The Life Scientific Folgen

Imagine a nanoparticle, less that a thousandth of the width of a human hair, that is so precise that it can carry a medicine to just where it’s needed in the body, improving the drug’s impact and reducing side effects. Ijeoma Uchegbu, Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London, has spent her career with this goal in mind. She creates nanoparticles to carry medicines to regions of the body that are notoriously hard to reach, such as the back of the eye and the brain. With clinical trials in the pipeline, she hopes to treat blindness with eyedrops, transform pain relief and tackle the opioid crisis. Ijeoma took an unconventional route into science. Growing up in the UK and in Nigeria, she tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili her remarkable life story, from being fostered by a white family in rural Kent, while her Nigerian parents finished their studies, to struggling to pay the bills through her PhD as a single mum with young children. So passionate is Ijeoma to spread her love of science, she’s even turned to stand-up comedy to help get her message across! Presented by JIm Al-Khalili Produced by Beth Eastwood

Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their predatory behaviour: ganging up to catch hapless seals or attack other whales. But for the last fifteen years, Darren Croft’s focus has been on a gentler aspect of killer whale existence: their family and reproductive lives . Killer whales live in multi-generational family groups. Each family is led by an old matriarch, often well into her 80s. The rest of the group are her daughters and sons, and grand-children. Especially intriguing to Darren is that female orca go through something like the menopause - an extremely rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom, only documented in just five species of toothed whales and of course in humans. Halting female reproduction in midlife is an evolutionary mystery, but it is one which Darren Croft argues can be explained by studying killer whales. Darren is Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. He talks to Jim Al-Kalili about his research on killer whales, his previous work revealing sophisticated social behaviour in fish, his life on the farm, and the downsides and upsides of being dyslexic.Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker

Bill Gates is one of the world's best-known billionaires - but after years at the corporate coalface building a software empire and a vast fortune, his priority now is giving that wealth away. And his ethos for doing it has been shaped by science.Famed for co-founding Microsoft, in recent decades Bill’s attention has turned to philanthropy via The Gates Foundation: one of the largest charities in the world. Since its inception in 2000, the organisation's helped tackle issues around health, education, inequality and climate change in some of the world’s poorest countries, with an undeniable impact: from contributing to the eradication of wild poliovirus in Africa, to helping halve global child mortality rates within 25 years. But, as Jim Al-Khalili discovers, for a man with lofty ambitions and an even loftier bank balance Bill has surprisingly humble tastes - from cheeseburgers and a bingeable spy series, to a good game of pickleball... Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Lucy Taylor