In the Mind of Plants

Plants belong to another universe, a silent and seemingly simple world; they make food from sunshine, which in turn feeds the animal kingdom. But what if plants were keeping something from us? What if they have minds? What if they are intelligent? Scientists are asking these very questions, do they perceive their environment? Do they have a memory? Could they have a nervous system? To these men and women, the great divide between the plant and animal world is not that great at all.

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What Plants Talk About
The Private Life of Plants

Species Hunter

Dr. Marc van Roosmalen is a Brazilian primatologist of Dutch birth living in Manaus in Brazil. His research has led to the identification of several new monkey species, as well as other animals and plants, although some of these identifications are challenged as dubious, unconvincing, or contradictory to the evidence. He is also an activist in the protection of the Brazilian rainforest.

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Andes to Amazon - Amazon Jungle

The Ghost in Your Genes

Biology stands on the brink of a shift in the understanding of inheritance. The discovery of epigenetics – hidden influences upon the genes – could affect every aspect of our lives. At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.

The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence – a cornerstone on which modern biology sits.

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DNA