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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Strange Encounters - Series 2

The Essay: Strange Encounters - Series 2: Episode 1: Matthew Cobb

Strange Encounters - Series 2

Episode 1

Episode 1: Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb

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Biologist Matthew Cobb considers the quest for spontaneously-generated life.

In a series in which scientists revisit mould-breaking experiments in history, biologist Matthew Cobb considers the quest for spontaneously-generated life.

Strange Encounters - scientists revisit mould-breaking experiments in history. Today, biologist Matthew Cobb on the quest for spontaneously generated life. In the sweltering heat of a 17th century Tuscan villa, surrounded by jars of putrefying meat, Francesco Redi doubts the idea, handed down from Aristotle, and accepted unquestioningly by his contemporaries, that insects and reptiles emerge without parents from dead flesh. The painstaking experiments not only established the notion of testing theories by exhaustive experimentation, but also laid the foundations of modern ideas of continuous heredity in all life. 

Producer: Roland Pease.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series in which scientists re-examine ground-breaking scientific experiments

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Episode 1: Matthew Cobb

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