Science Club (2012) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
DNA, sexual attraction, inheritance.
Bicycles.
Polish vodka.
Tonight, we talk about how we make new life.
Tonight we talk about how YOU were made.
My name is Dara O Briain.
Welcome to Science Club.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Welcome and good evening.
In our audience, curious people are here.
Some fine minds.
Professor Steve Jones, thank you for joining us.
We'll discuss genetics later.
We'll have reports from Alok Jha and Tali Sharot.
Ed Byrne will join us.
- You've got something for us? - I'll toss something into your gene pool.
Lovely.
Very appetising.
We'll do an experiment with Mark Miodownik that you can repeat at home.
But so to sex.
As a method of passing on our DNA, it is more fun than spitting into a cup.
Once that moment has passed, is it the best way to move this species along? We put sex and inheritance under the microscope.
Here at my new science club, we'll probe the topic in all sorts of different ways while neuro-scientist Tali Sharot asks can we pass on traits that aren't in our genes? This is a new frontier of medicine.
Science journalist Alok Jha questions if the Genome Project was all it was cracked up to be.
We did not overstate the case.
We said this would be key to medicine.
That's absolutely right.
Comedian Ed Byrne gets to grips with his Neanderthal family history.
I don't mean to disrespect her but would our breeding with Neanderthal have coincided at all with the invention of alcohol? Professor Mark Miodownik takes the technological view by pulling a bike apart and showing how they've influenced our sexual selection.
All this and more in this week's Science Club.
APPLAUSE While you're watching, you can get facts and doodles by following or going to our website.
When it comes to passing on genes from one generation to the next, it's only been the last 100 years that we've understood what goes on.
One of life's great mysteries and this is what we used to think.
The story of inheritance begins, like many things, with the ancient Greeks.
Aristotle, fresh from inventing logic itself, noted that children often looked like their parents.
Aristotle decided that the man determined the form of the child, whilst the woman provided the material.
He planted the seed, she provided the soil that fed it.
For hundreds of years, this was as far as people got.
The first clues to what goes on inside women, came in the 1600s.
Two Dutch medics announced that women produced eggs, like birds.
A few years later, another Dutchman, a fabric merchant, made a startling discovery by examining the contents of his trousers with a primitive microscope.
Semen seemed to be full of tiny creatures that thrashed around like a snake.
He had discovered sperm.
Most people thought babies must start off as perfect miniatures, inside either egg or sperm.
But no-one knew which.
By the 1800s, the inheritance question took another leap forward, thanks to some farmers.
Men like Robert Bakewell were a new breed, who saw sheep as machines, for turning grass into money.
He bred his best males with his best females.
The resulting super sheep suggested offspring were a mixture of their parents.
Naturally, it wasn't quite that simple.
In Austria, a monk called Gregor Mendel, had spent years breeding pea plants - tall with short, yellow with green.
His results suggested that instead of a simple blend, each offspring received one element for height or colour from each of its parents but that one could override the other.
By 1909, Mendel's elements had been renamed genes.
A year later, whilst breeding flies, Thomas Morgan showed these genes lived on tiny structures inside the cell - the chromosomes.
The science of genetics has been born.
Scientists delved deeper until Watson and Crick finally revealed the double helix of DNA.
So how does inheritance work? Put simply, we receive half our dad's chromosomes from the sperm and half of our mum's from the egg.
On these chromosomes are genes, pieces of DNA containing the instructions to make our bodies.
They are the basic units of inheritance and affect whether we, our children and our children's children end up short, tall, blue-eyed, curly-haired or bald.
APPLAUSE Those are the basics.
To explain more, let me welcome our guest tonight.
A genetics expert, a broadcaster and a man who's furthered our knowledge of natural selection.
He is Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University of London and one of the world's greatest experts in the love life of snails.
Professor Steve Jones.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It's difficult to know where to start on a subject as massive as this.
We said it would be about sex.
Does sex work? Is it efficient? Is it the best we could have done? It's messy but it works.
I start my genetics course by saying, "I'm a geneticist "and my job is to make sex boring.
" It's an inefficient mechanism because what it means is that women waste their time copying someone else's genes.
Why they should do that is the biggest mystery in biology.
Why do women allow men to get away with it? I've no idea.
It's a mystery.
Because we're so charming! Is it almost over-engineered? The competition for attention, all these mechanisms that have come around sex? If life had been designed, if there had been a creator, we wouldn't have sex.
Anybody who designed that wouldn't deserve a job.
People who like creators dislike sex anyway.
There was a scientist called Lazzaro Spallanzani, are you familiar with his work? He was one of the first ones who said sperm was important, in a series of exciting experiments in which in order to remove the sperm from the equation.
While frogs mated, he created, from male frogs, tight-fitting trousers that he stretched around their legs so that the sperm would not escape and let them mate, - let them rub off each other but not mate.
- That's right.
That was a proper experiment with a hypothesis of theory that this stuff called sperm, which nobody knew what it did.
Many people thought it was the only thing that mattered.
They thought that the female was just an incubator, in which the baby grew up.
All the information came from the sperm.
That was a proper, clean experiment.
Hurrah for Spallanzani, in spite of the trousers.
Let me ask you about the ways we've dispersed - as we have moved, we have mixed our genes more, even on a town-to-town basis.
You have a theory about bicycles.
I once said - and it's haunted me ever since - the most important event in human evolution was the invention of the bicycle.
There is some reason behind that.
What the bicycle did, you no longer had to have sex with the boy or girl next door because you had no choice, you were in a little village, you couldn't move.
You could get on your bicycle and have sex with the boy or girl in the next village.
Now, you can get on your 747 and have sex with the boy or girl in the next continent.
What that's done, it's turned, very rapidly turning the human race into a kind of soup.
We're rapidly becoming much less different from each other across the world than we were even 100 years ago.
Arguably, that's the most important event in the last 100,000 years of human evolution.
We knew about Steve's bicycle theory.
When we realised the bicycle played such a pivotal role in history, we thought sod the genetics, let's understand why it's such a brilliant invention.
Here's Mark Miodownik.
You may think the bike is a relic of the past.
But it's one of the most beautiful pieces of machinery we've created.
It shaped society in surprising ways.
That's because it's affordable and extremely efficient.
It had a huge impact because for the first time, it facilitated travel for the masses.
Unlike horses and trains, it didn't need feeding or stabling.
You didn't need to buy a ticket or run to a timetable.
It's simple and incredibly efficient.
That's down to how the wheels, pedals and chain all combine together.
Two key features are responsible for the bike's efficiency - the chain drive and the wheels.
Although the wheel is one of humankind's best inventions, early versions were a bit clunky.
The stone wheels much too heavy.
The wooden wheel much too unreliable.
But this, the bicycle wheel, this is one of our best yet.
Elegant, light and extremely strong.
Original spokes are thick because they work under compression.
Bicycle spokes are too thin for that and can easily buckle.
Instead, they have been engineered to work under tension.
Although none of the spokes are capable of holding your weight individually, they are quite weak.
Because there are lots of spokes, they are held in tension so this suspends the axle in all directions so they are all taking their turn to hold a bit of you up in the air.
This continues as the wheel rotates.
The lightweight spoked wheel transformed the bike from a mere curiosity into a viable means of transport.
For wheels to move, they need power and that's where the pedals come in.
Early bicycles like this penny-farthing had the pedals attached to the hub.
This meant that larger wheels were a primitive form of gearing because the larger the wheel, the further you went for one turn of the pedals.
This had the downside that you were further from the ground, which was precarious at best but mostly downright dangerous.
The ordinary bicycle, as it was then known, was pretty much for men only.
But one simple addition made bikes suitable for everybody to ride.
This is the ladies' safety bike.
It's over 100 years old.
It's characteristic feature is a chain, hidden beneath this guard.
It's the safety bike that allowed everyone - men and women - to move more freely and further than ever before.
It's popularity was linked to falling church attendances, to the decline of piano playing and new courting standards amongst the young.
It was a sexual revolution, albeit one aided by a piece of engineering.
The introduction of the chain drive Created a different sort of gearing from the penny farthing so now, one turn of the pedals can turn the back wheel many times, allowing you to go further for the same effort and that meant you could have two wheels of the same size and that made it much more comfortable, much safer and more efficient but they had one further trick up their sleeve - the freewheel.
So you could stop peddling altogether and still get there.
Genius.
APPLAUSE Mark, thank you very much.
It's a bit of a miracle that we can even ride bikes, isn't it? Well, I think the miracle is that we created this machine that's stabilised and can ride itself.
You can actually throw a bike in a direction without a rider and it will self-balance for 100 yards, and it's extraordinary.
We didn't realise, and we still don't really understand why that is.
With regard to your theory, by the way, that these opened up genetic diversity, why is genetic diversity important? Well, genetic diversity is the raw material of evolution.
If there was no genetic diversity, we'd all still be We would all still BE the primeval slime.
Evolution is inherited differences in the ability to reproduce.
That's natural selection and the word is differences.
Without differences, you can't have genetics or evolution.
OK, so the last 150 years of mass migrations will have had a huge effect in terms ofan evolutionary effect? Sure.
If you walk through the streets of London today, you will see a genetically different population from what you would have seen a century ago, even when I was a kid, almost a century ago.
One of the ways you can see the effect of this moving business, and maybe everybody in this room can ask themselves the question - how far apart And everybody watching the show.
How far apart were you born from your partner, if you have one, compared to how far apart your mother and father were born, compared to how far apart your mother's mother and your mother's father was born, and so on.
What you'll find generally speaking, that figure, the marital distance, get enormously bigger over the last three or four generations.
- Miodownik, by the way, not a London name.
- No.
- How many generations back? - Polish to two generations.
As a matter of interest, just because we have a spread of predominantly young London people here, who would win that prize, by the way, in terms of how far apart their parents were from? What's the most racially diverse, ethnically Yourself at the back? Mongolia and Ireland.
How did they meet? What weird social gathering? Where did they meet? Here? In Mongolia.
At the airport, actually.
- They met at the airport? - Yeah.
- No, they were both working at the airport.
- Oh, right, it just seemed like your dad from Ireland just swept into Mongolia - No, no! - But that's what? 8,000 miles of a difference, Mongolian and Irish, any rarer? Yourself there at the back? Yep, so Austrian, Lebanese and a little bit of Spanish.
Austria, Lebanon and a bit of Spain? It's the bit of Spain I'm intrigued by.
Why was that guy there? Was he just a guy on a guitar at the night in question? OK, fantastic.
