Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (2012) s01e02 Episode Script
Life After Death
'The novelist Aldous Huxley once wrote 'that most human beings behave as though 'death were no more than an unfounded rumour.
'But what happens when you realise the rumour is true?' 'Let's face it, none of us, 'until it hits us in the face, think we're going to die.
'I can still sort of picture the consultant's room.
'He said, "Well, I've got some bad news for you.
'"We think you've got motor neurone disease.
"' 'As we film this, Richard Chell has only months to live.
'His comfort lies in his religious faith.
'For him, death is not the end.
' Death, to me, the actual process of dying, is not something I'm scared of it's going through a door into another room.
What do you mean by that? I'm a Christian and therefore I do believe in a life after death.
I do believe that this life is just part of a process, and that there's another part of that process to complete.
I know very well your feelings about on religion and the rest of it.
But I would say having a view that is finite is a bit like having half a meal.
It will leave you hungry at the end of the day.
But, of course, the existence of hunger doesn't mean that there's food.
No, but it means that there's a need.
And I would argue that there is a food.
If you faced a situation where, like myself, say, you were suddenly saying, "Well, look.
Death is fairly close and you're going to die.
" Do you think you would feel any differently? Or are you clear in your own mind, if that was the situation, "I know exactly how I'd respond and exactly how I'd feel"? 'It is a fair question.
'I follow reason and I don't believe in God.
'But this series is not about whether God exists or not.
'It's about a more difficult problem - 'what, if anything, can take God's place? 'Religion has shaped our understanding of life 'for thousands of years.
'Ideas of the soul, 'sin, 'and the afterlife are hard to shake off, 'even for non-religious people like me.
'As more and more of us realise there is no God, 'what happens as we leave religion behind?' I have to believe there's a plan, and that God is going to accomplish something through this.
I suppose Jesus is an unpaid babysitter.
It's like, "If I'm not watching you, Jesus is.
" So do you think that we, in the West, are too materialistic? I think so.
'In this film, Death, 'religion has traditionally been thought to bring comfort 'at the end of life.
'But does it really? 'What can science and reason tell us?' How does someone like me, who has no religion, face death? 'Varanasi, India - 'one of the oldest cities in the world.
'It has a macabre speciality.
'Its main business is the industry of death.
'Every year, a million Hindu pilgrims visit Varanasi, 'dragging with them some 40,000 corpses 'to be cremated on the banks of the Ganges.
' This the holiest place in the whole of Hinduism.
This is the place where Hindus aspire to come to die, to escape from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth.
It is the most amazing scene.
It's probably been going on like this for centuries, even millennia.
It looks as though there are ashes down here in the river, swirling around.
'As an atheist for whom death is a full stop, 'I suppose I shouldn't feel sentimental about the carcasses.
'They are ex-people who have ceased to be.
'Yet I find something a little bit shocking here.
'The partially-burnt corpses '.
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the locals casually searching 'for precious metals in the burnt remains '.
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and the rejected dead.
' Although this is clearly steeped in religion, there's a surprising lack of evident reverence or solemnity.
The people standing around the funeral pyres are doing the job of work in a pretty matter-of-fact way.
'But there is a kind of logic behind the apparent lack of reverence.
'In this religious tradition, the flesh is no longer important.
'What matters here is releasing the spirit or soul.
'This is where religion plays its strongest card.
'The body may not live for ever but the soul does.
'On the face of it, it's a comforting idea.
'And a challenge for an atheist like me.
'If you want to hear the challenge starkly expressed, 'you can go to a place like this in Kansas City.
' Hello, I'm Richard.
'This Catholic hospice, Alexandra's House, 'is for babies who die within hours of birth.
' These are clearly fatal disorders.
Babies perhaps with anencephaly, Potter's Syndrome, where they have no kidneys, severe genetic heart disease.
So, they're all going to die.
They're all going to die.
And so, the normal recommendation by the medical profession - .
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would be probably be an abortion at that point, would it? - Yes.
This may, you know, be hard for some people to see.
These are many of our babies for whom we've cared, some who have lived here, but all of them that we've cared for.
And so this is leading us up to where the families stay.
This is where the parents stay.
'Over the last 11 years, Patti Lewis 'has helped the families of over 500 babies 'who have died within these walls.
' Do you think their mothers are ever going to meet their babies again? Yes.
I think the mothers believe that, too, and the fathers and the siblings.
'I do sympathise with the desire to meet again 'somebody whom you've known and loved.
'But a newborn baby? 'I feel very sorry for these parents, 'but still, reality may be raw.
'But we have to face it.
The baby was born on Saturday, 7/9/11.
Which was yesterday.
Yeah.
And she came into the world at 6pm and she lived 30 minutes.
And those 30 minutes seemed so short and so precious.
We held her and loved her and got to give her a little bath and put her in her christening outfit.
We baptised her.
The family was there with us, and it was a very precious time.
Can you talk us through when you first found out that there was a problem with the baby? We found out in January that we were expecting and it would be our third.
And we were overjoyed.
And we go in for our ultrasound and find out if it was a boy or girl.
She did the scan and told us there was no kidneys.
No kidneys? Right.
That was the first time that we had heard that diagnosis.
And she called it a "lethal pregnancy".
So, that's when you sort of went into shock, is it? More so, yes.
Did it occur to you that the total sum of suffering would be much less if you drew a line under it then and restarted you life? You've got to restart your life now.
Why did you decide to go on for the remaining months? Well, there's hope in everything and God can do great things.
So, you were hoping for a miracle? Hoping for a miracle, but if it wasn't, it was still going to be precious and it's a baby and it's a life.
It's not my decision to terminate that.
It's not my choice.
I carried it and loved it and can feel it move every single day and And also the 30 minutes or so that we got to spend with her was worth, I didn't have any of the pain, but I would say it was worth all of the trial of getting to where we were.
And not only did we get to spend 30 minutes with her we got to be with her for, like, 12 hours, she wasn't with us spiritually, but we got to hold her.
And you took photographs? Oh, yes.
We have one that we have printed off.
She was beautiful, she was perfect and everything She looked just like her mom even down to her fingernails.
Yes, beautiful.
I wouldn't have changed it for anything.
Do you think you will ever meet the baby? Oh, of course! .
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there is great hope in that.
We will meet the baby, it's in heaven with God.
'I feel for Runae and Lee.
'They sincerely think they are gaining reassurance 'from their faith.
'So now, I need to understand how this relationship between death and religion has evolved to be so strong.
Religion denies death is real.
It sets up, instead, the forbidding prospect of eternity either in heaven, or worse, in hell.
For me, what's frightening is not death itself but eternity, whether you're there or not.
Yet people still reach instinctively for religion and its rituals when it comes to the end.
Why? It's a very, very artificial situation.
We see the person lying down.
