Things Can Only Get Better?

Welcome to Infinite Monkey Cage.

I'm Robin Innce.

And I'm Brian Cox.

This is the last show of the series.

Sadly, we've run out of time, despite Professor Cox promising that he'd completed his time-lengthening machine by now.

Why so long, Professor Cox?

So, in an attempt to get the most out of the final show, we are recording this while travelling at just under the speed of light relative to the listeners.

That means we will stretch time for ourselves relative to you.

But sadly, that means most of you will have been dead for a few million years by the end of this recording.

You've learnt something, haven't you, over the last few weeks?

I've learnt how magic time is.

So, in case we don't have quite enough time, here are a few ideas we haven't managed to fit into the last two series.

Symmetries are related to conservation laws through Noether's theorem.

For example, the fact that the laws of physics were invariant under rotations means that angular momentum is conserved.

And of course, the fact that they are transitionally invariant leads to the conservation of linear momentum.

Indeed.

Today, we'll be asking whether scientists' promises have made the public over-optimistic about the future.

Is there a clear line between what science should meddle with with and what it should leave alone, or is it all fair game?

Ten years ago, the mapping of the human genome was completed, and we were promised by some scientists that medicine would be transformed by the discovery.

A decade on, how close are we to a genetic revolution?

Is there a limit to what science and medicine could and should achieve for us?

As we look into the future, can things only get better?

Brian, what do you think?

Can things only get better?

Only if we accept rational thought as the way forward.

So we'll take that as a possible yes for for things only getting better.

Well, with us is a stand-up comedian who loves to lecture.

He's written and performed lectures on many subjects, including Aristotle, Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, Mark Steele.

Thanks very much.

I can also add that

your introduction is very, very similar to the discussion that Gary Lineker and Mark Lorison had on the World Cup report.

There was actually a discussion on a physics website, which I think is correct, that if the ball hits the bar twice, then it must have crossed the line.

Because there's no way that a non-spinning ball is hard.

Well, that's just geometry, isn't it?

It is geometry.

That is something we don't hear enough in football commentary.

Well, that's just geometry.

We're also joined by neurobiologist Professor Colin Blakemore, a specialist in vision and the development of the brain, and former chief executive of the Medical Research Council.

He's also a marathon runner, and he's completed 18 more marathons than Brian and me put together.

He's completed 18 marathons.

Colin, the map of the human genome was published 10 years ago now, and it was hailed as a landmark achievement.

Indeed, it was.

But what's the real potential of mapping the human genome?

Well, it was a landmark.

I mean, it really was an incredible endeavour, I mean, scientifically.

As much for the...

the collaboration, I mean, the international cooperation that was needed to produce it, as well as pots and pots of money, of course.

But I think it stands as an example of the capacity of scientists all over the world to spot that they can't solve a problem individually, which is what most scientists are about, after all, concealing from their bowels what what they're doing, getting their paper out in nature, you know, and being successful.

But here was an issue that was too big for any single person to do, but clearly very important for everyone that it was done, done by a whole group of people all over the world working in collaboration.

That's fantastic.

All right, so what is it?

It's three billion sequences of letters that tell us about the makeup of human beings, but actually of one human being, because it was only one DNA from one individual.

And a lot of the effort now, of course, is being directed at looking at the variation between people, which is really important if you're interested in disease, but not just in disease, in the variability between individuals.

As you look around a group, we're different, different in hair colour, eye colour, behaviour, height, build, lifespan, I mean, all kinds of things.

And that's to a large extent contributed by our genes.

So finding out all that stuff is necessary too.

I think the point is that people hadn't quite grasped, partly because they didn't know the science, how big the issue is beyond just knowing the genome.

Because the more we learn about genes, the more complicated it is.

So it's not just genes, what controls the genes, then what turns on the things that control the genes, and how the environment affects the things that turn on the things that control the genes.

And basically, you've got to know all of that stuff before we get the real payoff.

So is it essentially like knowing the basics of quantum mechanics, which will tell you the structure of atoms, but from that, assuming that you can derive all of chemistry?

