Robyn Williams: Listen to this voice. It belonged to a man who was a giant in science. Many listeners would not be alive were it not for the work of him and his Australian friend Mac Burnet.

Peter Medawar: I think the young can easily get hooked on science. If they just to go into it long enough to feel something of the exhilaration of discovery, the true and ineffable delight of enlarging human understanding, then they are hooked and they will go on being scientists for the rest of their life, come what may.

Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show coming from Coventry and Warwick University, and that was Sir Peter Medawar who won the Nobel Prize in 1960, together with the genius from Melbourne, Sir McFarlane Burnet. They pioneered immunology and made it possible to tackle cancers and other diseases for the first time. Sir Peter, as you'll hear, was president of the B.A. 50 years ago, and that, now known as the British Science Festival, has just ended at Warwick University, which has plenty of strong links to Australia.

Meet Caroline Meyer. She chairs science, engineering and medicine at Warwick.

Caroline Meyer: So I've been here for five years. Prior to that I was over at the university in Loughborough, and prior to that I was at Warwick, so I actually arrived in Warwick in 2000 and stayed for seven years and then went away and came back again because it's so fabulous.

Robyn Williams: So you know the place, fantastic, yes. Not terribly far from Birmingham, and it's interesting that there should be such a thriving university doing different things with Birmingham up the road with its more than one university. How come Warwick University was established, and when?

Caroline Meyer: So we've recently had our 50th anniversary. Warwick was established really as a partnership with the city of Coventry and the local region as a university that would be very outward focused in terms of the research and innovation and teaching that we engage with. So we do do lots of collaboration across the region, so we have lots of collaborations with the University of Birmingham but also Coventry University up the road. But yes, Warwick is slightly different in the way that it was originally developed was very much with that outward facing, regional role.

Robyn Williams: With industry, surrounding industry, and engineering especially.

Caroline Meyer: Absolutely, so we pride ourselves on our industrial collaborations, we do a lot of work both regionally but also nationally and internationally with lots of different organisations. So my particular area of expertise is within the health sector, but we work lots with automotive, with many, many different sectors of industry.

Robyn Williams: And it really is flourishing because along here…somebody who used to be here, Lord Professor Bhattacharyya. Tell me about him.

Caroline Meyer: Indeed. We are terribly sad that Kumar Bhattacharyya is no longer here. He was the leader of WMG, which is the institution actually where I'm based.

Robyn Williams: What doesn't stand for?

Caroline Meyer: Warwick Manufacturing Group, and very, very outward facing, lots of industrial collaborations, both in terms of research but also in terms of education. So we do lots of apprenticeships, we do lots of skills based training where there is a real industry or sector need. WMG is one example of that, but we've also got lots of examples across the university, but I think because Lord Bhattacharyya was one of the initial driving forces behind the university, we do have that very outward facing view.

Sushanta Kumar Bhattacharyya: Well, we have been pioneers over the last 30 years. It was tough in the beginning, industry wasn't doing very well, it was just after this dry 1970s, so there we were. I was here, given a chair and table and they said to get on with it, because there was no money around.

But I think one of the purposes of being here, and at that time the Vice Chancellor thought this university should be facing outwards, not facing inwards, and I was given a total freehand, and I jointly, with the Research Councils, developed a program for industry to update and upskill the senior managers of industry for them to be competitive. That was totally new. Okay, now a lot of people are doing it, but at that time we had to break down a lot of barriers within universities and academics of some industrial circles for that to take place.

You must understand, industry at that time was going through a lot of problems, a lot of changes were taking place, and Mrs Thatcher had come into power, there was this perception that we should privatise. The majority of the manufacturing companies were nationalised anyway, and they depended on life support from government. And that wasn't sustainable because you would never get competitiveness unless you control and manage your own affairs. So there was a transition coming and we were preparing, we were skilling the people for that transition.

Robyn Williams: How do you make it work though, because all around the world, especially in Australia, and in Britain, people are searching for engineers, they want students to study engineering, become engineers and so support the local industry, and there's a perpetual shortage, is there not?

Caroline Meyer: I think there is across the sector, both in the UK and, as you say, in Australia. I think where we differ is that we don't just turn out graduates with an engineering degree. When they come to Warwick, we've got an eye on their CV from the minute they get here. So we do lots of industrial placements, we work very, very closely with industry partners, meaning that they are not just learning the theory, they are also learning the practical side, and many of our programs are driven by industry need. So we work with various sectors to identify what the need is, where the skills gaps are, what the need for research is. And many of our projects, both in terms of research and innovation and teaching comes from that industry pull rather than the academic push.

Robyn Williams: And the students do come and they do stay.

Caroline Meyer: They do come and they do stay. Many of them stay on to do masters level work and PhDs. Obviously some of them go to the four corners of the globe, but generally we lose very few and lots of people want to stay, it's one of those places.

Robyn Williams: A sign of success. And you talk about various corners of the globe. One corner of the globe is Melbourne, Monash, your links to them.

Caroline Meyer: Indeed, we are really, really proud of our partnership with Monash, we've got a very successful program of work. It's now I think in its fifth or sixth year. We've got lots in the way of research collaborations, so we set up a program of joint PhD students, we've got joint professorial appointments. So we've got people who work as professors in the chemistry department, in the health sector, and we are really trying to share the expertise across the two organisations, and it has been very, very successful. So we've raised lots of external funding together, and we are really trying to focus on some of the grand challenges that are pervasive right now.

Robyn Williams: Like green chemistry. I seem to remember…I've in fact done a couple of interviews with your chemistry department about green chemistry, to see if you can recycle aspects of wood to make biofuels, for example, and they've got a huge green chemistry department at Monash, have they not?

