The Life Scientific Folgen

Suzanne O'Sullivan has been described as “a detective of the mind”. She’s a neurologist who helps some patients with the strangest of symptoms, from so-called ‘Alice in Wonderland’ seizures to those suffering from temporary blindness or paralysis, and that turn out to originate in their subconscious minds. By the time these people get to see Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan they’ll often have been to many specialists, undergone a range of tests and given a variety of diagnoses. Suzanne’s an expert on epilepsy, and the unusual ways that seizures can manifest themselves, who currently works at University College Hospital in London and for the Epilepsy Society. As well as diagnosing and treating patients, Suzanne has also written books about some of her most memorable, and frankly bizarre, cases. Her first book, It’s All in Your Head, which won the Wellcome Book prize in 2016, describes many of her case studies involving patients whose illnesses are psychosomatic. But, she argues that this is an area of medicine that has not been studied deeply enough yet. After all, for the patients themselves, these debilitating symptoms are all too real.

For all his success as a Supervet on TV and as a pioneering orthopedic surgeon, Noel Fitzpatrick insists that his life has been full of failures. He didn’t enjoy studying for his specialist vet exams and spent ten years working as an actor before setting up his veterinary practice, Fitzpatrick Referrals. Determined to offer animals access to medical treatments and facilities that are more commonly reserved for humans, he has pioneered several new surgical procedures for small animals, specialising in spinal injuries and creating bionic limbs. The prosthetic leg he made for a German shepherd dog Storm was the first of its kind, inspired by the method that was used to rebuild the arm of one of the victims of the 7/7 bombing in London. And he built the world’s first prosthetic paws for a cat called Oscar whose feet had been crushed by a combine harvester. Now he’s on a mission to break down the barriers between human and veterinary medicine so that both animals and humans can benefit from cutting edge research, without the need to do experiments on animals. Producer: Anna Buckley

An ecologist who fell in love with computing, Jacqueline McGlade pioneered the use of satellites study the state of the global environment. Today thanks to programmes like Google Earth, we can see the surface of the earth in great detail. But when Jacqueline was a student, earth observation satellites were used for weather forecasting and not much else. Early in her career, she used satellite images to study fish populations, thinking it would be useful to know not only how many fish were in the sea but where they were likely to be. Few believed such an ambitious undertaking would be possible but, after a spell in Silicon Valley, Jacqueline found a way. The moving maps she created changed the way oceanographers and fishermen viewed the sea. In the early 1980s, she started trying to model the global climate using some of the earliest supercomputers and a roomful of un-networked PCs. As Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, she introduced monitoring systems for a range of environmental indicators and insisted that the information provided by Europe’s first earth observation satellite should be made available to everyone for free. She retired from her latest job, as chief scientist to the United Nations Environment Programme last year and now lives in a mud hut in the Masai Mara, having married a Masai chief. Producer: Anna Buckley