Beautiful Minds (TV programme)

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes how she discovered pulsars, the by-products of supernova explosions which make life in the universe possible.

Environmentalist James Lovelock explains how his way of thinking led him not only to breakthroughs in atmospheric detection systems on Earth and Mars, but also to the Gaia hypothesis – a new way of thinking about the Earth as a holistic, self-regulating system.

Biochemist Sir Tim Hunt at Cancer Research UK, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his discovery of the mechanism of how cells divide, recalls moments in his life that provided inspiration for his career as a scientist.

Jenny Clack, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Cambridge University, recounts how she overcame setbacks before she found and described a fossil which offered new evidence of how fish made the transition onto land.

Andre Geim, Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, reveals how his playful approach to his research helped him uncover the properties of graphene, the world's thinnest material, and won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Professor Richard Dawkins reveals how he came to write The Selfish Gene in 1976, an explosive book which divided the scientific community and made him the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation, and how this made him an outspoken spokesman for atheism.