Unless you're intimately acquainted with someone, you don't really see them lying down and they may well be dressed in their own clothes lying down with their eyes closed in an artificial situation that they're inside a wooden box.
Now, all of these things bring a surrealism, but despite that, people are very, very focused on the fact that the last physical connection they have with that person is lying in that coffin, and that's what they're saying farewell to.
So why do people go on with these strange rituals? It's the business of walking away from the funeral and feeling, "That was well done, we liked what they've done for us "and we feel that we laid someone we cared about very deeply to rest "in a very dignified and meaningful way.
" And even if the beautiful oak coffin is then burned or buried, somehow you feel you've given the person a good send-off.
Very much so.
More and more of us have no faith in God but we cling to the rituals.
Even in secular woodland burial sites, we find death brings illogical superstition.
It is fascinating to see people thinking of themselves as part of this place.
They're anticipating their postmortem identity.
So that when people talk about, as they can in this place, facing any direction, so some want to look up the hill, some want to look down the hill, some want to look towards the sun, they are buried in different spatial directions.
'Douglas Davies is an anthropologist 'fascinated by the fuss and trappings surrounding death.
' Do you think a part of what's going on is a reluctance to believe that the dead person is really dead? Yes.
One lady, her father used to farm around here.
And so he's been buried looking up towards the hill, cos he used to shoot rabbits up there and the like, and to her, this is dreadfully important because the relatives, too, are thinking about their dead after they've died.
Yes.
'I find I'm not immune to these notions.
' There's a place in Cornwall where my mother's family come from and where we used to spend childhood holidays called Dollar Cove.
And I think I'm right in saying there's a little tiny church more or less on the beach, more or less built in the sand, and I've sometimes fantasised about being buried there somehow with the sea crashing in and the tide coming in and out.
What is the allure that would be there for you in a location for your body? Yeah.
It's totally illogical.
It's pure sentimentality.
I suppose there's no rational defence for it whatever.
One should say, "Just stick me in a dustbin bag and throw me away.
" But you don't want to be in a dustbin bag? No, that's right, and it is pure sentiment.
I mean, we are sentimental animals Yes, absolutely.
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as well as social animals.
So why do even atheists like me carry around this sentimental baggage? When did these illogical thoughts first develop? As a child, I don't think I worried about God looking down at me and seeing what I was doing.
I worried about ancestors.
I worried about my great uncles and great aunts looking down from heaven and seeing everything that I did.
Childish, perhaps, but don't let's be too quick to dismiss it.
Hello, Iggy.
Whoops.
CHILD LAUGHS He doesn't want to come out and play.
(OK, OK, there we go) From an early age, we start to believe that there's more to us than just our physical bodies, as this experiment reveals.
Shall we give him a little tickle? He's very sweet, isn't he? This is a fake machine to fool children into thinking live beings can be duplicated.
MACHINE BUZZES There's Iggy.
And there's Iggy.
As scientists, we seem to be committed to the view that if you could take a person and make an exact copy, molecule by molecule, that copy would have exactly the same thoughts and memories, would be the same person.
But intuition rebels.
We seem to want to believe that there's some essence of ourselves, something that would not go across with all those molecules, something that a religious person might want to call a soul.
This is an attempt to look at an old philosophical problem, which is, imagine if you could copy anything, and in these experiments, rather than getting children to imagine it, we produce a machine which looks as if it can duplicate and copy anything, a bit like a photocopier for objects.
Now there's two.
It made two.
It made two.
We've shown in previous studies they can believe it can copy toys very easily, but the question is, would they really extend that to something like a living thing, like a hamster? Shall we tell him your name? Do you want to whisper? And so what copies over is the body of the hamster, the ideas of a hamster, the memories of the hamster? We believe the intuition is that the physical object can be copied, and therefore the physical body can be copied, but we're not so sure that children think the mind can be copied.
Just like adults, they have this sense that maybe the mind is different to the physical body.
The reason this is so interesting is because if you believe the mind is separate to the physical body, then it means if the body goes, then maybe the mind can stay on and exist.
And this allows for all sorts of notions of spirits and the soul, as being something entirely untethered to the physical world.
Yes, disembodied ghosts after death or surviving death in other ways, the soul goes on.
So these young children believe bodies can be copied but not minds.
Shall we have a look? One Two.
Two.
They are already thinking there's something in charge of each being that is unique.
Something like a soul? Did this hamster see your picture? (Yes.
) (Yes.
) Does it know what your picture is? (No.
) Does this hamster know your name? Does this hamster know your name? (No.
) Evolutionary psychology suggests that we have evolved a sense of separate mind or soul because it's useful to us.
Because the experience of being in control of your body is so pervasive, you just feel that you've made a decision, you'll have a cup of coffee, these things you feel like you're driving this very complex machine.
Yes, you certainly do.
If you didn't feel that you wouldn't be very well adapted to the world.
No, that's right.
I mean, to be a fully functional animal, which is what our ancestors were, hunting and feeding and running and escaping from predators, you need to feel like a soul that's in control of the body.
This is one reason why it's so hard to shake off the religious way of death.
We are programmed to believe in something like a soul.
Now, of course, I don't believe in a soul but I, too, have the feeling that there is some sort of essence of Richard Dawkins that makes me who I am .
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that gives me my unique personal identity.
'To understand more about this, I need to look at the role our memories play, with the person who's known me longest ? my mother.
So what have we got here? We've got, um Your first birthday party.
First birthday party.
Yes.
Well, I've no memory of this at all.
That's presumably me, is it? Yes, that's you.
In a little dress that your granny sent out from England.
'Our memories are hugely important to our sense of who we are.
' That's Kilimanjaro.
Oh, yes.
You used to like saying words like Kilimanjaro.
Oh, right.
But our memories lull us into a false sense of certainty.
They are fallible, riddled with errors.
- Another early memory was being stung by a scorpion.
- Yes.
We were miles, absolutely miles from anywhere, and you suddenly jumped off your chair without your shoes on, which you weren't allowed to do, and stepped on a scorpion .
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and Ali, our African boy, rushed in and got your foot and squeezed it and sucked it - Gosh! Good for Ali.
- .
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sucked it for hours.
- Yes.
- Well, not hours but And you were screaming.
We had to hold you while he sucked your foot Yes.
I My memory is slightly different.
My memory is that I was walking along the floor - .
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and I saw this creature walking across - Yes.
.
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and I thought it was a lizard.
Really? And I didn't step on it, I put my foot in the way of it to let it crawl over my foot.
Wellyou jumped off your chair Mmm.
I don't remember the pain.
Don't you? Isn't that interesting? Cos that was the terrible bit.
We think back to our first memory, our first big adventure, and it's almost as though there was a movie camera in our head recording every detail.
But that's not the way it is.
That's an illusion.
