The Language Exchange

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Meetings between poets and scientists who share language and ideas and create new work.

The Language Exchange is a place where poets and scientists meet to share language and ideas and create new work.

The Language Exchange is a place where poets and scientists meet to share ideas and create new work. In each episode a poet will sit down with a scientist to find out more about a specific piece of research. The poet will then write a brand new poem inspired by their discussion.

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The Language Exchange: Paul Farley and Professor Anne McArdle

Paul Farley and Professor Anne McArdle

BBC Radio 4 - The Language Exchange, Paul Farley and Professor Anne McArdle

Poet Paul Farley meets physiologist Professor Anne McArdle to craft a poem about her work.

The poet Paul Farley travels to the University of Liverpool to talk language with Professor Anne McArdle, who is measuring muscle loss in old age from the vantage point of space.

The International Space Station may not seem the obvious location for an experiment about how we age. 
But for Anne McArdle and the MicroAge team in The University of Liverpool, the micro gravity of earth orbit offers an accelerated look at how our muscles deteriorate over time. 
It's a problem astronauts have to deal with  - can it also offer a way to reduce the ill health and falls caused by muscle loss as we age?
For the poet Paul Farley, who watched his father succumb to a muscle wasting disease, it's a poignant question. 
Armed with his linguistic curiosity and a fresh lab coat, Paul is the latest poet to crunch two disciplines together and attempt to translate cutting edge science into verse. 
Paul takes a tour of the project, dwelling on the language of the experiment, with a view to transforming the word hoards of physiology and space into a poem for Anne and her team. 
The MicroAge project is delivered by the University of Liverpool, the UK Space Agency and Kayser Space Ltd. 

Presented by Paul Farley
Produced by Kevin Core

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