Brave New World with Stephen Hawking (2011) s01e02 Episode Script
Health
(STEPHEN HAWKING) Science is on the brink of changing your life.
Right now, men and women around the world are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible! Wow! 'Our team of leading scientists have chosen the discoveries 'they think matter most.
' Whoa! An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one of the most important of all conservation enterprises.
'From the car you drive ' Aahh! '.
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to medical advances that could save your life.
' This miracle means that we can replace surgery.
'On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa ' I'm here to hunt for one of the biggest threats to human survival.
'.
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to the quads of Oxford ' This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
'.
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we will show you how science is a force for good.
' 'Prepare to see your future.
' This is the beginning of that brave new world.
'Tonight - Health.
' The breakthroughs we think are most important in the fight against five big killers.
Heart disease, cancer malaria brain disorders and viruses.
We will show you how a handful of scientists could save the lives of millions.
'My name is Aarathi Prasad.
I'm a Doctor of Biology.
' I'm in Cameroon in Central Africa and I'm here to join the hunt to find one of the biggest threats to human survival the next big killer virus.
'Viruses invade healthy cells to stay alive and replicate.
'They cause infections like the common cold, 'but also much more dangerous and deadly diseases.
' 'This is what Spanish flu looks like.
' 'Just after the First World War, 'it wiped out about three percent of the world's population.
'And this is smallpox.
' 'that originate in animal species pose a very real threat to humans.
' 'We can defeat viruses, but we have to know our enemy.
' It's very heavily forested.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Lush vegetation.
But you know, what I'm thinking is in this beauty is some of the most dangerous viruses and parasites known to man.
'And that's why here, 'in this remote rainforest, is an outpost of science.
' This is Matthew LeBreton, a research co-ordinator of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
He's spent the last eight years investigating the flashpoint where viruses cross over to humans.
75% of all new and emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.
This is something that's actually incredibly common, through the history of humanity, even.
This is something that's really part of our existence.
So when you find viruses here that are not recorded at the moment, you might be spotting something that could be incredibly important to the rest of the world? Yeah, that's really the principle of what we're trying to do, is to try and find these viruses before they cross over, try and work out what's their potential in terms of whether they can cause a pandemic, whether they cause disease, and try and stop them before they get into communities like this.
It's in communities where they hunt for bush meat that people have far more direct contact with virus-carrying animals.
Some hunters have just found an antelope in the forest and they're about to kill it.
And they're going to take some blood samples from it, too, so we're going to take a look.
In the community where Matthew is based, he gets the hunters to collect blood samples from their kills samples that Matthew can screen for unknown viruses.
By being here, we're able to witness one potential source of virus outbreak the process of butchering meat.
It's at this point when we come into contact with infected blood of these animals though cuts in hands, insect bites and sores, that the virus crosses over from animal to humans.
This kind of contact with wild animals has been a part of life here for generations.
New viruses used to be contained within these places.
But what's different now is these once isolated areas have opened up to global travel.
In other words, I could spread a virus way faster than it could spread itself naturally.
I personally could start a pandemic.
One particular deadly virus that broke out of Central Africa has claimed 25 million lives.
It's now believed that HIV originated here when a primate virus, known as SIV, mutated into HIV.
This is what a cell infected with HIV looks like under a microscope.
It's now thought that HIV made the jump from monkeys to humans as long ago as the 1880s.
But we had no idea what it was until the 1980s.
Science was a century behind.
In this part of Africa, it's traditional to hunt monkeys for meat.
The hunters have just caught these two monkeys.
I'm not sure what species they are, but they're primates, which means, genetically, they're very related to us humans.
If these are carrying any viruses, there's a greater possibility that humans will be susceptible to them.
These monkeys are about to be taken by the hunter along these roads, which used to be logging roads.
They're a conduit, connecting these remote villages straight into the capital city.
So, if they are carrying a virus, in just a few hours it could be in the next town.
And in a day or two, anywhere on earth.
I'm virus hunting in Cameroon with an international group of scientists working to predict and prevent future pandemics.
It's by collecting blood samples from animals and humans that they hope to identify new viruses that have deadly potential.
It's at this point that the virus crosses over from animal to humans.
'Back in the capital, Yaounde, 'the samples we've collected are taken to the lab for analysis.
'These scientists recently discovered two new viruses related to HIV 'HTLV III and IV.
'They can cause cancer and paralysis and have already crossed over 'from animals to humans.
'As far as we know, 'these previously unknown viruses are still confined to Africa.
' If we have the ability to detect these viruses earlier and to understand these viruses earlier, it means we can potentially stop them getting into human populations in the first place, or it lets us be more ahead of developing vaccines and treatments if they manage to escape from our control.
It's definitely possible in this day and age to use our knowledge in a way to stop these viruses from becoming pandemics.
'History has shown that viruses can sweep indiscriminately 'through human populations, killing millions.
'Every discovery made here, 'forms part of a globally accessible database on viruses.
'So next time, if a virus does go pandemic, 'hopefully we'll have a head start.
' A generation ago, it was thought that the greatest threat to the future of the human race would be nuclear war.
Today, if you were to place a bet on our species being wiped out by nuclear war or a virus, you might be better off putting all your money on the virus.
But what I'm holding here is part of an advance warning system that might be the key to saving our entire species.
The medical breakthrough that's had the most impact on me personally is the MRI scanner.
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, it was the MRI scanner that picked up the tumour.
The contraceptive pill.
I think for me and millions of women, we've been able to choose whether to have babies, how many to have and when to have them.
And that's just meant an enormous liberation.
The medical breakthrough that's meant the most to me personally was fertility treatments - without them I would not have any children.
Was fertility treatments - without them I would not have any children.
The relief of pain, anaesthetics.
That's a huge breakthrough.
I think we've forgotten what it must have been like to deal with amputations, for example, or come to that, just filling your teeth.
Next, the latest from the battle against heart disease.
It kills seven million of us every year.
But now a combination of technology and robotics is giving new hope.
HEARTBEATS When I was a boy, I used to wonder what the doctor was doing when he listened to my heart with a stethoscope.
I didn't realise he could hear the beating of my heart, and the valves opening and shutting and the blood flowing through it.
'Of course, today we're not only able to hear the heart, but see it.
'The problem comes when it goes wrong.
'Repairing the heart often means major surgery.
' My name is Robert Winston.
