What is Life?
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedians Jo Brand and Ross Noble, alongside Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse and geneticist Prof Aoife McLysaght to ask the biggest question of all, what is life and how did it start? They look at the amazing feat of nature that has somehow created all of life from just four fundamental units of simple chemistry. From chickens to butterflies to yeast, we are all far more closely related then we think. But how did the spark of life occur and what has any of this got to do with Ewoks?
Producer: Alexandra Feachem
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.3 | Hello, I'm Brian Cox. |
| 0:06.5 | I'm Robyn Inc. and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. |
| 0:09.1 | We began the series asking how the universe will end, |
| 0:12.2 | and we're finishing this series by asking how life began. |
| 0:14.6 | Basically, what we're doing is we're running the whole thing |
| 0:17.0 | backwards, so there's a happy ending. |
| 0:19.2 | And the problem is that, of course, Brian, though, |
| 0:21.9 | there won't be a happy ending, because it'll then explain |
| 0:23.9 | that we need to go further back, and eventually we'll return |
| 0:26.0 | to a time before light and matter, |
| 0:27.7 | when everything was crushed together at terrible heats. |
| 0:30.2 | It's not my fault, is it? It's just the way the universe is. |
| 0:32.6 | Physics always spoils everything, doesn't it? |
| 0:34.8 | It's just spoil things, physics. |
| 0:36.2 | Today, we are following in the footsteps of Owen Schrodinger |
| 0:38.8 | and asking the question, which was the title of his influential book, |
| 0:42.1 | first published in 1944, What Is Life? |
| 0:45.3 | Joining us to discuss this profound question |
| 0:47.7 | are four separate populations of interacting cells, |
| 0:51.0 | at least one of which has won the Nobel Prize, |
| 0:54.0 | and at least one of which we are very certain has not. |
... |
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