So here I am not flying, as you can see. It's an ancient dream of people to fly as Icarus did, he flew too near the sun the wax melted, his wings fell off and he crashed to the earth. But we're right to think of how we can modify ourselves but the first thing to do is to think of understanding ourselves, can we understand ourself completely. Does anybody know what this is, yes. Sorry. No it's not an inhaler, I tell you what is it, it's a part of this, or at least the thing that's 5 times bigger than that, it's a part of a jet engine. And this little thing is immensely intricate it's partly made of ceramic, it's a composite material, it's got these intricate, intricate channels cut into it and its job is to whirl around right behind the combustion chambers of a jet engine.

This single blade from the turbine develops as much power as a Formula One Ferrari, this by itself and there's 92 of these in the engine and then others stacked behind. It works because people have designed it very carefully and they've thought about what they're doing they know how the engine works, there it goes you see one of these engines taxiing along and the plane lifts away and carries you safely thousands of miles to where you're going. But it doesn't come about by chance, evolution did come about by chance, but the effect is the same because in both cases after the human design and by evolution all the way through it was trial and error they would try out things, if they didn't work they would try a different way and so on. But now we're in a certain position that we know what's going on. This set of books contains the instructions to maintain this engine, it doesn't even have all the instructions to make it. Well there it can normally there now they're very embarrassed about the books but we wanted them, they actually have it on a CD Rom of course. But that's rather nice because it's also of course like our own genome that's now on a CD Rom, only unlike this one we don't understand it because we didn't design the thing that this codes for. The instructions are here to make a human being but we don't yet understand it, it's a hieroglyph.

We do understand parts of it, we've got some of the components here is a section of what we know about the biochemistry of our bodies. There are many of these charts now to make the whole thing and they show how the proteins, the specialised proteins the enzymes of our body convert one chemical into another and how the parts of our body are synthesised. But what we don't know much about yet is how these parts come together how they're assembled and above all we know very very little about how they're controlled. What turns all these parts on and off at the right moment to make all the cells of our body different and to eventually produce the subtle changes that mean that this codes for a human when something looking very like would code for a mouse or a tree. We don't yet know that. To find out more about it we need to harness everybody on earth, thanks Tim, in the science of bi-informatics, because all the information of biology is getting too great to deal with in a simple way. We have to we have to make computer models of the systems as we build them up, we don't, we don't do there, they're simple at the moment but they will become more complex they become more realistic. And part of this process is the beginning with the human genome is the network of laboratories, there's one here in Japan for example, there's one here at Hinxston our own lab in Cambridge and there is over here I hope in Washington which make, which hold the data for the human genome and all other genomes. And we make all this information from the genome available to all, there are no barriers and no payments because this is the way that we can harness the hundreds and thousands of able minds that are needed to really crack this problem. But now let's think a little bit more about the opening scene of me pretending to fly. Would it be possible after all if we gain control over all the control systems where they're talking now about the whole of the coming century, this is not talking about next year if we really gain control of all of those control systems is it conceivable that we could grow some sort of wings. We probably can't develop enough power ever to take off but we might be able to make pretty decent hang gliders out of ourselves or maybe we could develop gills like this chap here.

But there's another way, there's this way of swimming around under water. You see how the fish are swimming and she is swimming as you can see in a tank there she is, isn't that nice, she's in the tank. Well done thank you very much. But what's, the, what's the disadvantage of that and what's the advantage of the other way. Well the thing is if we did develop gills like a fish first of all it'd be enormous probably it'd would be like sharks and you wouldn't be able to take it off and go and do something else. If, like us, you want to hang glide and aqualung and lie around on the beach in the afternoon then it's far better to have this kind of detachable kit so you can take it off and do something else when you've finished. Thanks very much, well done.

