The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science and Spin

Episode Date: December 23, 2013

This week on the Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and Robin Ince take to the stage at Manchester University, to discuss the state of science communication. Is the public engaged enough with the complexities of science? Are scientists engaging enough with the hoi polloi or still stuck in their ivory towers? And when was the 'golden age' of TV science, if it ever existed? Joining our presenters are scientists Matthew Cobb and Sheena Cruikshank, comedian Helen Keen and legendary science TV presenter and writer, James Burke, whose classic series 'Connections' captivated audiences around the world. Producer: Rami Tzabar.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. On my left, a man who annoys people by saying there is only physics, only things that can be measured, then ordering the most complicated cocktail on the bar menu, which is, of course, chemistry. And I'm not actually allowed to tell you how there is then an overlap into biology, for legal reasons. It is Brian Cox. And on my right, a man whose life, if represented as a Venn diagram, would be the overlap of nonsense, apoplectic fury, and hard-up librarian chic.

It's Robin Innes. Today, in the 50th episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, we are asking what is science communication and is there really any point to it? If this is answered in the negative, we've signed our own death warrant. Let's move over and allow more space for programmes about colouring in. Obviously, by colouring in, he means the arts. That's the translation there.

So is it right that scientists should just be left alone to explore nature in their ivory tower, or is it important to know at least something about the scientific method? Would we be better able to meet the great challenges of the 21st century from climate change to pandemic disease if more people knew more about science and the way science is done? So to help us decide whether it's time to close the monkey cage, we are joined by four eminent guests.

Helen Keane, like me, was an art student until she started telling everyone about the space programme, eventually turning it into a Radio 4 series. It is rocket science. Matthew Cobb is Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester. He's an author of several books, including The Resistance, The French Fight Against the Nazis, and The Egg and Sperm Race, A History of Reproduction,

for which he won the Zoological Society of London's Award for Communicating Science. Dr Sheena Cruickshank is an immunologist, also at the University of Manchester, who shares with Matthew an indigestible fascination for wriggling annelids. And at this point, of course, being Radio 4, wriggling annelids. So what is a wriggling annelid?

Is it a worm? Is it a small hat? Is it a medieval tapestry depicting the fall of Rome? And our final guest is someone whose work had a tremendous influence on me, the panel and I imagine most of the audience. Creator of the landmark science series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.

Presenter of Tomorrow's World and chief reporter for the BBC's coverage of the Apollo missions and described as one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world. It's James Burke and this is our panel. James, you came into science broadcasting from an unlikely background. I think your degree was in medieval English or English literature. And then, as far as I understand it, I read that you came back to the UK in 66, and by 68 you were presented Tomorrow's World and then led the moon landing coverage.

So how did that happen? By accident. I was happily teaching Italian graduates the more arcane bits of medieval English, getting pretty bored at it. You would. And a friend of mine told me that a British television company was looking for a television director, and I said, I don't know how to do that.

And they said, they don't know you don't know. And I said, well, they'll soon find out. And they said, well, just go for a joke. And I went, and all they wanted to know was, did I speak fluent Italian, which I did. So they gave me the job. That was the time when the BBC was consciously, if the BBC can be said to be conscious,

was hiring humanities graduates for the new science division and putting all the scientists in the arts division. And it worked beautifully. There was one scientist on Tomorrow's World who made incomprehensible programs. Everybody else did quite well, on the basis that if we understood it, anybody would. It was a job for a start and not a bad reason to take a career on. And it was like teaching in a sense. I mean, you look at a camera instead of a crowd of people, you can't see the

boredom. So that's much better. And you don't know if they switched off, which most of my students did. So all in all, it was a good deal. And it sort of didn't matter what the content was. In fact, it was important that it didn't matter what the content was, because if I understood it, having discussed it in painful detail with some scientist, anybody would understand it. So now this is a slight worrying moment, because you have made some of the great television series on science, and with an incredible level of enthusiasm. Is it only because it was a job, or was there a point where you suddenly went, this is an incredible world?