What we're remembering is a memory of a memory of a memory, of perhaps the real thing.
A man may wear a wrist watch when he's 20 and the same watch when he's 50.
It's the same watch but it's not the same man inside.
Every atom in his body has changed, has turned over.
I'm not the child I once was.
The child I once was is dead.
So the physical cells that once made me are long gone and my memories are more tenuous than I would wish.
The connection between younger and older Richard Dawkins isn't as strong as I might like it to be.
And I think this is why the religious idea of something permanent, the soul, is so plausible.
Now I want to explore the reality of why we die.
Religion still dominates our thinking about death.
If we get rid of God, what's left? I'm on a voyage to tell you the extraordinary truth that science reveals about death.
According to evolutionary science, death is not something to be overcome at all.
It's a necessary part of the picture.
I'm joining the scientists on board Bangor University's research vessel on the Irish Sea.
- Is that alive? - Yeah, yeah.
So where do you put that? 'They are studying the lifespan of a species of clam 'called Arctica Islandica.
They may look rather ordinary 'but they have one attribute that is really quite amazing.
'These clams are among the longest-living animals on Earth.
' Save that one or not? The reason why we are so interested in this is that this is a very long-lived species.
We can pull it up from the wild and assign a year - almost to within one year - how old it is.
Basically, the shell grows in incremental steps.
Each ring is an annual ring, so the growth is very much like a tree.
Can you guess from this one how old is it? There's a size growth curve.
This is probably 80 to 150 years old.
The oldest of them reach what sort of age? Around the UK, it's around about 220 years.
Up in Iceland, in the far north, they'll hit 350, 400, maybe even 500 years.
Only recently, this research team found a clam that had lived for more than half a millennium.
It's amazing to think that some of these clams that we're dredging up were born before Darwin, even before Elizabeth I.
So, why do they live so long? Any evolutionary explanation of why aging happens has to do two things.
It has to be able to explain why you see aging in many species.
It also has to be able to explain why you see enormously long lifespans or possibly no aging in a very few species.
And the clams, I think, may be an example of this.
Because you've seen them and handled them for yourself.
They have enormously thick shells.
I don't think there are very many things down there that can actually bite through them.
And so they can sit around and they can just carry on producing offspring once they've reached a certain size.
These clams are continuing to pass on their genes to the next generation, even at 200 and 300 years old.
' So, from the evolutionary point of view, it is not just that the individuals are well protected against being eaten.
Because they're well-protected against being eaten, it's a good gamble to stay alive a long time, because you've got a good chance of reproducing later.
Whereas something like a salmon has a very poor chance of reproducing again, so it might as well throw everything it's got into one big gamble now.
That's exactly it.
There is no point in spending resources to make a body that will last 400 years if your chance of making it through the night is pretty slim.
So, evolutionary science tells us a lot about ageing and death.
The clams are able to reproduce when they are hundreds of years old, and so long as they are able to reproduce, their genes keep them alive.
We need to see death from a gene's eye point of view.
Our bodies are survival machines for genes.
Once our genes have got us to reproductive age and copied themselves into a new generation, our bodies have less purpose.
Time bombs inside us go off.
We age.
We die.
So, rather than looking upon ageing as a wearing out of the body, perhaps we should see it as a side effect of how our genes work.
Even extraordinary exceptions throw light on this truth.
This is Irving Kahn, a financial trader on New York's Madison Avenue, who has come to work every day since 1927.
Irving is 105 years old.
Do you remember the Wall Street crash? Oh, yes.
I came just at the time.
About three or four months before the peak, the summer of 1928, '29.
And that was one reason I didn't like the business.
Yes.
Because I came here, went to the exchange on Wall Street, and found, after a week on the floor, that it was like working in a casino.
I can imagine.
- A gambling house.
- Yes.
I understand that, not just you but many members of your family are extremely long-lived.
Yes, my brother Peter is about 103 or 104.
- I'm 105.
- Yes.
I have limited renals and limited hearsight - and I hope, the right number of marbles.
You have got a lot of marbles, I think! What about your sister, how old is she? She's 108.
Mr Kahn, is it possible to give us an idea what it feels like to be your age? It's much better and it's much worse.
So, why do some people's genes keep their bodies going for so much longer? The curious case of Irving Kahn and his family has intrigued scientists who are trying to answer this very question.
When we ask our people, why do you think you live to be so old? One of the things they're saying, "Hey, it's in my family.
My mother was 102, my grandfather was 108.
" Irving can show that he has four other siblings that lived to be 100.
The study looked at 500 aged Ashkenazi Jews, like Irving Kahn, from the same geographical area, whose environment and genes can be easily compared.
For Irving, and especially for his sister, Helen, she's been smoking for 95 years, two packs for 95 years, which shows you that if you smoke for 95 years, you live a long life! I know it doesn't! I can assure you I can assure you that that's true.
And Irving has smoked for about 30 years in his life.
So the point here is that our centenarians, as a group, did not interact with their environment the way we tell the way the doctors tell their patients, that you have to watch your weight, you have to exercise, you shouldn't smoke and you should drink one cup of alcohol a day and all the things we know to tell them.
It doesn't matter for them.
So, for some, lifestyle and environment don't play as large a role as we've been told.
But if Irving's genes hold the secret to long life, why hasn't evolution given us all genes like his? If there are genes that increase longevity out into the hundreds, why didn't natural selection favour those genes in our ancestral past? Well, I will tell you, there is something very upsetting in this sense in our group.
First of all, a third of the centenarians in the world don't have children.
OK, so I don't know, is it having children, raising them, rearing them, I don't know what? But the point is that there is some exchange between reproduction and aging.
But also, in my study, the centenarians had less kids at a much later age than my control population.
So, if the control population has three to five kids on average, our centenarians are 1.
7 kids on average.
And so, if you are thinking that way, we're losing longevity genes, right? Because in every generation, we populate more with kids of the people who don't have longevity genes than have longevity genes.
Our genes appear to trade long life for reproduction.
Longevity seems to be connected to later reproduction or no children at all.
So how long we live and why we die are dependent on our genes.
And I'm about to look my own genetic code straight in the face.
Advances in genetic science mean it is now possible for me to get my entire genome decoded.
There's something very personal and intimate about it as well.
This is something that is absolutely unique to me, there's never ever been, in the history of the world, nor will there be again a genome which is the same as mine, or the same as yours, or the same as anybody else's.
This new science is still in its infancy.
I'm going to be one of just a dozen people in the world and the first person in Britain publicly to have their whole genome sequenced.
What we're doing here is very new for us, actually, and it's actually very exciting for us.
We're taking a genome of a healthy person and we are asking, what can we learn about that person? It is your most important bit of information about you, is your genome sequence.
But on a serious note, of course, we may find information in your genome that has clinical or health implications.
Yes, I have thought about that.
