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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Start the Week: Newton: science and worldly riches

Newton: science and worldly riches

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Newton: science and worldly riches

Tom Sutcliffe with Edward St Aubyn, Patricia Fara and Chris van Tulleken.

Edward St Aubyn, Patricia Fara and Chris van Tulleken discuss scientific breakthroughs and the pursuit of knowledge with Tom Sutcliffe.

Edward St Aubyn is the award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose series. His new novel, Double Blind, also revolves around transformation and the headlong pursuit of knowledge. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that his characters range across the sciences – from genetics to ecology to psychoanalysis. And their investigations into inheritance, freedom and consciousness intertwine with their feelings of love, fear and greed.

Isaac Newton is often revered as the scientific genius of the 18th century: an unworldly scholar who abandoned his intellectual life to rescue the country’s finances. But the academic Patricia Fara paints a more complicated picture in Life After Gravity. Here Newton is seen in the last 30 years of his life as he heads both the Royal Mint and the Royal Society – a scientist who revelled in the dirty worlds of money and politics. 

Chris van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor who has also forged a career presenting health and science programmes on radio and television. With his twin brother Xand he has put competing health theories to the test, and shared his own personal experience of Covid 19. In his new series for Radio 4, The Jump, he investigates the latest scientific evidence looking at how animal viruses spread to humans, and how far human behaviours are causing pandemics.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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Newton: science and worldly riches

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