Any more diverse than that? And yourself there? UK and Vietnam.
UK and Vietnam, OK, grand.
So this has become more and more the case, so genetically, when we're talking about, at the very fundamentals, you take genes that have come from very, very far apart, you're removing the danger of mutations? Well, no, it's not quite like that.
I mean, there are some inherited genetic diseases, which are simple diseases, which most genetic diseases are not, most of them are very complicated, which just demand two copies of the same damaged gene, OK? Many people will have heard of a famous one called cystic fibrosis.
About one birth in 2,500 in Britain, about one person in 25 in Britain carries a single copy.
Now, if you happen to think that you might carry a single copy of this gene, and now you can be tested very easily, but that's new, and you were very, very worried that perhaps your partner might have a single copy and you might have an affected child a geneticist's advice would be, marry a Nigerian because there's no cystic fibrosis in Nigeria and it might be that with all this amazing mixing across the globe, we've actually entered somewhat of an era of genetic health.
The idea that mixing is bad is probably wrong.
Mixing is probably good.
The world does seem to be our oyster as far as the genetic pool is concerned but attraction is a strange and mysterious thing and a burning question we have to ask is, taken as a random sample, how attractive is our studio audience? As the audience came in tonight, one of our researchers took a photo.
There's a few of them popping up behind me here.
Well, that's me, obviously.
That may drag down the average.
What we're going to do is that there are various theories about attractiveness involving symmetry, whether symmetry reflects a genetic strength, whether if we average across all of the faces, that we will remove some of those asymmetries and whether if we get an average face, it will be more attractive then on average.
We'll work that out and show you a face at the end of the show.
In case you think we're being brutal and impersonal here, reducing you all down to one thing, it's worth reminding yourselves, even though we say we're all different, there's only a part of us, which is unique.
We have some pretty close cousins.
It takes a very specific set of genes to make a human.
Compare two humans and you'll find their DNA will be almost identical, to 99.
9%, in fact.
Much of our DNA is, as you might expect, also similar to other primates.
It's up to 99% for a chimp, 97% for an orang-utan and 95% for a macaque.
On average, 85% of compared human and mouse genes are identical.
In fact, it's also been said that 50% of our DNA is shared with a banana but how many genes do you reckon a banana has? A simple bacteria has around 4,000 genes, yeast, a fungus, has about 6,000, the honey bee over 10,000, a fruit fly has roughly 14,000 genes, a sea sponge about 18,000, this frog has around 21,000.
A mouse has about 23,000 and so do we.
But a tomato has over 30,000 genes.
A water flea has nearly 31,000 and that banana - over 36,000 genes, which is half as much again as we do.
APPLAUSE Steve, this was never my field of expertise.
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of those points.
Are we overestimating some of those comparisons? Well, you're getting into deep water when you talk about genes as the big surprise for all those creatures, including the banana, is how few genes in the traditional sense there are - 24,000, which is far, far fewer than anybody thought and when you talk about a 4% difference between us and the chimp, it's still hundreds of thousands of differences in the DNA and we know that a single change in one single DNA letter can turn you, for example, into somebody who's very short with achrondoplasia, a dwarf, or a giant, or give you a terrible genetic disease or change your skin colour, so these are really quite big differences, actually.
We have a simple test here, which apparently is the indicator of one particular gene.
Now, if you could just spread one of those samples sheets out.
Some people have a variant that allows them to pick up this particular scent.
We know where the gene is, and some people have variants that mean they can't smell it.
It'd be interesting to test the population - to see how many of the different kinds we have.
- Take one, pass it on.
Some of you will be able to smell this and some won't.
Some of you will find it pleasant and some will find it unpleasant.
- No? Smell blind.
- Nothing.
Nothing, nothing.
Is anyone getting a smell off that? Yeah? Are you? What kind of smell are you getting? It's not very distinctive.
Sorry, excuse me.
What kind of smell are you getting? It's not that distinctive.
It's not good or bad, kind ofI don't know.
Would you describe it as being like any other smell? - Chemically? - It's chemically? OK, grand.
Hmm.
Chemically is everything, really, isn't it? Bit difficult - I shouldn't say that as a scientist.
- Yeah, I know! Anyone else? Can anyone get a smell off it? - You can.
What sort of smell? - Really unpleasant.
You're finding it unpleasant? - Yeah.
I'd say sweat.
- Sweat? - Yeah.
- Possibly urine, maybe? - Potentially.
Potentially, OK, grand.
I'm not going to force your hand on that.
How many of you aren't getting this at all? Majority.
So we'll only get a couple who are seeing it and how many of you are getting any smell at all? You are, you are.
- Quite a few.
- A few over there, seven or eight, a few at the back.
- Shout out, what word would you use to describe it? - Wee.
Wee? Wee.
Anybody getting, is there anyone getting a sweeter smell? You are? You're getting the sweet smell? OK.
See, these are all different reactions from the same gene.
- Yeah, they are.
- By the way, to explain what it is, this is Boarmate, the boar odour spray.
LAUGHTER B-O-A-R, by the way.
I'll let you get that.
If you're looking for a boar odour spray, I can't recommend this one highly enough.
And the purpose of Boarmate, by the way, it's used to determine whether or not a sow is at the correct stage of oestrus for artificial insemination, and by the way, in a test, you don't ask the pig, "Do you get that? Are you getting that smell?" For us, it means nothing.
I'm just reassuring those of you who raised your hand, - it means nothing, other than - As far as we know.
As far as we know.
Thanks.
I'm trying to reassure the nice ladies who smelt it.
I'm thrilled to read on the back, "Avoid spraying Boarmate on hands or clothing," like I just have five times.
"Wash hands immediately after use and change affected clothing.
" Great, well, if we hear the sound of little footsteps, it'll be pigs racing towards me in a state of excitement.
Now, it was 12 years ago that the human genome was sequenced and it was fanfared as one of the most significant events in science or in human history at the time but was it? What has decoding the human genome ever done for us? Alok Jha investigates.
Here they are - more than 100 volumes containing all the instructions you need to make an average human being.
This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.
A revolution in medical science whose implications far surpass even the discovery of antibiotics.
But what now? What use has all this information been out there in the real world? Nobel prizewinner John Sulston was instrumental in delivering the Human Genome Project, or HGP.
John, why have so few of the promises from the Human Genome Project actually emerged? Well, as far as I was concerned, these promises, if you'd like to call them that, or predictions, were very long-term.
But the point is that we had read the code of instructions to make a human being but I had no idea how long it would take to understand.
Indeed, we found that the whole thing was a great deal more complex than we could have imagined.
Was there an element of scientists leading us along just a little bit, just to justify the millions of pounds and dollars being spent? Well, I'm arguing, Alok, that we did not overstate the case.
We said it was important, we said this would be key to medicine.
I think that's absolutely right.
It's because we have the sequence, because we can now learn how one sort of cancer is different from another, how every single tumour probably turns out to be somewhat different, but we have the means, the tools to analyse it, and indeed, precisely because we've discovered it's so much more complex than anybody could have imagined, with different classes of genes, which have only been made accessible as a result of the work.
I think it's justified more than ever.
There's no doubt that the human genome project has been great for fundamental science, but, so far, its direct contribution to medicine is far from clear.
Should we believe scientists' promises? I mean, they don't take things on faith, so why should we? Why is it that we've not seen any treatments so far? Because the genetics turned out to be a great deal more complicated than the simple-minded molecular geneticists thought at the beginning, because you cannot read off the whole of human life from 20,000 genes.
After all, we're 98% identical genetically, in terms of genes, to chimpanzees, and no-one would mistake either you or I for a chimpanzee and so for any one human characteristic, there may be tens, hundreds, thousands of genes involved and if you are trying to get cures for diseases, the idea that you can get one gene which will solve everything is clearly wrong.
We've discovered that the links between human genetics and disease are far more subtle, far more complex, than perhaps people realised amid the hubris of the human genome launch.
So how do we steer this juggernaut that the Human Genome Project has created and can we ever hope to turn all that data into useful medical knowledge? In 2010, the Wellcome Trust announced new plans to sequence even more genomes - 10,000 over three years - in the hope of delivering new therapies.
Mike, the Human Genome Project was completed more than a decade ago.
Why do you create ever more sequences? What we got in the year 2000 was what we call the reference human genome.
So it's like an average human genome.
One of the most important things to study is, what are the differences between individual human genomes? And so by sequencing the genomes of many tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, we'll find out all those differences between individual human beings.
The hope is that these differences can be linked to disease, then perhaps new strategies will be found to treat, even cure, some of the most common and life-threatening human diseases.
Give me some numbers.
What kind of timescales are we talking about for these treatments and medicines? It's going to be happening drip, drip, every day, every year, for the next several decades.
So today's message is far more measured than the fanfare that rang out back in 2000.
Who was to blame for all of the hype, all the expectation we got? The responsibility has to be divided between the scientists who sold the project at the beginning, the big pharmaceutical companies and industrialists who saw there was a bonanza to be made from patenting genes, and the selling to the politicians - it was described as equivalent to putting a man on the moon or even the equivalent of the discovery of the wheel.
These grandiose words simply were not justified by what came out.
And as for one of those involved, John Sulston recalls being at Number 10 Downing Street, preparing to announce the first draft of the Human Genome.
I was sitting there next to Max Perutz and Fred Sanger and one of them turned to me and said, "John, why did you publish now when it's not finished?" I said, "I'm sorry.
This is not about science, it's about politics.
" Perhaps the most important lesson of the past decade has been to show us that, when it comes to investing in science, members of the public and politicians should think more long-term.
It's something we're not used to doing.
Back in 2000, it seemed as if we were writing the concluding chapter of biology.
Now it seems that was just the beginning.
Alok APPLAUSE Could I just accuse you of impatience in this situation? - Are we just being too quick to judge? - Absolutely.
Let's be honest, yes, we are being too quick to judge but the whole point of the genome project was that it was going to give us these things immediately.
That's what they said to us.
That's exactly what John Sulston kind of admitted to saying.
They did what they had to do.
They had to say these things to get that much money to allow these things to happen because it was a massive project.
See it like an infrastructure project.
You just have to do it, you have to build roads for everyone to drive down, you had to do this for the next generation of biology to happen.
You can't explain it to politicians in two minutes, unfortunately.
Shall we all just be slightly embarrassed about the claims that were made, but glad they basically bluffed the politicians into paying for it? Probably, yes.