I'm a medical scientist at Imperial College, London.
I also sit in the House of Lords.
Some of my time is devoted to arguing for new strategies in the fight for health.
Now at least a third of you watching this programme will get some kind of cardiovascular disease, and that often means major surgery.
So the medical advance that most excites me is one that could change that.
Here at St Thomas' Hospital in London, a remarkable group of specialists physicians, engineers, computer scientists have put together a sophisticated piece of kit which could revolutionise cardiac surgery.
At St Thomas', they're combining powerful medical imaging with bio-robotic surgery.
Here's how it works advanced X-ray and MRI scans provide a 3D road map.
The surgeon uses this to guide a remotely controlled flexible tube or catheter to the damaged area.
It's all done through a tiny incision.
This patient is a 27-year-old man, and the operation is about to save his life.
He's suffering from one of the most common forms of heart disorder, atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm of the heart that may cause a heart attack, or even sudden death.
In the UK, probably between 1.
5 and 2% of the population have atrial fibrillation.
So we're talking 600,000 people? We're talking almost up to a million people.
We're talking almost up to a million people.
A million people? The vast majority in the second half of their lives.
And over the age of 80, 10% of the population have atrial fibrillation.
The catheter uses high frequency radio waves to destroy the rogue tissue that causes the abnormal rhythm.
So, it looks like a very complicated concept.
'The catheter is remotely controlled 'using a highly sensitive joystick.
'If used correctly, it can be more precise than doing it by hand.
' So this is the? These are the upper? Upper pulmonary veins.
The right upper vein.
'The patient's operation has gone well.
'Now they're going to letmehave a go.
' The patient's not going to have a cardiac arrest if I do this? 'Not on a human being, of course.
'Instead, I'll be performing surgery on this 'a phantom heart.
'This glass model is used like a flight simulator for surgeons.
' This moves the catheter around.
Yes.
'The joystick controls an intricate mechanism of wires and pulleys 'inside the catheter, allowing me to steer it 'to the hardest to reach chambers of the heart.
' So as that model is moving, the catheter is moving, and you're very close to the pulmonary veins.
'The very tip of the catheter delivers 'the high frequency radio waves that destroy the abnormal tissue.
' Itisvery tricky, isn't it? 'I'm only supposed to using the 3D images of the heart to navigate, 'but it's hard to resist taking a peek at the heart model.
' It's very much like a computer game.
I think I could get to enjoy this! 'This combination of extraordinarily detailed images of the heart 'and the latest robotics means that this can be done much faster 'and with less trauma.
' It gives the operator the capability to manipulate with a very high degree of precision, which is something we can do quite well with our hands, but perhaps not quite as well as a robot.
'Only about 200 physicians in the world 'are capable of operating one of these.
'Yet hundreds of thousands of people worldwide 'need this life-saving operation.
' So how could it be rolled out for everyone? The team here have a plan.
One of automatic surgery, where the mind of the surgeon is replaced by autonomous software.
The next thing we need to do is harness the precision of the robot.
We can see a situation arising where we can image the heart in real time and take into account every beat and movement of the heart.
Take in all of the physiological parameters, including blood pressure, pain and be able to process those in a computer to guide a robotic procedure such that once the robot is positioned in the rightplace, it can do the procedure itself.
This team predicts a time when instead of just doing two or three operations a day, they supervise an array of robotic catheters simultaneously performing ten or even 20 procedures in the same time.
I do find this pretty mind-blowing.
It looks incredibly complicated all these catheters with sensors and the ability to receive and deliver impulses to the heart.
But the extraordinary thing is that this technology, this miracle, means that we can replace surgery, opening the chest, a massive injury to the patient, and that must be one of the great promises of the future.
We are choosing the medical breakthroughs that matter most.
Now we go inside the brain to a whole new science which is at last unravelling its mysteries.
My name is Richard Dawkins.
I'm an evolutionary biologist.
The work I want to show you gives a vision of how human health might be cared for in the future.
This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
There's one inside my skull, there's one inside yours.
In there were once thoughts, memories, dreams, perceptions of colour, sounds, melodies, language.
There are perhaps 100 billion nerve cells, neurones, in there and maybe 200 trillion connections between them.
Problems in the brain cause terrible disorders like Alzheimer's and dementia.
They affect over 35 million people worldwide, and they're on the rise.
It has been a dream of science to be able to identify specific neural pathways and control them.
It's a dream that has proved elusive so far.
This is Professor Gero Miesenbock, an Oxford neuroscientist.
He wondered if it was possible to have switch-like control over individual brain cells, to be able to turn them on and off.
He began his quest by studying not the 100 billion or so neuronal cells of the human brain but something far simpler the 250,000 brain cells of the tiny fruit fly.
He's being trying to control its mind with light.
He began by getting a light-sensitive protein into the fly's brain.
We thought, in our initial experiments, "Well, there are cells in nature that naturally respond to light.
" And these, of course, are the photoreceptors in our eyes and in the eyes of many different animals.
What if we could borrow the light sensing devices from these photoreceptors and transplant them genetically, through genetic engineering, into cells that are not normally light responsive? This technique has given Gero such precise control over the fruit fly's mind that he can make a female think she's a male.
If you look through the microscope, Richard, you will see a male and a female.
So what you should see is that he is quite persistent, he being the smaller animal in this case, chasing the female.
Sticking out one wing, one side or the other, and vibrating, which presumably the female hears.
I can't hear it.
So this is a behaviour that's entirely sex specific only males show this one-sided wing vibration, and females never, under normal circumstances, stick out one wing.
Gero genetically engineered the brain cells that govern sexual expression so they would respond to light.
So when light is flashed on the female it shines through her transparent exoskeleton and hits those targeted cells causing her to perform a male sex ritual.
We were able to make females exhibit part of the male courtship dance.
So the females stuck out one wing, started to vibrate it and produce sound, just like a male would.
And that's never been seen before, presumably? It's never been seen before because the behaviour never occurs in nature.
Gives a whole new meaning to turning one on.
This way of controlling brain cells is called optogenetics.
It allows us to target specific bits of the brain and then control them, so it's a discovery that could revolutionise the way we treat brain disorders.
Any organ can go wrong, and with an organ as complicated as a brain it's not surprising that up to 1 in 7 people have some sort of brain malfunction.
But could optogenetics actually be used on humans? At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists have taken things one step further.
