The human body is fantastic, but it's far from perfect.
Millions of years of evolution have left us with littered with glitches
and flaws, of which I'm just too painfully aware.
In my opinion, the human body is long overdue a makeover.
Nobody designed the human body.
It evolved with no plan in mind, and, like other animals,
we've got useful adaptations -
but we've also inherited plenty of flaws.
That's why we have ears that go deaf...
My ears aren't working properly, it feels as though I need to pop them.
..throats that can choke us,
and skin that is easily damaged.
That is shocking.
But what if we could shed that evolutionary baggage
and seize the best that nature has to offer?
There we go, the toes curl round.
Exploring the entire animal kingdom,
I want to find out how evolution has solved problems we face
in different ways.
Release the guinea fowl!
Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on!
Do apes have the pain-free backs we've always wanted?
Oh! SHE LAUGHS
Can an octopus open our eyes to better vision?
Now, that is much better.
And could a marsupial teach us something about childbirth?
Having a jelly bean-sized baby, that's amazing.
Using the best of these animal designs,
I'm going to create a lifelike model of me that will be a total rethink
of the human body.
So, you want to do something a little bit like this?
Oh, wow, look at that!
Each improvement will highlight our limitations,
and reveal how changing body parts could mean compromises.
So, the mouth needs air from the lungs in order for us to speak?
Can I create a body better than my own,
and what will she look like when I come face-to-face
with my perfect body?
The human form is incredible -
the result of millions of years of evolution.
muscle and other tissues working together in miraculous harmony.
Our bodies have helped make us one of the most successful species
on the planet.
But are they perfect?
I'm an anatomist, I am fascinated by the structure of the human body,
but the more I delve into it, the more I realise
what a cobbled-together, hodgepodge of bits and pieces it really is.
The human body is far from perfect.
Ironically, our technological and social progress
has created new problems for us.
Thanks to modern medicine and with good diet and exercise,
we can expect to live decades longer than our ancestors.
As we get older, we start to suffer from bad backs, joint pain,
failing senses, even our hearts can become unreliable.
And if you focus in on each of those elements,
you just can't help feeling that they could be better designed.
I've been writing about this for some time,
but now my outspokenness has provoked a response.
I've been summoned to the Science Museum.
I'm here to see an old friend, Roger Highfield.
Roger! Hey, Alice!
Hello! Good to see you! But this is no social call.
You're always complaining about how the human body
isn't really optimised, how it's kind of trapped by...
Do I always do that?! ..that we're not as well-designed,
you know, whinge, whinge, whinge. So, Alice,
I want you to put your money where your mouth is,
and look at your own body, figure out the flaws in it,
and then I want you to rebuild yourself,
to create a model of yourself, a perfect Alice.
A physical model? A physical model,
so we can see what perfection looks like,
and then we want to put that model on display in this case
for our million or so visitors to this gallery each year
to have a look at. It's going to be right there, in the Science Museum?
It's going to be right there. It's going to be the perfect you.
I'm up for it. I accept the challenge.
How long have I got?
You've got about three months, so not that long.
This is an imaginative exercise, but in tackling this project,
I'm not going to give myself completely free rein,
because that feels like cheating.
I'm going to stick with biological materials,
but what I am going to do is allow myself to rewrite some of that
evolutionary history, or at least to get rid of the evolutionary baggage.
I think of the human body as a building
which has been renovated over time,
and some of its features are just a bit odd now,
so I'm going to take it right back down to ground level
and build it again, from the bottom up.
Natural selection only weeds out anything that reduces
the chances of survival and reproduction.
It's only perhaps now, as we demand more quality from life,
that we're aware of our failings.
But the animal kingdom is full of alternative forms...
..different ways that nature has tackled the same trials of life
that humans face.
This is quite a challenge that the Science Museum has set me,
but as I attempt to redesign my own body,
I have got the entire natural world to provide me with inspiration.
To keep my design grounded in reality,
I'm going to call on the talents of anatomical artist
and designer Scott Eaton.
Scott is an expert at recreating accurate human and animal anatomy,
producing sculptures or models for the art world and CGI industry.
He's agreed to help me produce the blueprint for Alice 2.0.
Well, Scott has asked me to meet him here at this industrial estate
on the edge of London, and I think this is the building.
I'm pretty excited about this,
because this is the start of making the new me.
At this special effects studio,
a bit of hi-tech photographic wizardry takes place.
Scott? Alice, hi.
Hello. Come in, come in.
Can I come through here? Try, be careful!
Squeeze in! Well, this is an amazing rig.
Ah, we have a lot of cameras set up.
To provide a visual base to work from, Scott must first capture
exactly what I look like in three dimensions.
Oh, my goodness, OK, how many cameras have we got here?
Looking around, there are about 130 cameras in this rig.
And each one of them is trained on this spot in the centre,
so I presume that's where I've got to stand?
Yep, that will be your position on the platform,
kind of your little pedestal.
So, 130 eyes all trained on me?
Yep.
OK, Alice, for the first kind of pose,
we're just going to do a standard anatomical reference pose,
so elbows out, and try to get your forearms going down vertical.
Yeah, that's it.
OK, I'm good to go.
Oh!
THEY LAUGH
That was quite bright!
Relax, relax, relax.
OK, in three, two, one.
And the last one I think we'll get you to do is stretch out,
like you're pushing on a wall.
Like I'm in a case. That's it, that's it!
Three, two, one.
Good.
Great, thanks, Alice. So weird!
A bit of data crunching and 130 photos are combined
into a single 3-D image.
Alice, so there you are.
What do you think? Oh, that's amazing.
It's really strange.
It looks like a solid object when you pull out,
and then when you go in, you realise that I'm just mapped
as a cloud of individual pixels.
Oh, it's great!
OK, Alice, so we have the data now, what are we going to do to it?
What I want to do is talk to plenty of other people.
I want to talk to other anatomists, I want to talk to surgeons -
who are always patching up the human body -
and then I'll get back to you with a wish list of ways of modifying me.
OK, let me know, let me know.
So, where to begin?
Well, since the model is based on me,
I've decided to get deeply personal.
Well, the best place to start looking for flaws in the human body
is actually right here,
so I'm going to take an extremely detailed look inside my body.
I've come to seek the help of a master at exposing hidden flaws,
consultant radiologist Iain Lyburn.
Iain, I want to have a look inside. OK.
There are a few areas that I want to focus on.
Right. And I just want to see how my body's bearing up, you know,
after 44 years of wear and tear.
OK, so the plan is to get into the MRI machine... Yeah.
..and sort of slice you, lots of different slices,
lots of different angles, check out all the different structures inside,
and make sure you're surviving and doing well.
So, I'm approaching this with a bit of trepidation,
there is a possibility that we might find something unforeseen.
There'll be some sign of something, some ageing process.
The MRI sees right through me,
collecting data on all the tissues in my body.
But it's my skeleton, and most specifically my spine,
that catches Iain's attention.
So, looking at the spine here, the vertebral bodies,
the bony bits of the vertebrae, are these squares.
Yes. And then in between them,
we've got the slightly pulpy cartilage discs.
That's right, yes, yes. They're like the shock absorbers in between
the vertical bodies, slightly softer, more spongy discs.
This disc here, I don't like the look of that.
No. The height is narrowed, so the disc is slightly squashed,
but also it's lost some of its water content, so it's dehydrated,
and that's a sign of it being degenerate.
It's a bit like a doughnut, we talk about it like a doughnut,
because there's a nice sort of rounded edge, and in the middle
there's the jam, and it's the jam that comes out at the back
and squashes onto your nerves and causes trouble.
OK, so it is pushing out the back,
so this is what we would describe, surely, as a slipped disc,
or the beginning of a slipped disc?
Very near the beginning of one.
