Alzheimer's Disease, False Memory, Diamond Light Source, Twins in Space

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Alzheimer's disease is becoming increasingly common as the global population ages. It is estimated that currently 44 million victims of Alzheimer's dementia exist in the world and that this will grow to more than 100 million cases by 2050. The announcement this week of the creation of the Drug Discovery Alliance - a network of labs to fast track dementia treatment aims to address the urgent need to identify drugs that prevent, slow the progression, or improve the symptoms of Alzheimer's. But what are the scientific hurdles and what's missing in our knowledge in fuelling an ambition to achieve a disease modifying therapy for dementia? Adam Rutherford speaks to Cambridge University neuroscientist Rick Livesey, and to Eric Karran, Director of Research at Alzheimer's UK

How is it possible to remember something initially and then change your account of the experience later on? Possibly, giant swathes of your own personal history are partially fictional if not completely false. The problem isn't that our memory is bad, but that we believe it isn't. Adam talks to forensic psychologist Julia Shaw whose astonishing new research examines the ability to implant completely made-up rich false memories into ordinary people in a lab setting and points to circumstances under which police officers can extract false confessions.

There's a visit to the UK's synchrotron light source at Harwell in Oxfordshire which since it started operations in 2007 has illuminating research on subjects ranging from Egyptology to virology and this year is opening its doors to the public

Adam meets Mark Kelly, one of NASA's twin astronauts taking part in a year-long space experiment to examine the impact of space travel using identical twins as subjects. With one twin orbiting on the International Space Station whilst the other remains confined to Earth, the aim is to examine how individuals with the same genetic profile respond to radically different environments - in particular the genomics of humans as they prepare to move away from their home planet.

Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.2	Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from the BBC first broadcast on the 19th of February
0:35.3	2015 and I'm Adam Rutherford. More information at BBC.co.
0:40.0	UK slash Radio 4. Plenty of untruths on this week's programme, like the time me and you went on that fishing trip.
0:47.0	Oh, the laughs!
0:48.0	We'll be taking a look at our incredibly fallible memories and how susceptible we are to recalling events that never happened, not just
0:54.8	jolly holidays but violent criminal activities.
0:58.4	We take a peek at the gigantic particle accelerator hidden in the Oxford countryside that has been used to examine everything
1:04.2	from HIV to ancient parchments.
1:07.4	And one of the classic thought experiments is about to be made flesh, one that tests Einstein's
1:12.3	special relativity by sending one half of an
1:15.1	identical twin pair into orbit for a year and leaving the other one back on Earth.
1:19.9	But first, Alzheimer's disease. It's becoming increasingly common. In the UK alone, there are more
1:25.7	than half a million people with Alzheimer's, and with better diagnostics and an ageing population,
1:31.4	that number is due to go up.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.