Caroline Meyer: They have indeed, yes, and that work I think is really gaining momentum very, very quickly. It's all very exciting.

Robyn Williams: It's very exciting, but one little caution, how do you get your relationships with industry on a practical footing where…who owns the intellectual property, how do you make sure that there isn't too much of a commercial push to the intellectual development of the students, all those sorts of things to make sure you've got the vigour without the compromise?

Caroline Meyer: Indeed, and it's always a challenge for academic industry partnership. I'd say one word is essential and that's 'communication'. There has to be partnership working, there has to be a really thorough listening to the other party. So as academics we need to think about and listen to our industrial partners in terms of their time scales, which is often a challenge, and their IP, and it's all about making sure that swiftly at the start of projects these things are ironed out, and I think that's what Warwick does really, really well.

Robyn Williams: My final question, and that's a bit of local knowledge, is about a street not terribly far from here, just slightly off campus, it's called the Sir Henry Parkes Road, and so Henry Parkes, of course terribly famous in Australia for being the father of Federation, much of the national education push early on, as well as having a telescope, Parkes Telescope, and a town named after him. He's done so much. I hope he's famous here?

Caroline Meyer: He is famous. We have a road, as you've said, named after him. I'm not sure he's as famous as he should be, but yes, certainly one of our local heroes and certainly that's what this Science Festival, the British Science Festival is about and why we are delighted to be hosting it because we are trying to showcase the regional developments around research and the wonderful science that goes on locally.

Robyn Williams: Thank you very much.

Caroline Meyer: You're welcome.

Robyn Williams: Professor Caroline Meyer. But Sir Henry Parkes, may I say, was none too pleased when he first got to Australia in the mid-19th century. He would go down to the harbour with friends as a new ship arrived and shout, 'Go away, there's nothing worth having here, go away!' And I got that tale from Sir Henry Parkes's great-grandson, now a professor at Oxford.

The Science Show on RN, from Warwick.

Sir Peter Medawar was once the president of the B.A. and he did everything imaginable to show that science was and is for everyone. This very posh sounding man was an egalitarian like no other.

Peter Medawar: I don't believe that the prosecution of science requires very great intelligence in the sense of sort of pyrotechnical feats of intellection, these are not required. What is required is imaginativeness, that's essential, a critical mind and strong, sturdy commonsense. And in addition to that one needs old-fashioned virtues, the kind that people tend to laugh at nowadays, you know, diligence, application, concentration, and enough strength of character not to be cast down by disappointments because scientists are disappointed constantly. Most of our ideas are wrong, any good scientist will tell you that. If all our ideas were right, we'd all be raving geniuses, like Pasteur and Newton.

Robyn Williams: And even they made mistakes. This year the president of the B.A. is the brilliant TV star Professor Alice Roberts who has done umpteen series you've seen over the years. She was on Australian television again just days ago. And here she is giving a press conference on her role at the festival in Warwick.

Alice Roberts: So I'm giving my presidential address later, and as I thought about what I wanted to talk about, the place of science in society, where we are as a society, how we feel about the future, whether we are rather despondent about the future and whether science and technology make us feel more or less despondent about where we are heading, and exactly 50 years ago Sir Peter Medawar was giving his presidential address as he became president, and he was looking back. So he looked back at a particular piece of writing by Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, and it was quite a peculiar short story. It's really interesting, it's like an early piece of science fiction, it's where Francis Bacon is imagining where science might take us in the future, although rather than imagining himself into the future or putting it on another planet, he puts it on an island.

So there's this story called New Atlantis, and he's imagining a scientifically advanced society, an advanced civilisation, from the perspective of the 17th century, and it's wonderful to read it now because you've got him describing this society where they have geothermal energy, they have engines driven by water and wind. He's rather cautions about this, they've got some degrees of flying in the air, he says, and boats that go under water. So he's kind of imagining what science could possibly create, what technology could create in the future. And then also talking about spreading the knowledge around and talks about the light understanding and their merchants of light who carry that understanding out and bring understanding back to New Atlantis.

So Peter Medawar was looking at that and saying what was extraordinary was that Francis Bacon was writing this at a time when most people were feeling quite despondent, and that the early 17th century was this time of despondency and almost feeling as though the end of the world was nigh, that humanity was coming to an end in some way, and then Francis Bacon was what E.O. Wilson described as this herald of adventure and very soon we'd have the scientific revolution leading into the Enlightenment.

And so Medawar was saying how did people in the 17th century manage to lift themselves out of that feeling of despair, how did they manage to replace that with optimism, because he said he felt that that feeling of despair had returned, and in the 1960s again there was a feeling of decay and deterioration which seemed very similar to what was happening in the 17th century. And people were worried about the environmental fallout of technology, they were worried about biological warfare, nuclear apocalypse, and the fact that, as I've written in my talk, the optimistic visions of the Victorian industrialists had grown rusty by the 1960s. And he said how should we be approaching this, and should we be very negative about science or can we still be positive about where science can take us? We need to look at advances that we've made as a society and the real improvements to people's lives that have happened, and we must keep trying and we must be optimistic.

So it is fascinating, isn't it, 50 years on, to say I think we are still in a time when a lot of people feel as though the future contains enormous threats and challenges. There is a feeling of despondency I think. And some of the challenges that are facing us are enormous, and I don't think they are imagined challenges at all. Most environmental scientists agree that climate change and biodiversity loss are crucial challenges that are facing us this century, and if we don't find solutions to them, then the future of humanity is threatened, the future of a lot of other species is threatened as well. And then we are faced as a global society with working out how we approach this problem. We can't go back to a kind of Palaeolithic idyll, we can't go back, we can't strip away the technology because we are dependent on it, but can we lessen the impact that we are having on the planet?