Is it that scale of problem?

It's a complexity problem.

There is a complexity problem because in some instances you're talking about things like behaviour.

Big issue is, you know, is genetics the basis of intelligence, for instance.

And the distance between, you know, a base sitting in an DNA coil and the answer someone gives to an IQ test is clearly a complexity issue.

And genes just aren't really the right way to be describing the ultimate behaviour.

But there is another issue to it, and that's just information.

I mean, it's just knowing how genes really work.

And we obviously don't know everything about that yet.

So was it overplayed then in a sense?

Because there was a great fanfare about the, and as you said, it was a tremendous achievement from a technical perspective.

But in terms of real medical treatment, in terms of public health improving as a result of that work, was it overplayed at the end of the day?

Well, I think it was deliberately overplayed.

It was just that those guys didn't know at the time

how much more was needed to be known.

So Peter Goodfellow, long before human genome sequence, when the first human disease gene was identified, cystic fibrosis gene, a single gene, gene.

Well, actually, now we know there are lots of genes actually that are likely to be involved, but then it was thought to be a single gene that caused the disease.

Whoopee, this problem's going to be solved, isn't it?

Because we now know the cause.

And he wrote this very upbeat article saying, Now the impact on medicine is going to be even greater than the impact on science.

It's actually the other way around, because the knowledge of the gene has driven the most fantastic science, understanding how this disease is produced, but hasn't led to a cure yet.

It's just a much longer process than I think any of those guys recognised.

There is a wonderful thing at the Wellcome exhibition, just on the Euston Road.

They've got the whole of that human genome in book form, and you can just take out.

And when I first saw it, I thought, just check it's not full of blank pages.

And then did take one out, and you just edit really tiny letters.

And I was hoping that maybe there'd be a moment I'd go, hang on, they put a G where there should be a T.

Can you imagine being the copy editor for it?

Proofreading.

Oh my god.

God, proofreading the human race's DNA.

I've got to have it it in my third.

Mark, you are, well, in fact,

you're 50 this weekend.

Half century, am I allowed to say that?

Oh, george.

You are.

I don't know what it's doing for my state of mind.

I was thinking, you know, when you were growing up and, you know, that was kind of a world of dandere and tomorrow's world.

And at that point, we've been bombarded with this is what the future will be.

It was a very optimistic vision.

Do you feel in any way that slightly let down by scientific advance if you think of what's happening in that 50 years?

I don't personally feel let down by it because I think that I was always slightly sceptical of it, but not of the science, of the sort of social mechanisms that employ that science.

And one thing that I think is interesting is that certainly when I was about sort of 10, 11

sort of age, so you know the early 1970s, there were two things that we were promised that as usual with predictions about the future, we're just taking trends of the time and just imagining that they would go on forever.

One was that space travel would just be would go on and infinitely on if you like and that by now certainly we would be on Mars or whatever.

But the other thing was that new technology would mean that we would almost certainly have this crisis of having so much leisure because we would have everything done by machinery that there would be just a problem with what on earth do we do with all the time and as we know the average working week now in Britain is longer than it was back then and so it's the social mechanisms of that that employ science I mean it's you know very much like the the way the arguments that go around the the sort of things that you were talking about there when you sort of hear all the the fears if you like not the fears from people that actually despise science in all its form, but genuine fears from people when they say, oh, but with all this DNA and cloning, what if it went into the wrong hands sort of thing?

You think it's a legitimate question.

I don't agree with it.

I don't agree with disputing the value of science or certainly not with people who say that we should somehow shut it off.

This is too much information that we've got now with the implications of the human genome and so on.

But there's a fear that what if the wrong people get hold of it?

And you can see why that is, because here we are in a world where they're clearly now, certainly in a huge chunk of the world, there clearly would be the possibilities of people doing, having a far shorter week than we had, and yet somewhere we've got to a point where we're working more than ever with all the advances there have been.

Colin, is there a difficulty in, first of all, expectation management?

Big stories, you're trying to make a splash in the press and compete.

Is there a problem between expectation management, over-promising, but also scaring some people?