So, it's a slightly protruded disc
but not actually squashing anything particularly.
This explains my years of back pain.
But I'm not alone.
It turns out that bad backs are everywhere.
Spinal problems and bad backs are a huge problem for this country.
We spend well over £1 billion a year on treatment
for spinal disorders.
Wider than that, it has a huge implication for the nation
as a whole, with over £12 billion, £13 billion a year spent
in missed days from work because of back pain and spinal disorders.
And, in fact, if you look at chronic pain as an entity,
about 30% to 40% of patients who suffer with chronic pain,
it's originating from the spine.
So why are our spines so injury-prone?
The challenge the spine faces is that it has to move
in many directions, at the same time it has to bear the weight
of the body and the torso.
This puts huge forces throughout this structure.
To balance our upper body over our legs,
our spines evolved a series of curves.
But this shape created specific weak points.
We tend to see the wear and tear at the points within the curves
of the spine where there is the most amount of movement and flexion
extension, which in the neck is around the mid-cervical region,
and in the lumbar spine is at the very base of the spine,
where the curve is at its most noticeable.
About 95% of spinal problems in fact originate
from the lower lumbar spine region.
As we get older, the structures within our spine fail.
That then leads to the pain,
and that then leads to the disability caused by it.
So, why hasn't natural selection weeded out bad backs?
Well, back pain doesn't really start to affect us
until we're in our fifth or sixth decade, and I'm afraid,
once you've passed your genes on,
evolution doesn't care quite so much about you.
The ageing process exacerbates a fundamental problem in our spines.
But perhaps a close look at our evolutionary past can provide a path
to a possible solution.
So, I've come here to Twycross Zoo to meet some of our closest
living relatives in the animal kingdom,
and to find out more about our own evolutionary journey.
Here to meet me is Dr Emily Saunders,
and some monkeys who can take our backs back in time.
What monkeys represent really nicely is how we would have been
a long time ago,
so we're going back 40 million years or more,
and so we would have been small-bodied,
running around the tree tops on four limbs.
What this does is it brings your body centre of mass down
lower towards the branch, and lessen the risk of you swaying,
and over-balancing, and toppling off the branch.
For millions of years,
our ancestors' spines worked in a horizontal position.
As our ape ancestors got larger and heavier,
they held their bodies in a more upright position, climbing,
and then even standing on two legs, up in the trees.
But our spine problems really began around 7 million years ago,
when our ancestors started to do less clambering in the trees,
and more walking on the ground.
To walk more efficiently,
our lumbar spines lengthened and became more flexible,
but that made the backbone weaker.
So, our spine is longer and we've also got this curvature?
Yeah, it's a slight recipe for disaster,
because we perhaps don't have the muscle support to be able to support
that part of our spine, so that causes quite a lot of the problem.
In terms of a durable design, humans have perhaps taken a wrong turn.
So, maybe we could learn something useful by studying the alternative
spinal arrangements of our primate cousins.
What chimpanzees do is they're moving in a lot of different ways,
in an upright posture...
And then they're clambering, hanging from their arms,
bearing their weight on their feet?
Yes, and so they're adapting themselves to that upright posture,
and that comes with a lot of anatomical changes...
BANG Oh!
THEY LAUGH
Thank you for that! We're not popular!
In a chimp, the lumbar spine is straighter, shorter,
and entrapped by the pelvis on each side,
making for a more stable structure.
They're flinging themselves around the trees and doing all these
different behaviours that they need to do to be able to move
around the forest canopy.
That support might actually be to do with reducing the injuries
that they might get in that part of the spine as a result.
I'm now thinking that chimps might hold the key to the solution here.
We might be better off switching to a stiffer, shorter lumbar spine.
So, if I was going to re-engineer the human spine to be more
chimpanzee-like... If you had a sort of slightly more entrapped,
shorter lumbar spine, that was a bit straighter,
you'd get a huge amount of support and stability,
and potentially have reduced risk of all the different maladies
that come along with that.
You wouldn't be able to walk quite as nicely as we do,
quite as efficiently as we do, but chimpanzees,
when they're walking bipedally,
do actually have a little bit of opposite rotation, in that vein.
And I'd avoid my slipped disc, I think.
Exactly, yes. You may do, yeah.
Not making any promises! THEY LAUGH
Time to pass on my first redesign to artist Scott.
So, this is your den! Hey, Alice! Come in.
Hello! How are you? Good to see you.
OK, then, Scott, what have you got for me?
OK, well, I have you loaded into the computer.
You might recognise yourself, I hope!
The colour is there, the form is there.
It's quite freaky!
It's quite... It is strange,
because there's something quite spooky about it.
I'm obviously used to seeing photographs of myself,
and I'm even used to seeing myself on film,
but there's something quite different about this.
That's the starting point,
and then we can do anything we want to it, really.
I've got a good idea of where I want to start with this,
and it's the spine.
I think that there are problems there that we could try to fix
that are actually quite personal to me,
but also generally quite important.
I've got a slipped disc.
OK. And this is a really common problem for humans.
OK. So, I think this is a poor bit of design
that we could look at fixing.
It's the structure of the spine
which predisposes it to this problem,
the fact that you've got this curve.
OK, so you want to work on straightening
some of the lumbar region?
So, you want to do something a little bit like this?
Wow, look at that!
That is actually moving back.
This is amazing, this is like some kind of
really radical virtual surgery.
Scott is now able to incorporate elements of chimpanzee
into my upgraded spine.
We have five lumbar vertebrae. Chimps have four.
Right. They're also really well supported at the bottom here,
so you can see the way that the pelvis comes up on either side.
So what do you think, shall we...?
Can you pull the pelvis up a bit?
OK, so let me, let me just see...
That's amazing. That's a variation, right there.
It's odd, it's going to make me more straight-sided...
Yeah, let's see. ..as chimps are.
So, I've lost the small of my back, I've lost my waist.
It's also going to change functionality, isn't it?
Bringing the pelvis closer to the ribcage is going to mean
that I don't have as much rotation there.
Is that worth it for the stabilisation of the spine?
Maybe, maybe it is.
We'll see. It looks weird, it looks completely weird to me,
I'm very familiar with human anatomy,
I'm very familiar with chimpanzee anatomy,
and that's a kind of...hybrid.
Well, it'll look even more weird when we fit your body
to this underlying skeleton. Yeah! Then it will look weird.
The new me has received its first modification.
Straightening and strengthening my lumbar spine is a subtle change,
but it could make life dramatically more comfortable.
Now, it's time for the next adaptation.
Our backs aren't the only parts of our bodies that have suffered
from our ancestors' preference for walking upright.
As we became more bipedal,
the strain of supporting the body fell from four legs to just two.
That's a lot of weight passing through just a few joints...
..as judo competitor Rhys Thompson knows to his cost.
I planted my foot to try and move my opponent.
He pulled me in a certain direction, my foot slipped, replanted,
and his weight came down on my knee.
Initially, I felt, like, a snap.
I thought I'd done something.
I couldn't get up, and then I struggled to walk after.
Rhys had ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament,
a key element in the crowded mechanics of the knee.
The important thing to understand about the knee joint
is it's a very complicated join, by comparison to many others.
It moves a little bit like a hinge, slides backwards and forwards,
but it also turns.
So, it's inherently unstable.
Rhys broke the anterior cruciate ligament,
which is this ligament in the centre of the joint at the front.
The way these ligaments break is usually through a pivoting motion,
so the knee rotates.
The foot is fixed on the ground, and the body rotates around the joint,
and this explodes.
Sportspeople are especially prone to ligament damage.
But the forces that the knee experiences,
and the complexity of its structure, means there's a lot to go wrong.
The thin layer of protective cartilage lining the bones
takes much of the punishment.
Two pieces of normal cartilage rubbing over one another
are more slippery than two ice cubes rubbing over one another.