No, I lied about that, really. The incredible programmes, which is nice of you to call them that, that were large and expensive, and, you know, in those days the BBC threw lots of money at you, there's nothing more exciting than spending a lot of money doing this kind of stuff. So that's the real reason. My programme's a very good value for the licence fee payer.

Helen, you also, you're an English graduate as well, and you started off being a stand-up comedian, and again... I'm still a stand-up comedian. Well, I suppose what I meant there was just a stand-up comedian as opposed to a stand-up comedian and rocket communicator. Other things, yeah. So, again, did you have a childhood love of science and think, well, maybe I can't do this in stand-up,

maybe stand-up wants something a little bit broader than that, or was it something I really want to communicate? This is an idea that I'm finding increasingly exciting. Yeah, I think so. I think it was always something that I kind of loved from being really little, and so, yeah, wanting to do an Edinburgh show and wanting to think, you know, what would be an amazing thing to talk about that nobody else is talking about this time.

And it didn't really, I guess, the way I was taught science at school and my interest in space didn't really ever collide, possibly because we had the PE teacher for physics quite a lot. So that might have been something to do with it, I guess. Do you find it daunting, because I know you talk at science festivals as well now, if you give a talk, which is part comedy but part factual, about the Apollo programme, for example, at Rockstar, you don't feel people are judging you about the quality or precision of your knowledge? I hadn't worried about that until this point.

You should. No, I think because I've been so into it for so long that I've kind of read all the books. So you do get people coming up and sort of saying, you know, or whatever. But I think usually, yeah, I haven't touched wood, had any huge, massive mistakes I've made yet. We're going to cut that out. There's no way on a science show we can have you say touch wood. I'm sorry, it's exactly what I was talking about.

I've found that an interesting thing, that when you start communicating science, when you try to do that in stand-up, the major change is you no longer get heckled, but you do get footnotes. Yeah. So it's kind of like... Yeah, but I think that's one of the things, when you are from an arts background, you're very aware of that and you don't want to make mistakes.

You do kind of, you know, redouble your efforts to make sure you get everything correct, I think. Matthew, you've got, amongst your many titles, Professor of Zoology, but you're also the Associate Dean for Social Responsibility at the university. So we talked about science on television and science in comedy, but science communication at universities, how seriously is that taken now? Well, I think it's very important. It's part of our job to explain to people what we do and the reasons why we do it. Not everybody has to be involved in it,

but we really want to encourage those people who are interested finding ways of developing things that they can take into schools or doing science festivals or talk about on the radio. Because universities, I suppose, a few years ago or a few decades ago would be more inclined to look inwards. So this idea of an ivory tower, obviously a cliché, but probably true a few decades ago. Yeah, I think it's partly changed because there's pressure from the government,

which is legitimate, so that people should know what their money's being spent on. And I think it's also part of the appetite for the public to know more about science. And given the challenges we're facing in the coming century about climate change, about changes in biodiversity, people need to know what the risks are and try and work out what political decisions they should take as a consequence. So I think it's an essential part of being a fully-rounded citizen. Sheena, what do you feel is the most important part of you communicating your work to the public,

to people who, like me, kind of lay people, non-experts? Well, I think I always wanted to do it, but I guess I needed to feel I had permission to do it, if that makes sense. And Manchester is very good at giving you the permission and the freedom to start doing this and share my enthusiasm for worms, as we've referred to, with the public and try and get them excited about the horrible little parasitic diseases that are lurking in their guts. Parasitic worms really gets people. So we have a display that we use, and it's just pots and pots of parasitic worms. And people come up and you say, do you want to see some real worms? And they go, no, yes, yes. And they come running

over. So actually, you've got them hooked very easily. And then when you explain the relevance, because obviously in our part of the world we don't have these parasites anymore, although there are no respecters of authority. Richard III had them, as we recently discovered. But in the countries that do have them, people are quite surprised to find out how many people have them. So it's about 2 billion people.