I see scientists' voices being divided. There is never a real dichotomy but we are seeing scientists being divided between people who are extremely optimistic and think there are problems with technological fallout at the moment which we will very rapidly find solutions for, and that perhaps we should be looking to colonise other planets rather quickly so that we can move the problem elsewhere. To me that just feels like you're taking the problem somewhere else.

I think as a biologist it feels to me as though what we need to do is learn to live within our limits. There has been a ratchet of progress, there has been a ratchet which has enabled us to extract more and more from the environment and to support the billions of people on Earth, but there is a limit, the resources are finite eventually. And actually the more we push at the edges of the envelope, the more of an impact we are having on all those other species. So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people's lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.

So that's kind of my address in a nutshell. You're all going; ah, well at least we don't need to come and see your address this afternoon because you've done it.

Robyn Williams: May I be so rude as to ask a question on that? It just so happens that just about 50 years ago I went to interview Sir Peter Medawar who, as you may know, suffered a stroke whilst doing his address. And the extraordinary thing about him, as far as I'm concerned, is he shared the Nobel Prize with McFarlane Burnet, one of the geniuses of the 20th century, and he was also, Peter Medawar, astoundingly optimistic, but also concerned about the anti-intellectual elements there were around that day and keen really to get the bright sparks going again instead of all the lifestyle stuff. What do you think about that?

Alice Roberts: He talked about that in his address actually. He says a couple of things. He says, you know, some of the despair and despondency seems to stem from a misunderstanding of science, and I suppose quite a luddite approach to it, that if there are problems with technology you just throw it all out rather than thinking that actually you might build fix those problems. He also said he thought it was perhaps a bit de rigueur to be despondent as well and that perhaps some of it was an affectation.

Robyn Williams: A final thought on that; as I went into his room, he was in a wheelchair, and he kind of stood up and said, 'Look what I can do now!' with a huge grin on his face. Positive right through all that.

Alice Roberts: It's extraordinary. He was this incredibly positive voice I think in the 1960s, as Bacon was in the 17th century. And I think we can be realistic about the problems facing us without being incredibly despondent. There's anxiety…it's interesting, philosophically, looking at what's happened with the scientific revolution through the Enlightenment to where we are now, that historians and philosophers look on this kind of process of expanding understanding and say, well, it doesn't help us feel any better about ourselves and, if anything, it makes us feel really unsettled. So the fact that a lot of science is difficult to grasp, difficult to understand, that shouldn't make us turn away from trying to expand scientific literacy as much as we can.

But actually it's the kind of fundamentals of…the cosmology that we've got now is not as cosy as the mediaeval cosmology. We are not at the centre of the universe and all that, we are evolved apes, and our brains are just about able to grasp these concepts. But I think it's amazing that our brains are able to grasp these concepts and we are able to uncover the fabric of reality using science. I think, for me, we need to focus on the positives. I think also that anxiety about being toppled from, first of all, a special creation then from being apparently the pinnacle of evolution as the 19th century biologists thought we probably were, being toppled off that perch and being told we were just a twig on the tree of life and humbled in that way. You know, we can still say, okay, we are still very special and we can still have amazing cognitive powers and we have science that other species don't have, but I rather like being a twig on the tree of life, that feels to me like a very satisfying context for humanity, that Homo sapiens is part of nature, not separate from it.

Robyn Williams: The president of the British Science Festival in Warwick University, Professor Alice Roberts. So how does Professor of Anatomy, a young woman as she was and is, become a TV presenter and get recognised as an archaeologist and anthropologist? Was it by mistake?

Here's a chat we had after her speech, and do listen for the remarks she makes referring to discoveries made by Bert Roberts, professor at Wollongong, that humans got to Australia before they reached Europe.

Alice Roberts: My story is about how I've ended up presenting a lot of archaeology on television, and occasionally, very occasionally people will say, 'But you're not an archaeologist, why are you presenting this stuff?' I'm also talking about British archaeology in a kind of series of theatre shows at the moment. 'Shows' is a strange word for it, they are lectures really, I'm taking this lecture on tour, and I open the lecture by saying; I know you're expecting me tonight to talk about British archaeology but I have to admit right at the beginning that I'm not an archaeologist, and then explain how I've ended up being one of the public faces of archaeology on television.

And it essentially came about because I was originally following a career in surgery and then got side-tracked into academia, and my area of research was biological anthropology. So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series Time Team. So they were doing their digs and, like any other archaeological unit, had to commission reports on what they found, and they would send the bones to me and I would write reports for them. And then they started inviting me actually along to the digs and I would look at the bones as they were coming out of the ground and do a bit of digging as well.

Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series Coast, which turned into a very long-running series. But when they originally approached me, I was fairly sure that they thought I was an archaeologist, and I was fairly sure of this because of a conversation I'd had at the initial brainstorming meeting about Coast with Miranda Krestovnikoff , who is now a very good friend of mine. I'd see Miranda on television, diving to wrecks on a series called Wreck Detectives. I said to Miranda, 'Are you an archaeologist?' It was the first time I'd ever met her. And she said, 'No, I'm a zoologist, but I think they think I'm an archaeologist.' She said to me, because she'd seen me on Time Team, 'Are you an archaeologist?' And I said, 'No, I'm not, but I think they think I am.'

So when the producers said, 'We'd love you to present it,' I was completely upfront with them and I said, 'I'm not an archaeologist, I think you think I'm an archaeologist, and I'm not, I'm a biological anthropologist.'

Robyn Williams: You're an anatomist as well, you're a Professor of Anatomy at Birmingham.

