The Life Scientific Folgen

What once took decades, now takes days, thanks to an astonishingly powerful new technique invented by Richard Henderson, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Richard grew up in a remote village in the Scottish borders exploring the countryside and reading the weekly bundles of comics sent by his great aunt, as part of a care package for his family. When he started work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a string of Nobel Prizes had been awarded for x-ray crystallography, a technique that had revealed the double helix structure of DNA, and the atomic structure of haemoglobin, vitamin B12 and insulin. But Richard decided to experiment with a radical new approach, using electrons not x-rays. After an early success in 1975, he spent the next 15 years trying to improve the resolution of electron crystallography and, in 1990, he managed to see in astonishing atomic detail how individual atoms were arranged within a particular biological molecule. Next, however, he decided that the future of microscopy lay in different direction and,despite the initial results being very blurry, he embraced a more direct approach to microscopy that involved flash freezing molecules to catch them, mid-movement, as they existed in nature. Undeterred by a steady stream of technical problems, Richard spent the next 17 years refining this new approach to microscopy convinced that it should outperform all the others and, in 2012, he was proved right. Cryo electron microscopy now enables us to see how the individual atoms are arranged within biological molecules that were previously opaque. We are seeing atomic structures that have never been seen before and, since these are the molecules that make life possible, knowing what they look like is worth millions to pharmaceutical companies trying to design drugs to activate or inhibit their action. Richard talks to Jim Al-Khalili about half a century of problem solving and the bold strategic decisions that led him to be awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, together with Joaquim Frank and Jacques Dubochet. Producer: Anna Buckley.

2018 is having the worst flu season for seven years. Influenza continues to make a lot of us feel very ill, and it can of course be fatal. Wendy Barclay, Professor Virology at Imperial College London, has spent many years trying to learn everything she can about the way flu viruses behave. These microscopic infectious organisms are formidable foes - they mutate all the time, making it hard to predict which strain is going to be the one to make us sick and therefore to design effective vaccines against it. Jim al-Khalili talks to Wendy Barclay about how she uses genetics to understand how flu viruses mutate. She explains how she began her scientific career studying physical sciences but then became fascinated by viruses. Her first experience of working with viruses was when she found herself doing nasal swabs of snuffling volunteers when she did her PhD looking for a vaccine against the common cold.

Nothing annoys Eugenia Cheng more than the suggestion that there is no creativity in mathematics. Doing mathematics is not about being a human calculator, she says. She doesn't spend her time multiplying big numbers in her head. She sits in hotel bars drawing (mainly arrows) with a fine quill pen, thinking about how ideas from different areas of mathematics relate to one another and hoping to reveal a unifying, underlying logic to the whole of mathematics. Her area of research, Category Theory, makes algebra seem superficial. And if that makes your head hurt a little, don't worry. Feeling confused is an essential part of doing mathematics. 'You can't make progress without it' Eugenia says. Jim asks Eugenia what drove her to such a high level of abstraction and learns more about her mission to rid the world of maths phobia, by baking. Producer: Anna Buckley Photo credit: Paul Crisanti, PhotoGetGo.