And it's the major reason that children in third world countries don't go to school. So by simply deworming in Kenya, they've managed to get attendance up by 25%. So when you tell that to people, they're very interested. But when you remind them that we used to have worms, and of course I've said Richard III did, and now we have allergies,

and the countries that have worms don't have allergies then they start to see the relevance to them as well as the global significance so I think it hooks people in quite well and you get into quite in-depth scientific conversations. James who were the communicators for you that inspired you when when when you were a child? I think what inspired me early on for science was science fiction Asimov and the others who were writing back in the 40s and 50s. And I think that spurred a lot of, stimulated a lot of interest in science back then for lots of people.

That was the kind of only example of mass media, as it were, that I was touched by. I think Carl Sagan said it was Edgar Rice Burroughs' Novels of Mars, wasn't it? That he used to stand in his garden trying to get to Mars, shouting the words in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. As, as Carl used to say, we used to go online and look up there and wonder how many civilizations there were. That kind of thing was very inspiring

in that sense, yes. For a certain generation, you are the face of the Apollo program on the BBC, which is about as big and visible as you get. Do you think, obviously that had a massive impact culturally, but do you think that was the driver that led to the commissioning and the popularity of these big series in the 70s? Undoubtedly, yes.

I think above all, Apollo gave a vast number of people the kind of vocabulary they'd never thought they could have. I remember getting into a taxi and a taxi driver saying something about mid-course corrections. That would never have happened five years before. The Apollo 13 broadcast.

Can you just describe what that was like? Because it's worth seeing. You can get the footage. It's all over the internet. The tension, particularly on the re-entry, when you didn't know whether they were going to make it through, for me is a classic piece of broadcasting. Yes. I got a lot of hate mail because i crossed my fingers yes it's a very famous shot isn't it because they zoomed in on your cross fingers about witchcraft and stuff like that yes it was extremely tense because you didn't know i mean from when they went into blackout to when they came out you didn't know if they were going to come out unfortunately one of the

things about doing that kind of job is half of you is thinking that, and the other half of you is thinking, what shall I say if they don't? It's like most of the time when they were in the space or on the moon, the really difficult thing was shutting up, because the audience would eviscerate you if you talked over the top of the astronauts,

and you never knew when they were going to talk. Yeah, that's one small step. Anyway, that's Neil Armstrong. Helen, did you have any influences when you were... I mean, we've mentioned, obviously, James, obviously, Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, I suppose, very important in terms of communicating ideas in the mid to late 70s.

I wasn't born in the mid to late 70s. I know. Well... I just ask, there's no way out of that. It's not my fault if you haven't aged well. Might be the knitwear. No, I'm going to make it worse. Yeah, I mean, I was a big reader of science fiction as well, but I think the thing I really noticed in the 80s was that...

Robin. ..was that, I mean, I felt that you can get inspired and you can see science everywhere. I mean, I remember, and this is probably going to sound really silly, but there was a video for a song by Mars called Pump Up the Volume. I don't know if anyone else remembers that. But it was full of vintage footage of space missions, and that's where I first...

I mean, I was already interested in space rockets and I was already into the moon launchers, but that's where I first saw a lot of the uh you know a lot of the Apollo astronauts a lot of the Mercury 7 that's where I first saw them in that video and I thought oh this is interesting. So dance music was your entry into science which is the same for Brian Cox as well so it all links. Matthew James made an interesting point there but so there are obviously two ways of communicating science. It could be non-scientist, specialist communicators, or scientists. And as you mentioned earlier, now there's not a pressure on academics,

but universities are glad if academics want to communicate science. You've got to have people who really understand it and also can imagine what the audience needs to know. So it might well be that arts graduates might be better at the communication, but the key thing is they've got to understand the stuff they're talking about, and that's the same for scientists. Do you think you sometimes notice that, Sheena?

