Television: Review

Personally, I think the finest way of marking Science Week would have been to declare a seven-day moratorium on programmes which actively promote human gullibility - but television is not very good at self-denial, so we will have to make do with a temporary glut of attention, whether it is sentimental or suspicious. Some of the programmes are very small indeed, but nonetheless manage to convey the passionate wonder that drives the best science. In Shapes of the Invisible, for example, BBC2 is transmitting a series of beautiful magnifications of ordinary objects, plunging into their inner structure in a seamless zoom. Channel 4 have been running Black Holes in Science, in which various people offer up scientific canapes for our mental titillation. On Monday, Steve Jones started by making one of the few, really intriguing remarks about Dolly the sheep I've heard in the last fortnight: the unresolved question of whether her age should be calculated from her own birth or that of her genes, which have already been around for some years. Apparently, no one yet knows whether Dolly will kick the fodder bucket at around the same time as the adult sheep which provided the raw material or whether her clock was set back to zero in the test tube. The following night, Professor Richard Gregory did an on-the-spot experiment with a tube of glue and a non-stick pan, an engagingly simple procedure which reminded you that all good scientists must preserve the useful ability of children to ask "stupid" questions. Even Newton described himself as "like a boy playing on the sea shore".

This quality of innocent captivation is one of the commodities about scientists that most appeals to television - a religious attitude without any awkward denominational implications. Seven Wonders of the World (BBC2) is a good example of the rational rapture genre, with scientists invited to nominate their own selection of awe-inspiring objects. Aubrey Manning, a biologist, began with trees and concluded with the Grand Canyon - a great fissure in which 400 million years of terrestrial history lies open like a book. He was a little stronger on the rapture than the rationality - sometimes leaving you light on information but still effectively conveying his pleasure in his choices. He also gave some of them a cast of moral indignation, as in his elegy for the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial which had taken over a hundred million years to evolve itself into close morphological proximity to the mammalian wolf - and then been exterminated in decades by farmers.

But science is also useful to television as a ready source of the jitters, an element present in Adam Curtis's odd tale for Modern Times (C4). Curtis's speciality is to construct portraits of modern anxieties through a collage of low culture and archive material. He was in mildly self-denying mood here, employing, as far as I could see, no monster movies in his account of a fairly major glitch in 20th-century medical research. Perhaps this was because the facts were a kind of monster movie in themselves, a Quatermass tale in which the cells of a black female cancer patient survived after death, multiplying in laboratories all over the world.

HeLa cells, named after Henrietta Lacks, their unwitting donor, were at first thought to be a miracle breakthrough, providing scientists with an endless supply of human cells on which to test vaccines and theories. In fact, their inexplicable vitality proved to be a huge problem - a single HeLa cell could invade and take over any culture left exposed. HeLa cells infiltrated top-security research establishments and even crossed the Iron Curtain, resulting in a shocking disappointment for Russian scientists who excitedly announced that they had isolated a cancer virus. Curtis's methods are not exactly scientific - the footage which purported to show HeLa's cells growing under the microscope was a simple reversal of an earlier sequence apparently showing a failed attempt to culture human cells in the laboratory - but the results were compelling even so, a fascinating account of political expediency, scientific ambition and the abiding human dread of extinction.