The problem is it has no ability to repair or heal itself,
so over time, it gradually wears out.
It's only in the last 50 years or so that we've doubled our life span,
we now live until we're 100, and so our joints, I'm afraid,
can't quite cope.
When the cartilage wears away, you get arthritis.
Successful surgery means Rhys is now on the road to recovery.
OK, head back and relax, I'm just going to make it move.
But by the time we pass 45,
nearly 20% of us will suffer from arthritic knees,
rising to almost a quarter by the time we pass 75.
The knee is clearly a prime candidate for my next redesign.
If we look at the knee joint, and explode it,
we can just see how much anatomy is in there.
All these ligaments, all these bits of cartilage,
each one of those is another component that can go wrong.
So, I think we could simplify this even more.
I think we could make it into a very simple hinge joint.
However, I think what we need to do is look at the whole leg.
I don't think we can just pull the knee out on its own,
I think we've got to look at the entire lower limb,
and see if there's something quite radical we could do
to save some of the stress on these joints.
Could we learn something from other successful bipeds?
Birds, the descendants of dinosaurs,
have been at this game tens of millions of years longer than us.
Their legs evolved very differently to our own,
so could they have discovered a less damaging way to treat their joints?
I've come to the Royal Veterinary College campus
to meet Dr Monica Daley.
Hello. Hi. Are you Monica? Yeah, hi.
Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too.
Come and meet my team. This is Hannah. Hannah, hello.
Monica and her team are bird locomotion specialists.
Hello. That's a lovely guinea fowl.
This is one of our flock, he's going to run for us today.
He's a performer? Yes. An athlete?
Yes. I've been working with guinea fowl for over ten years now,
and I have spent my career trying to, basically, trip birds,
as they're running! THEY LAUGH
That sounds really mean!
It does, but they're very, very good, and it's actually rare
that they ever fall down. Have you managed to trip them up?
Occasionally. A couple times in a thousand.
So, if you were to compare us running with a guinea fowl running,
who's better?
Guinea fowl. Really? Yes.
Monica is keen to rope me in.
An extremely important part of this experiment involves this,
and I have been commissioned to use this instrument in order
to make the guinea fowl run,
but no bird will be harmed during the filming of this sequence.
In the wild, guinea fowl can travel over 20 miles a day
in search of food, so they are optimised for running.
Right, release the guinea fowl!
Go on, go on! Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run!
The force plates detect the impact of the bird's feet,
while high-speed cameras capture its every move.
Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on!
Ooh! SHE LAUGHS
Thank you very much. Well done! I'm sorry about that...
GUINEA FOWL SQUAWKS I'm sorry. It is just a mop.
It's very disgruntled with me.
GUINEA FOWL SQUAWKS LOUDLY
So, there's the bird running.
And you can see the force plates, the rectangles, in the runway here.
And you can see the bird running along, a nice, bouncing gait.
It's beautiful.
The pressure pad data reveals that bipedal birds proportionately
put their leg joints under far less stress than we do.
We have the ground reaction forces here, so this is measuring how hard
the leg is pushing against the ground,
so in this running guinea fowl,
you see a nice, characteristic single peak.
Yeah. But it's a nice, slow peak,
so you don't see a very rapid loading of the leg,
because they have a very soft gait.
If we were to look at a human running,
how would it vary from this?
If you were to compare this to humans,
you'd see a very rapid rise in the force,
so there's very rapid loading of the bones,
because we have a very straight-leg posture,
very heavy legs,
so when they come into contact with the ground,
you see very large and rapid impact loading.
These powerful, sudden impact forces are one of the reasons human knees
and ankles are vulnerable to damage.
So, what is it about these birds' legs that puts such a spring
in their step?
To explore their anatomy in detail,
Monica needs to get something from the freezer.
So, what's this bird, then, Monica?
Well, this is the left leg of an emu.
Is it? It's huge!
It's huge. Yeah.
Here you have the calf muscles, and then ankles down here.
So, that is the equivalent of our ankle, but it's right up there?
Up in the middle of the leg, yeah.
So, this is all essentially foot.
Right, shall we have a look under the skin, then? Yes.
Time to make use of my skill as an anatomist.
It's kind of what you find on chicken drumsticks, isn't it?
Yeah, well, it's exactly what you find on chicken drumsticks!
Emus weigh up to 60kg, and can hit speeds of up to 30mph.
But you rarely hear of them ripping a cruciate ligament
or twisting an ankle.
Their anatomical secrets are now exposed.
The fleshy parts of the muscles are all high up in the leg,
controlling movement lower down via long tendons.
So, these tendons that start here, all the way up here,
go all the way out to the toes.
Wow, so look how long those tendons are, then.
So, I'm going to pull on them here.
OK.
There we go. And the toes curl round.
Just to prove it.
But, importantly, these tendons also take pressure off the joints,
acting as enormous shock absorbers.
The Achilles tendon is the tendon we actually use quite a lot during
running to store elastic energy.
Yeah. But it's much, much bigger here.
These are springy, aren't they? They're elastic.
They're stringy, very, very compliant tendons,
so these stretch a lot.
The leg works almost like a pogo stick.
The force of each step is absorbed by the stretching tendon,
which then recoils back to pop the bird into the air.
It makes running very efficient.
With ankles lifted right up off the ground,
these birds make the most of their shock-absorbing tendons.
Being able to respond passively, like birds can do,
to an unexpected bump means that it can have an intrinsically fast
response, and it's intrinsically more stable.
And when you say "responding passively,"
you're simply talking about the stretch and...?
Just the stretch of the tendon,
and the response is entirely due to the stretch of the tendon,
and how that transmits up the leg.
I think I've been tinkering with human anatomy up to this point,
but I am so persuaded by the efficiency of this bird design,
this time I'm going to go for something a bit more radical.
It's time to go back to my designer, Scott Eaton.
I've got something rather extreme, so I don't know if it's too extreme.
So, I was wondering about doing something
which is a bit more birdlike. OK.
So, it's going to be a really radical departure,
because the human lower limb is really different from the bird's.
This is a big, complicated redesign.
I think the first thing to do is to kind of modify the length
of the femur. This is just going to be kind of an approximate sketch,
and we'll refine this later... SHE LAUGHS
So, I've kind of imagined all these in my mind's eye,
and now actually seeing it happening, it's just bizarre.
We've kind of done a quick modification of the femur.
We have the tibia in place.
To resolve the rest is going to take a bit of time.
We're going to have to stretch out the foot.
This lower segment here is going to be basically a really lengthened
metatarsal, isn't it? The whole of that segment there.
A really lengthened and reinforced metatarsal.
And how many toes am I going to end up with, do you think?
Three toes? I'm going to estimate that you end up with three toes.
Yeah. One order for bird legs, coming up!
The addition of bird legs is a compromise.
I will lose the mobility of my feet, so useful in climbing,
but those enormous tendons should take the pressure off my joints,
keeping me happily mobile for years to come.
I'll send you some more stuff...
In order to keep me focused on the science, for the rest of the build,
Scott has banished me from his studio.
Can you send me updates?
No. No, no, no, it'll be a surprise.
All right, I'm up for that. Brilliant. All right?
Thanks for stopping by. No, it's been brilliant, thank you very much!
OK, I'll see you again soon, Alice. See you soon!
Skeletal weaknesses aren't our only flaws.
Dig deeper, and you discover more of evolution's oversights.
The heart is the most active muscle in our body,
but unlike other muscles, it never gets tired.
By the time you hit 90,
it will have generated almost 4 billion heartbeats.
But some basic flaws in its design mean that many of us
won't get that far.
It's time for me to get to the heart of the matter,
with the help of cardiologist Dr Alex Lyon.
Alice, here's your heart on the ultrasound.