These guys are much cleverer than us, let's be honest.
They knew what they were doing and let's just thank the Lord that they actually were able to understand the politics to get this stuff done, otherwise they would never have done it and, actually, other people, private sector, would have done it and we'd be in a very different place now because the genome would have been patented, it would have been hard to use, genetic medicine would have been even further away.
I think, first of all, it was a remarkable scientific breakthrough.
Secondly, it was an astonishing technological breakthrough.
The technology now is simply breathtaking, it's unthinkable what we can do now that we couldn't three years ago so it's quite remarkable.
Let's also remember it's been very important to some people.
The place where it's been genuinely important is in cancer studies because it turns out that some, but not all cancers, have a strong inherited component.
And there's one particular kind of colon cancer which, until a few years ago, five, six years ago, the only way you could pick up whether somebody was at risk of inheriting the gene which caused it, whether they had it or not, was whether they had any signs of the cancer, by which time it was probably too late to do much about it.
Now you can look straight at the DNA and say you inherited this damaging variant or you didn't.
And you can start treatment straight away.
There's a lot to keep across here and if you want to know more or get involved with the show, this is how you do it.
You can find us at Or follow us on Twitter.
Or join the conversation.
Still to come - comedian Ed Byrne looks into his murky gene pool and neuro-scientist Tali Sharot reveals the latest startling genetic discoveries.
With all this talk of DNA, we shouldn't act like it's a mysterious thing.
You can actually see the stuff.
You can see some of your own DNA.
All our cells contain DNA but what you might not know is you can extract it, should you want to, using simple household ingredients, assuming your house has a ready supply of super strength vodka.
- What percentage is this, Mark? - 88%.
- 88%.
OK.
What's the recipe? How do we do this? We need to make a cocktail and we'll try to get this DNA that's in every one of our cells out so we can see it.
First thing to do is collect the cells and we thought we'd have a couple of volunteers and try and get people's cheek cells into a solution of their saliva.
We don't want you to bite off the inside of your cheek, just rub it with your teeth.
Two here, two there.
Essentially, chew the inside of your mouth and then spit into that.
What we're trying to do is get the dead cheek cells from inside your mouth into your saliva and make a cocktail out of your saliva.
I think that's probably enough.
In you go.
OK, grand.
Temptation is obviously to judge these by how murky they are.
- Actually I'm sorry! - Look at the difference! - I know, I know.
That is insane.
That one actually is filthy! That is Yeah, can we exclude that on the grounds? - We may need to redo this experiment.
- Yeah, that's just bits in that! Moving one of them, I am not saying who it is.
It was him! Bung them all in together so that we're not revealing any information.
- For anonymity reasons.
- No-one will be cloned from this.
Mixture of cells.
There's a membrane on the outside.
- We need to get through that.
- What's it made of? - Lipids, these are fats.
We need to get through the fats and to the cytoplasm, need to swim through the cytoplasm, hit the nucleus, we need to drag the DNA out.
This is an enormously complicated thing to be doing.
How do we get through the fats, firstly? We do something quite simple, which is add detergent, which you all know will nicely mop up fat.
- This is just common garden detergent.
Whack it in there.
- Washing-up liquid.
Hopefully we're tunnelling through some membranes.
- This is just pineapple juice.
- What's in pineapple juice? It's got this protease cold bromelain and it's amazing stuff.
It's used to tenderise meat and if you put it on meat, it will essentially dissolve it, almost.
We just need to mash this up, there we go.
I think you can hear the cells screaming.
OK, there's too many bubbles and frothy stuff in there, so the next thing is to strain it.
- I'll try to - You have all the gear, don't you? Try this at home with the old vodka martini.
The cocktail shaker you never use.
You got it as a wedding present or something.
OK, there we go.
That's quite exciting.
We're going to get the DNA to come out of the solution by marrying it with the alcohol.
It's not such strong alcohol that it doesn't dissolve The DNA doesn't dissolve as strongly and so it will precipitate out.
- What percentage is that? - It's 88%.
- Go on.
- Yeah, go on! - That's probably enough.
- Polish vodka? - While you're doing that - Generations of Poles.
We know how to drink that stuff.
LAUGHTER - DARA GASPS - Oh, Jesus! LAUGHTER This was the real experiment, by the way.
It was worth it just for that.
- Oh, oh! - Down there, there.
Why is that your national drink? That is horrible! Oh, God! Wow! - Bits of my throat and everything.
- DNA? I would say.
Blood, actually! We're going to get a layer of alcohol that will sit on top of the solution.
And when the DNA molecules hit that layer, they can't dissolve as well in that and so they come out of solution.
They rise out of They hit it, it's a bit like sugar in tea, when you cool it down it's not as soluble.
You can see it.
There's a cloud of DNA.
- That is really, really good.
- That's the joint DNA of the three of you.
Have we a shot that we can get from here? Because that's amazing.
It's really, really clear.
John, can you come in here? Now, that is very clearly That's like a little web of DNA.
You should all be very proud of the strength and health.
- Now we can gather it up.
There we go.
- Wow.
That, although it looks very unimpressive, that goo, that is the genius that is life.
Lovely stuff, well done, that's impressive.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Mark.
Thank you very much.
Well done, Mark.
Yes, extract your DNA and you could become one of the most famous names in science.
We've all heard the famous names in science but there are many scientists that have been doing amazing work and you've never heard their names.
This is why we've instigated our hall of fame.
Obviously headed by the big five.
Darwin, Einstein, Newton, all that.
Who do you think has been overlooked? Someone who has been overlooked is the guy who founded genetics is this chap here.
He's called Francis Galton.
He was this chap's cousin.
They were both pretty smart.
He did many extraordinary things.
He was interested in human quality, which he measured in different ways.
He measured height, weight, looked at their parents.
He did a lot More or less founded statistics.
He's the only person who has made a beauty map of the British Isles and he went from city to city scoring the local females on a five-point scale from attractive to repulsive.
The low point was in Aberdeen.
I once said that in Aberdeen - that was a mistake.
I had one.
Lazzaro Spallanzani.
This man was knitting tiny trousers for frogs.
He's a good scientist.
He should be here.
I always put mine over here cos he'll be remembered for the wrong things.
He'll always exist slightly sideways.
It was a big deal when we had our GMC quiz but recently, our heavy-browed, knuckle-dragging evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals have also had their genomes decoded.
It's thrown up some fascinating facts as Ed Byrne is finding out.
I'm on my way to the world-famous Natural History Museum.
Meet Chris Stringer, Britain's foremost expert on human origins.
Are we related to or descended from Neanderthals? 50 years ago, the opinion was we descended from them but with the new evidence, the idea now is that we're two branches of the evolutionary tree.
So there was a split between homo sapiens and Neanderthal.
About half a million years ago, there was a species called Homo heidelbergensis and they went in different directions.
North of the Mediterranean, it became the Neanderthals and south of the Mediterranean, it became us - Homo sapiens.
Why Homo sapiens flourished when our Neanderthal cousins didn't is a bit of a mystery.
What's even more of a mystery is how it is that, despite them being two different species, there was some interbreeding.
Some experts have always thought there was a bit of interbreeding.
People like me regard the Neanderthal as being a different species.
We know closely-related mammals can interbreed so lions and tigers, African and Indian elephants.
There probably was a bit of interbreeding when modern humans came out of Africa and the early DNA work on Neanderthals, getting DNA from bones also supported that view.
In the last couple of years, the latest DNA work shows that you and I have got some Neanderthal in us.
I take a liberal attitude to these things but I'm feelingdon't fancy yours much.
If you know what I mean.
I don't mean to disrespect here, but would our breeding with the Neanderthal coincide with the invention of alcohol? No evidence of booze back there.
- It could have been magic mushrooms maybe.
- That would do it.
How the interbreeding happened, we don't yet know.
On one extreme, it's the desperation scenario so modern humans ran out of mates and they captured some from a Neanderthal group.
In a sort of Annie Hall as a goal spirit.
Maybe they had a big love-in.
I tend to think that's less likely.
I love the idea that there could have been one massive love-in between the Neanderthals and humans.
Can you tell how Neanderthal someone is by looking at them? Are there physical traits that signify Neanderthal? Big brow ridges, big nose ridges.
Not much of a chin.
You can look around and say, those people look a bit more Neanderthal.
The upper classes, they haven't got the chin going on.
Is there more Neanderthal there? But just looking at people, we can't tell that now.
We'd have to look at their DNA.
To tell how much Neanderthal they are.
There's actually a cool website here that tests your DNA to find out exactly what percentage of you is Neanderthal because as Chris was saying, the physical characteristics like broad shoulders or a sloping forehead don't indicate how Neanderthal you are.
Just cos he looks like one, doesn't mean Dara is a Neanderthal.
There, I said it.
It was out there.
I said it.
I've got their testing kit here.
I was apprehensive about giving a sample of genetic material on camera, but apparently saliva will suffice.
So Actually spitting camera is also a bit gross.
Maybe we should cut three.
Professor Mark Thomas is an evolutionary geneticist from UCM.
He specialises in looking into our ancient DNA.
Have you seen this? It's an app.
It turns you into a Neanderthal.
Right.
Go on, do it.
HE LAUGHS - It's an improvement.
- Not bad.
You should consider a beard.
Yeah.
Some say Neanderthals were a different species.
Inter-species breeding is quite a rare thing.
Particularly to happen on the scale we're talking about.
How would that have come about? The problem here is what do we mean by species.
Some people define it as you're a different species if you can't interbreed.
Clearly we're not a different species from Neanderthals cos we did.
That shouldn't surprise us cos we only separated from Neanderthals as a species about 300-400,000 years ago.
That's a blip in evolutionary terms so we shouldn't be that different anyway.
There we have it.
Despite our obvious differences.
We, homo sapiens, used to get it on with Neanderthals.
Although bit like a one-night stand.
The details are hazy.
We're not sure how it happened, when it happened or indeed who instigated it.
One thing I do know, if you've ever used the term Neanderthal to describe someone who's a bit stupid, I for one am insulted.
That's my relative you're talking about so I take great offence.
I'm not sure how much offence I should take until I see the results of the DNA test.
APPLAUSE Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Byrne.
Did you learn anything on that? I learned that no-one can agree on anything.
That's the fun part about science.
They can always be relied upon for a good dust-up between scientists.
How it came about that we ended up mating with Neanderthals whether it was homo sapiens that did it out of necessity or Neanderthals that did it to us out of superior strength is unknown.