As Mark said, you know, there isn't a sinister element to map in the human genome.

But if you've just read Frankenstein, then you maybe members of the public can convolute all this together.

Yeah.

One of the problems is the great temptation in announcing these big investments of public money is to promise that they're going to cure all diseases.

And I think that's a mistake.

And I think the public is actually much more willing to accept that their money is being spent to generate fantastic and interesting scientific results.

I really do.

I mean look at the way that the discovery of background dark matter in the universe got the front page of the newspapers or the launch of the Hubble telescope or whatever.

The opening of the Large Hadron Collider.

They're not going to cure any diseases, but people were interested enough.

So, you know, we should not oversell medical research always by promising that it's going to cure cancer.

This is where, you know, the sort of thing that I've looked at in history, where science sort of, how science develops, or the idea of science in history, is that it seems to me that the direction of science depends upon the society in which you're talking about.

And at certain points in history, for various reasons, it has been the desire of the people running society to just have this great thirst for knowledge that it's connected not just with the not just with the people coming up with the ideas.

You know, in ancient Greece or at the time of the Renaissance or at the time of the French Revolution, just odd moments when, for various historical reasons, there is this drive to actually adore knowledge.

At other times, then science has a different role.

And at the moment, it reflects the ideas that nothing really has any value unless somebody can make a profit out of it and therefore you know that's science is obviously determined by that so if you can't sort of come up with some if you can't get a sponsor for this particle thing then what's the but the sponsors have to recognize that the way to the really big payoffs look at history is to allow good scientists relatively free reign to exercise their own curiosity i mean i give it i'll give you two more recent examples than the greeks of attempts to direct science one of which worked and the other didn't the one that worked was kennedy's commitment to be on the moon moon, you know, by the end of the decade.

Why did it work?

Because all the science was done.

Basically, all the science was done.

It was just technology.

An awful lot of heavyweight technology.

Very, very impressive.

But that was driven by the Cold War.

It was driven by the Cold War.

Yeah, okay, that's the motive.

But it got done because it didn't actually involve dictating the direction of basic research.

And the place where

a commitment was made that didn't work was Nixon's War on Cancer.

Massive amounts of public money in the 60s injected into cancer research, which generated fantastic cell biology and molecular biology.

That's true, but it didn't cure cancer because the time wasn't ripe for it.

So that failed in a way to deliver on the target, generated lots of good science.

And I suppose that's a good question.

So you can't, the message I think is you can't top-down control the success of fundamental research.

By definition, it depends on risk, on chance, on curiosity.

How far, I mean, what are the limits, do you think, in terms of how far we can go?

When we're looking at certainly what can be done with the human body and how much we can discover about the human mind, how far do you think we can actually go?

How much should people expect in the next 50 years, for instance?

Well, you know, prediction's always a problem.

Let me just give you a 50 years is a

good time scale,

your age.

You know, those Christmas greetings cards, birthday cards, you open them, they play a little tune.

You know, they cost, you know, whatever, 50 pence.

The computing power in one of those is more than the totality of all computing power in the world 50 years ago.

Kind of sobering thought.

So the expansion of computing capacity has driven so much innovation from the supercomputers to the iPod.

And that will, at least for the next 10, 15 years, carry on.

And then we'll be down to the problem of molecular dimensions and have to have new forms of computing elements, different sorts of chips, if that's going to continue to grow.

But adding to human capacity by making machines that can do things faster or better, or even different from the things that we can do.

That'll undoubtedly continue.

Okay, let's fantasize a little bit then.

Why not have extra bits of electronics which plug into us?

And people do speculate about that, you know, plug-in memories and stuff that actually go into the brain.

I think that's a speculation too far.

For one thing, it implies that the kinds of processing that go on in a chip are in principle the same as the sorts of processing that go on in the brain.

Well, we don't know everything about brain processing, but what we do know suggests it's really pretty different.

And anyway, why stick the thing in your head?

You know, when you could be holding it in your iPad or your iPhone, it will do the job, and two or three people can see it if you want to, as well as you feeling it inside your head.