So, every pulse you feel, it's due to this lovely organ,
the heart, contracting to pump the blood.
You have 100 billion little muscle cells making up
this pumping chamber, and I can tell this is lovely and healthy.
Oh, good. It's just amazing to see it in real-time, isn't it?
It is. It's fantastic. It's a beautiful structure.
There are a few things that I think we would like to change,
if we could.
According to Alex,
there's a big problem with the arteries that supply the heart
itself with oxygenated blood.
One of the biggest problems is heart attacks
caused by coronary blockages.
We all have two main coronary arteries,
one on the left and one on the right,
and our left coronary artery starts as this common trunk,
and then divides into two important arteries.
So, we really have three big arteries supplying our hearts
with all our blood.
Our problem is that every part of the heart muscle only receives
blood from one artery, so if one of the big three block off,
then that causes a large heart attack and the heart muscle dies.
Every seven minutes, someone in the UK will have a heart attack.
Coronary heart disease remains one of the biggest killers
in the country.
It does seem crazy to have two blood vessels supplying the heart,
but for each part of the heart muscle to only have supply
from one of those vessels.
I agree, and there are some species which actually have a much
more clever coronary system, with lots of little connections
between the different arteries, which we call collaterals.
So, here is an example of the coronary anatomy of a dog heart,
and you can see that each part of the heart muscle
gets its blood supply from lots of different routes,
so if you blocked off one artery it would still receive the blood
from the other side.
So, that would mean if you had a clot coming down
this blood vessel here,
it's got branches coming from the other vessel too,
so it's OK? If we're designing a perfect heart for you,
I would like your coronaries to have lots of collaterals,
like a dog's heart,
so that you're protected if you ever have a blockage of the coronaries
that you don't then suffer a heart attack.
So, dog-like coronary arteries?
That's right.
So, it turns out we can learn some useful tricks
from man's best friend.
Like the lumbar spine, this is a very subtle change,
but one that could transform countless lives.
This could be a simple redesign,
but there are more structural additions I could make
to improve the circulation of the blood.
Our upright bodies make the steady flow of blood a challenge.
There's the heart, up there.
In red, we're seeing the arteries
which are carrying blood away from the heart, and in blue,
the veins, which carry blood back to the heart.
And this is where we get the problem in the legs, of course,
because the blood's coming all the way down here to the feet,
and then it's got to get all the way back up again to the heart.
As we age, the circulatory system can have trouble
overcoming the force of gravity.
When blood begins to pool in the legs, it can cause varicose veins,
and deep-vein thrombosis.
It's clear that the circulation needs some assistance.
It is helped a bit -
the muscles of the calf help to pump the blood
through the deep veins.
And there are valves in the veins, as well,
to keep the blood flowing in one direction.
But I think we could improve this.
I think that rather than just relying on the muscles
outside the veins, why don't we put some muscle into the veins?
So, rather than just having these thin walled veins...
..maybe at a couple of places we could add a bit of muscle
into the walls, and create what is effectively another tiny heart.
Add a couple of valves in like this, then we've got a little pump.
I mean, this is essentially how the heart forms in the embryo, as well.
It just starts off as a fairly simple vessel,
with contractile muscle in its walls to pump the blood through.
So, I think that this is relatively easy to achieve.
In terms of the exact positioning of these extra little hearts
in our leg veins, I'm going to leave that up to Scott.
But I think this could be part of the solution
to varicose veins and DVT.
I'm banished from his studio, but Scott is hard at work,
turning my ideas into reality.
The big kind of requirement that the body always has to fulfil
is it has to protect really important organs.
So, to protect these new little pumps that we're putting in,
the obvious place is to put it in this area
called the femoral triangle, kind of on the inner surface of your thigh.
And here is the corresponding area on her.
Depending on how lean she is in her new form,
you'll be able to make out possible evidence of it.
So, reasonably well-protected, all things considered.
Scott is my virtual architect,
but responsibility for building the Science Museum sculpture
goes to top prosthetics and special effects expert, Sangeet Prabhaker.
I mainly work in the film industry.
I create creatures and monsters, fake people,
but I don't think that's quite the same thing.
I think this is quite a unique design,
unlike anything that I've done before.
Scott's virtual designs are made real
with the help of Sangeet's 3-D printer.
If we were just working from drawings provided by Scott,
we would easily spend six or seven weeks, I think,
just working on the sculpture.
But since we're working with printers,
we can get something together in about a week
that is way more accurate than most human sculptors
could ever achieve.
Sangeet's first challenge is my spindly bird legs.
They will have to support the whole structure.
What we have here is our left foot, and believe it or not,
that is the entire foot.
The tricky thing is getting this to stand, right?
And not have any visible supporting structure underneath.
It's a bit of a challenge, but, I mean, that's what we do, right?
Everything we make is a prototype.
Everything - by definition - we make hasn't been made before.
So, that's our craft, it's always being adaptable,
and finding new, efficient ways of putting things together.
So far, in my imaginary redesign of the human form,
I've been correcting flaws that generally only show themselves
with age.
But the problems with our design can go deeper than that.
The flawed blueprint of the human body means that some
totally natural processes can be gravely damaging.
I'm in hospital today for a minor operation,
and it's to correct a small injury that was essentially caused
because my body wasn't up to the mechanical demands
being placed on it.
It's a hernia, and I can show it to you - it's just here.
I don't know if you can see this lump just there.
I can certainly feel it,
and I can push it back in.
It's not fatal, but it's uncomfortable,
and it's quite painful at times.
So, we need to keep it on the inside.
As far as I'm concerned, this really is a flaw in the design
of the human body.
It came about as an unfortunate side-effect of a completely natural
process that up to half of the adult population can go through -
pregnancy.
As my belly swelled with my second child inside,
my muscles separated a little bit, and then the seam between them tore,
and that is the origin of the hernia that, hopefully,
I'm going to get corrected today.
So, it is fixable,
but wouldn't it be brilliant if it didn't happen in the first place?
It's estimated that up to 20% of pregnant women experience
some type of hernia, but it can be much worse.
Giving birth is perhaps the most dangerous natural process
experienced by any animal.
For much of history, at least 2% of women died giving birth.
Our babies' large heads have to fit through a fairly narrow gap
in the pelvis.
But there's no reason why women should put up with this...
..because an intriguing alternative exists in some of our close cousins,
the marsupial mammals of the southern hemisphere.
I've come to the Natural History Museum
to meet marsupial expert, Professor Anjali Goswami.
Hi, Anjali. Hey, Alice.
Anjali is using laser scanners to create a 3-D virtual catalogue
of this particular group of mammals.
We are trying to gather really high-resolution data
for a wide variety of marsupials,
to try and reconstruct their evolutionary history.
And we have a nice fossil record for them,
going back to 125 million years ago. That's a long time!
I mean, that's way back into the time of the dinosaurs.
Absolutely. Yeah.
The most noticeable difference between marsupials
and placental mammals like us is the process of birth.
How big are they when they're born?
Maybe a jellybean size would be appropriate for a kangaroo.
That is minute!
I would have liked to have given birth to something
the size of a jellybean! I am right behind you, I absolutely agree.
It seems terribly unfair that we have this
difficult birthing process,
and yet, you could just have a nice, little baby that was this big,
and go about your business most of the time.
These marsupial jellybean newborns look very underdeveloped,
but Anjali's scans show that parts of their bodies
are unexpectedly well-developed.
It looks equivalent to about, I don't know,
a seven-week-old human embryo,
but, at that point, the embryo in the human has no bone.
So, it's got bone around the jaws,
it's got bone in its little, tiny forelimbs here.
In many ways, you can think of placental birth as -
for the embryo, at least, or for the baby - as really cushy
compared to what a marsupial has to do at that really early stage
of development.