Here they're using optogenetics to control the minds of mice.
This is Professor Ed Boyden, an MIT physiologist and electrical engineer.
All right.
So this is the main microscopy area.
He also dreams of using optogenetics to treat human brain disorders.
This is an X-ray scanner so if you want to find out where a probe is in the brain you can scan it with X-rays.
It's pretty cool.
This We don't actually use this device, so it's irrelevant for our research right now.
It's a cool device anyway.
It's called a FIB - Focused lon Beam.
When I see it I think, "We should do something with that.
" We might be the only neurotechnology group with a piano in the atrium.
Professor Boyden developed a fibre optic cable that delivers a pulse of light directly to a mouse's brain cells.
Like the fruit fly, the mouse's brain has been genetically modified to respond to light.
But in this case, it's the bit of the brain that makes the mouse happy.
So every time the mouse sticks its nose through the hole, it gets a zap of light that triggers a flood of dopamine from the pleasure centre of the brain.
In less than 30 seconds the mouse learns that it feels good to stick its nose through the hole.
A number of people are trying to hunt down the neural targets in the brain that can overcome aversive emotion, like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety.
We're now starting to find that you can activate very specific sets of cells in the brain and overcome those pathological states.
And that's of great importance because it's very hard to treat these kinds of disorders.
Treating anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder is very difficult.
The drugs being used have a lot of side effects and they don't work as well as one might hope.
So we're trying to figure out, if you want to fix this circuit, what are the points in the brain that, when modulated, have the most powerful therapeutic benefits.
Using optogenetics on humans is still a long way off.
But, in the future, not only could it be used to identify which neurones a treatment needs to turn on or off, it could even be used as a treatment itself.
The great Oxford physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington likened the brain to an enchanted loom.
It's an enchanted loom of immense complexity and optogenetics is one of the most fruitful tools so far devised for working out the principles by which brains work.
The great thing that makes humans different from other species is that we are fundamentally inquisitive in a very influential way.
We're programmed to ask questions and that's why, of course, humans have achieved so much.
It's a difficult question for an evolutionist to answer why we are so curious.
I can only think that, in our ancestral past, in the Pleistocene savannahs of Africa, something equivalent to modern scientific curiosity must have aided our survival.
Only by unorthodox thought does science improve and progress, and I think the best discoveries are always shocking and fly in the face of given knowledge.
That happens again and again.
In our next choice the scientist has done just that taken an unusual approach to combating one of our oldest and most deadly enemies malaria.
Many of us just think of malaria as something we might catch if we go on holiday somewhere exotic.
The truth is malaria is still one of the biggest problems facing mankind.
Somewhere on Earth a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
My name is Joy Reidenberg.
I'm a Professor of Anatomy.
My work involves comparing animal and human anatomies to find new medicines and treatments.
One disease that I would love to see eradicated is malaria.
In the past, we've tried insecticides and drugs to slow the spread of the disease.
But they're expensive solutions and most people at risk have to rely on something much more basic.
The first line of defence for people in the parts of the world where malaria is rampant is the trusty mosquito net.
Mosquito nets have been used against malaria for centuries.
But they're by no means fool proof.
They're essentially just flimsy nylon or cotton nets that can get damaged or torn.
In the 21st century you would think that science could come up with a more robust solution to a disease that kills over a million people a year.
Well, interestingly, the challenge has been taken up by researchers working in a completely unexpected discipline of science.
Here in New York City, in an obscure lab at Columbia University, an experimental physicist has been working on a defence against mosquitoes that's never been tried before.
This is Professor Szabolcs Marka.
A few years ago a close colleague died after becoming infected with malaria.
Ever since, he's been developing an anti-mosquito force field using the technology he knows best lasers.
So tell me about this device you have here? I see lots of mosquitoes buzzing around, what's the rest of it? What we have here is really a device which creates a light barrier in the middle of this chamber.
We put a bunch of mosquitoes here and what happens is that, when I switch on the device, it will create a light barrier which will divide the box into two regions and that will be a light barrier which will be hard to cross.
OK.
So can we try it out, see how it works? Sure.
The test chamber is full of mosquitoes, but when the laser-generated infrared beam is switched on it splits the chamber in two.
The human eye can't detect infrared, so we've added a line.
The mosquitoes in the lower half seem unable to cross over to the top half and vice versa.
If they try, they bounce off the beam.
I really want to know what's actually happening in the mosquito when it senses this light.
It's not clear what's happening right now.
Many people don't even care what's happening as long as it's happening.
It might be that the infrared beam, although imperceptible to me, is something the mosquitoes are instinctively avoiding.
They are, after all, a species that hunt at dawn and dusk, avoiding the sun's infrared rays.
Perhaps they're seeing this as a stream of sunlight in the middle of night time and they're thinking "This is the wrong place, I can't be "in the middle of the sunlight.
I have to hide in the shade.
" Could that be why they're avoiding it? Maybe.
Maybe that's the explanation, we just don't know it yet.
It seems like a really wonderful device, but the problem is it's so big.
Could this practically really work if you were to take something like this to an African village? That's an interesting question.
Right now we are in the laboratory exploratory phase, but I think long-term effect will only be there if it shrinks.
I mean, if you have seen the first cell phone, it was like this big! The ultimate vision is to produce smoke detector-sized units that use optics to create sheets across windows or 3-dimensional shapes over beds.
They'd be run on solar or battery power.
The laser mosquito net could be the ultimate defensive barrier, but it's not going to stop the spread of malaria completely.
What if science could give us a more radical solution? What if we could get rid of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes for good? To do that would mean genetically modifying an entire species.
We have been following science's battle against malaria.
Now our understanding of kinetics is creating a remarkable new way to fight back.
Every year, 250 million people get malaria.
To stop it, we need to find a chink in the mosquito's armour.
The mosquito has existed for over 100 million years.
It's perfectly evolved to find its prey.
It has a battery of sensory devices that registers smell and breath from 50 metres away.
But when it bites into humans, it can pass on a deadly disease.
What if we could genetically modify the mosquito so that it was rendered completely incapable of carrying the malaria parasite? Well, that's exactly what they're doing here in the desert in Arizona.
So if we come over into this lab here, this is where our mosquito containment facility is 'This is Professor Mike Riehle.
'He and his team have created new mosquitoes, 'deliberately engineered so they can't spread malaria.
'Security in the lab is tight.
