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Professor Lee Cronin is trying to create synthetic life in a Glasgow laboratory – giving non-living materials such as sand, rock and metal the ability to divide and multiply like biological cells. If he succeeds he will have answered two of the biggest questions in science: how did life on Earth start? And could there be life on other planets? But Cronin has a problem – despite being a highly successful chemistry professor, people are beginning to question how realistic his theory is. And worse than that, he has publicly set himself a deadline, which has now arrived…
– Synopsis courtesy of Scottish Documentary Institute
Director: Valerie Mellon
Producer: Ruth Reid
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
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8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Animals and humans
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Technology and the self
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Childhood and adolescence
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28 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes