A Good Science Read: How humans changed the landscape and ourselves

Professor Peter Burge joins Professor Frances Ashcroft to discuss Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens and The Species that Changed Itself or How prosperity reshaped humanity by Edwin Gale. Dust is all around us and we breathe it in with every breath we take, but it is not something most of think much about. Yet it impacts all our lives in multiple ways, causing environmental disaster and damaging our health. In Dust, Jay Owens combines history, politics, travel writing and science to tell the story of dust, from particulates that cause air pollution, to toxic dust from dried up seas, radioactive nuclear fallout and the role of dust in shaping the climate. The Species that Changed Itself combines biology, anthropology, history, epidemiology, and science with fascinating stories and literary references to tell the story of our phenotype. Our phenotype – the way we look and behave – things like height, weight, skin colour and so on, is determined by the interaction between our genes and our environment. But unlike all other species we have created our own environment and in doing so, Gale argues, we have reshaped ourselves - both our physical bodies and our behaviour. Peter Burge is an Honorary Consultant at the Oxford University Hospitals, a Departmental Lecturer in orthopaedic surgery at the University of Oxford and a past President of the British Society for Surgery of the Hand.