[APPLAUSE]
Oh my word!
And suddenly the aircraft's depressurising!
You've got to get these oxygen masks on as quick as you
possibly can!
One!
Perfect.
In you go, fast as you can!
My name's Hugh Montgomery.
I'm Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at UCL in
London, University College London, where I direct the
Institute for Human Health and Performance.
My lectures were in 2007 on the science of survival with
the running title of Back From The Brink.
When a meteorite struck the Earth, it produced massive
climate change.
And that climate change was not something that the
dinosaurs could adapt to, and they died.
But your ancestors survived.
And in fact, they were lucky.
But you're very lucky, too, because there have been five
or six episodes of mass extinction in the Earth's
history, all caused by climate change, and every single time,
your ancestors have survived.
In every case, we manage to hang the lecture around a real
life survivor.
So that for me was the most exciting part of it.
We had some tremendous people in.
Mike Stroud, who had man-hauled across Antarctica.
Ranulph Fiennes.
And from that slot up there, right in the ceiling,
abseiling in, Jamie Andrew, who'd been stuck on a mountain
in the Alps for nearly seven days, and ended up having both
arms and legs amputated.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, there's an entrance, Jamie.
Thank you very much for joining this.
Now, this was an extraordinary feat of survival.
I think people looking at that mountain, though, might not
have quite a feel for how cold it was.
How cold were you on that ridge?
It was very cold, indeed.
I mean, the temperatures were measured at minus 30 degrees
C.
And strong winds as well?
130 kilometres an hour down in the valley that day.
I think the demonstrations are crucial to the Christmas
Lectures, partly because that's what they've
always had in them.
It's like trying to have Christmas
without turkeys and pudding.
You just can't do it as a Christmas Lecture.
And CGI and so forth will never replace that real sense
of awe children get when they see something happening in
front of them which can also go wrong.
And they're working on quite low pressure.
And what I'd like you to do, without stabbing and putting
your finger through, is give that a push for
me when it's inflated.
What does it feel like?
Squidgy.
Squidgy!
There we go.
Isn't that beautiful?
And it's a lovely looking heart, that.
Put a twist in it.
The molecule just twists around.
And as you can see, if I only kept doing that, you get the
famous double helix of DNA, which you can see over here.
In terms of things going wrong, I suppose that's also
rather a tradition of the Christmas Lectures, and
actually makes it all the more fun.
Because they're not edited out, these
things that go wrong.
When things don't work, that's part of the narrative.
And we had model just over to my right, actually, from where
I'm sitting now, of a cutout man with a column that was
meant to give an index of how much water he had in them.
And we got a child pouring in water to the level
that he'd been at.
But of course, as often in the Christmas Lectures, we were
down to the wire, Andy had been working all night again
to try to get things together.
Everyone rushed to get out there.
Off we go.
The child is on the stairs.
He's pouring the water in, and it just poured straight out
the bottom, all over the floor.
To here, now.
Oh, it's leaking!
We'd better stop, hadn't we?
He's having a pee!
[LAUGHTER]
Your dad can't hold his beer, can he?
Right!
[LAUGHTER]
Better get you out of the way.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Presenting to children is every bit as demanding as
presenting to adults, if not more so.
And I was trained by a professor many years ago
called Eric Neal, who was one of the world's great
physiologists.
And I remember him saying to me when I was merely a BSE
student, he said to me, Hugh, if you can't explain your
science to a five-year-old, it means you don't understand it.
So genes are very important because at the beginning of
each of them, there's a little accelerator region.
Just imagine it's a few of these letters.
And if you switch on that accelerator, you
switch on the gene.
You switch on the gene, you make more of the protein.
So a gene determines which protein you make, in what
cell, how much, and when.
So I suppose all in all, the Royal Institution Lectures are
hugely stressful.
Very time consuming.
But an enormous honour, tremendously good fun, and the
reward of hearing 300 children for five nights in a row
hanging on your every word is fantastic.
I strongly commend it for others to do in the future.