Have you seen, whether it might be TV programmes or just presentations where you think, I don't think this person knows what they're talking about. I think they haven't quite got the chutzpah. It is that where an actor is presenting the information and you can see that the audience therefore don't quite believe it. I think I'm just pleased if science is being communicated to a lot of people with some degree of accuracy. I think

it bothers me more when they're kind of way off the mark and they're saying something that's just completely wrong which you probably get more in in films and tv i mean my husband will not watch a whole load of things with me because i'll start ranting but that's just not how you catch fluid that's not what you do with a vaccine so i think it's more about accuracy for me yeah there's a film called i think it's called sunshine and that's a Danny Boyle film. And that's this idea of sending a rocket into the sun to restart it. And it's meant to be an absolute shambles in terms of scientifically. So no one knows who that scientific advisor was. I mean, turning to you, though, Brian, interestingly, at roughly the same time.

This is, I know I'm not meant to interview, but in terms of dealing with physics, one of the things that once you start talking about particle physics, you know, again, kind of muons and gluons and quarks and all of these things, when you first approached your shows, did you sometimes find yourself going, oh, hang on a minute, I've realised that even though I'm totally au fait with this, these are alien terms?

There is, but I think also, as james mentioned i think that perhaps the difference between the 60s and today is that a lot of people are well read and well educated there are a lot of general science books out there and a lot of science on television a lot on radio so what i tend to do is try to to say a sentence in which i'll say the simple term, but then also say the complicated term, because there's a large percentage of the audience that are au fait with these terms, I think. So I think it may well have moved on now, because the level of knowledge is higher,

which is interesting. It's a question to you, actually, James, because what you hear, I mean, particularly amongst a certain generation, perhaps the older generation, is they'll say, well, it's dumbed down now. And they'll look back to a golden age, perhaps the older generation, is they'll say, well, it's dumbed down now. And they'll look back to a golden age,

which was connections, but also the ascent of man and cosmos, and they'll see that as a golden age. It was a simpler world. I mean, you know, there were some very major issues. There was a Cold War. There was big rockets going to the moon. There were computers filling entire floors of buildings, you know, air-conditioned with people in white coats. There was a large separation between what we would now call science and engineering and the public. And as I said earlier,

there's a general low level of understanding in the general public at large. So I think the times were different. The requirement was different. What we felt our job was, at the time, was to say, look, it looks frightening and it looks dangerous because the Cold War was, I mean, and nuclear bombs and so on. It looks difficult and dangerous, but, you know, try to understand it and you'll feel much more confident about thinking about it and making decisions about it.

It was much easier for us in those days because the world was a much simpler place. Today it's terribly difficult. Access, online access, gives everybody the impression they understand, they know, they don't need to know anymore. They can make up their minds on the basis of what they get on Google or wherever they get it. And I think that's a slippery path. Well, Sheena, there's

a line, Carl Sagan, again, we'll probably come back to him quite a lot, obviously, because for at least two of us on the panel, he was very important. And he once said about science communication, someone said, why do you want to do science communication? He said, you know, when you're in love, you want to tell the whole world. And obviously you are dealing with parasitic worms, but nevertheless, do you have that sense that in your subject,

you know, the chance, even though obviously there are very practical reasons of why you want to inform people, but as well just the joy of knowledge and the excitement of ideas, do you have that feeling when you're delivering these ideas? Oh, definitely. I mean, it's partly why we do it, because we're so excited and passionate about our subject that we want to go out and tell as many people

and try and get them excited and passionate about parasitic worms. Clearly. Everybody should do that. But I think that there's also sort of other issues. I mean, one of the projects that I've just started is building on from community work that I did where I'm working with immigrants who have limited English but have a lot of experience with parasitic infections so they can actually inform me about what it is to live with a parasitic infection what their understanding is and I'm able to inform them about what their gaps are.

And I'm also hoping to improve their science literacy so that they are able better to communicate with just their GP, to be honest. I mean, when we talk to them, a lot of them have a real issue with talking to the GP and saying, I have a stomachache. They can't do that. They don't know the word for stomach.

