Self-Assembly: Nature’s way to do it
Biology operates at two levels: the large scale which we can see and the underlying microscopic one. The amazing way in which intermolecular forces cause protein arrays to self-assemble, enabling Nature to fabricate the large scale components of livi....
More details | Watch nowNuts and Bolts of the Mind
Susan Greenfield conducts us on an exhilarating tour of brain. A brief fascinating historical introduction is followed by a discussion on our present, admittedly limited, understanding of this amazing organ. Members of the group handle (and dissect) ....
More details | Watch nowIn the Oceans
Satellite, ship survey and computer modelling studies of the workings of the marine environment are used explore present fish supplies worldwide. The desperate need for global 'farming' strategies necessary to ensure that the Oceans can continue to p....
More details | Watch nowFlight in Birds and Aeroplanes
John Maynard Smith, one of our most eminent evolutionary biologists and scientific communicators originally trained as an engineer and spent the war years designing aircraft. He describes the way that flight developed in the animal kingdom. The fossi....
More details | Watch nowFred Sanger – Father of Molecular Biology
Fred Sanger is often considered the father of modern molecular biology, and is one of the few people to have been awarded two Nobel prizes. Working in Cambridge he developed a new chromatographic method for determining amino-acid end-groups. His n....
More details | Watch nowBert Sakmann
Winner of the Nobel Prize 1991 in Physiology / Medicine 1991 together with Erwin Neher 'for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells'
More details | Watch nowPlague-carrying crayfish
The Origin of Life
In modern organisms, there is a division of labour between two kinds of molecule: DNA, which stores and transmits genetic information, and proteins, which do all the work. They are connected by the 'genetic code', whereby DNA specifies what kinds of ....
More details | Watch now