Summary
Long before most of us gave air pollution a second thought, Frank Kelly was studying the impact of toxic particles on our lungs. In a pioneering set of experiments on human volunteers in northern Sweden, he proved that pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and particulates, are harmful to our health. And he is the driving force behind an air quality monitoring system in London that is the envy of the world. When in the late 1990s, the UK government was encouraging us all to buy diesel cars to help reduce our carbon emissions, he warned that while diesel engines might be less bad for the planet than petrol engines, they were more damaging to our health. Later Frank and his team provided evidence that the car manufacturers were not telling the truth about emissions from diesel vehicles. As the chair of the Government Medical Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution, he has worked tirelessly to try and move air pollution up the political agenda and worked closely with successive Mayors of London to improve air quality in the capital. Changing all the buses from diesel to hybrid or electric vehicles would make a huge difference, he says. But we will also need to get used to relying less on driving our cars to get us from A to B. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Newscast is the unscripted chats behind the headlines. |
| 0:05.6 | It's informed, but informal. |
| 0:07.5 | We pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can really dig into them. We use our colleagues in the newsroom and |
| 0:14.4 | our contacts. Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others. |
| 0:18.0 | We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests. |
| 0:23.5 | Join us for daily news chats to get you ready for today's conversations. |
| 0:28.3 | Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds. My grandfather worked on the Sounds. |
| 0:37.0 | My grandfather worked on the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and it troubles me. |
| 0:40.0 | It also troubled some of the scientists who developed it. |
| 0:43.2 | Find out more in The Bomb, a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service, available now. |
| 0:48.4 | This is Discovery from the BBC. I'm Jim Mel Killelli and in today's program I'm in conversation with a leading scientist about their life and research. |
| 1:00.0 | Welcome to the Life Scientific. |
| 1:03.0 | My guest today has done everything he can to tackle a problem that it's not going to go away, |
| 1:08.0 | air pollution. |
| 1:10.0 | Frank Kelly was one of the first scientists to prove that toxic particles in the air, put there by cars, buses, trains, planes, power plants, factories can damage our lungs. |
| 1:21.0 | Long before most of us gave air pollution a second thought, he set up an extensive |
| 1:25.0 | network of monitoring stations to measure air quality in London and develop ways of |
| 1:30.2 | modeling air pollution in the capital that have been adopted around the world. |
| 1:34.0 | When the UK government was encouraging us all to buy diesel cars |
| 1:38.0 | to help reduce CO2 emissions, |
| 1:40.0 | he warned that emission from diesel engines would be worse for our lungs, but to no avail. |
| 1:46.1 | For the past 10 years he's chaired the Government Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
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.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.