The Life Scientific Folgen

C. elegans is a rather special worm, so-named for the elegant way it moves in sinusoidal curves. It's studied, and much loved, by thousands of scientists around the world. Alison Woollard joined this exclusive club of worm scientists when she moved to the world famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, also known as 'worm Mecca' in 1995. She started her career working as a lab technician, having dropped out of university. After later graduating from Birkbeck, she worked on yeast. But once she found the worm there was no turning back. She describes the hours she spent staring down the microscope at these tiny creatures, unprepossessing to the uninitiated, but an absolute joy to her. These hours led her to the discovery of two genes responsible for different defects in the tails of the male worms, called male abnormality 2 and male abnormality 9. (There are no female worms by the way, only males and hermaphrodites). It's not easy finding a gene or genes when you don't even know what it is that you're looking for, only the effect it has on the tails of mutant worms, each no more than a mm long. And it took Alison a year of repetitive trial and error to see which normal gene corrected the fault in the next generation. "Most days are failures", she says. Finding her first gene was a euphoric moment. She celebrated by buying everyone a cup of tea. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Alan Winfield is the only Professor of Robot Ethics in the world. He is a voice of reason amid the growing sense of unease at the pace of progress in the field of artificial intelligence. He believes that robots aren't going to take over the world - at least not any time soon. But that doesn't mean we should be complacent.Alan Winfield talks to Jim al-Khalili about how, at a young age, he delighted in taking things apart. After his degree in microelectronics and a PhD in digital communication at Hull University, he set up a software company in the mid-80s, which he ran for the best part of a decade before returning to academia. In 1993, he co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of the West of England, by far the largest centre of robotics in the UK. Today, he is a leading authority, not only on robot ethics, but on the idea of swarm robotics and biologically-inspired robotics. Alan explains to Jim that what drives many of his enquiries is the deeply profound question: how can 'stuff' become intelligent.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely has spent his whole career arguing that mental and physical health are inseparable and that the Cinderella status of mental health funding is a national disgrace. His current role, as President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has given him a platform to bang the drum for parity of funding, better training for doctors and the need to reduce stigma around mental health (and armchair psychiatrists who think it's OK to diagnose the new American President with a mental illness get short shrift as well). Professor of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, part of King's College in London, Simon Wessely has always been fascinated by those puzzling symptoms and syndromes which can't easily be explained. So it was perhaps inevitable that he would find himself at the centre of research trying to explain the distressing and debilitating illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Threats and abuse finally led to him leave this particular research field, and he moved instead to military health and another complex illness which appeared after the first Gulf War in the early 90s, Gulf War Syndrome. Years of detailed epidemiological studies about the health of British troops followed through the King's Centre for Military Health Research and many of the findings had a direct impact on policy within the armed forces. Yet for somebody who has spent years as a psychiatrist treating patients with serious mental illness, Simon tells Jim Al-Khalili that people are tougher than many in authority give credit for and his research has had a major impact on the way we treat people after traumatic events. We used to think "better out than in" but studies showed after the London 7/7 Bombings for example, that jumping in and getting people to talk through the trauma straight away can actually do more harm than good.