' Two doors? Two doors? There's two doors.
This is just one more level of security so the mosquitoes don't get out.
One of the mosquito chambers is in this room right here.
Wow! Look at this room.
There's so many in here! 'Mike is an entomologist - a professor of insects.
'So he knows very well how malaria is intricately linked 'to a mosquito's life cycle.
'The disease is actually caused by a parasite in the mosquito's gut 'and that's what they inject into us when they bite.
' I get to be guinea pig.
I'll take out one of these female mosquitoes here.
Aah! I feel one, I feel one.
There's one there.
'If this mosquito was carrying malaria, 'then this is all it would take for it to infect me.
' She's definitely getting fatter.
Yeah.
'But Mike has found a weak spot in the mosquito 'the time lag between the mosquito picking up malaria 'and being able to transmit the disease.
' So a mosquito only lives for about three weeks in the wild, and the malaria parasite, from the time it feeds on, say, myself, if I had malaria, takes about two weeks for that parasite to get back to the mosquito's salivary glands, where it can be injected into another person.
What we were trying to do was reduce the mosquito's lifespan from three weeks to about two weeks so the parasite didn't have enough time to develop in the mosquito.
'As they created mosquitoes that didn't live long enough to pass on malaria, they noticed there was an unexpected bonus.
What we found is that the genetically-engineered ones didn't have any malaria parasites developing in them.
So we have two mechanisms that work in the same mosquito.
They can't get infected in the first place and even if a few of them do, they'll die before they can transmit the parasite.
That's so cool! 'There was one last problem 'how to tell the difference between normal mosquitoes 'and the ones he'd altered.
' Those are the oldest larvae and then they turn into the pupae which are the comma-shaped things.
'The solution - he added a fluorescent marker 'so his mosquitoes had eyes that glowed.
' I'm going to hit them with the UV light.
Oh! That's so cool! Yeah! Nice glowing red eyes.
Nice glowing red eyes.
Oh, yeah! This story illustrates the incredible power we have over nature.
The ability to change how long an animal lives, what it does, even the colour of its eyes.
But should we be concerned about setting free a genetically-modified insect? As far as concerns about generating a 20-foot mosquito, or anything like that, it's very unlikely.
We targeted a very specific gene that was already found in the mosquito.
We're not introducing foreign DNA into the mosquito, or anything like that.
And so you could think of it more as a very controlled form of selective breeding.
I think it's always dangerous when you play with the genetics of a species and then consider reintroducing it back into the wild.
You could be messing up the food web, you could be messing up natural selection.
But in this case, maybe it's worth it.
There is one disease that many people fear more than any other.
Cancer.
Science has made great advances against this killer.
But now we are entering a new era where genetics is giving us a powerful weapon to save lives.
'My work as a biologist 'has focused on looking at genetic therapies for cancer.
' I spent nearly ten years studying cancer in a laboratory, and as a scientist I find it an incredibly fascinating and challenging disease.
But the day-to-day reality is most of us know someone who has been diagnosed with it.
And the likelihood is that as people start living longer and longer, each and every one of us is going to be affected by it.
Cancer is the disease that originates in the genes.
When certain genes mutate, they can cause our cells to turn cancerous.
When we get the disease, the treatment is not always as focused as doctors would like.
Current cancer therapy, it's like a carpet-bombing technique.
It kills cancer cells, but it destroys healthy cells as well.
What if scientists could create a targeted medicine? I've come to Boston, where researchers are doing just that.
'Tina Meranda is married with two young sons.
'Three years ago, she got the news we all dread.
'She was diagnosed with cancer.
'It was in her lungs.
'Despite taking numerous drugs and undergoing chemotherapy, 'the cancer spread.
' It's something you don't expect in life, and, boy, when it hits you, it hits you.
And it's awful, you know, to see your kids, and to think you're not going to be around for them.
But Tina is one of the first cancer patients in the world to be given a new form of personalised medicine.
She is being treated here at Massachusetts General where most cancer patients who come through the door have their tumours investigated at a genetic level.
It's allowing researchers to build up an extraordinary database that classifies individual cancer mutations.
This programme is the first of its kind, and, to me, it marks the start of a new era in cancer treatment one of personalised medicines and smart drugs.
Doctors knew that to give more focused treatment, they had to uncover each cancer's genetic fingerprint.
So what we do is we take the tumours, like in this block for instance.
This is a piece of a patient's tumour.
We remove a little bit of it and make DNA from this.
Within a day, or a few days, we will have the information about what are the genetic changes that actually made this tumour grow.
That is interesting, but more important is, if you can identify the key genes, we can now give that information to oncologists who have a set of drugs that can exactly target that mutant gene.
In fact, those patients that have been on those trials, many have seen their tumours shrink away.
'Over the last three months, 'Tina has been given a targeted drug therapy 'that is specific to her type of cancer mutation.
'They're not just treating cancer, they're treatinghercancer.
'Within only 48 hours of taking it, her tumours started to shrink.
' One thing I wanted to ask you.
Did you get the rest of my tests back? Everything looks good.
We couldn't be more pleased about how well you're doing.
You're feeling well, you cancer has been shrinking away.
It's wonderful to see that.
Tina is back to where she was pre-cancer within two days of taking the medication targeted at the particular mutation that her tumour had.
It cleared up.
She went off the painkillers.
And she stopped the chemo.
She's just a different woman.
This genetically-targeted medicine is not a cure for cancer and would not necessarily work for everyone.
Not all mutations have matching drugs that are effective treatments.
But when such a drug exists, it is a way of keeping the cancer under control.
Tina will remain on these drugs for as long as the cancer stays dormant.
Without them, she would most probably be dead.
What this points to is a future where cancer is no longer a death sentence, but something we can live with.
Just over ten years ago, the human genome was sequenced and with it came the promise of a brave new world of genetic medicine.
Since then, not many actual treatments for human health have emerged.
What I have just seen here today, this is the beginning of that brave new world.
In the last century, scientific endeavour almost doubled life expectancies.
My own life is evidence of this.
It is also a testament to the great challenges we still face.
But as long as science continues to battle for the health of humanity, we, and generations to come, will lead longer and healthier lives.
'Next time - technology - the innovations shaping our century.
'We visit the city of the future ' 'Your vehicle is now ready to leave.
Please be seated so you may depart.
' '.