They don't know the word for faeces, stools, all these other words. So I'm trying to do something slightly different just now if you look back over the history of what's become known as this field of science communication um years ago it used to be called the public understanding of science this horrible thing puss which is a ridiculous thing but that's what it used to be called for a long time public understanding of science with the sense that it was it was we dictated we were passing information down to the masses. And what you suggested there was now the reality is that it's much more interactive, there's much more of a conversation, it's about communicating both ways.

It's the way I see it for me personally, but I'm not sure that's the way it is everywhere. I have some colleagues who work in the field of studying science communication, and they say that, you know, that would be ideal, but really it's a bit messy and that there's an awful lot of stuff happening and not a lot of it's very well evaluated. So you get a lot of people going out and going, right, well, I've got this great science product

and it's ever so much fun, and everybody's had a really, really great day, and that's basically all they've got out of it. and there's a bit of that going on as well which is fine but it's not the two-way engagement has it got over complicated matt is it is it as simple as james gave this as a wonderful description you're just trying to encourage the individuals to to to learn a bit and to be interested in the acquisition that's the essence of. In terms of campaigning for a general science literacy then that's why I teach at a university, that's why I think that's important. I've also been involved in dealing with very difficult areas recently so we recently did something which I'm very proud of in that we invited 36 formers into the university to

discuss and study the issue of animal experimentation. They visited our animal house, they saw the way that the animals were kept and then we had a big discussion with them afterwards and I think that was a very bold decision by the university and by the staff of the animal house to really deal with what is a very difficult issue and then of course we had to ask the students what do you think about animal testing? And they all felt less uncomfortable after the visit than they did before. And I think that we have that responsibility to people to explain what we're doing. Sheena, do you feel now that the public have a different view of scientists?

There have been times where there's a view that scientists almost, they're in an entirely different world, a world of measurements, facts and figures, something which cannot be breached. I think sometimes there's still that attitude, oh, you're a scientist, therefore you're clever, which I clearly disprove regularly by falling over and doing random things.

But I think... But that is expected of scientists, isn't it? They're so clever, they can't walk because they're thinking about other things. Next time I fall over, I'll say, it's not because I can't walk, it's because I'm a scientist and I'm too clever to walk. Great. Don't blame me, blame the parasitic worms. Oh, I explained that very badly. Never mind. But there's still a bit of an issue. I mean, they do say that one of the reasons that more women don't get into science

is because they don't perceive that being a scientist is a job so you don't see scientists just normally in the community, so they don't perceive that being a scientist is a job, so you don't see scientists just normally in the community, so they don't understand that that's an option. I mean, even now we still see in supermarkets and toy shops gendered toys. Here are the pink things for girls, here are the rockets and things like that. The toys thing, I mean, you sort of take two steps forward and one step back. Like this year, I think Barbie's job of the year is a Mars astronaut. But all the packaging is like she's bringing her signature pink splash

to the red planet. And she doesn't have any gloves. This is the really awful thing. She's going to get up there, her hands are going to explode. It's just upsetting. It's upsetting. What can I say? That is a good doll with exploding hands.

That's not for boys and girls. Matt, I believe you've got an example of the way that you communicate science. Or they've all been eaten. Because everybody will see that there are jelly beans scattered around. If you, people at the edge, in the end seats, if you look under your seat, you should find a cup full of jelly beans, some of which may have fallen... Right.

So we're going to do an experiment in science. So what you want to do is to take a jelly bean and hand it along. Don't eat it yet. So... Sorry, here. There's not a kind of grand surprise where it turns out that he has replaced his animal experiment laboratory with you

and that you've all been given different forms of disease. These are normal jelly beans as well. So it's kind of half of them have got parasitic worms implanted. Actually, parasite worms' eggs are smaller than this, so don't worry. There are no maggots in there either. So take a jelly bean. Everybody should be able to take one. Have you everybody got one?

