One Australian is born every 1.45 minutes, while one dies every 3.25 minutes. We’re good at talking about the beginnings of life, but pretty awkward when it comes to facing the end.
While modern society embraces and celebrates new life and various milestones, the topic of death has become taboo. This series of special events explores life, and looks at how death affects us from the moment we start living: how we come into existence (and how this could change in the future), prevent and create life, prolong the inevitable, and find unconventional ways to die. The Science of Life + Death will push us to the edge of our comfort levels, starting a national conversation about life, death and beyond.
This series proudly supported by Science and Technology Australia
Associate Professor Bryan Fry heads up the Venom Evolution Lab within the School of Biological Science at the University of Queensland. While snakes are his first love, his research team investigates a wide array of venomous animals including komodo dragons, octopuses, centipedes, spiders, scorpions, jellyfish and even venomous mammals such as the world’s only venomous primate (the slow loris).
Jenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who works on Australian animals, including kangaroos and platypus, devils (Tasmanian) and dragons (lizards). Her research group uses the animals’ distant relationship to humans to discover how genes and chromosomes and regulatory systems evolved, and how they work in all animals including us.
Bernie Hobbs has always had a thing for science. And while she’s spent some time actually doing it, her real passion is for talking (and talking, and talking) about science.
A former teacher and medical researcher, Bernie’s been talking, writing and having a beer or two over science at the ABC since 1997. Whether it’s through her weekly radio shows, award-winning websites, Science in the Pub or The experiMENTALS, her mission is to convert the ‘science = yawn’ crowd.
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