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explore how lasers are changing the way we build our world, 'and head deep underground to the most mysterious lab in the world.
' That is amazing.
Right now, men and women around the world are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible! Wow! 'Our team of leading scientists have chosen the discoveries 'they think matter most.
' Whoa! An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one of the most important of all conservation enterprises.
'From the car you drive ' Aahh! '.
.
to medical advances that could save your life.
' This miracle means that we can replace surgery.
'On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa ' I'm here to hunt for one of the biggest threats to human survival.
'.
.
to the quads of Oxford ' This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
'.
.
we will show you how science is a force for good.
' 'Prepare to see your future.
' This is the beginning of that brave new world.
'Tonight - Health.
' The breakthroughs we think are most important in the fight against five big killers.
Heart disease, cancer malaria brain disorders and viruses.
We will show you how a handful of scientists could save the lives of millions.
'My name is Aarathi Prasad.
I'm a Doctor of Biology.
' I'm in Cameroon in Central Africa and I'm here to join the hunt to find one of the biggest threats to human survival the next big killer virus.
'Viruses invade healthy cells to stay alive and replicate.
'They cause infections like the common cold, 'but also much more dangerous and deadly diseases.
' 'This is what Spanish flu looks like.
' 'Just after the First World War, 'it wiped out about three percent of the world's population.
'And this is smallpox.
' 'that originate in animal species pose a very real threat to humans.
' 'We can defeat viruses, but we have to know our enemy.
' It's very heavily forested.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Lush vegetation.
But you know, what I'm thinking is in this beauty is some of the most dangerous viruses and parasites known to man.
'And that's why here, 'in this remote rainforest, is an outpost of science.
' This is Matthew LeBreton, a research co-ordinator of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
He's spent the last eight years investigating the flashpoint where viruses cross over to humans.
75% of all new and emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.
This is something that's actually incredibly common, through the history of humanity, even.
This is something that's really part of our existence.
So when you find viruses here that are not recorded at the moment, you might be spotting something that could be incredibly important to the rest of the world? Yeah, that's really the principle of what we're trying to do, is to try and find these viruses before they cross over, try and work out what's their potential in terms of whether they can cause a pandemic, whether they cause disease, and try and stop them before they get into communities like this.
It's in communities where they hunt for bush meat that people have far more direct contact with virus-carrying animals.
Some hunters have just found an antelope in the forest and they're about to kill it.
And they're going to take some blood samples from it, too, so we're going to take a look.
In the community where Matthew is based, he gets the hunters to collect blood samples from their kills samples that Matthew can screen for unknown viruses.
By being here, we're able to witness one potential source of virus outbreak the process of butchering meat.
It's at this point when we come into contact with infected blood of these animals though cuts in hands, insect bites and sores, that the virus crosses over from animal to humans.
This kind of contact with wild animals has been a part of life here for generations.
New viruses used to be contained within these places.
But what's different now is these once isolated areas have opened up to global travel.
In other words, I could spread a virus way faster than it could spread itself naturally.
I personally could start a pandemic.
One particular deadly virus that broke out of Central Africa has claimed 25 million lives.
It's now believed that HIV originated here when a primate virus, known as SIV, mutated into HIV.
This is what a cell infected with HIV looks like under a microscope.
It's now thought that HIV made the jump from monkeys to humans as long ago as the 1880s.
But we had no idea what it was until the 1980s.
Science was a century behind.
In this part of Africa, it's traditional to hunt monkeys for meat.
The hunters have just caught these two monkeys.
I'm not sure what species they are, but they're primates, which means, genetically, they're very related to us humans.
If these are carrying any viruses, there's a greater possibility that humans will be susceptible to them.
These monkeys are about to be taken by the hunter along these roads, which used to be logging roads.
They're a conduit, connecting these remote villages straight into the capital city.
So, if they are carrying a virus, in just a few hours it could be in the next town.
And in a day or two, anywhere on earth.
I'm virus hunting in Cameroon with an international group of scientists working to predict and prevent future pandemics.
It's by collecting blood samples from animals and humans that they hope to identify new viruses that have deadly potential.
It's at this point that the virus crosses over from animal to humans.
'Back in the capital, Yaounde, 'the samples we've collected are taken to the lab for analysis.
'These scientists recently discovered two new viruses related to HIV 'HTLV III and IV.
'They can cause cancer and paralysis and have already crossed over 'from animals to humans.
'As far as we know, 'these previously unknown viruses are still confined to Africa.
' If we have the ability to detect these viruses earlier and to understand these viruses earlier, it means we can potentially stop them getting into human populations in the first place, or it lets us be more ahead of developing vaccines and treatments if they manage to escape from our control.
It's definitely possible in this day and age to use our knowledge in a way to stop these viruses from becoming pandemics.
'History has shown that viruses can sweep indiscriminately 'through human populations, killing millions.
'Every discovery made here, 'forms part of a globally accessible database on viruses.
'So next time, if a virus does go pandemic, 'hopefully we'll have a head start.
' A generation ago, it was thought that the greatest threat to the future of the human race would be nuclear war.
Today, if you were to place a bet on our species being wiped out by nuclear war or a virus, you might be better off putting all your money on the virus.
But what I'm holding here is part of an advance warning system that might be the key to saving our entire species.
The medical breakthrough that's had the most impact on me personally is the MRI scanner.
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, it was the MRI scanner that picked up the tumour.
The contraceptive pill.
I think for me and millions of women, we've been able to choose whether to have babies, how many to have and when to have them.
And that's just meant an enormous liberation.
The medical breakthrough that's meant the most to me personally was fertility treatments - without them I would not have any children.
Was fertility treatments - without them I would not have any children.
The relief of pain, anaesthetics.
That's a huge breakthrough.
I think we've forgotten what it must have been like to deal with amputations, for example, or come to that, just filling your teeth.
Next, the latest from the battle against heart disease.
It kills seven million of us every year.
But now a combination of technology and robotics is giving new hope.
HEARTBEATS When I was a boy, I used to wonder what the doctor was doing when he listened to my heart with a stethoscope.
I didn't realise he could hear the beating of my heart, and the valves opening and shutting and the blood flowing through it.
'Of course, today we're not only able to hear the heart, but see it.
'The problem comes when it goes wrong.
'Repairing the heart often means major surgery.
' My name is Robert Winston.
I'm a medical scientist at Imperial College, London.
I also sit in the House of Lords.