Get them to James. There you go. So what we're going to do is a little experiment in perception, and it's in particular about how your sense of smell and your sense of taste are related. I study the sense of smell, so I want to convince you that, in fact, your sense of smell is incredibly important

and you're actually tasting with your nose. So if everybody's got their jelly bean, then I want you to hold your nose, put the jelly bean into your mouth and just chew a bit. Chew away. You can't really taste what it is. Now take your fingers off your nose. It's diphtheria.

It's horrible. It's horrible. Lovely, by the way. Can I just say that? That was a lovely celebration of the wonderful and late comedian Frank Sidebottom as you did that. So did everybody, for the benefit of the listeners at home... So did everybody, I mean, I certainly got that.

I could taste absolutely nothing until I took my fingers off my nose and then I could taste it. What did you sound like? Just tell, do the next link, just with your fingers on your nose. So I, yeah, well, that's the same, isn't it? It's not as alluring, is it? Yeah, your voice doesn't really change. Why doesn't your voice change?

Why are you actually a robot? Because your skin never looks real to me. And I'm now kind of intrigued by this. Because I'm from Manchester, I'm essentially nasal. Yeah. Oh, look at that lovely planet. Matthew, so given that this is about science

communication and we've talked about all sorts of things about the importance to society of science communication and everything, what was the point of that? Well, it's showing you basically how important your sense of smell is and it also tells us something quite important about our Asian communities because your sense of smell is based on these

tiny little cells in your nose, and they're the only part of your brain which carries on reproducing. You probably know that if you go out for a night on the town, you're going to lose, I don't know, tens of thousands of brain cells. And that's true except for your smell cells in your nose or part of your brain, which is dangling down through the bottom of your skull into the top of your nose. nose or part of your brain which is dangling down through the bottom of your skull into the top of your nose and those cells carry on growing they'll reproduce in fact you can clone a mouse from a mouse nose cell it's a it's what's called a stem cell it can turn into anything so you actually people actually created new mice from the nose cells of another mouse now what happens as you get older is the rate at which those cells reproduce gets slower and slower and slower.

And so gradually, as you get older, your sense of smell declines. And as you've just experienced, what that tells you is food doesn't taste as much, doesn't taste as good. So when old people who are in homes, for example, claim that their food doesn't taste of anything anymore, well, they're probably right because the food is probably not very good but even more importantly they probably can't taste it as much anyway because their sense of smell has gone and they're reduced to a very limited sense of exactly what things taste of and that's one reason so you might want to therefore increase the taste of things in old people's homes by having more spicy products, which don't actually rely on the sense of smell at all, but you can taste them and they make food more interesting.

So there's an important implied aspect to that. You've got an experiment involving smell there, which is you've been down to a specialist shop in an area of Manchester and you've got something in your hand. If you could explain what you bought from the specialist shop. This is not from the specialist shop, but if you do go to a specialist shop, you can buy nice smells that will attract ladies or attract men.

And they happen to be the same smell. And this, in fact, is really to attract sows. So it's a pheromone. It's not a human pheromone. So what this, in fact, does, we'll excite a sow and bring her onto heat so that she can then be artificially inseminated by a member of the archers. Now, what's interesting is that different people respond to this very, very differently. So if I smell it, it just smells kind of sweet, quite pleasant. And if Sheena smells it, she doesn't want to do it.

She's done this already. Go on. It's not good. Yeah, I kind of just find it pretty, it's just meh. It's a very powerful smell, actually, but I don't find it repellent in any way. It smells like a bathroom cleaner or something like that. Oh, no, I find it smellier than that. If you get that in your Christmas basket from the body shop...