It's jarring for people to think that they evolved in Europe while we were evolving in Africa.
The odd thing about humans nowadays is that there's just us.
The species to which most of us claim to belong which is homo sapien.
It might be that the Neanderthals who had been in Europe for a long time while we were evolving in Africa, we drove them out.
Because we're smart nasty and unpleasant.
There was a time before driving them out that we got kissy with them.
We gave you a test to see what percentage of Neanderthal you had.
Before you open that, can we introduce some competition here? What percentage of Neanderthal? That's what we're asking cos they also did me.
We should not invest any significance in these figures.
I am not more stooped or powerful or have a larger brain.
- There's an easy way to find out.
- Yes.
We just wrestle, you mean? This is how you want this to end? - Ed, firstly, what percentage of you is Neanderthal? - I am 3.
2%.
- That strikes me as quite high.
- That is quite high.
- Excuse me.
Well, well, well.
You mixed, didn't you? Whereas I am 3.
0%.
That could be why I prefer decorating my house with animal bones more than you do.
I do.
That's why you will die out earlier.
That app is great.
Yvette first as a Neanderthal.
That's ED I presume.
Grand.
And me, although this I am clearly less.
I get the way it works.
It's a picture of your eyes on the same Neanderthal.
What 69p did we waste on that? In 2003, when the human genome was decoded, we decided we had 22-23,000 genes.
This was about the same number of genes as a mouse.
For such a complex organism as us, it was disappointingly few.
We had massively underestimated how complex genetic expression is.
A rethink was needed and that rethink led us into the world of the epigenome.
We sent Tali Sharot to find out more.
These mice are famous in the world of epigenetics.
They're called the agouti mice because they have the agouti gene which makes them yellow and very fat.
They're identical in terms of the genes and as you expect, they look exactly the same.
This one looks very different.
It's brown, it's leaner and it's much healthier, but it too is genetically identical to the other ones.
It has the agouti gene.
What's different is that it has a chemical tap on top of that gene which suppresses it.
That is epigenetics at work.
We used to have a very simple model of genetic expression.
These mice are changing that.
They clearly show that one gene can be expressed to two quite different ways.
And as we're discovering, it's the epigenome that's instrumental in mediating that expression.
This is a molecule of DNA.
The epigenetic markers sit here, on top of one of the base pairs.
What they are is a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms.
They don't change the underlying gene.
What they do is they suppress the gene expression.
You can think of the epigenome as software to the hardware of the DNA.
Now, what's really interesting is that, unlike the DNA, which remain stable, the epigenome is something that we can actually manipulate and control.
Dana Dolinoy is an epigeneticist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
She's been changing the epigenetic markers on the agouti mouse genome.
She does this by adding chemicals to the diet of the pregnant mothers because the epigenome is most vulnerable to change during development in the womb.
When we did this experiment, we noticed there were a lot more yellow obese offspring.
So by introducing the chemical to the diet of the mother, you were changing the epigenome of her offspring? Exactly.
And it turns a gene on when it normally should be off and it caused these mice to eat and become obese.
Once they figured out how to make the offspring fat, they repeated the experiment with a second pregnancy to see if they could make the new babies healthy.
They found out they could.
And this time we supplemented their diet with a whole lot of nutritional factors like folic acid so we showed by nutritional supplementation we could counteract the effect of that chemical alone.
And that was truly amazing.
This time, the mother was able to produce lean brown mice pups, all because nutrition had altered their epigenome.
It's an astonishing proof that environmental epigenetic changes can override what's written in their DNA.
The big question is, could it be the same for humans? Can we manipulate our own epigenome? Here in Sweden, scientists are trying to find out by doing just that.
We used to think that our epigenome is set at birth, but new research in humans now shows that, actually, it can change throughout our life.
That's really interesting because it suggests we have much more control over our genetic destiny.
Many diseases, like cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are thought to involve the epigenome, with epigenetic markers altering the expression of our DNA.
If these markers are flexible, this has huge implications for our future health.
Juleen Zierath studies diabetes at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
She's been trying to find out if exercise changes the epigenetic markers on our muscle tissue.
All right, so that's your first stage.
And her team have uncovered some surprising results.
This picture on top represents a schematic diagram of a gene that's really important for burning fat in muscle.
And this is before exercise.
And you can see that after exercise the hill is smaller, so that would suggest that there is a disappearance of methyl groups from the DNA.
So these are changes to the epigenome that we're seeing here? - And all these changes are positive in this case? - That's correct.
We didn't imagine that we would be able to see these kinds of changes in response to exercise.
After intense exercise, the epigenetic methyl tags disappeared from the DNA, making the tissue healthier, better at metabolising glucose and burning fat.
This change was completely unexpected.
We thought that this was fixed.
What this would suggest is that the epigenome is more flexible than we could have imagined, so this was really surprising to us.
So a simple workout, a 20-minute workout, can change our epigenome.
We used to think that if you were predisposed to a disease, you couldn't do much about it.
Juleen's results suggest we may have more control over our future health than we thought possible.
This is a whole new frontier of medicine.
Based on the studies, something like exercise can reprogram the muscle to be more fit, and to increase its capacity to burn fuels like glucose and fats .
.
and possibly even prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, because we can keep our sugar levels under control.
Until recently, we believed that genetics alone determined our inheritance.
But we now know that's not the case.
Far from being fixed at the moment of conception, these new insights into our dynamic epigenome suggest we may actually be able to take control of our own genetic destinies is ways that we never imagined.
Tali, thank you very much for coming in.
This is a big deal.
This is a major change, isn't it? Yeah, it seems that things like nutrition and exercise and all kinds of environmental factors will change the epigenome, and the epigenome changes the expression of the gene.
And the epigenome is a switch that sits on top of the base-pairs on the DNA - and can either be functioning or not functioning? - Yeah.
And what it does, it can switch off the expression of the gene and therefore totally change traits, like we saw with the agouti mice.
Yes, and we also saw the man on the bike was switching on or switching off was switching off certain genes because of the exercise he was doing at the time.
Yeah.
So that's really interesting, cos what happens there is that the epigenome is changing for a very short amount of time.
So you exercise and the change only lasts for about an hour, so it's acute.
And that's quite interesting.
The only thing about it is, - we don't know whether it's a good effect or a bad effect? - In the case of exercise, it seems like it was a positive effect, cos it enhances metabolism, and that's good.
But we do know that For example, in a famous study in Sweden, they looked at a village - Overkalix - and they showed that whether the grandparents had a lot to eat, whether it was a good time for them, or whether they were in famine, where they didn't have much to eat, actually it affected two generations later the longevity of their grandchildren.
- You pick an obscure Swedish village We have shots of it.
- Yeah, that's it.
.
.
which is isolated, but well recorded, and then you contract the relative health.
But two generations later? - Possibly more.
At least two now.
- Yeah.
They looked at two, but What's astonishing, genuinely astonishing, about the Swedish study is it goes down through males.
So it's actually changing the DNA in the sperm.
- It's nothing to do with the woman's body.
It's actually the DNA.
- So I think there's two points here.
One is we can change our epigenome throughout our lifetime, and the second is that changes to our epigenome can actually be inherited and not only inherited by our kids but a second generation over.
It means we have a lot of responsibility.
So if I start smoking and drinking or not eating well, it's not only going to affect me, it's going to affect my kids, - possibly my grandkids, and so on and so on and so on.
- The guy on the bike, by the way, if the guy on the bike wanted to pass on those changes to the next generation, would he have had to make a baby, basically, an hour after he'd been on the exercise bike? - Is that how long? - On the bike.
- On the bike is great.
Fantastic.
I don't think we know and I don't think the experiment has been done Yes.
You'd get funding for that! We've talked about everything we wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask.
If you have any other questions you want to add to this about genetics, we have our after-hours science club which is starting now, where Steve Jones will be waiting for your questions.
If you want to get involved with the show, this is how you do it.
APPLAUSE Some last items of business, then.
How attractive is this crowd? Let's have a look.
We've been staring at you all day, but let's have a look at the average of this.
The gist of this, basically, the scientific principle was, we tend to favour more symmetric faces because we believe they are healthier and there is possibly an argument to say the more symmetric face is genetically stronger, having weeded out imperfections and things that cause asymmetry.
So let's have a look.
We've flashed you various faces.
Those are faces of the studio audience there.
We've got two composites, obviously, the male and the female composite, which I think we can do.
Do you have the male composite? Not an enormous amount of raw lust coming out of the room at this stage for that.
- It's Michael McIntyre! - It genuinely is Michael McIntyre.
Michael McIntyre, it turns out, is your image of the ideal beautiful person.
Let's have a look at the ladies.
You know, I can't see exactly who that is.
Let's put them together and just see if you think they are more attractive than average.
Try not to think of Michael McIntyre when you're actually doing the vote.
More or less attractive than average? No-one, no-one? Literallyone guy.
You don't have to throw in cos I need you to get involved.
OK, so that piece of science is clearly bunk.
We're going to lose that.
Can we bring in the rest of our contributors? That's very, very kind.
Thank you.
- By the way, if you average - ED GROWLS - Sit down.
Sit down! Sit down, Caveman Ed.
- ED GROWLS This, by the way, is the average of the presenters.
LAUGHTER - That's actually - There's a lot of me in there.
It is predominantly You can see me! That actually isn't bad.
That actually is better than all of us combined, I think.
- Apart from the fringe.
- At least we've got hair now, Dara.
I've got hair.
You're right! It's me with hair! That is just about it for tonight.
I would like to say thanks to all of our reporters, to Alok and Tali.
Thanks to Mark Miodownik, of course, and to our special guest, Ed Byrne, and a big thanks to tonight's science guru Steve Jones.
CHEERING But more than that, ladies and gentlemen, we have to wrap up what we have learned tonight.
We've learned, many, many things in the Science Club.
We've discovered genes aren't everything, that epigenetics is the emerging big new area of study.
We've learned scientists make pairs of shorts for frogs, that Ed Byrne is more Neanderthal than me - that's quite a nice thing.
We found out also that if you drink really strong Polish vodka midway through a television show, at the end, it still hurts.
That's something you may not have learned, but take it from me.
We found that our audience, if you add them all together, are moderately attractive but less attractive than anyone in particular, but weirdly they look like Michael McIntyre.
But mainly we've learnt - if you take any advice at all - if you want to make a baby, do it on an exercise bike.
That's what we've learnt tonight.
It's been a pleasure to have you.
