GMOs; International Year of Light; Coral health

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2015

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is likely that scientists will soon engineer strains of "friendly" bacteria which are genetically recoded to be better than the ones we currently use in food production. The sorts of bacteria we use in cheese or yoghurt could soon be made to be resistant to all viruses, for example. But what if the GM bacteria were to escape into the wild?

Researchers writing in the Journal Nature propose this week a mechanism by which GMO's could be made to be dependent on substances that do not occur in nature. That way, if they escaped, they would perish and die.

George Church, of Harvard Medical School, tells Adam Rutherford about the way bacteria - and possibly eventually plant and animal cells - could be engineered to have such a "failsafe" included, thus allowing us to deploy GM in a range of applications outside of high security laboratories.

Adam reports from this week's launch in Paris of the International Year of Light marking 100 years since Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Amongst the cultural and scientific events at UNESCO in Paris, Nobel Prize winner Bill Philips explains how using lasers can achieve the most accurate atomic clocks imaginable and we hear how Google X is embracing new ways to manipulate light to ignite some of the team's futuristic technologies

And as the global decline in coral reefs continues as a result of human activity, Adam talks to Hawaii based biologist Mary Hagedorn who is using unusual techniques normally adopted for fertility clinics, to store and regrow coral species that are in danger

Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:37.0	Hello You, this is the podcast version of Inside Science from the BBC first broadcast on the 22nd of January and I'm Adam Rutherford.
0:43.7	For more information go to the website at BBC.co. UK slash Radio 4.
0:48.6	Hello today we bathe in a warm light for all mankind.
0:53.6	In celebration of the centenary of Einstein's theory of general relativity, 2015 has been designated
0:59.4	International Year of Light, and later we'll be through the looking glass on how light is being used to do bizarre things such as cooling atoms and
1:07.7	Keeping time so accurate that it would shame the Radio 4 Pips.
1:12.5	And we're under the sea with coral reefs and how researchers are taking a leaf out of the IVF
1:16.8	book to help save them.
1:19.3	But first, the perennial problem of genetically modified organisms.
1:23.2	In the US, they've always had a fairly relaxed view on GM foods.
1:27.3	Some estimates have it that over 3 trillion meals containing GM ingredients were eaten
1:32.2	in the two years up to 2012.
1:34.5	In Europe, there has been legislative hostility
1:38.0	and no GM crops have been grown for consumer sale,
1:40.5	only experimental crops in very small numbers.
1:43.4	Last week's announcement that the EU have relaxed the law to allow the growth of GM maize
	...

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