Alice Roberts: But anatomy overlaps with biological anthropology. Biological anthropology tends to focus on skeletons because that's what is often left behind in the ground, but I am a whole-body anatomist, I'm a clinical anatomist and that's what I teach, I teach it all, not just the skeleton, the muscles and nerves, blood vessels.

Robyn Williams: Let me ask you a question about what you did in our region, you did a series about human beings, where they came from, and you came right around Australia and you looked at the situation then a few years ago. Since then of course we've had the discovery in the Northern Territory, 65,000 years old signs in the cave, with ochre and ceremonial work, suggesting that to get to our region they must have taken the very fast train from Africa. There are so many discoveries. The Hobbit in Flores and so on, and Denisovan, the genomes of Aboriginal people include, in some instances, 2% Denisovan genes, only discovered a couple of years ago. Do you think you ought to do another series to update us?

Alice Roberts: I'd love to do another series. I did that series, we filmed it 11 years ago and it went out 10 years ago on the BBC, and I have suggested to the BBC that we might do a bit of an update. I did do a Horizon program, just a one-hour Horizon program on some of the updates since that series because of course the big revelation has been all of this interbreeding; interbreeding with Neanderthals, interbreeding with Denisovans, and any other human species that was around at the time that we haven't even discovered the bones of apparently.

Robyn Williams: Couldn't stop them, could you.

Alice Roberts: No, exactly, it's phenomenal. And that's a big change in the last 10 years. But yes, what hadn't changed so much was the timing of colonisation of the world, so although when we were filming 11 years ago and I met Bert Roberts and we went to the Northern Territory and we were talking about a couple of sites there where it looked as though there were very early 60,000-year evidence of human occupation. And those sites of the time were fairly contested, although I met Bert and I was sure that his science was robust and that his archaeology was robust and that's what we presented in the program, and I'm very glad we did because the more recent findings have totally justified those original findings where everybody was a bit nervous about such an early date of colonisation because it doesn't mean that this vast expansion out of Africa…yeah. And it also means, rather wonderfully, that people were in Australia, modern humans were in Australia, Homo sapiens were in Australia 25,000 years before they got to Europe.

Robyn Williams: And what's the consequence of that?

Alice Roberts: An older heritage. So in Australia you've got much more depth of modern human archaeology than we have in Europe.

Robyn Williams: We are older than Europe. The human story in Australia. Alice Roberts, president of the British Science Festival, and professor at the University of Birmingham.

The Science Show on RN.

Science leads to surprising leaps and twists, as you just heard, but who would expect a materials engineer like Mark Williams to be consulted about who killed the Oxford Dodo, and then also the body in the suitcase. Here's how:

Mark Williams: The Oxford Dodo was a project where we initially were employed to use our high resolution micro CT scanners to characterise the very iconic specimen. We carried out our scans and lo and behold when we were looking at the reconstructed model we found something very interesting inside.

Robyn Williams: This is of course a specimen that's 400 years old or roughly.

Mark Williams: It's got quite a chequered history. It was in the mid-1600s it came into the Ashmolean collection, and then became part of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. But prior to its first documentation, very little is known about the specimen. It was part of the urban myths of where it came from, there was a dodo curiosity locally based in London where people could pay to come and see the dodo, could feed it. And it was always assumed that this dodo died of natural causes and then ended up as part of the collection. Obviously what we found cast an incredible amount of doubt on that story.

Robyn Williams: How did you investigate it with your technology?

Mark Williams: With the CT scan you obviously take lots of X-ray projections and then you stitch those projections into a three-dimensional model, and when you look at the slices you can see all the interior geometry of the dodo, so its skull, all the trabecular structure and all the brain cavity, the optic nerve and all the other biological characteristics of the specimen. And when we looked deep inside we found evidence of these strange metallic particles around behind the right ear of the dodo. And when we did an analysis, a mass spectroscopy analysis of the material, it came out as 83% lead. So these were lead pallets. In fact it became obvious that this particular dodo had been shot in the back of the head with the shot gun.

Robyn Williams: How awful! Who would want to do that? Not to eat it presumably?

Mark Williams: Well absolutely. No, dodos actually were known as almost inedible. In fact there are documented cases of boiling them for 24 hours to get the meat to be chewable. So it certainly wasn't shot for food. And also was it shot by those Dutch sailors who discovered the dodos and why would that specimen then be transported all the way back to the UK and then end up as a specimen in a museum? And finally, this curiosity in London, why would you shoot such a rare exhibit and something making a lot of interest, a lot of money, attracting a lot of the public, why would you shoot such a specimen in the head?

Robyn Williams: And there's soft tissue on it as well.

Mark Williams: There is indeed, the soft tissue is what makes the Oxford Dodo so incredibly precious, and we were absolutely honoured to be chosen to be the ones that scanned it. And credit should go to the museum and particularly the director, Professor Paul Smith, who championed us being chosen, the facility to carry out the scans.

Robyn Williams: And it you were chosen because you are…actually, this is a paradox, you're doing forensic work yet you are engineers, but you can turn your skills to almost anything, including murder.

Mark Williams: Absolutely. Our research facility was founded on supporting big businesses, automotive and aerospace industries. These scanners are incredibly expensive and complex and sophisticated bits of kit and highly specialised, and there's no way the police would be able to access these types of scanners. So the methods have been validated with big business, and here we have opportunities within criminal forensics and heritage and museology to apply a scanner to real societal benefits.

Robyn Williams: And there was a corpse, one of your famous cases, in a suitcase, and some of it had been burned, and you were called in to help. And you found something that could only be analysed by looking through it in a kind of X-ray way.