Some of my time is devoted to arguing for new strategies in the fight for health.
Now at least a third of you watching this programme will get some kind of cardiovascular disease, and that often means major surgery.
So the medical advance that most excites me is one that could change that.
Here at St Thomas' Hospital in London, a remarkable group of specialists physicians, engineers, computer scientists have put together a sophisticated piece of kit which could revolutionise cardiac surgery.
At St Thomas', they're combining powerful medical imaging with bio-robotic surgery.
Here's how it works advanced X-ray and MRI scans provide a 3D road map.
The surgeon uses this to guide a remotely controlled flexible tube or catheter to the damaged area.
It's all done through a tiny incision.
This patient is a 27-year-old man, and the operation is about to save his life.
He's suffering from one of the most common forms of heart disorder, atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm of the heart that may cause a heart attack, or even sudden death.
In the UK, probably between 1.
5 and 2% of the population have atrial fibrillation.
So we're talking 600,000 people? We're talking almost up to a million people.
We're talking almost up to a million people.
A million people? The vast majority in the second half of their lives.
And over the age of 80, 10% of the population have atrial fibrillation.
The catheter uses high frequency radio waves to destroy the rogue tissue that causes the abnormal rhythm.
So, it looks like a very complicated concept.
'The catheter is remotely controlled 'using a highly sensitive joystick.
'If used correctly, it can be more precise than doing it by hand.
' So this is the? These are the upper? Upper pulmonary veins.
The right upper vein.
'The patient's operation has gone well.
'Now they're going to letmehave a go.
' The patient's not going to have a cardiac arrest if I do this? 'Not on a human being, of course.
'Instead, I'll be performing surgery on this 'a phantom heart.
'This glass model is used like a flight simulator for surgeons.
' This moves the catheter around.
Yes.
'The joystick controls an intricate mechanism of wires and pulleys 'inside the catheter, allowing me to steer it 'to the hardest to reach chambers of the heart.
' So as that model is moving, the catheter is moving, and you're very close to the pulmonary veins.
'The very tip of the catheter delivers 'the high frequency radio waves that destroy the abnormal tissue.
' Itisvery tricky, isn't it? 'I'm only supposed to using the 3D images of the heart to navigate, 'but it's hard to resist taking a peek at the heart model.
' It's very much like a computer game.
I think I could get to enjoy this! 'This combination of extraordinarily detailed images of the heart 'and the latest robotics means that this can be done much faster 'and with less trauma.
' It gives the operator the capability to manipulate with a very high degree of precision, which is something we can do quite well with our hands, but perhaps not quite as well as a robot.
'Only about 200 physicians in the world 'are capable of operating one of these.
'Yet hundreds of thousands of people worldwide 'need this life-saving operation.
' So how could it be rolled out for everyone? The team here have a plan.
One of automatic surgery, where the mind of the surgeon is replaced by autonomous software.
The next thing we need to do is harness the precision of the robot.
We can see a situation arising where we can image the heart in real time and take into account every beat and movement of the heart.
Take in all of the physiological parameters, including blood pressure, pain and be able to process those in a computer to guide a robotic procedure such that once the robot is positioned in the rightplace, it can do the procedure itself.
This team predicts a time when instead of just doing two or three operations a day, they supervise an array of robotic catheters simultaneously performing ten or even 20 procedures in the same time.
I do find this pretty mind-blowing.
It looks incredibly complicated all these catheters with sensors and the ability to receive and deliver impulses to the heart.
But the extraordinary thing is that this technology, this miracle, means that we can replace surgery, opening the chest, a massive injury to the patient, and that must be one of the great promises of the future.
We are choosing the medical breakthroughs that matter most.
Now we go inside the brain to a whole new science which is at last unravelling its mysteries.
My name is Richard Dawkins.
I'm an evolutionary biologist.
The work I want to show you gives a vision of how human health might be cared for in the future.
This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
There's one inside my skull, there's one inside yours.
In there were once thoughts, memories, dreams, perceptions of colour, sounds, melodies, language.
There are perhaps 100 billion nerve cells, neurones, in there and maybe 200 trillion connections between them.
Problems in the brain cause terrible disorders like Alzheimer's and dementia.
They affect over 35 million people worldwide, and they're on the rise.
It has been a dream of science to be able to identify specific neural pathways and control them.
It's a dream that has proved elusive so far.
This is Professor Gero Miesenbock, an Oxford neuroscientist.
He wondered if it was possible to have switch-like control over individual brain cells, to be able to turn them on and off.
He began his quest by studying not the 100 billion or so neuronal cells of the human brain but something far simpler the 250,000 brain cells of the tiny fruit fly.
He's being trying to control its mind with light.
He began by getting a light-sensitive protein into the fly's brain.
We thought, in our initial experiments, "Well, there are cells in nature that naturally respond to light.
" And these, of course, are the photoreceptors in our eyes and in the eyes of many different animals.
What if we could borrow the light sensing devices from these photoreceptors and transplant them genetically, through genetic engineering, into cells that are not normally light responsive? This technique has given Gero such precise control over the fruit fly's mind that he can make a female think she's a male.
If you look through the microscope, Richard, you will see a male and a female.
So what you should see is that he is quite persistent, he being the smaller animal in this case, chasing the female.
Sticking out one wing, one side or the other, and vibrating, which presumably the female hears.
I can't hear it.
So this is a behaviour that's entirely sex specific only males show this one-sided wing vibration, and females never, under normal circumstances, stick out one wing.
Gero genetically engineered the brain cells that govern sexual expression so they would respond to light.
So when light is flashed on the female it shines through her transparent exoskeleton and hits those targeted cells causing her to perform a male sex ritual.
We were able to make females exhibit part of the male courtship dance.
So the females stuck out one wing, started to vibrate it and produce sound, just like a male would.
And that's never been seen before, presumably? It's never been seen before because the behaviour never occurs in nature.
Gives a whole new meaning to turning one on.
This way of controlling brain cells is called optogenetics.
It allows us to target specific bits of the brain and then control them, so it's a discovery that could revolutionise the way we treat brain disorders.
Any organ can go wrong, and with an organ as complicated as a brain it's not surprising that up to 1 in 7 people have some sort of brain malfunction.
But could optogenetics actually be used on humans? At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists have taken things one step further.
Here they're using optogenetics to control the minds of mice.
