UK's longest-running cohort study, The Brain prize, Hairy genetics
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
This week is birthday time for the 3000-strong group of 70 year olds who might qualify for the title of longest-serving science guinea pigs. Participants in The National Survey for Health and Development cohort study have been closely monitored since their birth in 1946. Joining Adam Rutherford to discuss how this and other similar studies have influenced our lives, and what data we should collect on today's babies, are the Head of the National Survey for Health and Development at MRC's Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at University College London, Professor Diana Kuh, and Professor Debbie Lawlor, programme lead at the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at Bristol University.
A team of British team has picked up £1 million from The Brain Prize, which is issued by a Danish Charity annually. Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris have won for their work on how memories are formed. BBC science reporter Jonathan Webb is a former neuroscientist and brings us up-to-date with the latest thinking on how we remember.
Finally, grey hair and mono-brows have been all over the news this week with some follicular genetics. A team from UCL assessed the hair types of several thousand Latin Americans and cross-referenced this with their genomes to see what bits of DNA are associated with those characteristics. They found a set of gene variants - or alleles - some known to us, some new, that appear to be part of the reason we have straight hair or curly, bushy brows or mono-brows. Dr Kaustubh Adhikari from UCL is the lead author on the study.
Producer: Jen Whyntie.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of BBC Inside Science from Radio 4 first broadcast on the 3rd of March 2016 |
| 0:06.5 | I'm Adam Rutherford but for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be Tracy Logan because I'm going to |
| 0:10.8 | New Zealand to science the hell out of it I'm going to New Zealand to science the hell out of it. I'm going to meet a |
| 0:14.0 | kakapo. Keep your emails coming about your experiences of and opinions on UK |
| 0:18.9 | science in relation to Europe will be following up in the next couple of weeks. |
| 0:22.1 | More at BBC.co. |
| 0:23.7 | UK slash radio 4. |
| 0:25.6 | Today we've got male pattern baldness big bushy beards and monobrows |
| 0:30.6 | impressive if you've got all three the genetics of all things head hair related |
| 0:35.1 | and what they mean for human evolution. And we've got the neuroscience of memory formation, |
| 0:39.3 | something about the hippocampus, to be honest I can't really remember. But first a huge happy birthday to |
| 0:45.0 | to three thousand seventy-year-olds back in 1946, 5,362 babies born in one week |
| 0:51.8 | in March was signed up for what became a lifetime of scientific study. |
| 0:56.2 | The National Survey for Health and Development was the first of its kind and such an important step in inventing projects that help us understand all manner of things about the lives |
| 1:05.8 | and health of ordinary people. |
| 1:08.2 | They get called Douglas babies after the doctor who first set up the cohort and now they're |
| 1:12.4 | amongst the most studied people on earth |
| 1:14.7 | and their contribution to human health knowledge is unprecedented. |
| 1:18.1 | Professor Diana Koo is head of the survey and I asked her just how involved you get |
| 1:22.4 | both scientifically and personally with the |
| 1:24.8 | project and the people. I think one of the things that makes this and other studies |
| 1:29.7 | successful is that you have study teams who actually are as committed to the study as the study |
... |
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