We'll see you for another Science Club soon.
Good night.
Bicycles.
Polish vodka.
Tonight, we talk about how we make new life.
Tonight we talk about how YOU were made.
My name is Dara O Briain.
Welcome to Science Club.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Welcome and good evening.
In our audience, curious people are here.
Some fine minds.
Professor Steve Jones, thank you for joining us.
We'll discuss genetics later.
We'll have reports from Alok Jha and Tali Sharot.
Ed Byrne will join us.
- You've got something for us? - I'll toss something into your gene pool.
Lovely.
Very appetising.
We'll do an experiment with Mark Miodownik that you can repeat at home.
But so to sex.
As a method of passing on our DNA, it is more fun than spitting into a cup.
Once that moment has passed, is it the best way to move this species along? We put sex and inheritance under the microscope.
Here at my new science club, we'll probe the topic in all sorts of different ways while neuro-scientist Tali Sharot asks can we pass on traits that aren't in our genes? This is a new frontier of medicine.
Science journalist Alok Jha questions if the Genome Project was all it was cracked up to be.
We did not overstate the case.
We said this would be key to medicine.
That's absolutely right.
Comedian Ed Byrne gets to grips with his Neanderthal family history.
I don't mean to disrespect her but would our breeding with Neanderthal have coincided at all with the invention of alcohol? Professor Mark Miodownik takes the technological view by pulling a bike apart and showing how they've influenced our sexual selection.
All this and more in this week's Science Club.
APPLAUSE While you're watching, you can get facts and doodles by following or going to our website.
When it comes to passing on genes from one generation to the next, it's only been the last 100 years that we've understood what goes on.
One of life's great mysteries and this is what we used to think.
The story of inheritance begins, like many things, with the ancient Greeks.
Aristotle, fresh from inventing logic itself, noted that children often looked like their parents.
Aristotle decided that the man determined the form of the child, whilst the woman provided the material.
He planted the seed, she provided the soil that fed it.
For hundreds of years, this was as far as people got.
The first clues to what goes on inside women, came in the 1600s.
Two Dutch medics announced that women produced eggs, like birds.
A few years later, another Dutchman, a fabric merchant, made a startling discovery by examining the contents of his trousers with a primitive microscope.
Semen seemed to be full of tiny creatures that thrashed around like a snake.
He had discovered sperm.
Most people thought babies must start off as perfect miniatures, inside either egg or sperm.
But no-one knew which.
By the 1800s, the inheritance question took another leap forward, thanks to some farmers.
Men like Robert Bakewell were a new breed, who saw sheep as machines, for turning grass into money.
He bred his best males with his best females.
The resulting super sheep suggested offspring were a mixture of their parents.
Naturally, it wasn't quite that simple.
In Austria, a monk called Gregor Mendel, had spent years breeding pea plants - tall with short, yellow with green.
His results suggested that instead of a simple blend, each offspring received one element for height or colour from each of its parents but that one could override the other.
By 1909, Mendel's elements had been renamed genes.
A year later, whilst breeding flies, Thomas Morgan showed these genes lived on tiny structures inside the cell - the chromosomes.
The science of genetics has been born.
Scientists delved deeper until Watson and Crick finally revealed the double helix of DNA.
So how does inheritance work? Put simply, we receive half our dad's chromosomes from the sperm and half of our mum's from the egg.
On these chromosomes are genes, pieces of DNA containing the instructions to make our bodies.
They are the basic units of inheritance and affect whether we, our children and our children's children end up short, tall, blue-eyed, curly-haired or bald.
APPLAUSE Those are the basics.
To explain more, let me welcome our guest tonight.
A genetics expert, a broadcaster and a man who's furthered our knowledge of natural selection.
He is Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University of London and one of the world's greatest experts in the love life of snails.
Professor Steve Jones.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It's difficult to know where to start on a subject as massive as this.
We said it would be about sex.
Does sex work? Is it efficient? Is it the best we could have done? It's messy but it works.
I start my genetics course by saying, "I'm a geneticist "and my job is to make sex boring.
" It's an inefficient mechanism because what it means is that women waste their time copying someone else's genes.
Why they should do that is the biggest mystery in biology.
Why do women allow men to get away with it? I've no idea.
It's a mystery.
Because we're so charming! Is it almost over-engineered? The competition for attention, all these mechanisms that have come around sex? If life had been designed, if there had been a creator, we wouldn't have sex.
Anybody who designed that wouldn't deserve a job.
People who like creators dislike sex anyway.
There was a scientist called Lazzaro Spallanzani, are you familiar with his work? He was one of the first ones who said sperm was important, in a series of exciting experiments in which in order to remove the sperm from the equation.
While frogs mated, he created, from male frogs, tight-fitting trousers that he stretched around their legs so that the sperm would not escape and let them mate, - let them rub off each other but not mate.
- That's right.
That was a proper experiment with a hypothesis of theory that this stuff called sperm, which nobody knew what it did.
Many people thought it was the only thing that mattered.
They thought that the female was just an incubator, in which the baby grew up.
All the information came from the sperm.
That was a proper, clean experiment.
Hurrah for Spallanzani, in spite of the trousers.
Let me ask you about the ways we've dispersed - as we have moved, we have mixed our genes more, even on a town-to-town basis.
You have a theory about bicycles.
I once said - and it's haunted me ever since - the most important event in human evolution was the invention of the bicycle.
There is some reason behind that.
What the bicycle did, you no longer had to have sex with the boy or girl next door because you had no choice, you were in a little village, you couldn't move.
You could get on your bicycle and have sex with the boy or girl in the next village.
Now, you can get on your 747 and have sex with the boy or girl in the next continent.
What that's done, it's turned, very rapidly turning the human race into a kind of soup.
We're rapidly becoming much less different from each other across the world than we were even 100 years ago.
Arguably, that's the most important event in the last 100,000 years of human evolution.
We knew about Steve's bicycle theory.
When we realised the bicycle played such a pivotal role in history, we thought sod the genetics, let's understand why it's such a brilliant invention.
Here's Mark Miodownik.
You may think the bike is a relic of the past.
But it's one of the most beautiful pieces of machinery we've created.
It shaped society in surprising ways.
That's because it's affordable and extremely efficient.
It had a huge impact because for the first time, it facilitated travel for the masses.
Unlike horses and trains, it didn't need feeding or stabling.
You didn't need to buy a ticket or run to a timetable.
It's simple and incredibly efficient.
That's down to how the wheels, pedals and chain all combine together.
Two key features are responsible for the bike's efficiency - the chain drive and the wheels.
Although the wheel is one of humankind's best inventions, early versions were a bit clunky.
The stone wheels much too heavy.
The wooden wheel much too unreliable.
But this, the bicycle wheel, this is one of our best yet.
Elegant, light and extremely strong.
Original spokes are thick because they work under compression.
Bicycle spokes are too thin for that and can easily buckle.
Instead, they have been engineered to work under tension.
Although none of the spokes are capable of holding your weight individually, they are quite weak.
Because there are lots of spokes, they are held in tension so this suspends the axle in all directions so they are all taking their turn to hold a bit of you up in the air.
This continues as the wheel rotates.
The lightweight spoked wheel transformed the bike from a mere curiosity into a viable means of transport.
For wheels to move, they need power and that's where the pedals come in.
Early bicycles like this penny-farthing had the pedals attached to the hub.
This meant that larger wheels were a primitive form of gearing because the larger the wheel, the further you went for one turn of the pedals.
This had the downside that you were further from the ground, which was precarious at best but mostly downright dangerous.
The ordinary bicycle, as it was then known, was pretty much for men only.
But one simple addition made bikes suitable for everybody to ride.
This is the ladies' safety bike.
It's over 100 years old.
It's characteristic feature is a chain, hidden beneath this guard.
It's the safety bike that allowed everyone - men and women - to move more freely and further than ever before.
It's popularity was linked to falling church attendances, to the decline of piano playing and new courting standards amongst the young.
It was a sexual revolution, albeit one aided by a piece of engineering.
The introduction of the chain drive Created a different sort of gearing from the penny farthing so now, one turn of the pedals can turn the back wheel many times, allowing you to go further for the same effort and that meant you could have two wheels of the same size and that made it much more comfortable, much safer and more efficient but they had one further trick up their sleeve - the freewheel.
So you could stop peddling altogether and still get there.
Genius.
APPLAUSE Mark, thank you very much.
It's a bit of a miracle that we can even ride bikes, isn't it? Well, I think the miracle is that we created this machine that's stabilised and can ride itself.
You can actually throw a bike in a direction without a rider and it will self-balance for 100 yards, and it's extraordinary.
We didn't realise, and we still don't really understand why that is.
With regard to your theory, by the way, that these opened up genetic diversity, why is genetic diversity important? Well, genetic diversity is the raw material of evolution.
If there was no genetic diversity, we'd all still be We would all still BE the primeval slime.
Evolution is inherited differences in the ability to reproduce.
That's natural selection and the word is differences.
Without differences, you can't have genetics or evolution.
OK, so the last 150 years of mass migrations will have had a huge effect in terms ofan evolutionary effect? Sure.
If you walk through the streets of London today, you will see a genetically different population from what you would have seen a century ago, even when I was a kid, almost a century ago.
One of the ways you can see the effect of this moving business, and maybe everybody in this room can ask themselves the question - how far apart And everybody watching the show.
How far apart were you born from your partner, if you have one, compared to how far apart your mother and father were born, compared to how far apart your mother's mother and your mother's father was born, and so on.
What you'll find generally speaking, that figure, the marital distance, get enormously bigger over the last three or four generations.
- Miodownik, by the way, not a London name.
- No.
- How many generations back? - Polish to two generations.
As a matter of interest, just because we have a spread of predominantly young London people here, who would win that prize, by the way, in terms of how far apart their parents were from? What's the most racially diverse, ethnically Yourself at the back? Mongolia and Ireland.
How did they meet? What weird social gathering? Where did they meet? Here? In Mongolia.
At the airport, actually.
- They met at the airport? - Yeah.
- No, they were both working at the airport.
- Oh, right, it just seemed like your dad from Ireland just swept into Mongolia - No, no! - But that's what? 8,000 miles of a difference, Mongolian and Irish, any rarer? Yourself there at the back? Yep, so Austrian, Lebanese and a little bit of Spanish.
Austria, Lebanon and a bit of Spain? It's the bit of Spain I'm intrigued by.
Why was that guy there? Was he just a guy on a guitar at the night in question? OK, fantastic.
