BBC Radio 4 on genetic mutation.
Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" is one of my favourite BBC Radio programmes.
Genetic Mutation.
"When lying mortally ill with cancer, the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane penned the following lines:
Cancer's a Funny Thing:
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked...
Haldane knew better than most that many cancers and many other diseases are caused by genetic mutation. Indeed, to understand mutation fully may explain the ravages of illness and even unlock the secrets of ageing. But mutation, so often a destroyer of life, is also its creator. Without it, the variety of living things on Earth simply wouldn’t exist. It is, in the Darwinian view of life, the raw material of evolution.
Contributors
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in the Galton Laboratory, University College London
Adrian Woolfson, lectures in Medicine at Cambridge University
Linda Partridge, Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London"
Duration: 42mins | File Size: 20MB