There are people actually working on this, is there?

On devices that interact with the interface with brains, yes, but they're doing it for the obvious good reasons.

Helping people who have brain injuries or spinal cord injuries to communicate with prostheses and move around.

Picking up activity from their brain, using it to control things.

Oh, right.

It's interesting what

medical progress specifically, though you mentioned Nixon with a war on cancer.

So we still have a war on cancer now.

We've made progress.

But let's take cancers specifically.

I mean, are we a lot closer to really being able to cure most cancers, to prevent people from dying from cancer at any point in the future?

Well, I mean, this is the most obvious payoff of the Human Genome Project.

And it'll come, interestingly, not from studies of whole human genetics genomes, but from the genetic changes that occur in cancer cells.

And we're learning about that very, very quickly.

So the possibility of being able to direct,

target drug treatments or other forms of treatment on the basis of the genetic changes which have happened spontaneously inside a group of cells which has become a cancer, that's really going to progress.

So these stem cell transplants that people have, the knowledge around that, does that flow from what you're talking about?

No, no, no.

And these are usually treatments for the sort of blood cancers, for leukemia and so on, bone marrow transplantation.

And that's been going on for a very long time.

Actually, it's been going on since before we really knew about stem cells, kind of empirical medicine, if you like, that works.

But the hope of

treating other sorts of diseases, including other sorts of cancer, by stem cells, is certainly on the books.

And that's paradoxical because

stem cells in themselves, in principle, are kind of cancerous.

One of the properties of stem cells is they're capable of dividing forever.

They're immortal.

And that's exactly the characteristic of cancer cells.

So there's this sort of narrow borderline between cells that might help treat diseases and changes in cells that can cause cancer.

Colin, you mentioned immortality.

In stem cells, they're essentially immortal.

So there are living things that are in principle immortal.

Are we in principle immortal?

I mean, presumably, people always die of something, or do we just fundamentally wear out at some point?

Well, actually, Brian, that's not clear that

we always die of something.

There are some species that do.

I mean, there are some reptiles, some fish, and so on, that seem to be capable of growing.

They've got lots of active stem cells everywhere growing forever,

and they don't die until they're knocked off by something.

And fruit flies, for instance, too.

Apparently, there's evidence that

the chance of a fruit fly dying is the same, whatever age a fruit fly is.

And the mathematical function of death suggests that as well.

So if it never got squashed,

that's right.

It won't just be there forever.

It would go on forever.

Sort of could be, yeah.

Now, are people like that?

I mean, we live a lot longer than fruit flies.

Because Because remember, you know, fruit flies normally only live a few days or whatever it is.

But it's always accidental death for those things.

They get eaten.

Well, yeah.

But, you know, when you get to big things like trees and people and elephants and so on, there might be a real finite lifetime because things just accumulate gradually going wrong and then the whole great system body falls apart and you die.

Well, yeah, but

that would suggest that there's a real limit to life expectancy.

We've been sitting since 1840 until now, life expectancy on average in the world, for the developed world, has been increasing by seven hours a day.

So when you go home tonight, you know, you'll live seven hours longer than if

you've been born a day earlier.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

Seven hours a day improvement of life expectancy.

Now, everybody thought, well, that's right, that's clean water and it's good food and it's vaccinations and it's antibiotics and things like that.

So we should have kind of run out of those things by now.

But we haven't.

It's still inexorably going up.

So the insurance companies and the pension companies and governments, you know, with

Social Security benefits and so on, are getting really, really worried about people living too long.

You can see the discussion about the possibility of the age of qualification for state benefits going up by one year every five.

It needs to, because the life expectancy,

the extra life expectancy of a man aged 65 is now increasing by about two and a half months a year.

The majority of babies born since 2000 will live to be more than 100.

I mean, that's almost certain.

First of all, what does that tell us about the science?

Are we really potentially immortal?

And even more interesting, do we want to be immortal?

Just imagine the consequences of it for the world as a whole, not just for individuals.

Mark, you're about to have a birthday, you're about to be 50.