Any more diverse than that? And yourself there? UK and Vietnam.
UK and Vietnam, OK, grand.
So this has become more and more the case, so genetically, when we're talking about, at the very fundamentals, you take genes that have come from very, very far apart, you're removing the danger of mutations? Well, no, it's not quite like that.
I mean, there are some inherited genetic diseases, which are simple diseases, which most genetic diseases are not, most of them are very complicated, which just demand two copies of the same damaged gene, OK? Many people will have heard of a famous one called cystic fibrosis.
About one birth in 2,500 in Britain, about one person in 25 in Britain carries a single copy.
Now, if you happen to think that you might carry a single copy of this gene, and now you can be tested very easily, but that's new, and you were very, very worried that perhaps your partner might have a single copy and you might have an affected child a geneticist's advice would be, marry a Nigerian because there's no cystic fibrosis in Nigeria and it might be that with all this amazing mixing across the globe, we've actually entered somewhat of an era of genetic health.
The idea that mixing is bad is probably wrong.
Mixing is probably good.
The world does seem to be our oyster as far as the genetic pool is concerned but attraction is a strange and mysterious thing and a burning question we have to ask is, taken as a random sample, how attractive is our studio audience? As the audience came in tonight, one of our researchers took a photo.
There's a few of them popping up behind me here.
Well, that's me, obviously.
That may drag down the average.
What we're going to do is that there are various theories about attractiveness involving symmetry, whether symmetry reflects a genetic strength, whether if we average across all of the faces, that we will remove some of those asymmetries and whether if we get an average face, it will be more attractive then on average.
We'll work that out and show you a face at the end of the show.
In case you think we're being brutal and impersonal here, reducing you all down to one thing, it's worth reminding yourselves, even though we say we're all different, there's only a part of us, which is unique.
We have some pretty close cousins.
It takes a very specific set of genes to make a human.
Compare two humans and you'll find their DNA will be almost identical, to 99.
9%, in fact.
Much of our DNA is, as you might expect, also similar to other primates.
It's up to 99% for a chimp, 97% for an orang-utan and 95% for a macaque.
On average, 85% of compared human and mouse genes are identical.
In fact, it's also been said that 50% of our DNA is shared with a banana but how many genes do you reckon a banana has? A simple bacteria has around 4,000 genes, yeast, a fungus, has about 6,000, the honey bee over 10,000, a fruit fly has roughly 14,000 genes, a sea sponge about 18,000, this frog has around 21,000.
A mouse has about 23,000 and so do we.
But a tomato has over 30,000 genes.
A water flea has nearly 31,000 and that banana - over 36,000 genes, which is half as much again as we do.
APPLAUSE Steve, this was never my field of expertise.
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of those points.
Are we overestimating some of those comparisons? Well, you're getting into deep water when you talk about genes as the big surprise for all those creatures, including the banana, is how few genes in the traditional sense there are - 24,000, which is far, far fewer than anybody thought and when you talk about a 4% difference between us and the chimp, it's still hundreds of thousands of differences in the DNA and we know that a single change in one single DNA letter can turn you, for example, into somebody who's very short with achrondoplasia, a dwarf, or a giant, or give you a terrible genetic disease or change your skin colour, so these are really quite big differences, actually.
We have a simple test here, which apparently is the indicator of one particular gene.
Now, if you could just spread one of those samples sheets out.
Some people have a variant that allows them to pick up this particular scent.
We know where the gene is, and some people have variants that mean they can't smell it.
It'd be interesting to test the population - to see how many of the different kinds we have.
- Take one, pass it on.
Some of you will be able to smell this and some won't.
Some of you will find it pleasant and some will find it unpleasant.
- No? Smell blind.
- Nothing.
Nothing, nothing.
Is anyone getting a smell off that? Yeah? Are you? What kind of smell are you getting? It's not very distinctive.
Sorry, excuse me.
What kind of smell are you getting? It's not that distinctive.
It's not good or bad, kind ofI don't know.
Would you describe it as being like any other smell? - Chemically? - It's chemically? OK, grand.
Hmm.
Chemically is everything, really, isn't it? Bit difficult - I shouldn't say that as a scientist.
- Yeah, I know! Anyone else? Can anyone get a smell off it? - You can.
What sort of smell? - Really unpleasant.
You're finding it unpleasant? - Yeah.
I'd say sweat.
- Sweat? - Yeah.
- Possibly urine, maybe? - Potentially.
Potentially, OK, grand.
I'm not going to force your hand on that.
How many of you aren't getting this at all? Majority.
So we'll only get a couple who are seeing it and how many of you are getting any smell at all? You are, you are.
- Quite a few.
- A few over there, seven or eight, a few at the back.
- Shout out, what word would you use to describe it? - Wee.
Wee? Wee.
Anybody getting, is there anyone getting a sweeter smell? You are? You're getting the sweet smell? OK.
See, these are all different reactions from the same gene.
- Yeah, they are.
- By the way, to explain what it is, this is Boarmate, the boar odour spray.
LAUGHTER B-O-A-R, by the way.
I'll let you get that.
If you're looking for a boar odour spray, I can't recommend this one highly enough.
And the purpose of Boarmate, by the way, it's used to determine whether or not a sow is at the correct stage of oestrus for artificial insemination, and by the way, in a test, you don't ask the pig, "Do you get that? Are you getting that smell?" For us, it means nothing.
I'm just reassuring those of you who raised your hand, - it means nothing, other than - As far as we know.
As far as we know.
Thanks.
I'm trying to reassure the nice ladies who smelt it.
I'm thrilled to read on the back, "Avoid spraying Boarmate on hands or clothing," like I just have five times.
"Wash hands immediately after use and change affected clothing.
" Great, well, if we hear the sound of little footsteps, it'll be pigs racing towards me in a state of excitement.
Now, it was 12 years ago that the human genome was sequenced and it was fanfared as one of the most significant events in science or in human history at the time but was it? What has decoding the human genome ever done for us? Alok Jha investigates.
Here they are - more than 100 volumes containing all the instructions you need to make an average human being.
This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.
A revolution in medical science whose implications far surpass even the discovery of antibiotics.
But what now? What use has all this information been out there in the real world? Nobel prizewinner John Sulston was instrumental in delivering the Human Genome Project, or HGP.
John, why have so few of the promises from the Human Genome Project actually emerged? Well, as far as I was concerned, these promises, if you'd like to call them that, or predictions, were very long-term.
But the point is that we had read the code of instructions to make a human being but I had no idea how long it would take to understand.
Indeed, we found that the whole thing was a great deal more complex than we could have imagined.
Was there an element of scientists leading us along just a little bit, just to justify the millions of pounds and dollars being spent? Well, I'm arguing, Alok, that we did not overstate the case.
We said it was important, we said this would be key to medicine.
I think that's absolutely right.
It's because we have the sequence, because we can now learn how one sort of cancer is different from another, how every single tumour probably turns out to be somewhat different, but we have the means, the tools to analyse it, and indeed, precisely because we've discovered it's so much more complex than anybody could have imagined, with different classes of genes, which have only been made accessible as a result of the work.
I think it's justified more than ever.
There's no doubt that the human genome project has been great for fundamental science, but, so far, its direct contribution to medicine is far from clear.
Should we believe scientists' promises? I mean, they don't take things on faith, so why should we? Why is it that we've not seen any treatments so far? Because the genetics turned out to be a great deal more complicated than the simple-minded molecular geneticists thought at the beginning, because you cannot read off the whole of human life from 20,000 genes.
After all, we're 98% identical genetically, in terms of genes, to chimpanzees, and no-one would mistake either you or I for a chimpanzee and so for any one human characteristic, there may be tens, hundreds, thousands of genes involved and if you are trying to get cures for diseases, the idea that you can get one gene which will solve everything is clearly wrong.
We've discovered that the links between human genetics and disease are far more subtle, far more complex, than perhaps people realised amid the hubris of the human genome launch.
So how do we steer this juggernaut that the Human Genome Project has created and can we ever hope to turn all that data into useful medical knowledge? In 2010, the Wellcome Trust announced new plans to sequence even more genomes - 10,000 over three years - in the hope of delivering new therapies.
Mike, the Human Genome Project was completed more than a decade ago.
Why do you create ever more sequences? What we got in the year 2000 was what we call the reference human genome.
So it's like an average human genome.
One of the most important things to study is, what are the differences between individual human genomes? And so by sequencing the genomes of many tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, we'll find out all those differences between individual human beings.
The hope is that these differences can be linked to disease, then perhaps new strategies will be found to treat, even cure, some of the most common and life-threatening human diseases.
Give me some numbers.
What kind of timescales are we talking about for these treatments and medicines? It's going to be happening drip, drip, every day, every year, for the next several decades.
So today's message is far more measured than the fanfare that rang out back in 2000.
Who was to blame for all of the hype, all the expectation we got? The responsibility has to be divided between the scientists who sold the project at the beginning, the big pharmaceutical companies and industrialists who saw there was a bonanza to be made from patenting genes, and the selling to the politicians - it was described as equivalent to putting a man on the moon or even the equivalent of the discovery of the wheel.
These grandiose words simply were not justified by what came out.
And as for one of those involved, John Sulston recalls being at Number 10 Downing Street, preparing to announce the first draft of the Human Genome.
I was sitting there next to Max Perutz and Fred Sanger and one of them turned to me and said, "John, why did you publish now when it's not finished?" I said, "I'm sorry.
This is not about science, it's about politics.
" Perhaps the most important lesson of the past decade has been to show us that, when it comes to investing in science, members of the public and politicians should think more long-term.
It's something we're not used to doing.
Back in 2000, it seemed as if we were writing the concluding chapter of biology.
Now it seems that was just the beginning.
Alok APPLAUSE Could I just accuse you of impatience in this situation? - Are we just being too quick to judge? - Absolutely.
Let's be honest, yes, we are being too quick to judge but the whole point of the genome project was that it was going to give us these things immediately.
That's what they said to us.
That's exactly what John Sulston kind of admitted to saying.
They did what they had to do.
They had to say these things to get that much money to allow these things to happen because it was a massive project.
See it like an infrastructure project.
You just have to do it, you have to build roads for everyone to drive down, you had to do this for the next generation of biology to happen.
You can't explain it to politicians in two minutes, unfortunately.
Shall we all just be slightly embarrassed about the claims that were made, but glad they basically bluffed the politicians into paying for it? Probably, yes.
These guys are much cleverer than us, let's be honest.
