The explorers featured in this volume include: Michele Dougherty, the mathematician who persuaded the Cassini mission to Saturn to make a diversion; Richard Fortey on his love of trilobites; Monica Grady, Meteorite Lady; neurosurgeon Henry Marsh on slicing through our thoughts; the Director of the British Antarctic Survey, Jane Francis; Brian Cox on quantum mechanics; and Nobel Prize winner John Sulston on why he thought it would be a good idea to sequence the human genome.

The detectives featured in this volume include: Sadaf Farooqi on what makes us fat; Nick Lane on the origin of life on earth; Sue Black on what you can learn from dead bodies; Tejinder Virdee on the search for the Higgs Boson; and Amoret Whitaker on how insects can help solve crimes.

What does it take to be an inventor?

Judging by the ingenious individuals who have come into The Life Scientific studio in the last eight years, there is no simple answer. Mathematicians, electricians, molecular biologists and mechanics can all transform lives. Some think with their hands, others make things in their minds. Most have a vision of the future. All are driven by a passionate determination to solve problems.

These intimate accounts, based on interviews recorded for the popular BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific, chart the life journeys of scientists and engineers working in Britain today from childhood interests to innovation. Explaining what they did when and why, they make science seem straightforward and exciting, revealing moments of disappointment, creativity, frustration and joy.
The result is an illuminating collection of biographical short stories that make scientists and the work they do accessible to us all.

BBC Radio 4's celebrated THE LIFE SCIENTIFIC has featured some of the world's most renowned experts in the field of deadly viruses. The interviews make sobering reading, a reminder of all the deadly viruses that have threatened global health, and why for the scientists working on the front line in the war against viruses, the arrival of Covid-19 came as no surprise. Among the contributors to this all-too-timely book are:

Jeremy Farrar, before he became Director of the Wellcome Trust, worked in an Infectious Diseases Hospital in Vietnam. He was on the frontline tackling SARS and nine months later a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu, H5N1.

Peter Piot was at the forefront of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. He was the first to identify HIV in Africa. It took him fifteen years to persuade the world that it was also a heterosexual disease. Later as Executive Director of UN AIDS he fought for years to get the UN to take the threat of HIV seriously.

Jonathan Ball studies how viruses operate at the molecular level, hoping to find their Achilles' heel and so develop effective vaccines. During the West Africa Ebola epidemic, he studied how the genome of the Ebola virus evolved as it spread from Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone. He has shown that as this virus (which more happily lives in bats) infects more humans, it becomes ever more infectious.

Wendy Barclay seeks to understand how viruses are able to jump from animals to humans and why some viruses are so much more dangerous to humans than others. Most Londoners had no idea they were infected during the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009. The Bird Flu epidemic in Asia claimed thousands of lives

Kate Jones is a bat specialist who works on how ecological changes and human behaviour accelerate the spread of animal viruses into humans. Bats have been infected with coronaviruses for more than 10,000 years.