Mark Williams: Absolutely, that was our first, if you like, breakthrough case. We came into the case when obviously the remains of the victim had been discovered in two suitcases, the police for the post-mortem had assembled the body and found there was a particular piece of shoulder bone missing from the body. When searching the residence of the accused where the dismemberment police had assumed had taken place there was no evidence of any dismemberment, or any crime within the house. But in searching the rear garden they found evidence of a bonfire, and in that bonfire was a very strange piece of charcoal, and the charcoal was so badly burnt, it was crumbling away in the hands of the police, so they thought, through our connections, why not apply this X-ray technology and have a look inside this piece of charcoal. So obviously the charcoal was then transported to the university, we then scanned it, and then inside we could clearly see it was that missing piece of the shoulder bone which was the evidence recovered the house of the accused with then tying it with those remains that were recovered in the suitcases. It was the pivotal piece of evidence for that case.

Robyn Williams: So what was there in the fire was somehow linked to what he had in his home as well.

Mark Williams: Absolutely. It was the only piece of physical evidence in his home. All the other evidence of deposition was in the suitcases. So the home was spotless, there was no evidence of any crime taking place. The only evidence was this bonfire in the back garden with this piece of charcoal. Obviously when the remains of the victim had been packaged and scooped up, they'd missed this small piece of evidence, and when they tried and removed the evidence, that piece of bone was hidden right inside that piece of charcoal.

Robyn Williams: How accurate is your machinery? Obviously people have done scanning for a long, long time, but you've reached it to another level.

Mark Williams: Well, these scanners are very expensive and they are very specialist facilities, but in terms of when you're looking at high resolution scanners, you tend to compare to what's achievable, especially in forensics, what's achievable in a hospital scanner. Now, we talk about accuracy, we talk about resolution, a hospital scanner has a resolution of over half a millimetre. When we are talking about our scanners we go down to microns which are thousandths of a millimetre, but even nanometres and there's nano-scanning available, so that's millionths of a millimetre. So this makes these scans absolutely ideal for forensic applications where you can detect micro-injuries or things of interest to the investigation way beyond almost the human eye and this is then used to support the pathologist in coming up with the cause of death.

Robyn Williams: Did you imagine ever that you'd be doing this sort of work?

Mark Williams: Not in a million years. If you told me when we first started on this case four years ago that I'd be standing here at the British Science Festival talking about forensics and applying it, I'd have thought you were crazy. I'm an engineer and I worked in the automotive industry for many, many years, and to be able to diversify in such exciting novel areas is really, really exciting and long may it continue.

Robyn Williams: So you're making it safe in our cars and even our aeroplanes and safe in the street as well.

Mark Williams: We're doing our best, we're chipping in, yes.

Robyn Williams: Excuse me sir, may I have a quick word with you now? Another Mark.

Mark Payne: Another Mark. So I'm a detective, 25 years in the police, investigated 150-odd murder investigations, kidnaps, rapes, robberies, high-end investigation. I'm Mark Payne, I'm a detective chief superintendent, I am the head of the CID in the West Midlands.

Robyn Williams: And how did you come to meet the other Mark and make use of his amazing skills?

Mark Payne: So one of our Assistant Chief Constables is an alumni of Warwick University, and we had a particularly difficult murder investigation with some real issues around access to material that needed scanning. And the ACC suggested that I give Mark a ring. So I picked up the phone, and we've made hay ever since.

Robyn Williams: You've made hay, indeed! And you can talk the science, can you?

Mark Payne: Mmm, not so much…

Robyn Williams: But you don't need to.

Mark Payne: No, I'm very good at murder, I am quite happy to let the scientists do the science.

Robyn Williams: And does much on this scale go on in Britain where the police force is in touch with the scientists on the ground, the university and so on?

Mark Payne: So I think it's a first in the UK. I'm not aware of anything else that is actually this advanced in the rest of the world. There may well be but we get lots of interest internationally around this sort of joint work. So certainly in the UK we are leading the rest of the police as a nation. So we've got lots of police forces now taking an active interest in the partnership that we've set up, lots of really successful uses of the technology in trials. So we've broken new ground really, it's been great.

Robyn Williams: Congratulations, it's terrific.

Mark Payne: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Mark Payne, detective superintendent. He was with Mark Williams, a professor in the Warwick Manufacturing Group, normally checking the fabric of cars and planes, and now catching murderers and maybe killers of the dodo.

And so let's go for a ride.

We are standing in the campus of Warwick University, and I have in front of me both Nick and an autonomous car, which is very neat. Introduce it for me.

Nick Ridler: Well, this is Pod Zero. So we call them pods, and it is, as you say, an autonomous self-driving vehicle. It takes up to four passengers on the first or last mile of their journey. And we tend to put this in assisted living facilities, university campuses like we are here today at the University of Warwick, or other areas that it could be beneficial, shopping centres and suchlike, and it will carry four passengers, as I say, on a journey autonomously without them needing to drive or steer.

Robyn Williams: And Nick, what's your role in this wonderful accomplishment?

Nick Ridler: I'm engineering manager for the company, so I have a small team that we develop the systems on.

Robyn Williams: Here on campus?

Nick Ridler: No, we are a local company, Coventry based, we work just up the road.

Robyn Williams: May I climb inside?

Nick Ridler: Yes of course.

Robyn Williams: You first. You're going to go with me, aren't you.

Nick Ridler: Yes, I am. Find yourself a seat on the back there.

Robyn Williams: Thank you very much indeed.

Nick Ridler: Do you want to come for a journey? Come on Maria.

Robyn Williams: Another passenger. Your name is Maria, is it?

Maria: Yeah, I'm Maria, hi.

Robyn Williams: And are you an engineer as well?

Maria: Yes.

Robyn Williams: Did you design this as well?