They knew what they were doing and let's just thank the Lord that they actually were able to understand the politics to get this stuff done, otherwise they would never have done it and, actually, other people, private sector, would have done it and we'd be in a very different place now because the genome would have been patented, it would have been hard to use, genetic medicine would have been even further away.
I think, first of all, it was a remarkable scientific breakthrough.
Secondly, it was an astonishing technological breakthrough.
The technology now is simply breathtaking, it's unthinkable what we can do now that we couldn't three years ago so it's quite remarkable.
Let's also remember it's been very important to some people.
The place where it's been genuinely important is in cancer studies because it turns out that some, but not all cancers, have a strong inherited component.
And there's one particular kind of colon cancer which, until a few years ago, five, six years ago, the only way you could pick up whether somebody was at risk of inheriting the gene which caused it, whether they had it or not, was whether they had any signs of the cancer, by which time it was probably too late to do much about it.
Now you can look straight at the DNA and say you inherited this damaging variant or you didn't.
And you can start treatment straight away.
There's a lot to keep across here and if you want to know more or get involved with the show, this is how you do it.
You can find us at Or follow us on Twitter.
Or join the conversation.
Still to come - comedian Ed Byrne looks into his murky gene pool and neuro-scientist Tali Sharot reveals the latest startling genetic discoveries.
With all this talk of DNA, we shouldn't act like it's a mysterious thing.
You can actually see the stuff.
You can see some of your own DNA.
All our cells contain DNA but what you might not know is you can extract it, should you want to, using simple household ingredients, assuming your house has a ready supply of super strength vodka.
- What percentage is this, Mark? - 88%.
- 88%.
OK.
What's the recipe? How do we do this? We need to make a cocktail and we'll try to get this DNA that's in every one of our cells out so we can see it.
First thing to do is collect the cells and we thought we'd have a couple of volunteers and try and get people's cheek cells into a solution of their saliva.
We don't want you to bite off the inside of your cheek, just rub it with your teeth.
Two here, two there.
Essentially, chew the inside of your mouth and then spit into that.
What we're trying to do is get the dead cheek cells from inside your mouth into your saliva and make a cocktail out of your saliva.
I think that's probably enough.
In you go.
OK, grand.
Temptation is obviously to judge these by how murky they are.
- Actually I'm sorry! - Look at the difference! - I know, I know.
That is insane.
That one actually is filthy! That is Yeah, can we exclude that on the grounds? - We may need to redo this experiment.
- Yeah, that's just bits in that! Moving one of them, I am not saying who it is.
It was him! Bung them all in together so that we're not revealing any information.
- For anonymity reasons.
- No-one will be cloned from this.
Mixture of cells.
There's a membrane on the outside.
- We need to get through that.
- What's it made of? - Lipids, these are fats.
We need to get through the fats and to the cytoplasm, need to swim through the cytoplasm, hit the nucleus, we need to drag the DNA out.
This is an enormously complicated thing to be doing.
How do we get through the fats, firstly? We do something quite simple, which is add detergent, which you all know will nicely mop up fat.
- This is just common garden detergent.
Whack it in there.
- Washing-up liquid.
Hopefully we're tunnelling through some membranes.
- This is just pineapple juice.
- What's in pineapple juice? It's got this protease cold bromelain and it's amazing stuff.
It's used to tenderise meat and if you put it on meat, it will essentially dissolve it, almost.
We just need to mash this up, there we go.
I think you can hear the cells screaming.
OK, there's too many bubbles and frothy stuff in there, so the next thing is to strain it.
- I'll try to - You have all the gear, don't you? Try this at home with the old vodka martini.
The cocktail shaker you never use.
You got it as a wedding present or something.
OK, there we go.
That's quite exciting.
We're going to get the DNA to come out of the solution by marrying it with the alcohol.
It's not such strong alcohol that it doesn't dissolve The DNA doesn't dissolve as strongly and so it will precipitate out.
- What percentage is that? - It's 88%.
- Go on.
- Yeah, go on! - That's probably enough.
- Polish vodka? - While you're doing that - Generations of Poles.
We know how to drink that stuff.
LAUGHTER - DARA GASPS - Oh, Jesus! LAUGHTER This was the real experiment, by the way.
It was worth it just for that.
- Oh, oh! - Down there, there.
Why is that your national drink? That is horrible! Oh, God! Wow! - Bits of my throat and everything.
- DNA? I would say.
Blood, actually! We're going to get a layer of alcohol that will sit on top of the solution.
And when the DNA molecules hit that layer, they can't dissolve as well in that and so they come out of solution.
They rise out of They hit it, it's a bit like sugar in tea, when you cool it down it's not as soluble.
You can see it.
There's a cloud of DNA.
- That is really, really good.
- That's the joint DNA of the three of you.
Have we a shot that we can get from here? Because that's amazing.
It's really, really clear.
John, can you come in here? Now, that is very clearly That's like a little web of DNA.
You should all be very proud of the strength and health.
- Now we can gather it up.
There we go.
- Wow.
That, although it looks very unimpressive, that goo, that is the genius that is life.
Lovely stuff, well done, that's impressive.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Mark.
Thank you very much.
Well done, Mark.
Yes, extract your DNA and you could become one of the most famous names in science.
We've all heard the famous names in science but there are many scientists that have been doing amazing work and you've never heard their names.
This is why we've instigated our hall of fame.
Obviously headed by the big five.
Darwin, Einstein, Newton, all that.
Who do you think has been overlooked? Someone who has been overlooked is the guy who founded genetics is this chap here.
He's called Francis Galton.
He was this chap's cousin.
They were both pretty smart.
He did many extraordinary things.
He was interested in human quality, which he measured in different ways.
He measured height, weight, looked at their parents.
He did a lot More or less founded statistics.
He's the only person who has made a beauty map of the British Isles and he went from city to city scoring the local females on a five-point scale from attractive to repulsive.
The low point was in Aberdeen.
I once said that in Aberdeen - that was a mistake.
I had one.
Lazzaro Spallanzani.
This man was knitting tiny trousers for frogs.
He's a good scientist.
He should be here.
I always put mine over here cos he'll be remembered for the wrong things.
He'll always exist slightly sideways.
It was a big deal when we had our GMC quiz but recently, our heavy-browed, knuckle-dragging evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals have also had their genomes decoded.
It's thrown up some fascinating facts as Ed Byrne is finding out.
I'm on my way to the world-famous Natural History Museum.
Meet Chris Stringer, Britain's foremost expert on human origins.
Are we related to or descended from Neanderthals? 50 years ago, the opinion was we descended from them but with the new evidence, the idea now is that we're two branches of the evolutionary tree.
So there was a split between homo sapiens and Neanderthal.
About half a million years ago, there was a species called Homo heidelbergensis and they went in different directions.
North of the Mediterranean, it became the Neanderthals and south of the Mediterranean, it became us - Homo sapiens.
Why Homo sapiens flourished when our Neanderthal cousins didn't is a bit of a mystery.
What's even more of a mystery is how it is that, despite them being two different species, there was some interbreeding.
Some experts have always thought there was a bit of interbreeding.
People like me regard the Neanderthal as being a different species.
We know closely-related mammals can interbreed so lions and tigers, African and Indian elephants.
There probably was a bit of interbreeding when modern humans came out of Africa and the early DNA work on Neanderthals, getting DNA from bones also supported that view.
In the last couple of years, the latest DNA work shows that you and I have got some Neanderthal in us.
I take a liberal attitude to these things but I'm feelingdon't fancy yours much.
If you know what I mean.
I don't mean to disrespect here, but would our breeding with the Neanderthal coincide with the invention of alcohol? No evidence of booze back there.
- It could have been magic mushrooms maybe.
- That would do it.
How the interbreeding happened, we don't yet know.
On one extreme, it's the desperation scenario so modern humans ran out of mates and they captured some from a Neanderthal group.
In a sort of Annie Hall as a goal spirit.
Maybe they had a big love-in.
I tend to think that's less likely.
I love the idea that there could have been one massive love-in between the Neanderthals and humans.
Can you tell how Neanderthal someone is by looking at them? Are there physical traits that signify Neanderthal? Big brow ridges, big nose ridges.
Not much of a chin.
You can look around and say, those people look a bit more Neanderthal.
The upper classes, they haven't got the chin going on.
Is there more Neanderthal there? But just looking at people, we can't tell that now.
We'd have to look at their DNA.
To tell how much Neanderthal they are.
There's actually a cool website here that tests your DNA to find out exactly what percentage of you is Neanderthal because as Chris was saying, the physical characteristics like broad shoulders or a sloping forehead don't indicate how Neanderthal you are.
Just cos he looks like one, doesn't mean Dara is a Neanderthal.
There, I said it.
It was out there.
I said it.
I've got their testing kit here.
I was apprehensive about giving a sample of genetic material on camera, but apparently saliva will suffice.
So Actually spitting camera is also a bit gross.
Maybe we should cut three.
Professor Mark Thomas is an evolutionary geneticist from UCM.
He specialises in looking into our ancient DNA.
Have you seen this? It's an app.
It turns you into a Neanderthal.
Right.
Go on, do it.
HE LAUGHS - It's an improvement.
- Not bad.
You should consider a beard.
Yeah.
Some say Neanderthals were a different species.
Inter-species breeding is quite a rare thing.
Particularly to happen on the scale we're talking about.
How would that have come about? The problem here is what do we mean by species.
Some people define it as you're a different species if you can't interbreed.
Clearly we're not a different species from Neanderthals cos we did.
That shouldn't surprise us cos we only separated from Neanderthals as a species about 300-400,000 years ago.
That's a blip in evolutionary terms so we shouldn't be that different anyway.
There we have it.
Despite our obvious differences.
We, homo sapiens, used to get it on with Neanderthals.
Although bit like a one-night stand.
The details are hazy.
We're not sure how it happened, when it happened or indeed who instigated it.
One thing I do know, if you've ever used the term Neanderthal to describe someone who's a bit stupid, I for one am insulted.
That's my relative you're talking about so I take great offence.
I'm not sure how much offence I should take until I see the results of the DNA test.
APPLAUSE Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Byrne.
Did you learn anything on that? I learned that no-one can agree on anything.
That's the fun part about science.
They can always be relied upon for a good dust-up between scientists.
How it came about that we ended up mating with Neanderthals whether it was homo sapiens that did it out of necessity or Neanderthals that did it to us out of superior strength is unknown.