These newborns must immediately spring into action,
their arms pull them along as their noses follow a scent trail
to the safety of their mother's pouch.
What is the pouch actually made of?
Well, it's essentially a skin flap that's covering up
the mammary glands.
So, inside the pouch,
the mother will have a certain number of nipples.
Once they latch on, the newborns are sustained by energy-rich milk.
But this way of delivering nutrition isn't as efficient
as our placental system,
especially if you want to grow a brain like ours.
So, it's not just the equivalent of human gestation, plus lactation,
it's actually going to be even longer than that?
Oh, yes, it won't just be nine months extra,
it'll be years and years extra.
Years of carrying a baby in a pouch?
If you want them to have a big brain size.
And there is another compromise to consider.
OK, so I hadn't really thought about that.
The... The solution, if we import this into humans,
means that we are probably going to have to move the nipples down
off the chest, onto the belly, inside the pouch.
That's probably true. But I still think the pro of having
a jellybean-sized baby... That's amazing.
PHONE BUZZES
I've been expecting your call. So, what do you have?
This time, it's all about the problems associated with childbirth.
So...
I'd quite like to have a pouch.
Oh, wow! HE LAUGHS
It means that the baby can come out when it's really tiny,
and it's just easy to carry it around.
You can just keep it in the pouch.
Uh, yeah, that's, that's...
Uh...
That is going to have its own challenges.
If we move the teats down into the pouch,
then, obviously, I don't need breasts any more.
Mmm, yes. I knew you were going in that direction!
I'm not sure how I feel about giving up breasts, but I think...
..on the whole, it's worth it.
Well, we can do anything, you know, you just have to ask,
and you just have to bear with the results.
In my search for perfection, I've made some dramatic changes.
To strengthen my spine,
I've adopted the more stable design of the chimpanzee.
I've taken the shock-absorbing legs of a bird,
and added a few extra hearts.
And now I'm getting a marsupial pouch,
and saying goodbye to my breasts.
When I finally get to see this new me, will I even recognise her?
A lot of the changes I've been making so far
have been about correcting design flaws in the body,
but there's something else I can look at doing,
and that is improving function, enhancing performance,
boosting my abilities.
I've already looked at our skeletal and circulatory systems,
so to improve athletic performance, it's time to focus in on our lungs,
and ask the question, are they really doing a good job?
That's it, keep going...
At Middlesex University,
Dr Lizi Bryant works to help top-end athletes improve their performance.
OK, ready? And it's going to go up again now.
Keep pushing, this is a really, really good effort.
With the VO2 max test,
we are trying to get an athlete or an individual
to work to their absolute maximum,
and the reason we're doing that is because we want to know
what that individual's capacity is to intake oxygen and utilise it
within the muscles.
Oxygen is transported via our blood to every single cell of the body.
You've got one more in you!
It feeds the chemical reactions that keep us going.
Keep it going, keep pushing! Well done.
But the first challenge is to get oxygen into the blood...
Great effort, well done. ..and that is the job of the lungs.
You OK? Yeah.
Great effort, well done.
You can improve your lung function to a certain degree,
but you will definitely hit a ceiling,
and you won't be able to improve it any more,
and one of the reasons for that is because of the mechanisms
of the lungs.
The lungs are trying to perform more than one function.
The lungs do two jobs, in terms of they do the ventilation,
bringing the air from the room into your lungs,
and then they do the respiration,
which is the gaseous exchange from the oxygen in the air
into your blood.
The way that air flows into our lungs means they are not
as efficient as they could be.
The tidal flow basically means we bring air into our lungs
and we take air out of our lungs.
By constantly having to reverse the process of bringing air
in and out of the same channels,
we are unable to get that constant stream of oxygen into the blood.
We have to get rid of the air with the carbon dioxide in,
and then we can replace the oxygen.
So, it limits the amount of oxygen that we can get into our blood.
For the most efficient system,
for us to be able to perform at high intensities,
I think if we could have a mechanism where we had maybe
a one-way system, that we could have a constant supply of oxygen,
therefore our muscles are getting a faster supply of oxygen, as well,
then that would be definitely more efficient.
Having lungs like this, with a tidal, bidirectional flow of air
through them is something that we share in common with all mammals.
But a little bird told me it doesn't have to be that way.
Flight demands a constant effort from wing muscles,
needing an uninterrupted high level of oxygen...
..and birds achieve this through an ingenious design.
I've returned to see Monica Daley at the Royal Vet College,
where she's brought something else out of the freezer.
OK, Monica, what have we got this time?
A swan. A swan?
Monica shows me something intriguing.
Squeezing the abdomen of the bird has a weird result.
So, if we pull this up a little bit and compress...
SWAN WHEEZES
..you can hear it breathing.
SWAN WHEEZES
Oh, my goodness, that's so strange!
To find out what's happening, we're going to have to look inside.
I'm painfully aware that we're dissecting a swan here,
does that mean we're in trouble with the Queen?
No, we'll be OK!
This swan was donated to us from a wildlife park.
On inspection, a key part of its anatomy seems to be missing.
This is just so odd.
So, I can identify the heart easily, there's the liver down there,
but, in a mammal, I'd expect to see the lungs wrapping around,
so where are they? They're actually quite small,
so they're all the way at the back here.
These lungs are tiny! The lungs are quite compact and small,
because they don't inflate and deflate during breathing.
Monica reveals the source of the swan's strange wheezing.
Its body is full of air sacs.
If you look here, you can see the sort of deflated balloon tissue.
It's very thin.
See that air sac, there?
Let's open that up, then. OK.
Oh, deflated the balloon...
There we go. And we're into another air sac. Just very thin-walled.
Yeah, and it's lined with this incredibly thin membrane,
which is like clingfilm, isn't it?
Their entire body cavity is filled with these air sacs,
and they act like bellows to ventilate the lungs.
And it's the breastbone rocking forward and back
that ventilates the system, and acts as a bellows,
inflating and deflating these air sacs,
pumping the air over the lungs.
The air sacs do the job of moving the air around the system,
pushing it in one direction through the lungs...
Meaning that gas exchange is much more efficient
than in mammalian lungs.
In a mammalian lung, you're inflating and deflating,
you can never get all of the air out,
so that you're always mixing old air and new air.
Birds don't have that problem.
If I was to redesign a human body along these lines,
then I'd end up with smaller, more efficient lungs,
but I would have to accommodate air sacs.
Room for air sacs, yeah.
PHONE VIBRATES
Hello, Alice. So, this time, it's the respiratory system.
I've been looking at how other animals do it, in particular, birds,
and they've got a series of air sacs,
which feed into the lungs.
OK, that's interesting.
So, maybe a slight increase in the chest cavity?
Who knows? I think there might be a slight increase, but, on the whole,
gas exchange is going to be much more efficient.
These lungs, combined with my bird legs,
will make me quite the long-distance runner.
Improving lung function is all very well,
but our breathing arrangements are not without other pitfalls.
We often think about how we've evolved from apes and monkeys,
but we can understand even more about the human body
if we go back further,
to a time when our ancestors were all swimming in the oceans.
The air-breathing lung didn't evolve from nowhere.
Inside many fish is an air sac - the swim bladder.
It's a natural buoyancy device, and it buds off the digestive tract.
It fills with gas, which it derives from the blood.
As air-breathing amphibians evolved from fish,
other sacs budded off from the digestive tract,
the origin of our lungs.
But it's not all happy ever after.
The fact that our lungs are an offshoot of our digestive systems
means that, occasionally, it can all go wrong.
The digestive tract and the respiratory tract -
your windpipe leading into your lungs -
are intimately related to each other.
They meet at a junction in the throat,
and it's guarded by a trap-door valve called the epiglottis.
This valve closes tight as we swallow,
and it's the main barrier stopping food or drink
dropping into our lungs.