I can't smell it. She can't smell it. I can't smell anything. Oh, now, this is going to be a very interesting reveal, Helen. I did not! Only people over 57 can't smell it, didn't you know? I really can't, though. I do work in a very large pig-producing area of the country, though,

so maybe I've, like, I don't know, been there, done that. So you think you've become immune to the law of... Immune to the smell of pigs, maybe, I don't know. Yeah. Oink. Well, that's interesting. So we know what the gene is that is encoding the receptor for this particular smell. It's called OR7D4. And the differences between us are all based on two single base changes

on part of the receptors either outside of the cell or inside the cell. And both cases, interestingly enough, it's an A to C. It's an adenine to cytosine. And the gene actually means that you can either smell it or you can't. You've got these very different responses of some people can't smell it. Some people think it's foul. Other people think it's pleasant. And the quite amazing thing is that we have now sequenced the Neanderthal genome. So we can actually ask, what did Neanderthal genome, so we can actually ask, what did Neanderthals think of this rather vile smell?

It's a burning question. I can see everybody thought that. Well, it's not a trivial question, because these are what were the Neanderthals like? By looking at their genome, we can get an idea into their perception, which I think is absolutely extraordinary. They've been dead for 30,000 years. We have three individuals who were sequenced, and all three of them had the Sheena version of the receptor,

which meant that they would have found it absolutely foul. So Sheena is the one who did Neanderthal? Yeah. Well, she's kind of got reddish hair from Scotland and there's a suggestion that the Neanderthals had a lot of red hair. And obviously liked worms. But there is... I mean, this is not... Because there is a suggestion now that Neanderthals,

well, certainly bred with us, so there's part Neanderthal DNA in all of us. Well, obviously they did, otherwise she's all Neanderthal, isn't she? And that's going to change the whole way that we believe there are Neanderthals left, aren't there? But this is not a connection to that. It's not a measure of, statistically speaking, the people who can smell that. We only know what three Neanderthals were like. And we've seen we've got variation in human populations just on this panel.

And it might be the case that the Neanderthals had that variation as well. But no, indeed, we bred with them and they bred with us. The genes went both ways. And just recently, from another ancient human DNA sample, they've just discovered a whole new human group that we knew nothing about, because there's a big chunk of the genome in this ancient DNA that makes no sense.

So they've now got group x of humans we don't know what they look like we don't know anything about them but there's a bit of dna sitting there that must have come from an unknown set of humans so we're what we're going to be discovering over the next 10 years or so about human ancestry in the last 40 000 years is really going to shake things up quite as much as knowing that Neanderthals and humans interbred. I mean, we haven't got time to do the other one as well, but you've also got examples there, which is this right, that if there's literally, in terms of being able to smell, you know,

the difference in atoms, different things on periodic tables. So can you explain that a little bit? Okay, so what I've got here is two alcohols. You wouldn't want to drink either of them. One's octanol, which has got eight carbons and then an alcohol group at the end. The other's called nonanol, and it's got nine carbons and then an alcohol group at the end.

And you can smell the difference. You won't be able to recognize the smells, but you can tell the difference between those two smells, and that's a single atom of carbon is what your nose is able to detect and then process that in terms of perception so you've all got atomic noses you know people think they've got a bad sense of smell in fact our sense of smell is probably the same as a dog's in terms of the range of odors we can detect we've got about the same number of smell receptors kinds of smell

receptors but a dog's nose is much more sensitive so it's got much lower receptors, but a dog's nose is much more sensitive, so it's got much lower thresholds. But a dog like us would be able to detect a single atom of carbon. It's not the best Marvel superhero, the man with the atomic nose. There's a sow in trouble. Quick, I can tell. James, I was going to ask you whether it was an advantage being a non-scientist because people like Carl Sagan were often actually attacked by the scientists, that there is sometimes something, or certainly has been, a snobbery. Advantage being a non-scientist, because people like Carl Sagan were often actually attacked by other scientists, that there is sometimes something, or certainly has been,

a snobbery kind of vicious reaction by some scientists towards scientists who are communicating to the mass population. Well, I think in my personal experience, because I knew Carl, a great deal of it was stimulated by jealousy. I mean, the man became a superstar, earned vast amounts of money. The other argument is, of course, he's stepping away from the lab bench to waste time with trivial people like you and me on stuff like radio and TV shows when he should be working hard at doing what he's supposed to be doing.

