Science Britannica

This is the Old Bailey.

Today, it's the central criminal court

but until the mid 19th century, this site was home to Newgate Jail,

the most notorious prison in Britain.

On the morning of the 18th of January, 1803,

George Foster was taken from his cell here in Newgate Jail

and led down this corridor.

The reason this corridor narrows as you walk down it is that

as prisoners were led down here, they had a tendency to panic

and that's because this is the last walk they made of their life.

This was the route to public hanging.

Vast crowds had gathered outside the jail to witness

George Foster's last moments.

According to one contemporary account,

Foster died very easily as several of his friends

who were under the scaffold had

violently pulled his legs in order to put a more speedy

termination to his sufferings.

Now, Foster's hanging was an unremarkable event.

Public executions were common in 19th century London, but what

was unique was what happened to Foster's body after he died,

because it was taken directly from the gallows to an operating theatre.

George Foster's corpse was to be the centrepiece of a public

demonstration by Professor Giovanni Aldini, a practitioner

of the latest field of scientific experimentation...

..galvanism.

Galvanism was the belief that electricity was the spark of life,

perhaps even the very essence of life itself, and this is what Aldini

intended to demonstrate by taking a pair of electrodes and in front

of the watching audience, thrusting them into George Foster's corpse.

To the audience's amazement,

the dead body in front of them twisted and contorted.

When current was applied to the face, the dead man opened his eye.

Aldini was hoping that, through these experiments,

he would one day be able to bring people back from the dead.

For many watching in the audience, this was a step too far.

It was outrageous, immoral even,

and ultimately Aldini was forced to leave the country.

He's alive! He's alive!

He's alive! He's alive!

A few years later, Mary Shelley wrote her seminal work,

Frankenstein, the story of a corpse brought back to life.

And it's said that the eponymous scientist

was based on Aldini himself.

This image of scientists as Frankenstein's,

meddling with powers beyond their control,

is a vivid one that colours the public's perception

of science to this day.

The idea of mad scientists creating dangerous monsters has haunted

the story of British science.

In this film, I want to find out why.

I'm going to visit the locations where some of the most

controversial discoveries in British science were made...

..and examine the impact they had on the world.

It provided a physical explanation or heredity.

I'll be looking at scientists whose research horrified the public...

and I'll be meeting researchers

whose work remains controversial to this day.

I never had any doubts about the benefits that

accrued from the work that I was privileged to be involved in.

I'm not embarrassed about what I do.

Science is one of this country's great success stories.

We punch way above our weight.

I mean, just look at this view.

Over there, in Paddington, lived Alexander Fleming,

whose discovery of penicillin transformed our treatment

of bacterial infections.

There, on the other side of Regent's Park, lived Michael Faraday,

whose work in electricity and magnetism, electromagnetic induction,

made electricity a practical and useful thing.

And there, on Gower Street, lived Charles Darwin,

where he first formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection,

which transformed our view of the natural world.

It's these discoveries that shaped modern life.

And this from just one tiny slice of the country.

Across the whole of Britain,

our contribution to global science has been enormous.

But while Britain has been the location

for so many of science's important discoveries,

it's also been a place where discovery can be controversial.

A place where science, and scientists,

can still be treated with suspicion.

And to find the reasons for that, we need to go back

in time to when science caught the public imagination as never before.

In the early 19th century,

Regency London was at the centre of an intellectual revolution.

It was a place of great art and great architecture,

and the rock stars at the time were the Romantic poets -

mad, bad and dangerous to know.

But equally famous and arguably more dangerous

were the natural philosophers or, as we call them, the scientists.

At the time, science was transforming the way we understood the world

and the public were desperate to hear of the latest advances.

Lectures given by the top scientists of the day would be sold out.

And, in 1802, the hottest ticket in town was the Royal Institution...

..where the star attraction was their new professor of chemistry...

..Humphry Davy.

Humphry Davy was a Cornishman and a brilliant scientist.