So, this is a recipe for choking.
At the Wellington Hospital in North London,
I've come to meet Professor Martin Birchall, and his patient,
Angela Phillips.
Angela's trap-door valve was gravely compromised
when she suffered brain damage four years ago.
I had a subarachnoid haemorrhage, and then I had a stroke after that.
For two years, I couldn't eat anything, or drink anything.
Because of her problems with swallowing,
Angela had to be fed through a tube.
Angela, in effect, by having a stroke that's affected
this key crossing point in the railroads
between the airway and the swallowing pathway,
highlights this innate weakness in the human body.
Martin is keen to examine how the mechanics of Angela's throat
are working, four years on from her stroke.
He's asked her to drink a contrast medium of barium sulphate,
which reflects X-rays differently to human tissue.
Are you OK with this image?
On this moving X-ray, the liquid shows up as a black fluid.
With this scan, Angela's problem is still all too clear.
We can see a lot of it actually does go down the gullet,
does go down the right way.
We can see it going down the right way there,
but quite a lot of it is being held up in this top area here.
So, the epiglottis isn't doing its job, is it?
It's not behaving like a trap door,
and we're getting some of this black contrast fluid coming right down
into the entrance of the larynx, the voice box.
The trap-door effect of the epiglottis
is just not happening for her.
And do you think there's any more you can do, then,
to help her, at this stage?
We've already identified, just from today's exercise,
that turning her head slightly to the left does improve
certain textures going down.
Angela's condition illustrates an extreme version
of the design problem we face.
So, perhaps it would be better if we get rid of this junction altogether.
You might think that dolphins have come up with a solution.
They breathe through nostrils on the top of their heads,
but, on the inside, they've got the same problem as us.
The airway passes through a junction with the digestive tract.
I need to go for a completely new design, never seen before in nature.
This should be easy to fix, surely?
It's a ridiculous design that we've got the airway
and the passageway for food crossing over.
We should be able to separate them out.
My idea is for a throat bypass.
So, we could completely separate them,
the food's coming down from the mouth into the oesophagus,
the air is going from the nasal cavity,
down through these double trachea into the lungs.
Yeah. The mouth has a dual function, though.
We use it primarily for keeping ourselves alive by eating,
but we also, as humans, use it for speech.
If you put the windpipe somewhere else, it's not going to do that.
So, the mouth needs to have air from the lungs coming through it,
in order for us to speak? Yeah.
If we're going to speak like human beings, yeah.
It does. Surely, we'd be better off with gills...
So, if we're going to keep talking,
it's going to have to be a compromise.
So, I've got an idea for how to do this.
So, here's a tiny little valve - it can be very small,
it's a one-way valve, so that you can, if you want,
force air out through here, and it can come out through the mouth,
and you can speak. Absolutely, I don't see why not.
You know, I've actually thought of something else
that this would work really well for.
Speaking as a middle-aged man,
this would be really helpful in avoiding snoring,
which is a massive problem.
We can separate the airways from the oesophagus...
We've solved snoring.
So, I think we've done it. I think we have.
We're pretty pleased with this new design.
But Scott is not so sure, because the neck is already jam-packed.
You have food, you have air,
you also have veins and arteries, and it's all coming through
this really constricted passageway, and then,
to complicate things further,
that same passageway has a huge amount of mobility
so that you can flex and extend your neck,
and also a huge amount of rotation to both sides.
I would honestly have to look at all the mechanisms more closely
to see if it's the best way.
By retaining the lower single windpipe,
and adding optional bypasses just around the throat,
Scott has found a compromised but workable solution.
With less than three weeks to go
before the Science Museum's deadline,
Sangeet and his team are making progress.
Here, we've now joined all the printed elements,
so what we're now doing is using a filler paste to go over
the joins of each of the printed pieces, to create a nice,
seamless transition between all these elements.
As a team here, we are experienced in creating lots
of famous creatures and monsters for movies,
so it's nice to do something that's neither entirely human
nor entirely animal.
The design itself is pretty impressive.
I think Scott's done a beautiful job of designing this, so it's nice.
All that's left now is the head.
The eye.
Often touted as the prime example of refined biological engineering...
..but perhaps it's not all it's cracked up to be.
OK, here's an experiment,
and this one requires some audience participation.
So, please stand up,
and now, cover your right eye with your right hand,
and stare at this cross.
Don't look at me, look at the cross,
and I want you to move back and forwards in front of the screen,
and, eventually, you'll find that my head disappears.
So, this is very strange indeed.
You've discovered a blind spot.
Don't worry.
Everybody's got it, it's perfectly normal, but it's odd.
What is going on here?
I've come to Moorfields Eye Hospital to get a closer look
at what's causing this visual flaw.
I'm handing my eyes over
to consultant ophthalmic surgeon Badrul Hussain.
Mr Hussain? Yeah! Dr Roberts, nice to meet you.
Hello. I'm Badrul, please, please. Alice.
Let's get through, we'll start doing our tests.
If you pop your chin on the chinrest,
and your forehead against the bar, please. OK.
OK. Can you see the light? Yeah.
Very good. OK, stay as you are. Very, very good.
Wide, wide, wide. There's going to be a flash.
Whoa! Yeah. Very good. OK, very good.
Well done. You can sit back.
Ooh, that was quite bright.
Thank you.
Badrul's team has taken a photo of the back of my eyeball - my retina.
The retina is the innermost layer of the eyeball.
Buried inside it are light-detecting cells, known as rods and cones,
that allow us to see.
But they're not distributed evenly.
There is one particular concentration.
So, this is where you've got that density of colour receptors.
Yeah, yeah, so the macular is the tiny little spot here
with this concentration of light-sensitive cells.
That's where most of your vision comes from,
your clear, detail vision.
But close to the highly-sensitive macular is an area
that looks a complete mess.
A nexus of crazy pipework.
Both the blood supply and the nerves connecting the light-detecting cells
to the brain run across the front of the retina,
and pass through a hole at the back.
This area that you see here,
this is where all the wiring exits the eye to get to the brain.
There are no photoreceptors in this area,
so that you've effectively got no vision in that area.
This is the cause of our mysterious blindspot.
We don't usually notice, as our brains cleverly fill in the gap,
but, clearly, our retina is wired back to front.
I think this is a design flaw.
I think it's ridiculous to have the wires coming off...
..in front of the retinal light-detecting cells,
and then having to pile over here.
Pile up in such a way that there's actually no room
for any photoreceptors at that point,
and so you've got a whole area of the retina
where you cannot detect light.
We share this back-to-front design of our retina with all the other
vertebrates - fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals,
we've all got it this way.
It goes very deep in our evolutionary history,
but it doesn't have to be this way.
More than 500 million years ago,
the spineless ancestors of squid and octopi evolved eyes
completely independently.
Evolution led their eyes to form a very similar structure
to that of the vertebrates, but the retinae of these cephalopods
are the right way round, so no blind spots for them.
By adopting the retinal design of the cephalopods,
I will be rectifying an evolutionary glitch that has been hanging
around for 500 million years.
But perhaps our vision has bigger problems than blind spots,
because modern habits are stretching our eyes to their design limit.
We evolved from monkeys and apes who were active during the day.
But, increasingly, we seem to be spending a lot more time awake
at night, and our eyes are just not very good at dealing with low light.
Now, we can modify our environment, but that causes light pollution,
so what if we were to modify ourselves instead?
Now, that is much better.
Image intensifiers work by turning infrared light into visible light,
giving objects instant luminescence.
But by changing the design of our eyes,
we could achieve this with visible light.
It's simply a matter of scale.
As they evolve to live or hunt in semi-darkness,
nocturnal animals often have noticeably larger eyes.
Their enlarged pupils allow more light to hit the retina,
increasing visual sensitivity.