It's jarring for people to think that they evolved in Europe while we were evolving in Africa.
The odd thing about humans nowadays is that there's just us.
The species to which most of us claim to belong which is homo sapien.
It might be that the Neanderthals who had been in Europe for a long time while we were evolving in Africa, we drove them out.
Because we're smart nasty and unpleasant.
There was a time before driving them out that we got kissy with them.
We gave you a test to see what percentage of Neanderthal you had.
Before you open that, can we introduce some competition here? What percentage of Neanderthal? That's what we're asking cos they also did me.
We should not invest any significance in these figures.
I am not more stooped or powerful or have a larger brain.
- There's an easy way to find out.
- Yes.
We just wrestle, you mean? This is how you want this to end? - Ed, firstly, what percentage of you is Neanderthal? - I am 3.
2%.
- That strikes me as quite high.
- That is quite high.
- Excuse me.
Well, well, well.
You mixed, didn't you? Whereas I am 3.
0%.
That could be why I prefer decorating my house with animal bones more than you do.
I do.
That's why you will die out earlier.
That app is great.
Yvette first as a Neanderthal.
That's ED I presume.
Grand.
And me, although this I am clearly less.
I get the way it works.
It's a picture of your eyes on the same Neanderthal.
What 69p did we waste on that? In 2003, when the human genome was decoded, we decided we had 22-23,000 genes.
This was about the same number of genes as a mouse.
For such a complex organism as us, it was disappointingly few.
We had massively underestimated how complex genetic expression is.
A rethink was needed and that rethink led us into the world of the epigenome.
We sent Tali Sharot to find out more.
These mice are famous in the world of epigenetics.
They're called the agouti mice because they have the agouti gene which makes them yellow and very fat.
They're identical in terms of the genes and as you expect, they look exactly the same.
This one looks very different.
It's brown, it's leaner and it's much healthier, but it too is genetically identical to the other ones.
It has the agouti gene.
What's different is that it has a chemical tap on top of that gene which suppresses it.
That is epigenetics at work.
We used to have a very simple model of genetic expression.
These mice are changing that.
They clearly show that one gene can be expressed to two quite different ways.
And as we're discovering, it's the epigenome that's instrumental in mediating that expression.
This is a molecule of DNA.
The epigenetic markers sit here, on top of one of the base pairs.
What they are is a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms.
They don't change the underlying gene.
What they do is they suppress the gene expression.
You can think of the epigenome as software to the hardware of the DNA.
Now, what's really interesting is that, unlike the DNA, which remain stable, the epigenome is something that we can actually manipulate and control.
Dana Dolinoy is an epigeneticist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
She's been changing the epigenetic markers on the agouti mouse genome.
She does this by adding chemicals to the diet of the pregnant mothers because the epigenome is most vulnerable to change during development in the womb.
When we did this experiment, we noticed there were a lot more yellow obese offspring.
So by introducing the chemical to the diet of the mother, you were changing the epigenome of her offspring? Exactly.
And it turns a gene on when it normally should be off and it caused these mice to eat and become obese.
Once they figured out how to make the offspring fat, they repeated the experiment with a second pregnancy to see if they could make the new babies healthy.
They found out they could.
And this time we supplemented their diet with a whole lot of nutritional factors like folic acid so we showed by nutritional supplementation we could counteract the effect of that chemical alone.
And that was truly amazing.
This time, the mother was able to produce lean brown mice pups, all because nutrition had altered their epigenome.
It's an astonishing proof that environmental epigenetic changes can override what's written in their DNA.
The big question is, could it be the same for humans? Can we manipulate our own epigenome? Here in Sweden, scientists are trying to find out by doing just that.
We used to think that our epigenome is set at birth, but new research in humans now shows that, actually, it can change throughout our life.
That's really interesting because it suggests we have much more control over our genetic destiny.
Many diseases, like cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are thought to involve the epigenome, with epigenetic markers altering the expression of our DNA.
If these markers are flexible, this has huge implications for our future health.
Juleen Zierath studies diabetes at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
She's been trying to find out if exercise changes the epigenetic markers on our muscle tissue.
All right, so that's your first stage.
And her team have uncovered some surprising results.
This picture on top represents a schematic diagram of a gene that's really important for burning fat in muscle.
And this is before exercise.
And you can see that after exercise the hill is smaller, so that would suggest that there is a disappearance of methyl groups from the DNA.
So these are changes to the epigenome that we're seeing here? - And all these changes are positive in this case? - That's correct.
We didn't imagine that we would be able to see these kinds of changes in response to exercise.
After intense exercise, the epigenetic methyl tags disappeared from the DNA, making the tissue healthier, better at metabolising glucose and burning fat.
This change was completely unexpected.
We thought that this was fixed.
What this would suggest is that the epigenome is more flexible than we could have imagined, so this was really surprising to us.
So a simple workout, a 20-minute workout, can change our epigenome.
We used to think that if you were predisposed to a disease, you couldn't do much about it.
Juleen's results suggest we may have more control over our future health than we thought possible.
This is a whole new frontier of medicine.
Based on the studies, something like exercise can reprogram the muscle to be more fit, and to increase its capacity to burn fuels like glucose and fats .
.
and possibly even prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, because we can keep our sugar levels under control.
Until recently, we believed that genetics alone determined our inheritance.
But we now know that's not the case.
Far from being fixed at the moment of conception, these new insights into our dynamic epigenome suggest we may actually be able to take control of our own genetic destinies is ways that we never imagined.
Tali, thank you very much for coming in.
This is a big deal.
This is a major change, isn't it? Yeah, it seems that things like nutrition and exercise and all kinds of environmental factors will change the epigenome, and the epigenome changes the expression of the gene.
And the epigenome is a switch that sits on top of the base-pairs on the DNA - and can either be functioning or not functioning? - Yeah.
And what it does, it can switch off the expression of the gene and therefore totally change traits, like we saw with the agouti mice.
Yes, and we also saw the man on the bike was switching on or switching off was switching off certain genes because of the exercise he was doing at the time.
Yeah.
So that's really interesting, cos what happens there is that the epigenome is changing for a very short amount of time.
So you exercise and the change only lasts for about an hour, so it's acute.
And that's quite interesting.
The only thing about it is, - we don't know whether it's a good effect or a bad effect? - In the case of exercise, it seems like it was a positive effect, cos it enhances metabolism, and that's good.
But we do know that For example, in a famous study in Sweden, they looked at a village - Overkalix - and they showed that whether the grandparents had a lot to eat, whether it was a good time for them, or whether they were in famine, where they didn't have much to eat, actually it affected two generations later the longevity of their grandchildren.
- You pick an obscure Swedish village We have shots of it.
- Yeah, that's it.
.
.
which is isolated, but well recorded, and then you contract the relative health.
But two generations later? - Possibly more.
At least two now.
- Yeah.
They looked at two, but What's astonishing, genuinely astonishing, about the Swedish study is it goes down through males.
So it's actually changing the DNA in the sperm.
- It's nothing to do with the woman's body.
It's actually the DNA.
- So I think there's two points here.
One is we can change our epigenome throughout our lifetime, and the second is that changes to our epigenome can actually be inherited and not only inherited by our kids but a second generation over.
It means we have a lot of responsibility.
So if I start smoking and drinking or not eating well, it's not only going to affect me, it's going to affect my kids, - possibly my grandkids, and so on and so on and so on.
- The guy on the bike, by the way, if the guy on the bike wanted to pass on those changes to the next generation, would he have had to make a baby, basically, an hour after he'd been on the exercise bike? - Is that how long? - On the bike.
- On the bike is great.
Fantastic.
I don't think we know and I don't think the experiment has been done Yes.
You'd get funding for that! We've talked about everything we wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask.
If you have any other questions you want to add to this about genetics, we have our after-hours science club which is starting now, where Steve Jones will be waiting for your questions.
If you want to get involved with the show, this is how you do it.
APPLAUSE Some last items of business, then.
How attractive is this crowd? Let's have a look.
We've been staring at you all day, but let's have a look at the average of this.
The gist of this, basically, the scientific principle was, we tend to favour more symmetric faces because we believe they are healthier and there is possibly an argument to say the more symmetric face is genetically stronger, having weeded out imperfections and things that cause asymmetry.
So let's have a look.
We've flashed you various faces.
Those are faces of the studio audience there.
We've got two composites, obviously, the male and the female composite, which I think we can do.
Do you have the male composite? Not an enormous amount of raw lust coming out of the room at this stage for that.
- It's Michael McIntyre! - It genuinely is Michael McIntyre.
Michael McIntyre, it turns out, is your image of the ideal beautiful person.
Let's have a look at the ladies.
You know, I can't see exactly who that is.
Let's put them together and just see if you think they are more attractive than average.
Try not to think of Michael McIntyre when you're actually doing the vote.
More or less attractive than average? No-one, no-one? Literallyone guy.
You don't have to throw in cos I need you to get involved.
OK, so that piece of science is clearly bunk.
We're going to lose that.
Can we bring in the rest of our contributors? That's very, very kind.
Thank you.
- By the way, if you average - ED GROWLS - Sit down.
Sit down! Sit down, Caveman Ed.
- ED GROWLS This, by the way, is the average of the presenters.
LAUGHTER - That's actually - There's a lot of me in there.
It is predominantly You can see me! That actually isn't bad.
That actually is better than all of us combined, I think.
- Apart from the fringe.
- At least we've got hair now, Dara.
I've got hair.
You're right! It's me with hair! That is just about it for tonight.
I would like to say thanks to all of our reporters, to Alok and Tali.
Thanks to Mark Miodownik, of course, and to our special guest, Ed Byrne, and a big thanks to tonight's science guru Steve Jones.
CHEERING But more than that, ladies and gentlemen, we have to wrap up what we have learned tonight.
We've learned, many, many things in the Science Club.
We've discovered genes aren't everything, that epigenetics is the emerging big new area of study.
We've learned scientists make pairs of shorts for frogs, that Ed Byrne is more Neanderthal than me - that's quite a nice thing.
We found out also that if you drink really strong Polish vodka midway through a television show, at the end, it still hurts.
That's something you may not have learned, but take it from me.
We found that our audience, if you add them all together, are moderately attractive but less attractive than anyone in particular, but weirdly they look like Michael McIntyre.
But mainly we've learnt - if you take any advice at all - if you want to make a baby, do it on an exercise bike.
That's what we've learnt tonight.
It's been a pleasure to have you.
We'll see you for another Science Club soon.
Good night.