The Human Body

LIFE STORY

New-born baby Charlotte, like most of us at birth, is simply a bit of fat, a little sugar, a bit of protein – actually she’s 75 per cent water. She’s just a collection of chemicals. And yet she is the most complicated thing on earth, and during her lifetime she’ll achieve amazing things.

Life Story, sets out the complexity of the human body – that miraculous and mysterious organism which we all inhabit, but know so little about. The programme covers the evolutionary development of the body, explaining how it came to be the most advanced life form on the planet. It also explains that, while humans have scarcely changed in many thousands of years, they change totally within the space of a lifetime. Like the caterpillar transforming itself into a butterfly, so humans change beyond all recognition over the years: from a helpless baby, to an eager toddler; from a gawky teenager, to a vigorous young adult; and from mature middle age, to frail old age.

Richard Dale’s film also gives viewers a chance to see the Line Of Age – a remarkable piece of film – which starts with a tiny baby lying in a sunlight forest and pans across a line of 100 people from all walks of life, each one year older than the last, ending with a 102-year-old man. Seen like this, each person unique, yet fundamentally the same, each one another step further along the journey of life, captures the very essence of The Human Body.

AN EVERY DAY MIRACLE

Having a baby is a common enough experience and we feel we know a lot about it, but more than half of what’s actually going on inside our bodies is a mystery, even to doctors. It’s our greatest achievement, and yet it’s cloaked in secrecy.

Phillippa and Jeff Watson live in Bath. They’re both in their thirties and they’ve been married for seven years. Five months ago they started trying for a baby. With new medical imaging techniques developed especially for the series, the cameras take a look inside the uterus, and reveal, for the first time ever on television, the moment of ovulation – the egg being released from the ovary and into the fallopian tube , where it meets the sperm that will fertilise it.

The cameras then follow Phillippa throughout her pregnancy. "I just marvel at the fact that all this is going on, with no real intervention from me," she says."It’s my body taking over and doing it all, and I’m not in control of it. It all just happens."

An amazing sequence, filmed every three weeks, reduces the nine months it takes to create a new life to less than a minute. Phillippa appears simply to walk across the room, as her stomach grows and swells.The cameras also follow the foetus on its hazardous progress in the womb – using never-before-seen images of the dividing cells in the very first weeks of pregnancy.

So what is it like for the foetus to be inside someone else’s body? The Human Body recreates the conditions – a massive heart thundering away nearby, metres and metres of arteries and veins filled with someone else’s blood all around, two cavernous lungs working night and day, and having to contend with the moaning and groaning of the digestive system.

A unique view inside Phillippa’s body at seven months reveals how much space the baby is taking up. All her organs, including the stomach, liver and lungs have been squashed upwards, and her heart has both grown larger to cope with the extra work and been pushed sideways by the expanding uterus. Perhaps birth should be viewed not so much as an occasion when things can go wrong, but more as a miracle that can go right.

FIRST STEPS

This programme explores the first four years of childhood. Four years of miraculous achievement. Never again will the human body change so fast and learn so much, yet most parents take it entirely for granted.

The first few hours of a baby’s life are full of life-threatening challenges – to learn to breathe, to adapt to air temperature, and to find food. The cameras follow Bob as he starts out on his journey through life, from the moment his umbilical cord is cut to his growing relationship with proud parents Jane and Richard Jeffers, from Oxfordshire. Bob may have little conscious control of his body, but he does possess a handy set of automatic responses that help him survive. From automatically gripping objects fiercely with his hands and toes, to suckling at his mother’s breast.

Andrew Thompson’s film then joins eight-month-old Zach Troullous, from London, to explore the next crucial stage of development. It follows him over six months as he learns to take his first steps and speak his first words. At the same time, stunning motion analysis photography traces a baby’s crawling action, while imaging inside the ear explains how the skill of balance develops and medical scans of the larynx show what a baby needs to do to learn to speak.

Words and language are the most important things that a child will ever learn. Not just words to describe things you can point at, but words to describe abstract things: your past, your future, your fears, and your hopes.