So, let's go, let's go and do it.
OK.
It'll just be a little scratch as the needle goes in.
'Having my blood taken is only the first stage in a complex process.
' OK, so we're almost there.
This is the most painless blood test I've ever had.
'Having my genome decoded is, in effect, a way of narrowing down how and when I'm going to die.
'My journey to understand death has become personal.
' You have roughly 100 mutations which have been reported as being associated with a disease.
'I may be one of a handful of individuals in the world 'to have their genome sequenced, but before I find out my results 'I'm off to meet the man who was first.
'And he isn't just anyone.
'He's one of the two men who made this new science possible - 'James Watson.
' Well, it's certainly a very beautiful thing.
'Together with Francis Crick, 'James Watson discovered that genes are digital codes 'written on DNA molecules.
'Watson and Crick's names will live forever.
'And Watson isn't shy about it.
' So now I realise, I am, except for Hawking, the most famous scientist alive.
Oh, wonderful, yes.
I turned out to be helped by people looking at my DNA.
In what way? It revealed that I have a genetic polymorphism which metabolises drugs and I have one which acts very slowly.
So if I take, er beta blockers, it stays in my system for a week instead of going away for a day.
So I've been given them for, you know, to help control my blood pressure and I went to sleep! Watson took a personal risk in making his genome available for study, exposing all its imperfections to public scrutiny for the sake of advancing genetic research.
Do you get great pleasure from ideas? - No, I get pleasure from understanding.
- Yes.
So understanding, everything falls into place when you understand? Yes, you move from It's understanding, er that gives you happiness and I think it's one of the unique human features, because it's not limited to me but it clearly, you know, when you're able to find out how to do something.
This, for me, is what is so thrilling about science - understanding things, such as how the DNA molecule underlies all life on Earth.
It's because Watson discovered the structure of DNA, over half a century ago, that today I'm able to have my own genome analysed and understand what makes me live, and how and when I might die.
Today is a very special day for me.
In 50 years, lots of people will be able to say this, but today I'm one of very few people who's had their entire genome sequenced.
Today is the big day when I get to see the results.
So Richard, it's a long time since you were in Oxford and we took an armful of your blood.
We've had a team busy working since then, trying to extract the DNA and reconstruct your genome.
We take these fragments 'To understand my genes, 'Gil McVean matches them against the human reference genome - 'a composite of anonymous donors 'that took ten years to decode and construct.
' What we're really interested in is not saying where you agree with this reference but finding places where you differ.
In that, we find over four million differences between your genome and that reference.
We have about 50,000 variants that we have seen in you for the very first time, completely new to science.
'It is extraordinary that this enormous quantity of data 'reveals incredibly precise details about me.
'Elements of my private world 'that I've never shared with anyone before, or known myself.
' You have a classic European mutation that means that you've got runny earwax.
Another one which means that you can smell asparagus in your own urine.
You've got another one that means you can taste broccoli.
They sound frivolous, but at the same time they probably point to an evolutionary process and that's probably to do with your ability to detect toxins.
Plants have different toxins across the world.
There are local adaptations to toxins that you need to be able to recognise to survive.
'Buried in my genome is the story of my own survival, 'but also clues about how I may die.
'Do I have ticking time bombs in my genetic code?' You have roughly a hundred mutations which have been seen before in clinical settings and have been reported as being associated with a disease.
Having these mutations doesn't mean you'll definitely get the disease, it just alters your chance of getting that.
These are the variants that you carry which have been associated with a whole range of common disorders.
Everything from cancer through to type II diabetes through to schizophrenia.
Let's just take an example of this.
If you zoom in on chromosome 11, you've got a mutation which the literature tells you is associated with, or causes porphyria, which is the disease that people hypothesised for a while caused the madness of King George.
It's a nasty disease.
You would know if you had it.
You should have a 70% chance of getting porphyria.
'So I've dodged that bullet, but there are other threats.
'It's so impressively precise! 'My genome reveals that if I smoked, 'I would have been in the most high-risk group 'for developing lung cancer.
' Your genotype doubles your risk of getting lung cancer but actually the way it does it is through doubling your risk of smoking in a particular way.
So this variant influences your risk of getting lung cancer because it changes the way people smoke.
They smoke deeper breaths, they smoke closer to the end of the cigarette.
What it actually does is change your smoking habits.
How fascinating! So it's picked up as a gene for lung cancer but the method of transmission, the method of effect - .
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is via smoking behaviour.
- Exactly.
This raises the question of whether you've ever smoked.
Do you like the smell of wood smoke? No, I've never smoked.
That's good, but don't take up smoking is my advice.
It seems to me to be utterly astonishing that it's possible for scientists to take an individual and to detect these millions of digital pieces of information to actually read it out as though it was a computer disk.
Well, here it is then.
Here is your genome.
Look after it! Thank you very much! I'm delighted to have it.
Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues have put in.
I mean, when I look at this, this little box here, what it contains is all the information necessary to make not quite me, to make an identical twin of me.
And I think that's an astonishing thought.
Thank you very, very much for this.
It's been a pleasure.
As we come to learn more about DNA, our relationship with death is bound to change.
And as more of us have our genomes analysed, will we be able to avoid those ticking time bombs contained in our codes that killed our ancestors after they reproduced? This is my genome, my whole genome.
And strangely enough, portions of my genome are behind that door.
Behind there is the Dawkins' family vault.
This has been the Dawkins' church since the 1720s and in there are 20 of my relations, many of them my ancestors, and they have contributed some of the genes that are inside this little silver box.
At the top, next to the top there, Henry Dawkins, and then three down, his wife, Lady Juliana Dawkins.
They are my four greats - my great, great, great, great grandparents.
One-64th of the genes inside this little silver box come from Henry.
The bottom of this column here, the middle column, is another Henry, his son - he has contributed one-32nd part of the genes inside this hard disk.
Unfortunately, the door can't be opened.
It hasn't been opened since, I think, 1919.
They've lost the key, nobody knows how to open it.
There are some slots in there that I should never occupy unless they can get the door open! What would be rather nice would be if we could somehow post this disk in there to rest alongside my ancestors.
But the genes, the set of instructions inside us, don't rest.
Just as they have come from our ancestors before us, so too do they march on into our children and their children's children.
Our genes are a kind of archive of the remote past.
They go through us to the remote future.
Henry Dawkins may be my four greats grandfather and he's put some genes in here, but my two hundred million greats grandfather was a fish, and, by the way, the same fish was your two hundred million greats grandfather too.
Amazingly, even he has put some genes in here, and they, too, have a chance of going on to the remote future.
Our genes are, in a sense, immortal.
That's not comforting in the way the soul is supposed to be, but it is a wonderful thought and it is true.
We may argue about whether we have an immortal soul that survives our death, but one thing science tells us for sure is that if there's anything that's immortal in our bodies, it is our genes.