I don't think it's true anymore, I mean, in the sense that science is part of the popular culture now and therefore so are scientists. As to whether or not the great majority of is part of the popular culture now, and therefore so are scientists. As to whether or not the great majority of the population are involved in this discussion, I doubt it very much. I think in spite of our attempts over the last 40 years on television and radio to get science to the vast majority of the population, we've failed. Television has moved away from what the great dream was 40 years ago,

30 years ago, even 25 years ago, that television could be used as a great educative medium, above all in the sciences. You know, the great dream we had back then, naive as we were, was that television would go on onwards and upwards. And in fact, it went onwards and downwards, as the commercial pressures made it more and more difficult to do programmes that weren't going to get massive audiences. And science, I think, was one of the very early losers in that race. So do you feel that the BBC is not stepping up to face its responsibilities in that sense?

It should still have the aspiration to do what Reith said, which is to educate, to inform and to entertain. It can't do. We live in a different culture now. We live in a culture when Google exists and the internet exists. Commercial pressures to get a big audience are tremendously powerful. I mean, you mentioned Reith. I mean, Reith was a man who said something you can't say anymore. He said, never ask the audience what it wants.

Give them what you think it needs. You can't say that today. You'll be fired. I'll say it now. I agree with him completely. But it's an interesting point, isn't it? Because you say commercial pressures. I mean, do you feel that we could still aspire to that? And first of all, do you feel that we could do it? And secondly, do you feel it would be desirable to do so?

We could do it, yes. Will we do it? No. The medium won't allow us to do it. And the medium is dying anyway. I mean, everything is going to shift online. And there will be a renaissance. I would like to believe there will be a renaissance of this kind of stuff that we have not seen before.

And it will be available free, online, for an audience which globally could be bigger than anything the BBC ever had. I think what James said is extremely interesting, because if you look at science writing, that's increasingly being done on blogs for free, and people write some extremely interesting blogs that you can read in whatever area of science you're interested in and that I think if people then applied that to the visual medium to TV as they have already done in making podcasts there's loads of very interesting science podcasts then we could be actually at the cusp of quite a radical change in how science is communicated. Sheena, do you share James's pessimism?

I think it depends what question you're asking. If you're talking about inspiring, I think we're still doing that, and I think that's very much what we're talking about. If you're talking about perhaps improving science literacy, then really I don't think... They've done some polls and they reckon that science literacy in the US and the UK remains about 10%, but people do know what DNA is now, so that's improved.

So I think it really depends what you're asking. But the reality is you hear something about science, you're only going to remember so much until you actually need it. It's one of those social science experiments, isn't it? We asked the whole population in the 1920s if they knew what DNA was, and none of them did. Finally, we ask all our audiences a question, and in Manchester we have asked them, what has science communication not yet successfully explained to you?

And this one for you, Brian. Why was the announcement of the Higgs boson presented in the Comic Sans font? There's a lot of anger about that. Well, here's a good one. How the success of a broadcaster is inversely proportional to his scientific career. Catty up here, aren't they? Why the internet went for cats, videos, pictures, etc.,

over dogs, otters or other animals? Did Schrodinger have a dog? Why instances of the phrase, but there was a problem in any given episode of Horizon are always greater than one but less than four? So

thank you very much to our wonderful panel who have been Helen Keane, Matthew Cobb, Sheena Cruikshank and James Burke. So the question is, will Monkey Cage live or die? This is the final episode of this series. Has it all been a pointless waste of time? Will we survive intact into 2014 or vanish into the sea of dross that James has mentioned?

The modern media resurfacing as my big fat hadron collider in which the cast of Geordie Shore are forced to survive in a particle accelerator in Chelsea run by phone vote because we value your opinion. So, could this be the future?

Dystopian, I imagine. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it should be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault. You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to. Yeah, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it should be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault, you downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's Adam Rutherford, his dad discovered the atomic nucleus. Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister, thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects. These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

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