Science and Brexit, Antibiotic livestock growth promoters, Bepicolombo goes to Mercury
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How might Brexit affect UK Science? Why is feeding a 'last resort' antibiotic to farm animals not a good idea? Why is space probe Bepicolombo going to Mercury? Adam Rutherford is your host.
This week, leading British and European scientists wrote to the British Prime Minister and European Commission President. They expressed their concerns about the potential impact if there is a no-deal departure by the UK from the European Union. We hear from one of the signatories Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and from UK Science Minister Sam Gyimah.
Roland Pease reports on the use of the medically valuable last-resort antibiotic, colistin, as a growth promoting substance in agricultural livestock feed in India. He speaks to infectious disease consultant Abdul Ghafur in Chennai, India and microbiologist Tim Walsh at Cardiff University.
The space probe Bepicolombo has begun its 7 year voyage to the planet Mercury. Suzie Imber of the University of Leicester and David Rothery of the Open University tell Adam why the journey will take so long and why Mercury is such an intriguing planet, worthy of exploration by this new probe.
Transcript
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| 0:31.0 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Insight Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 25th of |
| 0:36.9 | October 2018 I'm Adam Rutherford at Astra once again for yet another amazing trip into space, this time a 10-year mission to boldly go to almost the center of the solar system to investigate one of the neglected planets, a mercurial ball of metal covered by a thin toxic crust of volatile volcanic |
| 0:55.2 | maelstrom it is in fact mercury and probably the most pressing biomedical concern of the |
| 1:00.5 | current age antibiotic resistance we take a look at the consequences of industrial |
| 1:05.1 | scale usage of antibiotics in farming in India. |
| 1:09.2 | But first, it's the defining political issue of this generation and science is not exempt from the potential impact of Brexit. |
| 1:16.3 | At the start of the week a phalanx of senior scientists in the UK and other European countries, |
| 1:21.2 | 29 Nobel Prize winners among them sent two openly other European Commission President Jean-Claude Unker. |
| 1:30.6 | In the letters, the author authors assert the importance of |
| 1:33.3 | internationality in science, the free movement of researchers and |
| 1:37.3 | warn against the possibility of Britain's scientific isolation within Europe. |
| 1:41.6 | Basically they make their case that a no-deal Brexit without provision |
| 1:45.7 | for continuing scientific partnership would severely damage both British and European science. |
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