Stripping down science, the naked scientists.

The Naked Scientists. So, the Hello, it's Sunday August the 28th and I'm Chris Smith and this week we're taking you to

Sunny Scotland, no joke, and the University of Aberdeen, where we'll meet, amongst others,

the scientist exploring the deepest part of the Pacific, over seven miles down, to find out

what's living there, a woman who can steer yeast cells with an electric

current, she's poised to discover how to block yeast infection, so it's important stuff,

and the man who's searching for the next generation of

blockbuster drugs but on the seabed and talking of drugs to kick us off

his pharmacologist Professor Ruth Ross who has successfully weeded out

some promising chemicals from the marijuana plant.

Cannabis has lots of potentially useful medicinal properties, but it also has potential side effects.

So we're trying to crack the issue with

making new compounds new drugs that act in novel innovative ways such that we can

produce effective medicines that lack side effects.

So get the good bits, lose the bad bits.

Exactly.

So most people know that cannabis potentially is effective in things like multiple sclerosis, pain, but it also has the potential side

effect of inducing psychosis when people misuse cannabis and take certain

types of cannabis that are available on the street.

So there's a number of issues there that we're looking into.

First, we're looking at making synthetic small molecule drugs,

which can actually target the effects of cannabis and the receptors and mechanisms which make it useful

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