Now, someone told me this bit of it may be rubbish philosophy or psychology, that in fact, the older you get, you get to a certain point where once everything is kind of falling apart and it's not really working out, that you feel vaguely depressed.

And the idea is that through some form of evolutionary psychology, which I know is often poo-pooed, that eventually you go, oh, I wish this was over, and then it is.

So, are you getting any sense of that?

Oh, I had it at 24.

I know, I think I've done, there's probably a million things I'd like to do, and out of those, I've done 11.

So,

I'm not,

I'm not, I'm not at all feeling like that.

But no, I can see, but then you're talking about something different, though, because you know, obviously, if we were immortal, but it was still the case that once you got to 86 that you were blind and deaf and could barely walk and was on a drip and now you had another eight million years of that to go that probably would be a nuisance yeah i think that you know most people apart from a few odd people in california

waiting in refrigerators to be reborn i mean most of us don't want to live forever and that and actually the surveys show that if you ask people over about the age of 50 or 60 whether they want to live forever they generally say well no and if you say well then how long do you want to live the answer is always the same.

You know, another 10 years or so.

But everybody at any age wants to live for another 10 years.

But they don't want to live forever.

I want to live long enough to look good smoking a pipe.

Well, we're going to just very quickly move on to

another subject because we are running slightly out of time.

Now, one of the things that happens with age is a change of your hopes and your dreams.

Now, for many of us, we may well be young and we want to be rock stars when we grow up and we become physicists.

And so, this may not have been predicted that wannabe rock stars would actually gain their rock star status by being physicists.

But the trouble is, how difficult is it to be a physicist stroke rock star?

We asked the pros from Dover to find out for us.

A one, two, three, four.

What are you doing?

Nothing.

Brian, you can't point out prime numbers every time we get a song in.

I don't.

Four's not a prime number.

Now, if it was one, two, three, five.

Brian, look, I'm throwing you out of the band.

What?

You're just not rock and roll enough.

I threw a TV out of our hotel window.

In a controlled experiment to compare wind resistance of flat screen versus cathode ray.

Versus trouser press versus mini-bar.

We got a huge bill.

Yeah, which the research council paid.

I had a different woman in every hotel room.

Brian?

Well, I'm young, single, on tour.

I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to study regional variations in bone density among women between 55 and 80.

Anyway, I wrote a song for us.

Babe, I'm hot for you.

Babe, I'm hot for you.

It was about heat transference and the second law of thermodynamics.

Sure?

You rhymed thighs with Nobel Prize.

That's clever.

You thought Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On was about getting a pacemaker fitted.

Well, it's very misleading.

Look, I'm just worried about the band's direction.

I've told you.

I've bought a sat-nav for the van.

The musical direction?

Brian, I'm sorry, it's just not working.

Well, how do you know?

We haven't tested it sufficiently, or had another band, a control band, one without me in it, running concurrently.

Brian, that would be a huge waste of resources.

I'm sorry, Brian.

I can't believe it.

I'm out of the band.

I don't want to end up like the forgotten beetle.

Oh, come on, Brian.

Ringo's hardly forgotten.

Who's Ringo?

I meant Rantus Abaratus, the water beetle.

It's gone extinct, you know.

Well,

all right.

Goodbye, Keith, and good luck.

Goodbye, Brian.

I hope I'm doing the right thing.

He couldn't half make that mess spectrometer see.

Well, there we are.

So that is, though it has little to do with the actual discussion we've had.

Those are why rock stars eventually have to go full-time and become physicists.

Anyway, so we have now, we're approaching the end, and we still are left with the question, things, can they only get better?

Now, I think it's going to be difficult to answer because during this series uh ben miller who was our guest at chelton a few weeks ago was reunited with his primary school science teacher mr bailey and the experimental research that's going ahead we're told between them is going fantastically well so maybe what we really need to do to create the answer to can things only get better is another reunion Brian the only way I think we can discover if things can only get better

well it's difficult isn't it we need to get a meeting of minds

And

so I think we should probably actually just reunite you with the lead singer and lead songwriter of your last ever rock band, Peter Cunner.