But let's go on further, let's again let's race on through the century and think about what we might do in creating life. Would it be possible to synthesise a piece of DNA from scratch that would make a new life form. Well there's a problem about this, there is a difficulty because you've got to get the thing going and here we have a picture of what happened in the Jurassic Park film. Here's a blood-sucking insect from the Jurassic I think; presumably anyway it's imbedded itself in amber and so the Jurassic Park story was that the insect had sucked the blood of a dinosaur and then immediately and conveniently got pickled in amber and that one could come along and suck that blood out, get the DNA from it and lo and behold create a dinosaur.

Now there's a problem. In order to make a dinosaur, even if you had got the DNA - and let me say straight away there is no possibility of the DNA surviving that long in any useful form - but even if you had got the DNA, the only way you could make it grow would be to put it into a dinosaur egg. This is a cast of a dinosaur egg; it's very lovely, you can see the broken shell there. It's very complete. And you need the system, all the proteins - the cell system inside a dinosaur egg - to make dinosaur DNA work. So that seems pretty forbidding. Is there any escape from this situation? Can we in fact make one form of life or recreate a form of life that doesn't exist anymore? It's a chicken and egg problem: without a chicken you can't make an egg; without an egg you can't make a chicken. What's the escape? Well there is a way. Let's have a go. We have a little fantasy machine here for you and supposing we had a system that we could put the chicken in here, and then close the door and turn the pointer from the present to the past and wind it up a bit and out comes that...

Pretty good, that would be amazing, wouldn't it! But no, I'm not off my head - at least I don't think I am - because it's entirely possible that by making progressive small changes in the chicken that you could actually take it back into the past to one of its ancestors which would not perhaps be exactly like this guy but would be one of that tribe. It's a matter of understanding what's brought us to where we are and then we should be able to retrace the steps or of course go off in some other direction entirely in progressively changing life forms.

Of course there's all these big ifs. I'm not suggesting that there aren't ethical considerations about all of this which we want to think about but I don't think anybody should feel that this is absurd. It'll take a long time we're talking a century or so but it's not absurd to do it and we have in fact some hints that it maybe possible the chicken, people have found that by genetic manipulation you can actually grow little teeth in the beak of a chicken embryo. There are residues there are residual systems there that are able to be expressed again and we have another example here with a python. So this guy has little limb buds getting very wound up here literally, this guy in the back of it's tail here has little tiny hind feet, they're like little claws sitting right there, you see. You see the claw there and the claw there, these are little tiny hind limbs would you like to have a closer look anybody like snakes here. What to have a look can you see the little claws, right there there's one, you see a little brown claw down there. Now those, although it's a sake those aren't being expressed fully they have the potential, the genes haven't entirely gone away. Now that doesn't mean again, this is not going to happen next year, don't imagine that what I'm saying is that we all do a little bit of business with a black box and out comes a dinosaur of course not, but we are going to gain control, we should take that very seriously, we should take very seriously both the power and the responsibility of taking control because it's going to happen over the coming decades. You're going to see remarkable things in your life times.

And it brings us to the unity of life the fact that all living things developed from a single beginning, thank you and through that long process of evolution we've got ourselves to a certain point. I think as as human beings we're tremendously programmed actually we can't help it we're looking all the time for correlations, we're looking to learn, we're looking to see what fits with what. It's sometimes very often leads us astray it leads us into superstition into myth into making up stories about things but it also gives us this great curiosity and this ability to put things together and I think we're building things up into a bigger and bigger structure of understanding with all of our arts, all of our sciences and I think surely we're actually breaking the mould of evolution, the 4 billion years of evolution that's brought us to this point we are now taking it by the tail and what we can do is only limited by our understanding and our imagination. So we have three generations here now in our family, we three, and that's something to think about. With you're a new generation and a human mind that he's developing is able to take us out into the depth of space and to take us into the innermost recesses of our own bodies.

In these lectures we've explored that a bit. I've really gone out to my limits and probably quite a bit beyond but I suspect I haven't reached your limits. I've talked a bit about the uncertainties and the decisions as well as about the joys and the excitement of discovery as he is experiencing and although I can't deal with everything you are going to be able to, that's why we have new generations. We need new generations to take over and leave behind the old with their baggage of prejudice. You know there's never been a better time to be alive. Have a wonderful time exploring.