this one. Both were caused by coronaviruses, but certain key changes to today's virus have allowed it to infect the world, where SARs was contained.