Maria: Part of it. There are many engineers who are part of this, so yeah, I am one of them.

Robyn Williams: And you're pressing the door to close.

Nick Ridler: Yep, we'll close the door now.

Robyn Williams: And how, Nick, does the car know where to go?

Nick Ridler: The pod will use a number of sensors that have all been scanning the area, they've mapped the area and they will be locating against that and using the odometry and telemetry to take the route via a planned map.

Robyn Williams: So, will you tell it to go?

Maria: It's just with the press of a button. So that's a dead-man handle, so it's just to start and stop the pod.

Robyn Williams: We're moving!

Maria: It does stop in case it sees an object, and you can manoeuvre slowly as well if want to if you see an object, and it does distance keeping, so if it sees an object and it will move according to the pace.

Robyn Williams: Well, there's an object coming towards us, in fact a pedestrian, and we are very graciously avoiding him. And speeding up again. Has this actually gone to main roads and the public?

Maria: No, this is not a road transport pod, it is only for the last distance cover-up, like in university campuses or industrial estates, for users like that. So no, it's not a road vehicle.

Robyn Williams: So you see it doing a useful job on big campuses like this where there is a safe-ish road.

Maria: Yes, we've already been using it in industrial estates in Australia and also in Canada. We have used a pod in Finland, Pori, it's a corporate estate, so it is just for transportation of the people for the last mile.

Robyn Williams: There's a bike going past and of course elegantly the pod stops. And now I think we are going to chuck a uey. Do you understand 'chuck a uey'?

Maria: I sort of get it…

Robyn Williams: A U-turn, yeah. That's the technical jargon we use in engineering in the southern part.

Nick Ridler: We also have a facility we are running in Brighton at the blind veterans' facility there, and we take persons from the facility at the top down to the seafront or down to the barn or to the chapel, and so they are using this on a daily basis to transport themselves around the facility in Brighton.

Robyn Williams: Have you come across anything that goes in front of the pod that it hasn't recognised yet? We are surrounded by about 200 geese, Canadian geese and greylag geese, who might suddenly nip across.

Nick Ridler: We have a number of LiDARs on the vehicle, including a safety LiDAR which is at a low level which would identify any foreign object, if you like, or something that would interfere with the safety beam area, safety zone I should say, and that would just stop the pod.

Robyn Williams: Excellent. We are going very elegantly and quite slowly. What's the top speed you might reach?

Maria: At the moment it's 7.5 metres per second, the top speed, because it's a university campus and we have a lot of people moving around, we thought we will keep it low today, just to have a smooth ride. So we are currently doing 1.5 metres per second to 2 metres per second.

Robyn Williams: It's very comfortable. Wonderfully silent. And what really do you see, Nick, as the major possibility in 10 years' time for this sort of vehicle?

Nick Ridler: Well, this will become commonplace, I believe. You'll be able to call a pod on your mobile phone or app or whatever, it will be able to turn up to wherever you need it, accurately take you on a short journey in the comfort of a vehicle rather than in the extreme weather that you might get once in a while.

Robyn Williams: And in Australia you said you'd been trying them out as well. Do you know whereabouts in Australia?

Maria: Adelaide…

Nick Ridler: Flinders University, yes, Elliot Park [Gardens] is also in Australia where they did an assisted living elderly facility, so they took people on quite long journeys, a kilometre around and about, and they really enjoyed it.

Robyn Williams: Thanks for the trip.

Nick Ridler: You're very welcome.

Robyn Williams: Thank you Maria.

Maria: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: A ride in the pod. And you'll find them, as you heard, at Flinders University, at Tonsley, where poignantly some may recall the car factory complex now transformed into the Innovation Centre for engineering, medical R&D, and much else.

But as you move around the campus at Warwick University, the links with shining industry, especially the car industry, are unmistakable. And there is the vast battery lab. Dave Greenwood is Professor of Advanced Propulsion Systems at the University.

Now, the setup you've got with batteries is incredibly impressive. How long did it take to set up like that?

Dave Greenwood: So WMG has been investing in batteries for about 10 years now. Many of the facilities that you've seen have really accelerated over about the last five.

Robyn Williams: What kind of relationship do you have with the automotive industry when you're working at such a level? Are they keeping up with you?

Dave Greenwood: We work very closely with lots of automotive manufacturers, and we also work closely with their supply chain companies. So that includes some of the chemical companies here in the UK that are looking to get into the supply chain for battery materials, for instance.

Robyn Williams: But your batteries are ahead really of the market, are they not? Two years, three years, five years?

Dave Greenwood: So we work on a variety of technologies, some of them as far as 20 years from market, where we are looking at really early research. Equally we are working right alongside manufacturers in their facilities today on batteries that are rolling off production lines now. So we span that whole spectrum.

Robyn Williams: And how do you see those batteries working in terms of the reach of the car, because the limitations some people speak about, sometimes unfairly, restricts the electric car to only a short distance.

Dave Greenwood: So, lots of the work we are doing is focused on making the battery cheaper so that you can afford to package more range into a car, and lots of it is focused on making the energy density of the battery higher, which again means that the battery delivers more range. But we do need to be a bit careful because right now electric cars need a long range because the infrastructure that supports them is not great. As that infrastructure gets better, there's an economic rational point of about 150 miles real-world range which would suit about 95% to 98% of most people's driving, and the consequence of putting more than that in is that you're asking the car buyer to pay more for a battery that they may only use once a month, once every couple of months.

Robyn Williams: And what about the charging speed, because some people talk about having to charge it overnight, hours and hours and hours, whereas other people talk about five minutes.