Hey, Alice. So, here's another one for you, then.
I've been looking at eyes and I think our eyeballs could be better,
so they could let more light in and we could trap more light, as well.
And I think the eyeballs need to be about 20-25% larger than they are
at the moment. I... You know,
I think that's just big enough that they will look really interesting.
There's no doubt about it.
You're going to have big old cartoon eyes.
Our distant relations, the Neanderthals,
actually had bigger eyeballs like this.
But we'll be the first vertebrates ever to operate
without a blind spot.
Sight isn't the only sense I want to tinker with.
As we age, our hearing is often the most vulnerable to failure.
Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.
The ears of our hominem ancestors evolved to help them survive
and communicate on quiet grasslands.
Ears haven't developed to deal with the high-decibel noises
we now encounter on a daily basis.
TRAFFIC ROARS
The African savannah was never THIS loud.
TRAFFIC ROARS
I've come to the University of Salford to check on
the true state of my own ears,
seeking the help of acoustic engineer Professor Trevor Cox.
Trevor, I want to find out about my hearing,
and I'd like to test how good it is.
Well, you need a really quiet place to do that,
and I've got just the room for you.
So, after you. In this room here? Yeah, it's this peculiar space.
Whoa, where are you taking me, Trevor? This is bizarre.
What on earth is this room?
Well, welcome to the anechoic chamber.
This is an acoustic isolation room.
I feel like I'm underwater.
It feels as though my ears aren't working properly.
It feels as though I need to pop them.
Well, if you really want to hear how weird it is,
you need to really close the doors,
to block out the outside world entirely.
It's very strange. The silence when we are not talking is dead.
All the foam wedges you can see above you and around you
and even on the floor are absorbing everything I say,
and, normally, when you listen to my voice,
you hear not just the voice coming direct from me to you,
you hear reflections from the walls and the floors and the ceiling.
People come in here and it's a really peculiar sense,
a bit like almost being travel sick,
and it's because you can see a room, but you can't hear it,
and your brain, your two senses are a bit out of kilter. Yeah.
And, therefore, people kind of go,
"No, this is a bit unpleasant, can I go?"
Yeah, I am not entirely happy in here, I must admit.
It is a bit unpleasant.
I wouldn't want to spend much time here,
but it's the perfect environment to check my ears.
So, how are you going to test my hearing, then?
We're going to do a really simple test where we start off with a tone
and move it gradually up in frequency
and see how high a frequency you can hear.
OK, so I have to tell you when I can't hear it?
Yeah, I want you to say when you can no longer hear it.
So I'll start it off. All right.
BEEP
I can hear that.
So, that is right in the middle of the speech range.
And I will just keep dialling it up.
HIGHER-PITCHED BEEP
Can still hear it.
Yeah, I can still hear it.
HIGHER-PITCHED BEEP
Yeah. Yeah.
Yep, I can still hear that.
Can still hear that.
It's weird, but I can still hear it.
It's gone.
So you could hear almost 15,000 hertz.
Is that good? Well, when you were 20,
you probably could hear up to 20,000 hertz.
The problem is, with hearing,
you have this age-related hearing loss
where the inner ear slowly loses some of its sensitivity
and it starts at high frequencies and works down.
You're better than I am. I stopped at about 10,000 hertz,
I couldn't hear it any more,
because I'm probably about ten years older than you are.
The inability to hear like my younger self
comes down to the anatomy of the ear
and, in particular, to the cells that turn vibrations into sound,
inside the snail-shaped organ known as the cochlea.
Hair cells inside the beginning of the cochlea
are responsible for detecting high-frequency sound.
But they also bear the brunt of all sound waves entering the inner ear.
As a result, they're usually damaged before the rest
and that's why we lose high-frequency hearing first.
But according to Trevor, there could be a simple solution.
There is a way I can make it audible to you.
What I can do is turn up the volume.
OK.
HIGH-PITCHED BEEP
Yes. Yeah, OK.
I can hear that quite clearly now.
If you can't, well, sorry -
I'm afraid your hearing is even worse than mine.
So, what you have is a loss of sensitivity,
so when the sound is loud enough, you can hear it,
and that's what hearing aids essentially do, they amplify things,
so you can get it into a range where you can actually hear things.
There is a natural way that we could increase the volume of sound
without a hearing aid, and that's by increasing the size of our ears.
The more sound waves we can trap, the louder the sound we hear.
And that is Trevor's suggestion.
It also has the advantage of focus.
So, Trevor, what's this all about?
So, this is a typical problem you have.
You are in a noisy cafe or bar
and you are trying to pick out the speech
from the noise that is around,
and I can see you are slightly struggling.
I think I am actually only really hearing every other word,
and I'm filling in gaps, but I'm struggling without looking at you.
But in front of you you've got these devices -
if you were to put those on, does my voice become more clear,
with the headphones and funnels on, than it does without?
OK.
As I talk quietly, can you hear the difference as you put those on?
Maybe my speech will suddenly become... Oh, that's...
Yeah, that's... That's really different.
I'm just going to pick up this,
because this is a parabolic microphone, so the viewers,
the listeners at home will be able to hear a similar thing
to what I'm experiencing.
And if you were to rotate that, so it's not facing me any more,
so it hasn't got that... VOICE FADES OUT
..and that volume level should drop off,
and if you point it back to me
and then it should focus and amplify the sound and it should be louder.
So, I'm really won over by this idea.
This is making quite a big difference to my hearing.
But I do need to come up with something
that is slightly less ridiculous.
Mobile ears are a common adaptation in the animal kingdom,
and one that's more feasible in humans than you might have thought.
Scott's aware of an anatomical secret
that could make them a simple adaptation.
The interesting thing about our ears is that,
kind of looking at our evolutionary past,
we have a set of ear muscles kind of left over that we no longer use,
but if we brought those back into play and kind of rewired them,
and maybe augmented them, we could, you know,
quickly kind of reintroduce mobility in our own ears.
With large mobile ears, I will collect more sound
to compensate for my hair cells' decline,
and have an enhanced ability to focus on sounds I'm interested in.
It's time for my final touch.
The largest organ of all - the skin.
Our skin is an incredible protective sheath -
elastic, waterproof and temperature controlling.
It is a fantastic shield, but it has its limits.
Especially when assaulted by UV light,
the high-energy component of sunlight.
To see how my skin has been bearing up,
I've come to a specialist London clinic
where I will be checked out by Dr Anita Sturnham,
who is going to give me a hi-tech facial scan.
OK, if you remove yourself from the scanner.
Your scan is now done,
so we're looking at the deeper layers of your skin.
This is hidden damage.
And so this is your UV damage in the deeper skin layers.
That is shocking.
You have a distribution of UV damage throughout the facial region.
You have slightly more damage than you should for your age.
So, that's over the last six months?
And that is over winter? Exactly.
So we must remember that it's not just about summer protection,
it's all year round.
High-energy UV rays from the sun can cause havoc to our cells,
attacking their DNA, causing dangerous mutations to develop,
which can lead to cancer.
So, that picture of the damage in the dark layers of my skin
looks horrendous. So, what does it represent?
When you have UV damage,
what's happening is those UV rays enter the skin,
they penetrate through the epidermis,
which is like your protective brick wall,
and they enter this layer here,
called the dermo-epidermal junction.
You have immune cells called melanocytes -
their job is to protect your skin from UV damage.
When they get a signal that there's damage happening,
you get melanin production.
When you tan, you're experiencing an immune-like reaction
to the damage being wreaked by UV light.
The brown pigment, melanin, acts as a physical shield,
but it's slow to appear and not highly effective.
Does that mean that any tan at all
is actually going to be associated with damage?
Absolutely. Any tan at all is bad for you.