This is Professor Ed Boyden, an MIT physiologist and electrical engineer.
All right.
So this is the main microscopy area.
He also dreams of using optogenetics to treat human brain disorders.
This is an X-ray scanner so if you want to find out where a probe is in the brain you can scan it with X-rays.
It's pretty cool.
This We don't actually use this device, so it's irrelevant for our research right now.
It's a cool device anyway.
It's called a FIB - Focused lon Beam.
When I see it I think, "We should do something with that.
" We might be the only neurotechnology group with a piano in the atrium.
Professor Boyden developed a fibre optic cable that delivers a pulse of light directly to a mouse's brain cells.
Like the fruit fly, the mouse's brain has been genetically modified to respond to light.
But in this case, it's the bit of the brain that makes the mouse happy.
So every time the mouse sticks its nose through the hole, it gets a zap of light that triggers a flood of dopamine from the pleasure centre of the brain.
In less than 30 seconds the mouse learns that it feels good to stick its nose through the hole.
A number of people are trying to hunt down the neural targets in the brain that can overcome aversive emotion, like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety.
We're now starting to find that you can activate very specific sets of cells in the brain and overcome those pathological states.
And that's of great importance because it's very hard to treat these kinds of disorders.
Treating anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder is very difficult.
The drugs being used have a lot of side effects and they don't work as well as one might hope.
So we're trying to figure out, if you want to fix this circuit, what are the points in the brain that, when modulated, have the most powerful therapeutic benefits.
Using optogenetics on humans is still a long way off.
But, in the future, not only could it be used to identify which neurones a treatment needs to turn on or off, it could even be used as a treatment itself.
The great Oxford physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington likened the brain to an enchanted loom.
It's an enchanted loom of immense complexity and optogenetics is one of the most fruitful tools so far devised for working out the principles by which brains work.
The great thing that makes humans different from other species is that we are fundamentally inquisitive in a very influential way.
We're programmed to ask questions and that's why, of course, humans have achieved so much.
It's a difficult question for an evolutionist to answer why we are so curious.
I can only think that, in our ancestral past, in the Pleistocene savannahs of Africa, something equivalent to modern scientific curiosity must have aided our survival.
Only by unorthodox thought does science improve and progress, and I think the best discoveries are always shocking and fly in the face of given knowledge.
That happens again and again.
In our next choice the scientist has done just that taken an unusual approach to combating one of our oldest and most deadly enemies malaria.
Many of us just think of malaria as something we might catch if we go on holiday somewhere exotic.
The truth is malaria is still one of the biggest problems facing mankind.
Somewhere on Earth a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
My name is Joy Reidenberg.
I'm a Professor of Anatomy.
My work involves comparing animal and human anatomies to find new medicines and treatments.
One disease that I would love to see eradicated is malaria.
In the past, we've tried insecticides and drugs to slow the spread of the disease.
But they're expensive solutions and most people at risk have to rely on something much more basic.
The first line of defence for people in the parts of the world where malaria is rampant is the trusty mosquito net.
Mosquito nets have been used against malaria for centuries.
But they're by no means fool proof.
They're essentially just flimsy nylon or cotton nets that can get damaged or torn.
In the 21st century you would think that science could come up with a more robust solution to a disease that kills over a million people a year.
Well, interestingly, the challenge has been taken up by researchers working in a completely unexpected discipline of science.
Here in New York City, in an obscure lab at Columbia University, an experimental physicist has been working on a defence against mosquitoes that's never been tried before.
This is Professor Szabolcs Marka.
A few years ago a close colleague died after becoming infected with malaria.
Ever since, he's been developing an anti-mosquito force field using the technology he knows best lasers.
So tell me about this device you have here? I see lots of mosquitoes buzzing around, what's the rest of it? What we have here is really a device which creates a light barrier in the middle of this chamber.
We put a bunch of mosquitoes here and what happens is that, when I switch on the device, it will create a light barrier which will divide the box into two regions and that will be a light barrier which will be hard to cross.
OK.
So can we try it out, see how it works? Sure.
The test chamber is full of mosquitoes, but when the laser-generated infrared beam is switched on it splits the chamber in two.
The human eye can't detect infrared, so we've added a line.
The mosquitoes in the lower half seem unable to cross over to the top half and vice versa.
If they try, they bounce off the beam.
I really want to know what's actually happening in the mosquito when it senses this light.
It's not clear what's happening right now.
Many people don't even care what's happening as long as it's happening.
It might be that the infrared beam, although imperceptible to me, is something the mosquitoes are instinctively avoiding.
They are, after all, a species that hunt at dawn and dusk, avoiding the sun's infrared rays.
Perhaps they're seeing this as a stream of sunlight in the middle of night time and they're thinking "This is the wrong place, I can't be "in the middle of the sunlight.
I have to hide in the shade.
" Could that be why they're avoiding it? Maybe.
Maybe that's the explanation, we just don't know it yet.
It seems like a really wonderful device, but the problem is it's so big.
Could this practically really work if you were to take something like this to an African village? That's an interesting question.
Right now we are in the laboratory exploratory phase, but I think long-term effect will only be there if it shrinks.
I mean, if you have seen the first cell phone, it was like this big! The ultimate vision is to produce smoke detector-sized units that use optics to create sheets across windows or 3-dimensional shapes over beds.
They'd be run on solar or battery power.
The laser mosquito net could be the ultimate defensive barrier, but it's not going to stop the spread of malaria completely.
What if science could give us a more radical solution? What if we could get rid of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes for good? To do that would mean genetically modifying an entire species.
We have been following science's battle against malaria.
Now our understanding of kinetics is creating a remarkable new way to fight back.
Every year, 250 million people get malaria.
To stop it, we need to find a chink in the mosquito's armour.
The mosquito has existed for over 100 million years.
It's perfectly evolved to find its prey.
It has a battery of sensory devices that registers smell and breath from 50 metres away.
But when it bites into humans, it can pass on a deadly disease.
What if we could genetically modify the mosquito so that it was rendered completely incapable of carrying the malaria parasite? Well, that's exactly what they're doing here in the desert in Arizona.
So if we come over into this lab here, this is where our mosquito containment facility is 'This is Professor Mike Riehle.
'He and his team have created new mosquitoes, 'deliberately engineered so they can't spread malaria.
'Security in the lab is tight.
' Two doors? Two doors? There's two doors.