Dave Greenwood: So where people can charge overnight, that's actually a really good thing to do from a sustainability perspective because that's using electricity when it's not in high demand and when most of the generation resources are quite low carbon. However, that's not always the case. If you pull up at a motorway service station and you want to continue your journey, then clearly you want to get going as quickly as possible. So we are developing technologies now which will allow the battery to charge must faster, I think 30 minutes to get to an 80% charge is within reach within a few years, and taking that down to something like 5 to 10 minutes could be possible within the next decade.

Robyn Williams: Are you working just on lithium?

Dave Greenwood: Not at all. We work heavily on lithium for the products that are going to market in the next few years to five years, but right now we've got very active programs on solid-state batteries, on sodium ion, on lithium sulphur, on silicon anodes, all kinds of exciting technologies.

Robyn Williams: With lots of components, and so many components, one wonders how thoroughly you can actually test them, all those bits.

Dave Greenwood: And you have to understand how to test each part of it at different parts of the development cycle. So some of the research work that we are doing, for instance on electrochemical materials, you can do all the research that you need on just a few grams of materials, you're testing minute amounts, and what you learn, you learn under a scanning electron microscope. Obviously when you then come to validate a plant which is going to produce 20 cells a minute or 20 cells a second, you can't be working at that scale anymore, you've got to be working with tonnes of material.

Some of the equipment that we are building at the moment in our UKBIC facility will use about 10,000 pounds worth of material every hour it's operated. So clearly you want to do your R&D on the small-scale as much as possible and just validate that as far as possible at large-scale.

Robyn Williams: Do you see the internal combustion engine to be on the way out in five or ten years?

Dave Greenwood: Definitely not in five or ten years. Long term, yes. I think realistically you're going to see things like plug-in hybrids still have a reasonable role to play for a couple of decades, and that's because that's the length of time is going to take us to put the electricity infrastructure and the charging infrastructure in place for us to be able to move to a fully electric future.

Robyn Williams: Dave Greenwood, Professor of Advanced Propulsion Systems at Warwick.

The Science Show on RN.

Yes, but what is she or he saying? Dr Michelle McGillion from Warwick has just published a paper about ways to engage with very young children to help them learn to speak and engage with their surroundings.

When you're studying these babies, how do you go about it? Do you watch them for days on end, or do you set up controls where some mothers or some fathers don't talk or take any notice of babies to see what happens, or what? How, in other words, do you study them?

Michelle McGillion: We take a variety of approaches actually to studying how babies grow and develop in the real world. My work is focused on, as you described, observational research. We set up cameras in a room and we watch what caregivers and their infants do together. And so that can give us a little bit of a snapshot of an interaction. But you can appreciate though that just a snapshot may not be reflective of what is happening in every day. So science is trying to catch up with that actually.

And in psychology we are increasingly using intensive methods to get a sense of what is happening in the environment of little people in the world. And one example of a technique like that is to use longitudinal audio recordings where children wear a little vest with a microphone in it, and they go about their day as they typically would. And looking at recordings like that over a much longer period of time, first of all we get a richer sense of what's happening in the environment, but we also get a sense of how much those little snapshots, those video recordings match up with what's happening when the researchers aren't there.

Robyn Williams: And how much the babies respond to what's happening to them in the first place from their presumably adults.

Michelle McGillion: Yes, from adults in their environment, and of course from other children if they are in a home.

Robyn Williams: And what are your conclusions so far?

Michelle McGillion: So the research we've been talking about here today at the British Science Festival is focusing on children at the end of the first year of life, so about 11 or 12 months. And we were looking at about how they communicate and their parents respond to those communications. And the main findings from that study are that first of all infants are trying to communicate at the end of the first year of life. They are using things like eye gaze to let their parents know that they want to communicate with them. And the main finding from our study is that by vocalising and looking at a caregiver's face and having a caregiver respond to that vocalisation can be really, really supportive of a child's language development.

Robyn Williams: So you respond to the way they are looking and the way they seem to be interested. Does it matter how you respond?

Michelle McGillion: I think that's a really good question. Our research looks specifically at one type of responding, and it's a type of responding called contingent talk. Contingent talk simply means noticing what your child is attending to and talking to them about it. So our main finding would suggest that when a child vocalises and they look to you as if to say, 'I am vocalising, I want to communicate with you now,' if you notice what they are attending to at that point and you talk to them about it, you describe the toy they are playing with or the food they are eating or whatever they are doing in the context they find themselves, that can be really helping children learn words.

Robyn Williams: So you respond to what's around them and reinforcing what they are noticing. But is there any other way of doing it? I mean, if you were to sit there next to them and talk about something that's not in the room, like, oh, there was a tiger somewhere, or something which takes you beyond, and even for a one-year-old that would be confusing.

Michelle McGillion: Okay, so what you're talking about is a type of language called decontextualised talk. Our research was a very much focused at the end of the first year of life. There's other research from researchers in other places that suggest that as children grow a little bit older, as they go towards the second year of life, the type of talk that you're talking about, this decontextualised talk, going beyond the here and now, is more important for child language development. Just talk to them about what they are interested in, it could really help them learn to talk.

Robyn Williams: And finally, it's bad to underestimate how responsive they can be because even in the womb before we are even born we respond to things like music and the human voice.

Michelle McGillion: Yes, that's entirely true. From before birth, infants are becoming attuned to the auditory environment around them, and that development continues across the first year of life, so that by six months infants are already beginning to make associations between the words they hear in their environment and really common objects. And that's six months before the time period that we are talking about when children begin to produce their first words.

Robyn Williams: And some babies' first word now in Britain I'm told is 'Brexit'. Dr Michelle McGillion is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick, where they have a bank, and it's one you should be very pleased to know about, given the weather.

Charlotte Allender: I'm Charlotte Allender from the University of Warwick. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences and I specialise in plant biology and specifically plant genetic diversity.