Red Bee Media Ltd
'But what happens when you realise the rumour is true?' 'Let's face it, none of us, 'until it hits us in the face, think we're going to die.
'I can still sort of picture the consultant's room.
'He said, "Well, I've got some bad news for you.
'"We think you've got motor neurone disease.
"' 'As we film this, Richard Chell has only months to live.
'His comfort lies in his religious faith.
'For him, death is not the end.
' Death, to me, the actual process of dying, is not something I'm scared of it's going through a door into another room.
What do you mean by that? I'm a Christian and therefore I do believe in a life after death.
I do believe that this life is just part of a process, and that there's another part of that process to complete.
I know very well your feelings about on religion and the rest of it.
But I would say having a view that is finite is a bit like having half a meal.
It will leave you hungry at the end of the day.
But, of course, the existence of hunger doesn't mean that there's food.
No, but it means that there's a need.
And I would argue that there is a food.
If you faced a situation where, like myself, say, you were suddenly saying, "Well, look.
Death is fairly close and you're going to die.
" Do you think you would feel any differently? Or are you clear in your own mind, if that was the situation, "I know exactly how I'd respond and exactly how I'd feel"? 'It is a fair question.
'I follow reason and I don't believe in God.
'But this series is not about whether God exists or not.
'It's about a more difficult problem - 'what, if anything, can take God's place? 'Religion has shaped our understanding of life 'for thousands of years.
'Ideas of the soul, 'sin, 'and the afterlife are hard to shake off, 'even for non-religious people like me.
'As more and more of us realise there is no God, 'what happens as we leave religion behind?' I have to believe there's a plan, and that God is going to accomplish something through this.
I suppose Jesus is an unpaid babysitter.
It's like, "If I'm not watching you, Jesus is.
" So do you think that we, in the West, are too materialistic? I think so.
'In this film, Death, 'religion has traditionally been thought to bring comfort 'at the end of life.
'But does it really? 'What can science and reason tell us?' How does someone like me, who has no religion, face death? 'Varanasi, India - 'one of the oldest cities in the world.
'It has a macabre speciality.
'Its main business is the industry of death.
'Every year, a million Hindu pilgrims visit Varanasi, 'dragging with them some 40,000 corpses 'to be cremated on the banks of the Ganges.
' This the holiest place in the whole of Hinduism.
This is the place where Hindus aspire to come to die, to escape from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth.
It is the most amazing scene.
It's probably been going on like this for centuries, even millennia.
It looks as though there are ashes down here in the river, swirling around.
'As an atheist for whom death is a full stop, 'I suppose I shouldn't feel sentimental about the carcasses.
'They are ex-people who have ceased to be.
'Yet I find something a little bit shocking here.
'The partially-burnt corpses '.
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the locals casually searching 'for precious metals in the burnt remains '.
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and the rejected dead.
' Although this is clearly steeped in religion, there's a surprising lack of evident reverence or solemnity.
The people standing around the funeral pyres are doing the job of work in a pretty matter-of-fact way.
'But there is a kind of logic behind the apparent lack of reverence.
'In this religious tradition, the flesh is no longer important.
'What matters here is releasing the spirit or soul.
'This is where religion plays its strongest card.
'The body may not live for ever but the soul does.
'On the face of it, it's a comforting idea.
'And a challenge for an atheist like me.
'If you want to hear the challenge starkly expressed, 'you can go to a place like this in Kansas City.
' Hello, I'm Richard.
'This Catholic hospice, Alexandra's House, 'is for babies who die within hours of birth.
' These are clearly fatal disorders.
Babies perhaps with anencephaly, Potter's Syndrome, where they have no kidneys, severe genetic heart disease.
So, they're all going to die.
They're all going to die.
And so, the normal recommendation by the medical profession - .
.
would be probably be an abortion at that point, would it? - Yes.
This may, you know, be hard for some people to see.
These are many of our babies for whom we've cared, some who have lived here, but all of them that we've cared for.
And so this is leading us up to where the families stay.
This is where the parents stay.
'Over the last 11 years, Patti Lewis 'has helped the families of over 500 babies 'who have died within these walls.
' Do you think their mothers are ever going to meet their babies again? Yes.
I think the mothers believe that, too, and the fathers and the siblings.
'I do sympathise with the desire to meet again 'somebody whom you've known and loved.
'But a newborn baby? 'I feel very sorry for these parents, 'but still, reality may be raw.
'But we have to face it.
The baby was born on Saturday, 7/9/11.
Which was yesterday.
Yeah.
And she came into the world at 6pm and she lived 30 minutes.
And those 30 minutes seemed so short and so precious.
We held her and loved her and got to give her a little bath and put her in her christening outfit.
We baptised her.
The family was there with us, and it was a very precious time.
Can you talk us through when you first found out that there was a problem with the baby? We found out in January that we were expecting and it would be our third.
And we were overjoyed.
And we go in for our ultrasound and find out if it was a boy or girl.
She did the scan and told us there was no kidneys.
No kidneys? Right.
That was the first time that we had heard that diagnosis.
And she called it a "lethal pregnancy".
So, that's when you sort of went into shock, is it? More so, yes.
Did it occur to you that the total sum of suffering would be much less if you drew a line under it then and restarted you life? You've got to restart your life now.
Why did you decide to go on for the remaining months? Well, there's hope in everything and God can do great things.
So, you were hoping for a miracle? Hoping for a miracle, but if it wasn't, it was still going to be precious and it's a baby and it's a life.
It's not my decision to terminate that.
It's not my choice.
I carried it and loved it and can feel it move every single day and And also the 30 minutes or so that we got to spend with her was worth, I didn't have any of the pain, but I would say it was worth all of the trial of getting to where we were.
And not only did we get to spend 30 minutes with her we got to be with her for, like, 12 hours, she wasn't with us spiritually, but we got to hold her.
And you took photographs? Oh, yes.
We have one that we have printed off.
She was beautiful, she was perfect and everything She looked just like her mom even down to her fingernails.
Yes, beautiful.
I wouldn't have changed it for anything.
Do you think you will ever meet the baby? Oh, of course! .
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there is great hope in that.
We will meet the baby, it's in heaven with God.
'I feel for Runae and Lee.
'They sincerely think they are gaining reassurance 'from their faith.
'So now, I need to understand how this relationship between death and religion has evolved to be so strong.
Religion denies death is real.
It sets up, instead, the forbidding prospect of eternity either in heaven, or worse, in hell.
For me, what's frightening is not death itself but eternity, whether you're there or not.
Yet people still reach instinctively for religion and its rituals when it comes to the end.
Why? It's a very, very artificial situation.
We see the person lying down.
Unless you're intimately acquainted with someone, you don't really see them lying down and they may well be dressed in their own clothes lying down with their eyes closed in an artificial situation that they're inside a wooden box.