This is just one more level of security so the mosquitoes don't get out.
One of the mosquito chambers is in this room right here.
Wow! Look at this room.
There's so many in here! 'Mike is an entomologist - a professor of insects.
'So he knows very well how malaria is intricately linked 'to a mosquito's life cycle.
'The disease is actually caused by a parasite in the mosquito's gut 'and that's what they inject into us when they bite.
' I get to be guinea pig.
I'll take out one of these female mosquitoes here.
Aah! I feel one, I feel one.
There's one there.
'If this mosquito was carrying malaria, 'then this is all it would take for it to infect me.
' She's definitely getting fatter.
Yeah.
'But Mike has found a weak spot in the mosquito 'the time lag between the mosquito picking up malaria 'and being able to transmit the disease.
' So a mosquito only lives for about three weeks in the wild, and the malaria parasite, from the time it feeds on, say, myself, if I had malaria, takes about two weeks for that parasite to get back to the mosquito's salivary glands, where it can be injected into another person.
What we were trying to do was reduce the mosquito's lifespan from three weeks to about two weeks so the parasite didn't have enough time to develop in the mosquito.
'As they created mosquitoes that didn't live long enough to pass on malaria, they noticed there was an unexpected bonus.
What we found is that the genetically-engineered ones didn't have any malaria parasites developing in them.
So we have two mechanisms that work in the same mosquito.
They can't get infected in the first place and even if a few of them do, they'll die before they can transmit the parasite.
That's so cool! 'There was one last problem 'how to tell the difference between normal mosquitoes 'and the ones he'd altered.
' Those are the oldest larvae and then they turn into the pupae which are the comma-shaped things.
'The solution - he added a fluorescent marker 'so his mosquitoes had eyes that glowed.
' I'm going to hit them with the UV light.
Oh! That's so cool! Yeah! Nice glowing red eyes.
Nice glowing red eyes.
Oh, yeah! This story illustrates the incredible power we have over nature.
The ability to change how long an animal lives, what it does, even the colour of its eyes.
But should we be concerned about setting free a genetically-modified insect? As far as concerns about generating a 20-foot mosquito, or anything like that, it's very unlikely.
We targeted a very specific gene that was already found in the mosquito.
We're not introducing foreign DNA into the mosquito, or anything like that.
And so you could think of it more as a very controlled form of selective breeding.
I think it's always dangerous when you play with the genetics of a species and then consider reintroducing it back into the wild.
You could be messing up the food web, you could be messing up natural selection.
But in this case, maybe it's worth it.
There is one disease that many people fear more than any other.
Cancer.
Science has made great advances against this killer.
But now we are entering a new era where genetics is giving us a powerful weapon to save lives.
'My work as a biologist 'has focused on looking at genetic therapies for cancer.
' I spent nearly ten years studying cancer in a laboratory, and as a scientist I find it an incredibly fascinating and challenging disease.
But the day-to-day reality is most of us know someone who has been diagnosed with it.
And the likelihood is that as people start living longer and longer, each and every one of us is going to be affected by it.
Cancer is the disease that originates in the genes.
When certain genes mutate, they can cause our cells to turn cancerous.
When we get the disease, the treatment is not always as focused as doctors would like.
Current cancer therapy, it's like a carpet-bombing technique.
It kills cancer cells, but it destroys healthy cells as well.
What if scientists could create a targeted medicine? I've come to Boston, where researchers are doing just that.
'Tina Meranda is married with two young sons.
'Three years ago, she got the news we all dread.
'She was diagnosed with cancer.
'It was in her lungs.
'Despite taking numerous drugs and undergoing chemotherapy, 'the cancer spread.
' It's something you don't expect in life, and, boy, when it hits you, it hits you.
And it's awful, you know, to see your kids, and to think you're not going to be around for them.
But Tina is one of the first cancer patients in the world to be given a new form of personalised medicine.
She is being treated here at Massachusetts General where most cancer patients who come through the door have their tumours investigated at a genetic level.
It's allowing researchers to build up an extraordinary database that classifies individual cancer mutations.
This programme is the first of its kind, and, to me, it marks the start of a new era in cancer treatment one of personalised medicines and smart drugs.
Doctors knew that to give more focused treatment, they had to uncover each cancer's genetic fingerprint.
So what we do is we take the tumours, like in this block for instance.
This is a piece of a patient's tumour.
We remove a little bit of it and make DNA from this.
Within a day, or a few days, we will have the information about what are the genetic changes that actually made this tumour grow.
That is interesting, but more important is, if you can identify the key genes, we can now give that information to oncologists who have a set of drugs that can exactly target that mutant gene.
In fact, those patients that have been on those trials, many have seen their tumours shrink away.
'Over the last three months, 'Tina has been given a targeted drug therapy 'that is specific to her type of cancer mutation.
'They're not just treating cancer, they're treatinghercancer.
'Within only 48 hours of taking it, her tumours started to shrink.
' One thing I wanted to ask you.
Did you get the rest of my tests back? Everything looks good.
We couldn't be more pleased about how well you're doing.
You're feeling well, you cancer has been shrinking away.
It's wonderful to see that.
Tina is back to where she was pre-cancer within two days of taking the medication targeted at the particular mutation that her tumour had.
It cleared up.
She went off the painkillers.
And she stopped the chemo.
She's just a different woman.
This genetically-targeted medicine is not a cure for cancer and would not necessarily work for everyone.
Not all mutations have matching drugs that are effective treatments.
But when such a drug exists, it is a way of keeping the cancer under control.
Tina will remain on these drugs for as long as the cancer stays dormant.
Without them, she would most probably be dead.
What this points to is a future where cancer is no longer a death sentence, but something we can live with.
Just over ten years ago, the human genome was sequenced and with it came the promise of a brave new world of genetic medicine.
Since then, not many actual treatments for human health have emerged.
What I have just seen here today, this is the beginning of that brave new world.
In the last century, scientific endeavour almost doubled life expectancies.
My own life is evidence of this.
It is also a testament to the great challenges we still face.
But as long as science continues to battle for the health of humanity, we, and generations to come, will lead longer and healthier lives.
'Next time - technology - the innovations shaping our century.
'We visit the city of the future ' 'Your vehicle is now ready to leave.
Please be seated so you may depart.
' '.
.
explore how lasers are changing the way we build our world, 'and head deep underground to the most mysterious lab in the world.
' That is amazing.