Four-year-old triplets James, Sean and Evan, who live in Philadelphia, then demonstrate early social skills. They are beginning to understand concepts such as right and wrong, and to develop their mind-reading skills. Far from being supernatural, it’s the ability to work out what another person might be thinking. The realisation that other people have points of view different to your own is also essential to the understanding of stories.

RAGING TEENS

Over four agonising years, our bodies and our minds are transformed during a biological revolution from childhood to sexual maturity. We call that rollercoaster ride puberty.

If living through puberty feels like a horror story, the villains of the peace are hormones. These tiny chemical messengers are beyond our control. Suddenly hordes of them start racing through our bloodstream, ordering our bodies to change. They tell us to switch on to sex, getting us ready to make babies. They tell our muscles and bones to get bigger and stronger. They make hair sprout in unusual places. And sometimes they really let us down and ugly spots erupt.

Amazingly, it seems that hormones affect our brains too. They make us think about new things, in a new way. Teenagers notoriously want to break free from their parents, and their rebellion can cause pain all round. But children are only doing what’s needed to maintain the next generation. They’re beginning to look after themselves and recognise the responsibilities of adulthood.

The cameras follow a group of articulate, surprisingly forthcoming teenage boys in California and, in a unique record, watch British 12-year-old Beatrice Maude for a crucial 18 months of her life, as she goes through the ups and downs of adolescence. "When you’re a teenager, you go bolshie, you get your periods, get hips and pubic hair, and you get breasts. I don’t want it to happen really," she says with typical candour in her first interview.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Once girl has become woman and boy has become man the body can look forward to the biological calm of adulthood.

BRAIN POWER

Between the turmoil of puberty and the decline of old age, the human body reaches its peak. In biological terms, adulthood is the finished article – the first time that we simply live our life rather than prepare for it.

But there is something unique about the human body that has made us the most powerful animal species on Earth. All the triumphs of human endeavour stem from one thing. It is the most mysterious part of the human body, yet it dominates the way we live our adult lives – it is the brain.

Scientifically, the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. A state-of-the-art medical scanner allows viewers to see inside a brain as a subject listens to music to see which areas are stimulated. Different parts light up as he processes the sounds and appreciates them, separate bits again are activated by melody, rhythm and pitch.

For the first time on television the cameras capture a single brain cell – or neuron – magnified 10,000 times, as it fires an electrical impulse, or thought. Further experiments demonstrate how easily the finely balanced cocktail of chemicals, which control the brain, can be disrupted by a few glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Human Body explores the amazing accomplishment of vision and demonstrates how we make sense of what we see, reveals how memory works, and why stories fuel our ability to remember things. It explains that the huge growth in the human brain probably came about because of the necessity of getting on with other people and having to cope with society.

Andrew Thompson’s film also attempts to pin down the brain’s most significant quality – consciousness. It’s difficult to pin down, but consciousness allows us to appreciate the greater things of life – love, art, science and religion – it’s what makes us truly human. Consciousness makes the brain more than just a collection of little grey cells and electricity. It gives us our mind.

AS TIME GOES BY

The film charts our gradual, but remarkable decline into old age. Uniquely in the animal kingdom, humans live beyond childbearing years, and even the years it takes to raise children.

Bud Mather is 78 and his wife Viola is 63.They have been married for 45 years and live in a small farming community in the Midwest of America. Bud is still herding cattle on their ranch in Kansas. "As we grow on through the years, we get a little more hair here and there, and a little less here and there," laughs Viola. And Bud adds: "But I don’t think our love has got any less. If anything it’s grown and we’ve got more understanding of one another."

The cameras travel inside the eye to explore the mechanisms of vision. John Groom’s film shows why the deterioration in Claude Monet’s eyesight made his paintings of the lily-pond, in his beautiful garden in Giverney, alter dramatically over the years. There’s also an explanation of why the male sex hormone, testosterone, causes men to go bald, but prompts hair to sprout from noses and ears, and even causes light beards in some elderly women.

So why do we age? One of the greatest paradoxes of human biology is that the body is constantly renewing itself, yet it still grows old. It seems that the process of making copies of the cells degenerates over the years, rather like a video, which has been recorded over too many times.