He became professor here at the Royal Institution

at the unlikely age of 23.

He was good-looking, charismatic and many said, arrogant.

He thought he was a genius and he was probably right.

As well as being a brilliant chemist,

Davy was also a passionate communicator of science.

Davy was a genuine star.

The Royal Institution theatre was packed with the great

and the good of the day.

They had come to witness Davy's spectacular demonstrations.

It had all the excitement of a magic show,

but what Davy was doing was better than magic...

..it was chemistry.

Davy first carried out this experiment in Italy

and what he was interested in doing was setting fire to diamonds.

Now...

Hang on a second.

They're very hard to hold in the tweezers.

When it is white hot, as hot as I can get it,

then I'm going to drop it into liquid oxygen,

and what should happen is the diamond should catch fire.

As the diamond burns, a single product is produced -

the gas carbon dioxide.

Through this experiment, Davy was able to deduce that diamonds

are made solely of carbon.

That the most valuable gems were made of the same stuff as coal.

To Davy's audience, this was captivating.

Here, in front of their eyes,

he was demonstrating one of the latest scientific theories.

That everything is made up of a limited number of elements.

Davy was famous for doing spectacular experiments,

in particular for blowing things up.

In fact, it's said that he was something of a pyromaniac.

And this is one of the experiments.

It's involving iodine, which is

in fact one of the elements Davy is famous for discovering.

So, Davy mixed iodine with this liquid,

and what happens is a powerful contact explosive is made.

And, in one of his experiments, he temporarily blinded himself

by doing just what I'm doing now.

Now what Davy wanted to do was to educate his audience.

He wanted to show them that chemistry was exciting and counterintuitive.

This idea that you can make compounds out of other substances that have

extremely surprising and, in this case, spectacular properties.

Nitrogen triiodide is a wonderful compound

for demonstrating those ideas.

It's basically a nitrogen atom with three iodines stuck to it.

Now, nitrogen atoms want to interact, they want to bond

together into the very stable nitrogen molecule, but the

iodines keep them just far enough apart that they can't interact.

All you have to do to change that

and make them interact very quickly indeed,

is to give them a little tickle.

And it really is a very little tickle.

Whaa! Look at that!

And that purple vapour there is iodine,

so that was a very rapid chemical reaction.

Nitrogen is produced and iodine is released.

Yeah, I can see why Davy liked that.

What Davy was demonstrating is that acquiring and applying

scientific knowledge gives us power over nature.

And his writings reveal how he believed our future

lies in exploiting this power.

Science has bestowed upon him

powers which may be almost called creative,

which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him.

And by his experiments to interrogate nature with power,

not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her

operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments."

Here, Davy is echoing the language of the Romantic poets.

When he uses the word creative, he doesn't mean the qualities

required to write a novel,

he's talking about being a creator in the Biblical sense.

Of controlling nature.

Davy is claiming for science the territory previously occupied

exclusively by religion...

and not everyone was so enamoured

with the idea of scientists playing God.

Shortly after Davy wrote those words,

Mary Shelley wrote her famous gothic novel Frankenstein.

And here, in the introduction to the second edition, she writes,

For supremely frightful were the effect of any human endeavour

to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world."

I mean, here is science with a dark side.

Frankenstein becomes a stereotype,

a view of science as darkness as well as light.

Scientists can also create monsters.

At the time, Mary Shelley's fears were not widely shared.

The majority of the public remained in love with

science for another century.

Just as Davy had predicted, we discovered more

and more about how the world works, and learned how to control it.

But as our scientific understanding increased,

so too did the potential for that knowledge

to reveal a dark side and unleash monsters.

70 years ago, this nature reserve in North Wales was

the site of a top secret military facility...

..at the heart of both the war effort and British science.

This was the home of the chemical warfare project.

It's where mustard gas was manufactured.

We are ourselves firmly resolved

not to use this odious weapon