numer 013
kwiecień 2022
8

Is the human body perfect? Professor Alice Roberts doesn't think so

Professor Alice Roberts has been challenged by the Science Museum to embark on a bold scientific stunt: to find solutions for our anatomical flaws and design a human body that’s perfect for life in the 21st century. Millions of years of evolution have helped to make humans one of the most successful species on the planet. We have some incredible adaptations, but we’ve also inherited plenty of physical flaws. That’s why we have ears that go deaf, knees that ache. We have the throat with ‘choking ability’, we are covered with easily damageable skin, we deliver ‘big kids’ as the effect of long and potentially dangerous pregnancy. Our vertebral column gives us pain, our eyes although perfect, seem to be quite vulnerable to diseases and cant’s see what animals’ eyes can. We have our hair to take care of – just imagine if you didn’t! How better it would be to have fins or membranes between toes or fingers. We have lungs but only to breathe them on the ground. We “enjoy” prolapsed discs, unexpected hernias, mouth designed to eat, breathe and speak! The definite advantage appears to be the brain – capable of such immense intellectual powers and the heart that tirelessly beats about 4 billion times in a 90 year old organism.
Movie poster with two women
Film “Can Science make me perfect?” BBC 4
Through natural selection animals have evolved incredible biological designs, from super-sharp senses to super-powered limbs. By meeting leading medical and animal experts, Alice learns what the human body’s biggest problems are and discovers how amazing anatomical adaptations found in the animal kingdom could provide inspiration for designing a perfect human body.

With the help of a virtual anatomical artist and an expert prosthetics sculptor, Alice redesigns her own body into a hyper-realistic new form - but is banished from the studio as the life-size model is made. Then, in a big reveal in front of 150 people at the Science Museum, Alice comes face to face with her ‘perfect’ self for the first time – has she really designed a body better than evolution could?

Ambitious, audacious and packed with cutting-edge science, Can Science Make Me Perfect? With Alice Roberts challenges everything you thought you knew about the perfect body.
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