The pilot whale is the only other animal that also experiences a menopause – and some zoologists think that this allows it to help out in caring for the young of the group. Could it be that humans have also evolved to concentrate on making the most of their old age by being a grandparent? We tend to think of the human capacity for art, science and technology as the thing that marks us out, but although we don’t often see it this way, perhaps our ability to live to a ripe old age is the human body’s greatest achievement.

THE END OF LIFE

We go about our daily lives hardly ever considering our final fate, yet at every moment we are surrounded by death – around 60 people will die in the United Kingdom during the course of this programme.

The processes of death in the human body are remarkable. Death is rarely a single event; it is a slow winding down as the body’s functions shut off. It is difficult to say exactly when every cell in the body ceases to have life. Long before we stop breathing, our brain may die, our personality lost forever.

In a moving tribute to the courage and determination of one man with inoperable stomach cancer, the cameras follow the last few months of his life. With his full support and co-operation they observe his slow decline, up to and beyond the moment of death. "I know I will never see this film in my lifetime," he says. "But I want everyone to see that a human being can manage an illness like mine, and that there is a way to make the best of the end of your life. I am not worried about dying – whether it is today, tomorrow or in a couple of months time. I know what’s coming and I face it."

From the beginning of the human body’s journey, death becomes an essential part of life, reveals Chris Spencer’s film. Even in the womb, some cells in the foetus receive signals to self-destruct, as they divide and grow. The hand, for example, develops as an enormous bundle of cells. Some of them are systematically destroyed, to sculpt the fingers and the gaps in between, in the same way that a sculptor chips away a block of stone. Using pictures from a hospital scanner, the cameras see inside a heart, as it undergoes a cardiac arrest, and watch a patient appears to ‘die’ briefly in a routine heart by-pass operation.

When someone dies we miss all the things that make them human – their personality, their unique identity, their emotion and warmth. Experiments with brain scanners shed light on the nature of that consciousness that goes.

Although we find it hard to contemplate our own deaths, there is one way in which our bodies will continue after we die. The cells in our bodies are made up of atoms that have existed since the start of the universe. They are constantly being exchanged and recycled. So today what makes up our bodies, were once parts of plants, animals, trees – indeed other humans.

THE MAKING OF THE HUMAN BODY

A special one-off film unveils some of the secrets of The Human Body, the series which takes cameras to places they’ve never been before. With innovations specially created for the programme, it reveals in staggering detail how our bodies work, following the journey we all make from the moment of conception to our last breath.

The Making Of The Human Body reveals how specialist cameramen filmed extraordinary sequences inside the body using a mixture of techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy, endoscopes and medical scans, to travel inside the inner ear for the first time, or to reveal the surface of the tongue in incredible detail. It demonstrates how computer graphics designers invented a system to translate medical scans into three-dimensional images, so that viewers can travel round the interior of mother-to-be Phillippa’s body and unborn baby, around the brain and even see the workings of the teenage knee.

Time-lapse photography has been used to record the amazing activity of the body, from the sprouting of hair to the growth of nails and bones. For the first time ever, the programme reveals a baby’s teeth bursting through the gums. Dentists Kathryn Harley and Richard Ibbetson used time-lapse techniques over 40 days to capture this unique event in their daughter’s life.

Motion capture techniques, using infra-red sensitive reflectors to track the precise movements of the body and translate it into realistic graphic images, reveal an amazingly accurate crawling skeleton, moving exactly like a real baby.

One of the most delightful sequences of the series shows several babies swimming underwater to demonstrate a little-understood early reflex. The sequence, which lasts just a few minutes on screen, took 30 people 12 hours and a huge amount of watertight camera and light equipment to capture. With the magic of chroma key, the technicians are able to make the mums and helpers, all dressed in blue, disappear from the final film. And the experts in the editing suite are able to make the babies appear and disappear exactly on cue.

The ‘Line of Age’ is one of the most memorable sequences of the series – the camera pans across 100 people, aged from just a few months old to more than 100, each one a year older than the one before. Shot in a forest in Surrey, it shows how the passage of time affects us all. One of the biggest and most complicated shoots to organise, it captures the essence of the human body – endlessly changing, ever surprising, and seen in this series in a fresh and fascinating way.