Exchanges at the Frontier 2010

Hedonism keeps us healthy.

Morten L Kringelbach is Professor of Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

His work explores the mechanisms in the brain that underlie sensory and social pleasure.

Food and sex can give us pleasure, but can understanding that notion teach us about the secret of happiness?

Pleasure - he believes - is intimately linked to emotional, cognitive and reward processing in the brain and by understanding it we can find ways to treat personality disorders, depression and obesity.

First broadcast on 24 November, 2010. It goes out in place of the planned programme on the topic of Alzheimer's Disease with Christine Van Broeckhoven.

A shorter version of this programme is available click here.

Aged 80, would you want the body of a 40 year old?

Cynthia Kenyon is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco. She is an ageing specialist.

Compare the lifespans of similarly-sized animals, living in similar environments and their life expectancies can be very different: for mice it's two years; for canaries it's 15 years; and for bats it can be 50 years.

Her work has revealed a latent ability in organisms to live longer - and with a younger body - than they do.

Kenyon has been able to extend the life of her experimental subjects - a kind of worm - by a factor of six. Is such a thing possible for humans? And if it is, is this something that we would want to do?

First broadcast on 27 October, 2010

A shorter version of this programme is available click here.

Of the 800,000 deaths a year caused by the malaria parasite, nearly 90% are children under five living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Kevin Marsh is director of the Kenyan Medical Research Insitute in Kilifi, Kenya, where he leads a research team of 100 scientists almost entirely recruited from East Africa.

He has been looking at the transmission and control of malaria for over 20 years.

Much of his research focuses on how the disease manifests itself in children and how immunity is developed. He is also testing a vaccine which could have 50% effectiveness within five years.

Is there cause for optimism? Why is it that children in Africa are so vulnerable?

First broadcast on 3 November, 2010

A shorter version of this programme is available click here.

What are string theory's chances of being proved correct and achieving that distinction of being the theory of everything?

Brian Greene is professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, New York. His specialism is string theory.

Reality's smallest things do not seem to behave according to the laws of the largest.

The laws of general relativity which explain the physics of large scale phenomena such as galaxies - and quantum mechanics, which deals with the science of extremely minute particles such as quarks, are incompatible.

String theory attempts to reconcile this breach by exploring the idea that fundamental particles are not dots, but vibrating filaments of energy.

In order for the theory to work there needs to be extra unobservable dimensions, messenger particles and other imagination-stretching attributes of the fabric of the cosmos.

If we do have a theory of everything, how will that change life on Earth?

First broadcast on 10 November, 2010

A shorter version of this programme is available click here.

How does the mind go badly awry?

Gwen Adshead is a consultant forensic psychotherapist at Broadmoor, one of the UK's high security psychiatric hospitals.

She oversees some of society's most problematic personalities. She is attempting to understand psychotic behaviour and is trying to find ways to treat it.

Many describe the acts her patients have committed as evil. Adshead describes the people in her care using a quote from Shakespeare's King Lear: "ruined pieces of nature". But does the notion of evil have any bearing in the treatment of psychotic people?

For the first time a public audience has been invited to the Learning Centre of Broadmoor itself, in order to test Adshead on society's expectations for the treatment of the dangerously insane.

First broadcast on 17 November, 2010

A shorter version of this programme is available click here.