Now, all of these things bring a surrealism, but despite that, people are very, very focused on the fact that the last physical connection they have with that person is lying in that coffin, and that's what they're saying farewell to.
So why do people go on with these strange rituals? It's the business of walking away from the funeral and feeling, "That was well done, we liked what they've done for us "and we feel that we laid someone we cared about very deeply to rest "in a very dignified and meaningful way.
" And even if the beautiful oak coffin is then burned or buried, somehow you feel you've given the person a good send-off.
Very much so.
More and more of us have no faith in God but we cling to the rituals.
Even in secular woodland burial sites, we find death brings illogical superstition.
It is fascinating to see people thinking of themselves as part of this place.
They're anticipating their postmortem identity.
So that when people talk about, as they can in this place, facing any direction, so some want to look up the hill, some want to look down the hill, some want to look towards the sun, they are buried in different spatial directions.
'Douglas Davies is an anthropologist 'fascinated by the fuss and trappings surrounding death.
' Do you think a part of what's going on is a reluctance to believe that the dead person is really dead? Yes.
One lady, her father used to farm around here.
And so he's been buried looking up towards the hill, cos he used to shoot rabbits up there and the like, and to her, this is dreadfully important because the relatives, too, are thinking about their dead after they've died.
Yes.
'I find I'm not immune to these notions.
' There's a place in Cornwall where my mother's family come from and where we used to spend childhood holidays called Dollar Cove.
And I think I'm right in saying there's a little tiny church more or less on the beach, more or less built in the sand, and I've sometimes fantasised about being buried there somehow with the sea crashing in and the tide coming in and out.
What is the allure that would be there for you in a location for your body? Yeah.
It's totally illogical.
It's pure sentimentality.
I suppose there's no rational defence for it whatever.
One should say, "Just stick me in a dustbin bag and throw me away.
" But you don't want to be in a dustbin bag? No, that's right, and it is pure sentiment.
I mean, we are sentimental animals Yes, absolutely.
.
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as well as social animals.
So why do even atheists like me carry around this sentimental baggage? When did these illogical thoughts first develop? As a child, I don't think I worried about God looking down at me and seeing what I was doing.
I worried about ancestors.
I worried about my great uncles and great aunts looking down from heaven and seeing everything that I did.
Childish, perhaps, but don't let's be too quick to dismiss it.
Hello, Iggy.
Whoops.
CHILD LAUGHS He doesn't want to come out and play.
(OK, OK, there we go) From an early age, we start to believe that there's more to us than just our physical bodies, as this experiment reveals.
Shall we give him a little tickle? He's very sweet, isn't he? This is a fake machine to fool children into thinking live beings can be duplicated.
MACHINE BUZZES There's Iggy.
And there's Iggy.
As scientists, we seem to be committed to the view that if you could take a person and make an exact copy, molecule by molecule, that copy would have exactly the same thoughts and memories, would be the same person.
But intuition rebels.
We seem to want to believe that there's some essence of ourselves, something that would not go across with all those molecules, something that a religious person might want to call a soul.
This is an attempt to look at an old philosophical problem, which is, imagine if you could copy anything, and in these experiments, rather than getting children to imagine it, we produce a machine which looks as if it can duplicate and copy anything, a bit like a photocopier for objects.
Now there's two.
It made two.
It made two.
We've shown in previous studies they can believe it can copy toys very easily, but the question is, would they really extend that to something like a living thing, like a hamster? Shall we tell him your name? Do you want to whisper? And so what copies over is the body of the hamster, the ideas of a hamster, the memories of the hamster? We believe the intuition is that the physical object can be copied, and therefore the physical body can be copied, but we're not so sure that children think the mind can be copied.
Just like adults, they have this sense that maybe the mind is different to the physical body.
The reason this is so interesting is because if you believe the mind is separate to the physical body, then it means if the body goes, then maybe the mind can stay on and exist.
And this allows for all sorts of notions of spirits and the soul, as being something entirely untethered to the physical world.
Yes, disembodied ghosts after death or surviving death in other ways, the soul goes on.
So these young children believe bodies can be copied but not minds.
Shall we have a look? One Two.
Two.
They are already thinking there's something in charge of each being that is unique.
Something like a soul? Did this hamster see your picture? (Yes.
) (Yes.
) Does it know what your picture is? (No.
) Does this hamster know your name? Does this hamster know your name? (No.
) Evolutionary psychology suggests that we have evolved a sense of separate mind or soul because it's useful to us.
Because the experience of being in control of your body is so pervasive, you just feel that you've made a decision, you'll have a cup of coffee, these things you feel like you're driving this very complex machine.
Yes, you certainly do.
If you didn't feel that you wouldn't be very well adapted to the world.
No, that's right.
I mean, to be a fully functional animal, which is what our ancestors were, hunting and feeding and running and escaping from predators, you need to feel like a soul that's in control of the body.
This is one reason why it's so hard to shake off the religious way of death.
We are programmed to believe in something like a soul.
Now, of course, I don't believe in a soul but I, too, have the feeling that there is some sort of essence of Richard Dawkins that makes me who I am .
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that gives me my unique personal identity.
'To understand more about this, I need to look at the role our memories play, with the person who's known me longest ? my mother.
So what have we got here? We've got, um Your first birthday party.
First birthday party.
Yes.
Well, I've no memory of this at all.
That's presumably me, is it? Yes, that's you.
In a little dress that your granny sent out from England.
'Our memories are hugely important to our sense of who we are.
' That's Kilimanjaro.
Oh, yes.
You used to like saying words like Kilimanjaro.
Oh, right.
But our memories lull us into a false sense of certainty.
They are fallible, riddled with errors.
- Another early memory was being stung by a scorpion.
- Yes.
We were miles, absolutely miles from anywhere, and you suddenly jumped off your chair without your shoes on, which you weren't allowed to do, and stepped on a scorpion .
.
and Ali, our African boy, rushed in and got your foot and squeezed it and sucked it - Gosh! Good for Ali.
- .
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sucked it for hours.
- Yes.
- Well, not hours but And you were screaming.
We had to hold you while he sucked your foot Yes.
I My memory is slightly different.
My memory is that I was walking along the floor - .
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and I saw this creature walking across - Yes.
.
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and I thought it was a lizard.
Really? And I didn't step on it, I put my foot in the way of it to let it crawl over my foot.
Wellyou jumped off your chair Mmm.
I don't remember the pain.
Don't you? Isn't that interesting? Cos that was the terrible bit.
We think back to our first memory, our first big adventure, and it's almost as though there was a movie camera in our head recording every detail.
But that's not the way it is.
That's an illusion.
What we're remembering is a memory of a memory of a memory, of perhaps the real thing.