It's like this is your mind.

This is the only way I can get to see you these days.

It is you.

Honestly.

How are you doing?

Very well.

Hello, that's.

I'm genuinely surprised.

There you are.

It was all cloak and dagger.

What do do you think about immortality then?

Immortality, bring it on.

I mean, if I could be the guy I was in 1994 to 96 for 100 years.

You haven't changed.

Can you expand on that a bit?

What were you doing in 1994?

Talk about the bone density of 18-year-olds to 30-year-olds.

That was probably closer to the mark.

I genuinely don't know what to say.

You should have worked out the fact that in the last bit...

Why am I leaning across my script so nothing can be seen there?

I just thought you'd gone mad.

I started reading out a load of nonsense that wasn't planned.

There we go.

Can we find you a lead touching moment?

You said, and we've flown him all the way from New Zealand.

It's right.

Ealing, isn't it?

Ealing, yeah.

Pig farming, isn't it?

All the way on the central line.

Now, one thing I do want to know: is it right that through Brian's connections, one of your pop videos was actually filmed.

Was it in the...

Yes, it's Jodrell Bank.

Jodrell Bank.

Yeah, we had a...

I mean, that was an amazing idea because I had a tune called Party Up the World, which I just thought was a good idea about sending out a nice message to the world about, you know, joining a universal world party, if you like.

And then Brian took us on a day trip up to Jodrell, which is, as you pull up to it, it looks like, you know, an alien has landed in the middle of this expanse.

And his enthusiasm is so infectious.

We got to wander around it a bit.

And then, I suppose, I can't remember when the light bulb moment came, but we put two and two together.

And the next thing I know, he's got me at the, what's the pinnacle of the...

the satellite dish.

I'm standing there precariously, not even tied, no, nothing official, no help in safety.

Don't tell anybody.

But they have this robot flying around me and it was just it just turned out really well.

They were in the middle of the dish.

We borrowed it for two days.

It's three-quarters of an acre in area, this thing.

And I remember we had this script and Bernard Lovell actually was kept away because Sir Bernard would not have enjoyed it.

Because the script just said on the front, D-Ream video, Jodrell Bank, 15th of August, Transvestite party terrorists invade Jodrell.

That's what it said.

That's the thing.

And I remember Bernard Lovell actually,

the phone call came through.

We were filming there for two days.

So we had the dish pointing directly upwards and you can run around in it and dancing around.

And then a phone call came through and it was the the test match was on at Old Trafford, do you remember?

And it was Bernard's coming, he's bringing John Major.

And we all had to hide in a cupboard.

Do you remember?

The film crew and the band and everyone sat in a cupboard while Sir Bernard came with John Major, showed him around.

Sir Bernard, if you're listening, he probably still doesn't know that we borrowed the telescope and I apologise, but there we go.

It's worse that John Major should then not only be knocked out of Ten Downing Street, but then hear all the time your song being played on the night of his loss.

It's a beautiful moment, though.

Wouldn't you see it in the TV series, the kind of adaptation of the life of De-Reem?

In episode 5, you have that moment where, come on, Brian, we've finished doing the pop video.

No, you lads go.

I'm staying at Jodsville Bank.

Bits can only get better!

So that brings this series to an end.

And surprisingly, in two series, we still have managed to answer all the questions of science.

So we'll try and do that when we return in November.

Yeah, thank you to our guests, Colin Blakemore, Mark Steele, and Peter Cunner.

Surprising.

If you have a question about the nature of the universe or the problems of replication, then why not write to Simon Jenkins?

If you'd like to listen to this programme again, it's available as a podcast from the BBC Radio 4 website, iTunes, and all those other places.

So, instead of Carl Sagan, this week we're going to leave you with the words of a great physicist, Richard Feynman.

I'm not afraid of being lost in a mysterious universe with no purpose, which is the way it is, possibly.

It doesn't frighten me.

Exciting, isn't it?

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Now I've found James Canal.

Come on in with a tiny

thing.

Can only get better.

Can only get better.