Plankton's untapped potential

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From Hay Festival 2026, a dive into a big year for our oceans, with plankton specialist Vincent Doumeizel and physicist turned oceanographer Helen Czerski.

Vincent is author of the Power of Plankton, which describes the crucial history and future of plankton and planktonic life on our planet. Helen's book The Blue Machine looks at the physical oceanic processes that shape the world.

Presented by Tom Whipple Produced by Alex Mansfield

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, we'll hear more stories emerging
0:25.2	out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:28.8	They did know that I was different.
0:31.7	You had kids together.
0:33.0	Yeah.
0:33.5	Then you met.
0:34.3	Then we met.
0:35.2	The Gift.
0:36.1	Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, welcome to Inside Science from the BBC
0:43.1	World Service with me Tom Whipple. And this week, we've rather a lot of other people too. We are at the
0:49.5	Hay Festival, an international gathering of readers and writers that Bill Clinton once described as the Woodstock of the Mind.
0:56.8	And as befits the standing of such a festival, we are here to talk about something pretty momentous.
1:01.5	How momentous?
1:03.0	Well, let me take you back to where it began.
1:06.4	New York 2004.
1:08.9	Picture the scene.
1:10.2	It is the 58th session of the UN General Assembly and we have reached
	...

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