The Life Scientific Folgen

Jim Al-Khalili talks to environmental scientist John Lawton about making space for nature. A keen birdwatcher from the age of 7, John describes his studies of birds, dragonflies and bracken and his groundbreaking experiments in the Ecotron, essentially a box full of nature. For the last few decades John has advised successive governments on a host of environmental issues such as GM crops, road traffic pollution and nature conservation. His latest report Making Space for Nature was turned into policy remarkably fast but, he says, it isn't always easy to get governments to listen to environmental advice based on science. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Jim enters the multiverse with Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. He's worked on the big bang, black holes and the formation of galaxies but what he would really like to know is if there is life elsewhere in the universe. As an ex president of the Royal Society and a member of the House of Lords he is at the heart of science policy and worked with the G8 to put science on the international agenda. An atheist, he has attracted criticism from other scientists for his religious views. He says we can now be fairly certain of what happened in the universe from a nanosecond after the big bang until today and is a supporter of the idea that there may have been many big bangs leading to many universes. Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Jim Al-Khalili talks to the pioneering health services researcher, Iain Chalmers, who was one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration. Once described by one writer as 'The Maverick Master of Medical Evidence'. Iain Chalmers trained as a doctor, eventually specialising in obstetrics. But early in his career, he started to question the basis of everything he was trained to do and this set him on a very different path: to champion treatments based on the best available evidence, first in his own field and then across healthcare. It's a journey that has at times challenged the foundations of medical practice. In 1992, he was appointed Director of the Cochrane Centre, which led to the foundation of the Cochrane Collaboration, dedicated to ensuring that patients, doctors and researchers have access to unbiased information about the effectiveness of healthcare interventions, across the world. Iain wants to reduce uncertainty in medicine so that patients can make sensible choices about their care. There are now 30,000 Cochrane members world wide, from Brazil to Belgium, Spain to South Africa. He's been hugely influential both within medicine but across all areas of social policy and the inspiration for a generation of evidence-based, sceptical enquirers such as Ben Goldacre. A frequent irritant of the medical establishment Iain become one of them when he was knighted for services to healthcare in 2000.Having spent his career trying to change the mindset of the medical community from the inside, he's now pushing from the outside, arguing that patients' concerns should drive the medical research agenda. Producer: Rami Tzabar.