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BBC World Service West and Central Africa

The Evidence

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

Claudia Hammond joins scientists and experts to explore science’s effect on our world

Claudia Hammond joins scientists and experts to explore the effect science has on the world around us

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The Evidence: Science and Society: Transforming Bodies

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Heart shaped by human and robot hands

05/05/2018 GMT

Transforming Bodies

Science and Society

BBC World Service - The Evidence, Science and Society, Transforming BodiesSearch BBC

The human body is evolving new senses like hearing colours with the help of technology

Claudia Hammond and a live audience ask neuroscientist Tamar Makin, journalist Frank Swain and creative director Ghislaine Boddington how our bodies will evolve in the future.

Claudia Hammond discusses how the body might evolve in the future with the help of technology. Transhumanism pushes the limits of what the human body can do by enhancing the body to give us new senses such as hearing colour. Scientists are looking at whether an extra limb will help us to work harder and be more efficient. The idea that some people could live way forever digitally is becoming possible.  But is this all too risky?  Could we end up with a super-enhanced elite, leaving the rest of struggling?  
 
Recorded at the Wellcome Collection with a live audience Claudia’s three guests are already pushing towards the limits of what’s currently possible, each in very different ways.  Ghislaine Boddington, who’s a Reader in Digital Immersion, Creative Professions and Digital Art at the  University of Greenwich, Journalist Frank Swain, who writes for the New Scientist and Tamar Makin who is a neuroscientist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. 

Picture: Heart shaped by human and robot hands, Credit: Dimdimich/Getty Images

The Evidence: Science and Society

Claudia Hammond explores health in the context of society with experts from medicine, neuroscience, history and art.

How does Science push Civilisation forward? When does Science lead the process and when does it take civilisation down as many wrong paths as it takes us forward. Science has given us understanding of the cosmos, penicillin, the human genome. It has also given us pollution, atomic bombs and a technological divide which means that for many civilisation is split between those who have access to science and its discoveries and those who do not. 

The BBC World Service is joining forces with Wellcome Collection to create a new series of events and radio programmes that will explore scientific discoveries and approaches in health in the context of society and civilisation with international experts from the worlds of medicine, neuroscience, history and art.

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