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Hybrid: The Skin We're In

The Skin We're In

BBC Radio 4 - Hybrid, The Skin We're In

Simon Watt wonders if we could upgrade the human body, with help from the animal kingdom.

Evolutionary biologist and comedian Simon Watt wonders if we could upgrade our wonky human body, with a little help from the animal kingdom. In this episode - our skin!

Evolutionary biologist, comedian, and aspiring Dr Frankenstein Simon Watt is on a quest to improve the human body, with a little help from our animal cousins. In each episode he turns his imaginary scalpel on a different human organ and wonders if we wouldn’t be better off with something slightly different – the eyes of a chameleon for example, or the guts of a vulture!

Our skin is the largest organ in our body, a soft, squashy bed-sheet sprinkled with hair follicles, sweat-glands and freckles. Not to mention all the cool scars. It's sensitive, flexible and waterproof - not bad. But it's also pretty fragile. Ashley Seifert from the University of Kentucky wonders if we might be better with the skin of the African Spiny Mouse. These incredible critters can lose huge patches of their skin, but then miraculously regenerate it all. Grow it back from scratch, like Wolverine, without a scar in sight. Handy!

But perhaps our skin could be helping us be more sneaky instead. Roger Hanlon, Marine Biologist from the Woods Hole Lab in Massachusetts has a suggestion: the light-show skin of the Common European Cuttlefish. This crafty cephalopod can transform in the blink of an eye to match pretty much any background you can think of; surely the most impressive feat of camouflage in the animal kingdom.

Meanwhile radio-pharmacist Ekaterina Dadachova in Saskatchewan introduces Simon to a truly extraordinary fungus. It might not be much to look at, but this microscopic black mould uses the melanin in its skin to derive energy from deadly radiation - you'll find it growing in the destroyed reactors at Chernobyl where it consumes radiation at levels that would kill anything else. Would we take the trade?

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Evolutionary biologist, comedian, and aspiring Dr Frankenstein Simon Watt is on a quest to improve the human body, with a little help from our animal cousins.

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