Ewan Birney

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2013

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Ewan Birney talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his work on deciphering the human genome and the race to come up with the right number of genes that make us human. Ewan explains why he started a sweepstake to get fellow scientists to estimate the final number and why numbers were wildly wrong. He explains his role in the recent controversy over claims about the demise of 'Junk' DNA. He also talks about artificial DNA and whether it could be the future for information storage? With a colleague, he has already used a small speck of artificial DNA to store Shakespeare's sonnets. In theory, all of the world's information could be held on DNA in a space the size of a small room. If kept cold, dry and dark, DNA lasts for thousands of years so could it be the archive medium of the future?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.0	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:20.0	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.3	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.9	Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.
0:45.0	My guest today is Ewen Bernie.
0:47.4	At the age of 40 his scientific career has already spanned three decades.
0:52.4	His role in one of the biggest projects of 20th century
0:54.9	science sequencing the human genome was to find out from the vast string of
1:00.0	letters that line up to make our DNA which bits are the genes that make our DNA, which bits are the genes that make us who we are.
1:07.0	It was his job to write and develop the software to locate the small islands of genes lying in the sea of 3 billion letters that make up our genome,
1:16.0	essentially to put a number to how many genes it takes to build and run a human being.
1:22.0	He predicts that biology will continue to move from the
1:25.4	lab bench to the computer. So what will it mean for our health when we can all have
1:30.9	our genome sequenced.
1:33.0	You and Bernie, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:35.0	Thank you.
	...

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