The fairer skin types, we know,
are more at risk of that damage becoming more severe,
so you're more likely to get burned rather than tanned,
you are more likely then to get an increased risk of skin cancer,
particularly the severe skin cancers like melanoma.
Because of the danger of UV in the Tropics,
our African ancestors were all dark-skinned originally.
But as some human populations moved north to less sunny latitudes,
the evolutionary pressure for dark skin lessened.
So, in some ways, it seems annoying that paler skin ever evolved.
We'd have been better off staying with dark skin.
Absolutely. From a UV damage perspective, yes.
We know, from some studies, that the paler the skin tone you are,
the more effective you are at making things like vitamin D
versus darker skin tones,
so there are some evolutionary benefits to being paler, as well.
If dark skin confers some protection against UV and skin cancer,
but, at the same time, perhaps makes vitamin D synthesis less efficient,
then wouldn't it be brilliant to be able to turn it on and off?
So, if I was trying to make vitamin D, I could make my skin paler,
and if I were wanting to protect myself from the UV, I could go dark.
Some cephalopods and reptiles have colour-changing capabilities,
used mainly for camouflage and communication.
But there's another type of animal that may have developed
the perfect sunshade system I'm looking for.
London Zoo's Dr Chris Michaels
has a few lurking at the back of one of his tanks.
Frogs change colour for lots of different reasons.
Sometimes it could be camouflage,
sometimes it could be to attract the opposite sex.
And, sometimes, it's to protect themselves from sunlight,
specifically UVB radiation.
To protect themselves from sunlight,
amphibians use the same melanin pigment as we do,
but it's contained in a unique type of cell called a melanophore.
So, this is a Majorcan midwife toad,
and you can see on its skin these dark spots,
and the dark spots are where the melanin-containing cells,
the melanophores, are especially densely packed.
Amphibians can rapidly adjust the apparent colour of their skin
by changing the size of those cells.
Our melanocytes only produce melanin slowly when stimulated by UV light.
But the amphibian melanophore cells are always filled with melanin.
They simply inflate like balloons.
In order to make them go darker,
all they have to do is expand those cells.
Those then expand and the frog is immediately darker
because that melanin is on show,
and that can happen over hours rather than over days to weeks
as you would get in people.
It's really, really quick to occur,
so whereas humans may get skin burns,
in that same time the frog would have gone brown already.
And the system works just as well in reverse.
If we had these amphibian melanophores in our skin,
we could provide ourselves with an instant shield
from the worst of UV light,
whilst also allowing for optimal vitamin D production -
the perfect skin for a globetrotting modern human.
This improvement comes just in time,
as Sangeet is reaching the end of the sculpting process.
The brief I have been given is
to create kind of adaptive froglike skin
that can very quickly change colour.
I have gone for a kind of look
that suggests she started off as a light-skinned person,
and I suppose the idea is she has got a very healthy skin tan,
but what I'm trying to do is just localise that,
to suggest that she is able to tan very quickly in some areas
and yet in other areas I'm keeping it much lighter.
Paintwork takes a couple of weeks, at least, really.
To give you an estimate of, you know, how little paint we're using,
there's probably less than half a cup of paint
spread out this entire model.
And the best part about it is
knowing that when I am done with this, the job is done.
With the model almost complete,
artist Scott has come to Sangeet's studio to get a sneaky peek.
Hi, Scott, how you doing? How's it going? Yeah, very well.
Good. All good. She's outside, do you want to come and look?
All right. Let me put my bag down.
So, here we are.
Wow, look at that.
HE LAUGHS
The marsupial pouches.
It is a thing of its own, isn't it?
The hands look great.
The hands are beautiful. That looks amazing.
Here's the last piece.
Wow. I am really looking forward to seeing Alice's reaction to it.
She will have kind of the shock of seeing her in a different way.
I think she is going to fall in love with her new legs.
I think she's going to like it. I think she is going to like it.
Yeah, I think she's going to really like it.
It's been three short months
since the Science Museum set me this challenge,
and now, the night of the big reveal has arrived.
As the crowds gather, it's time to finally meet the new me.
I have not seen anything of it.
I haven't seen any photographs, I haven't seen anything
since very early on in the project
when I was talking to Scott in his studio.
And it's over there with a veil over it.
So, I'm intrigued,
but I'm also slightly fearful about what it actually looks like.
Hundreds of people have turned up.
This experiment has clearly sparked the interest of the public.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Science Museum.
Alice came into this gallery, met me,
we were talking about something that she has complained about endlessly
in articles and books, and it sort of struck me,
well, why doesn't she come up with the perfect Alice?
Now, I can't wait to see what is behind that curtain.
It's now time to introduce...
Alice Roberts.
Thanks, Roger.
So, this has been an extraordinary project.
I have been terribly excited about this for a month.
But I'm also really nervous,
and I'm interested to see what you think, as well.
OK, right, help me with this, then.
Five, four, three,
two, one...
SHE SQUEALS
Oh, my goodness.
Oh.
No, I can't look at her.
Oh, this is really strange.
She's so different, and yet in some ways so realistic.
The thing I find weirdest is the face, actually,
because it does look like my face,
but those eyes have changed the geometry of it.
No, it's not the weirdest thing, is it?
The baby is the weirdest thing. That is the weirdest thing.
But it's very, very cute at the same time.
Ohh!
Alice 2.0 is amazing.
To counter the faults of our flawed transition to standing upright,
she has got a chimp's sturdy lower back
and the shock-absorbing legs of an emu.
To improve blood circulation, she has got tiny pumps in her thighs.
and the graceful lungs of a swan.
Her neck houses a choke-proof windpipe.
And to ensure a pain-free childbirth,
she nurtures her baby in a marsupial pouch.
Her senses have been transformed.
with large mobile ears and light-sensitive super-sized eyes.
This could be a human fit for the future.
I am blown away by the artistry here.
I mean, both of you. It's just astonishing.
It's weird, I'm... I think it is coherent.
Yeah. There's enough structure that it would be mechanically sound.
She looks like she could just walk away.
Yeah, for a moment you are able to suspend your disbelief and... Yeah.
..get wrapped up in something that you can see in front of you.
It's lovely. I can't believe how absolutely brilliantly well
it's all come together, and it's down to you.
So thank you so much.
But what does the public think?
I don't think, in our culture,
that is what you imagine the perfect body to look like.
But maybe it should be. Exactly.
See that first thing in the morning, I would run a mile,
faster than an ostrich.
If I were to think about the favourite part of her,
I would have to think long and hard,
and it definitely wouldn't be the massive eyes looking at me.
I would probably do a lot to spare the sheer horror
of what I expect childbirth to be like,
therefore the pouch is a winner for me.
Same with me.
I think the part I disliked most, if I can say that, is the legs,
because they look so very different, so animal-like.
When I saw the legs, I was astonished.
I think the legs were just so different, so amazing,
something I wouldn't have thought about. And exciting!
Creating the new me has been a fantastic journey.
But along the way, I've had to make a whole series of compromises.
I've provided stability and durability to my spine and legs,
but I've sacrificed mobility.
I've made childbirth easier,
but I'll be carrying this baby and producing milk for it for years.
And with those powerful and reliable new organs,
I may have created a corresponding new set of maladies
that I can only begin to imagine.
This journey has given me a renewed appreciation
of the true complexity of designing a working body
and of evolution itself.
I set out trying to achieve perfection,
and I'm not sure that's what we have done.
We've looked at all those different problems
that are in our bodies and tried to fix them,
but every single time we nudged something in a particular direction,
we lost something else.
So, it's been a lesson in trade-offs.
It's also been a lesson in...
Actually, what evolution has provided us with
is a package that works.
You can't take those individual elements out,
fix them, and put them back in.
It has to work as a coherent whole.
But, nevertheless, I think we've created something
which is different,
which is beautiful in its own way,
and deeply, deeply strange.