Robyn Williams: And you have a gene bank here.

Charlotte Allender: Yes we do, yes.

Robyn Williams: It's not in Norway, it's on the spot here in Warwickshire.

Charlotte Allender: It is in Warwickshire, it's not on the central university campus, it's on our satellite campus at Wellesbourne, and the gene bank is a big seed collection and we focus on genetic diversity in vegetable crops.

Robyn Williams: Which kinds of vegetable crops?

Charlotte Allender: We are looking after diversity in field grown crops, so that's things like carrots, the different brassica vegetables, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, onions, and also lettuce. They are our main collections but we also have some smaller collections of salad crops, so things like spinach and rocket and other leafy vegetables like that.

Robyn Williams: Are there many species of lettuce? I suppose there would be.

Charlotte Allender: Well, lettuce as we grow it is one species but there are lots of different varieties and lots of different types, so if you think of a stroll through the supermarket shelves you'll see some very loose-leafed lettuce heads, you'll see some very tightly wrapped iceberg-type lettuce heads, you'll see some lettuce is actually grown just to have the leaves cut off it, so you don't buy it as a head, it goes into a bag. Yes, there's a whole range of different types, different colours, different flavours as well.

Robyn Williams: And you keep genes, you keep seeds of the lot, do you?

Charlotte Allender: We certainly try. So we are aiming to conserve the diversity in the genepool of each vegetable. So for carrots, for example, we've got something along the lines of 1,400 different seed samples. A lot of those are different types of cultivated carrots, so carrot varieties but we also have samples of wild populations. These are wild species that are closely related to the crops and that we know.

Robyn Williams: And you personally, do you go out hunting new ones?

Charlotte Allender: I would love to but unfortunately we are not doing that at the moment, so what we are doing is actually trying to conserve, manage and understand the diversity we have in our collection.

Robyn Williams: And what's the point?

Charlotte Allender: The point is to make sure that that resource of genetic diversity, which is absolutely key to developing new crop varieties in the future. So if you think about the issues of climate change and the issues of needing to reduce the input, the fertilisers, the pesticides, et cetera, we have in agriculture, one of the answers to that is to have more robust crop varieties that can better deal with those conditions, and we need that resource of genetic diversity to breed them.

Robyn Williams: When I think of gene banks, I always think of Norway of course, and I think of something deep and cold, especially kept so that you preserve the seeds almost indefinitely. Is it like that here?

Charlotte Allender: It is a little bit like that. We don't have the permafrost that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has, but we do have two very large cold rooms that we keep at -20 degrees Celsius, and we keep our seed collections in there. The seeds are dried before they go in so that they remain alive but very dormant under those conditions, so they will last for decades, if not longer.

Robyn Williams: Of course people tend not to know about the restricted number of genomes that happened to be in, say, bananas or in some citrus fruit, that if you just assume it will carry on forever you might be in trouble, so getting variety is very important indeed, is it not?

Charlotte Allender: Oh yes, so the banana is a good example with the problems with Panama disease and the one type of banana that we tend to see over here in the UK, the Cavendish banana, which is susceptible to this disease. It's under threat from being wiped out. So the same can be said for other crops and vegetables as well, so we need that range of different types of varieties to mitigate against these threats of new diseases and changing environments.

Robyn Williams: Do you know how many seed banks happen to be in Britain?

Charlotte Allender: In Britain? We are one of the UK gene banks, we deal with vegetable crops. There is a gene bank in Norwich at the John Innes Centre that deals with peas and also cereal crops. There is a gene bank in Aberystwyth which deals with forage crops, so grasses and clovers and things like that. There's interestingly also a field gene bank which is managed by the University of Reading which deals with the national fruit collection. So they have thousands of fruit trees of lots of different types of apples, pears, all sorts of different fruits. So there's a whole range of organisations that are looking after this diversity.

Robyn Williams: And as the climate changes we will be a bit safer.

Charlotte Allender: Yes, that's the idea. We really do need to conserve this resource of diversity because we will need it in the future. So if we are not looking after it on farms, which we are not anymore because the farmers are using commercial seed which offers them a better return and offers quite often greater productivity, then we need to find other ways of conserving this diversity, such as gene banks.

Robyn Williams: Thank you.

Charlotte Allender: You're welcome.

Robyn Williams: Charlotte Allender, an Associate Professor in Life Sciences.

And that was The Science Show from Warwick University and the British Science Festival, just ended.

Now, if you go up from Warwick and Coventry you get to Leicester where a young fellow grew up 93 years ago. David Attenborough was interviewed for ABC television and triple j by Tom Tilley.

David Attenborough: Yes, I mean, young people see things very clearly. The older you get, you start thinking up this…well, this, but on the other hand there's that. But young people see things very clearly and they are speaking very clearly to the politicians. And they may not have the vote, they may not yet be old enough to have the vote, but they see things and it's their world, not my world or even your world, it's their world that's coming along and it's their world that's going to be in hazard. And they want to make it clear to the politicians that they know that. And if they just sit on the sidelines and say that in a nice, reasonable way, they can say, 'Oh kids.' But if they actually do something in the way that they have been doing it, then politicians have to sit up and take notice. And you can say, well, it gets nowhere, just stopping the traffic or disrupting London life gets you nowhere. It gets you noticed, it gets people listening to what you say and that you are important. And they are important. They are the people who are going to inherit the mess that we've made.

Robyn Williams: David Attenborough with Tom Tilley. We began with Sir Peter Medawar and end with Sir David Attenborough. Production by David Fisher and Mark Don.

Next week, the editor of Nature, Magdalena Skipper. I'm Robyn Williams.