A man may wear a wrist watch when he's 20 and the same watch when he's 50.
It's the same watch but it's not the same man inside.
Every atom in his body has changed, has turned over.
I'm not the child I once was.
The child I once was is dead.
So the physical cells that once made me are long gone and my memories are more tenuous than I would wish.
The connection between younger and older Richard Dawkins isn't as strong as I might like it to be.
And I think this is why the religious idea of something permanent, the soul, is so plausible.
Now I want to explore the reality of why we die.
Religion still dominates our thinking about death.
If we get rid of God, what's left? I'm on a voyage to tell you the extraordinary truth that science reveals about death.
According to evolutionary science, death is not something to be overcome at all.
It's a necessary part of the picture.
I'm joining the scientists on board Bangor University's research vessel on the Irish Sea.
- Is that alive? - Yeah, yeah.
So where do you put that? 'They are studying the lifespan of a species of clam 'called Arctica Islandica.
They may look rather ordinary 'but they have one attribute that is really quite amazing.
'These clams are among the longest-living animals on Earth.
' Save that one or not? The reason why we are so interested in this is that this is a very long-lived species.
We can pull it up from the wild and assign a year - almost to within one year - how old it is.
Basically, the shell grows in incremental steps.
Each ring is an annual ring, so the growth is very much like a tree.
Can you guess from this one how old is it? There's a size growth curve.
This is probably 80 to 150 years old.
The oldest of them reach what sort of age? Around the UK, it's around about 220 years.
Up in Iceland, in the far north, they'll hit 350, 400, maybe even 500 years.
Only recently, this research team found a clam that had lived for more than half a millennium.
It's amazing to think that some of these clams that we're dredging up were born before Darwin, even before Elizabeth I.
So, why do they live so long? Any evolutionary explanation of why aging happens has to do two things.
It has to be able to explain why you see aging in many species.
It also has to be able to explain why you see enormously long lifespans or possibly no aging in a very few species.
And the clams, I think, may be an example of this.
Because you've seen them and handled them for yourself.
They have enormously thick shells.
I don't think there are very many things down there that can actually bite through them.
And so they can sit around and they can just carry on producing offspring once they've reached a certain size.
These clams are continuing to pass on their genes to the next generation, even at 200 and 300 years old.
' So, from the evolutionary point of view, it is not just that the individuals are well protected against being eaten.
Because they're well-protected against being eaten, it's a good gamble to stay alive a long time, because you've got a good chance of reproducing later.
Whereas something like a salmon has a very poor chance of reproducing again, so it might as well throw everything it's got into one big gamble now.
That's exactly it.
There is no point in spending resources to make a body that will last 400 years if your chance of making it through the night is pretty slim.
So, evolutionary science tells us a lot about ageing and death.
The clams are able to reproduce when they are hundreds of years old, and so long as they are able to reproduce, their genes keep them alive.
We need to see death from a gene's eye point of view.
Our bodies are survival machines for genes.
Once our genes have got us to reproductive age and copied themselves into a new generation, our bodies have less purpose.
Time bombs inside us go off.
We age.
We die.
So, rather than looking upon ageing as a wearing out of the body, perhaps we should see it as a side effect of how our genes work.
Even extraordinary exceptions throw light on this truth.
This is Irving Kahn, a financial trader on New York's Madison Avenue, who has come to work every day since 1927.
Irving is 105 years old.
Do you remember the Wall Street crash? Oh, yes.
I came just at the time.
About three or four months before the peak, the summer of 1928, '29.
And that was one reason I didn't like the business.
Yes.
Because I came here, went to the exchange on Wall Street, and found, after a week on the floor, that it was like working in a casino.
I can imagine.
- A gambling house.
- Yes.
I understand that, not just you but many members of your family are extremely long-lived.
Yes, my brother Peter is about 103 or 104.
- I'm 105.
- Yes.
I have limited renals and limited hearsight - and I hope, the right number of marbles.
You have got a lot of marbles, I think! What about your sister, how old is she? She's 108.
Mr Kahn, is it possible to give us an idea what it feels like to be your age? It's much better and it's much worse.
So, why do some people's genes keep their bodies going for so much longer? The curious case of Irving Kahn and his family has intrigued scientists who are trying to answer this very question.
When we ask our people, why do you think you live to be so old? One of the things they're saying, "Hey, it's in my family.
My mother was 102, my grandfather was 108.
" Irving can show that he has four other siblings that lived to be 100.
The study looked at 500 aged Ashkenazi Jews, like Irving Kahn, from the same geographical area, whose environment and genes can be easily compared.
For Irving, and especially for his sister, Helen, she's been smoking for 95 years, two packs for 95 years, which shows you that if you smoke for 95 years, you live a long life! I know it doesn't! I can assure you I can assure you that that's true.
And Irving has smoked for about 30 years in his life.
So the point here is that our centenarians, as a group, did not interact with their environment the way we tell the way the doctors tell their patients, that you have to watch your weight, you have to exercise, you shouldn't smoke and you should drink one cup of alcohol a day and all the things we know to tell them.
It doesn't matter for them.
So, for some, lifestyle and environment don't play as large a role as we've been told.
But if Irving's genes hold the secret to long life, why hasn't evolution given us all genes like his? If there are genes that increase longevity out into the hundreds, why didn't natural selection favour those genes in our ancestral past? Well, I will tell you, there is something very upsetting in this sense in our group.
First of all, a third of the centenarians in the world don't have children.
OK, so I don't know, is it having children, raising them, rearing them, I don't know what? But the point is that there is some exchange between reproduction and aging.
But also, in my study, the centenarians had less kids at a much later age than my control population.
So, if the control population has three to five kids on average, our centenarians are 1.
7 kids on average.
And so, if you are thinking that way, we're losing longevity genes, right? Because in every generation, we populate more with kids of the people who don't have longevity genes than have longevity genes.
Our genes appear to trade long life for reproduction.
Longevity seems to be connected to later reproduction or no children at all.
So how long we live and why we die are dependent on our genes.
And I'm about to look my own genetic code straight in the face.
Advances in genetic science mean it is now possible for me to get my entire genome decoded.
There's something very personal and intimate about it as well.
This is something that is absolutely unique to me, there's never ever been, in the history of the world, nor will there be again a genome which is the same as mine, or the same as yours, or the same as anybody else's.
This new science is still in its infancy.
I'm going to be one of just a dozen people in the world and the first person in Britain publicly to have their whole genome sequenced.
What we're doing here is very new for us, actually, and it's actually very exciting for us.
We're taking a genome of a healthy person and we are asking, what can we learn about that person? It is your most important bit of information about you, is your genome sequence.
But on a serious note, of course, we may find information in your genome that has clinical or health implications.
Yes, I have thought about that.
So, let's go, let's go and do it.
OK.
It'll just be a little scratch as the needle goes in.
'Having my blood taken is only the first stage in a complex process.
' OK, so we're almost there.
This is the most painless blood test I've ever had.
'Having my genome decoded is, in effect, a way of narrowing down how and when I'm going to die.
'My journey to understand death has become personal.
' You have roughly 100 mutations which have been reported as being associated with a disease.
'I may be one of a handful of individuals in the world 'to have their genome sequenced, but before I find out my results 'I'm off to meet the man who was first.
'And he isn't just anyone.
'He's one of the two men who made this new science possible - 'James Watson.
' Well, it's certainly a very beautiful thing.
'Together with Francis Crick, 'James Watson discovered that genes are digital codes 'written on DNA molecules.
'Watson and Crick's names will live forever.
'And Watson isn't shy about it.
' So now I realise, I am, except for Hawking, the most famous scientist alive.
Oh, wonderful, yes.
I turned out to be helped by people looking at my DNA.
In what way? It revealed that I have a genetic polymorphism which metabolises drugs and I have one which acts very slowly.
So if I take, er beta blockers, it stays in my system for a week instead of going away for a day.
So I've been given them for, you know, to help control my blood pressure and I went to sleep! Watson took a personal risk in making his genome available for study, exposing all its imperfections to public scrutiny for the sake of advancing genetic research.
Do you get great pleasure from ideas? - No, I get pleasure from understanding.
- Yes.
So understanding, everything falls into place when you understand? Yes, you move from It's understanding, er that gives you happiness and I think it's one of the unique human features, because it's not limited to me but it clearly, you know, when you're able to find out how to do something.
This, for me, is what is so thrilling about science - understanding things, such as how the DNA molecule underlies all life on Earth.
It's because Watson discovered the structure of DNA, over half a century ago, that today I'm able to have my own genome analysed and understand what makes me live, and how and when I might die.
Today is a very special day for me.
In 50 years, lots of people will be able to say this, but today I'm one of very few people who's had their entire genome sequenced.
Today is the big day when I get to see the results.
So Richard, it's a long time since you were in Oxford and we took an armful of your blood.
We've had a team busy working since then, trying to extract the DNA and reconstruct your genome.
We take these fragments 'To understand my genes, 'Gil McVean matches them against the human reference genome - 'a composite of anonymous donors 'that took ten years to decode and construct.
' What we're really interested in is not saying where you agree with this reference but finding places where you differ.
In that, we find over four million differences between your genome and that reference.
We have about 50,000 variants that we have seen in you for the very first time, completely new to science.
'It is extraordinary that this enormous quantity of data 'reveals incredibly precise details about me.
'Elements of my private world 'that I've never shared with anyone before, or known myself.
' You have a classic European mutation that means that you've got runny earwax.
Another one which means that you can smell asparagus in your own urine.
You've got another one that means you can taste broccoli.
They sound frivolous, but at the same time they probably point to an evolutionary process and that's probably to do with your ability to detect toxins.
Plants have different toxins across the world.
There are local adaptations to toxins that you need to be able to recognise to survive.
'Buried in my genome is the story of my own survival, 'but also clues about how I may die.
'Do I have ticking time bombs in my genetic code?' You have roughly a hundred mutations which have been seen before in clinical settings and have been reported as being associated with a disease.
Having these mutations doesn't mean you'll definitely get the disease, it just alters your chance of getting that.
These are the variants that you carry which have been associated with a whole range of common disorders.
Everything from cancer through to type II diabetes through to schizophrenia.
Let's just take an example of this.
If you zoom in on chromosome 11, you've got a mutation which the literature tells you is associated with, or causes porphyria, which is the disease that people hypothesised for a while caused the madness of King George.
It's a nasty disease.
You would know if you had it.
You should have a 70% chance of getting porphyria.
'So I've dodged that bullet, but there are other threats.
'It's so impressively precise! 'My genome reveals that if I smoked, 'I would have been in the most high-risk group 'for developing lung cancer.
' Your genotype doubles your risk of getting lung cancer but actually the way it does it is through doubling your risk of smoking in a particular way.
So this variant influences your risk of getting lung cancer because it changes the way people smoke.
They smoke deeper breaths, they smoke closer to the end of the cigarette.
What it actually does is change your smoking habits.
How fascinating! So it's picked up as a gene for lung cancer but the method of transmission, the method of effect - .
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is via smoking behaviour.
- Exactly.
This raises the question of whether you've ever smoked.
Do you like the smell of wood smoke? No, I've never smoked.
That's good, but don't take up smoking is my advice.
It seems to me to be utterly astonishing that it's possible for scientists to take an individual and to detect these millions of digital pieces of information to actually read it out as though it was a computer disk.
Well, here it is then.
Here is your genome.
Look after it! Thank you very much! I'm delighted to have it.
Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues have put in.
I mean, when I look at this, this little box here, what it contains is all the information necessary to make not quite me, to make an identical twin of me.
And I think that's an astonishing thought.
Thank you very, very much for this.
It's been a pleasure.
As we come to learn more about DNA, our relationship with death is bound to change.
And as more of us have our genomes analysed, will we be able to avoid those ticking time bombs contained in our codes that killed our ancestors after they reproduced? This is my genome, my whole genome.
And strangely enough, portions of my genome are behind that door.
Behind there is the Dawkins' family vault.
This has been the Dawkins' church since the 1720s and in there are 20 of my relations, many of them my ancestors, and they have contributed some of the genes that are inside this little silver box.
At the top, next to the top there, Henry Dawkins, and then three down, his wife, Lady Juliana Dawkins.
They are my four greats - my great, great, great, great grandparents.
One-64th of the genes inside this little silver box come from Henry.
The bottom of this column here, the middle column, is another Henry, his son - he has contributed one-32nd part of the genes inside this hard disk.
Unfortunately, the door can't be opened.
It hasn't been opened since, I think, 1919.
They've lost the key, nobody knows how to open it.
There are some slots in there that I should never occupy unless they can get the door open! What would be rather nice would be if we could somehow post this disk in there to rest alongside my ancestors.
But the genes, the set of instructions inside us, don't rest.
Just as they have come from our ancestors before us, so too do they march on into our children and their children's children.
Our genes are a kind of archive of the remote past.
They go through us to the remote future.
Henry Dawkins may be my four greats grandfather and he's put some genes in here, but my two hundred million greats grandfather was a fish, and, by the way, the same fish was your two hundred million greats grandfather too.
Amazingly, even he has put some genes in here, and they, too, have a chance of going on to the remote future.
Our genes are, in a sense, immortal.
That's not comforting in the way the soul is supposed to be, but it is a wonderful thought and it is true.
We may argue about whether we have an immortal soul that survives our death, but one thing science tells us for sure is that if there's anything that's immortal in our bodies, it is our genes.
Red Bee Media Ltd