IntelligenceTheories

Now the pill is a hormone which inhibits the brain by telling it the egg is already being made when it's not being made so the brain thinks the woman is ovulating so it stops sending the message and that's exactly what happens with the male contraception too so if you're given the male hormone that tells the brain "I'm making lots of sperm " so it just shuts down. So it's quite an elegant idea and that feedback is one of the most interesting examples in biology of how the body works. The idea is that the injections will deal with Bill's biological feedback for months at a time. This was his idea. So the first entry on my list is the Pill - revolutionary in the ' s and still reinventing itself almost years later. Fantastic. My next advance has also had a dramatic impact on our lives - in fact it's so significant that it's played a part in almost all of the other inventions on my list. When I was a schoolboy I worked in a radio factory. I was being paid five pounds a week by Mr Benzimra a princely sum to solder little components onto a printed circuit board like this. Little did I realise that across the Atlantic a man was going to revolutionise the whole process. An engineer called Jack Kilby found a way to shrink all these components into one extraordinary and tiny thing. It's this the humble microchip. And since its invention years ago there's been more medical and scientific progress than in any other period in human history. The microchip has to be in our top ten. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed it affects every part of our lives. Without the microchip there would be no laptop no cash card no mobile phone. In short without the microchip we'd still be living in the s. It amazes me that today all those elements of the old electronic circuit board I soldered together as a schoolboy can only be seen down a microscope. And now the technology is set to make it even smaller. I'm in the London Centre for Nanotechnology where they make the smallest particles that are possible to be made. And the reason why I'm wearing the garb is because any skin cell in the atmosphere would contaminate what they do. And here on my fingertip is a little electronic chip. On this chip they can fit million transistors. This the next generation of mini-miracles is as small as it gets...for now. Each electronic component in these circuits is smaller than a virus. And that miniaturisation means that chips like viruses are getting closer to us than we could have possibly imagined. Now here's a thing. This microchip is made of a substance which is entirely edible. So when you swallow it it gets dissolved by the acid in your stomach and it sends a signal to a plaster on your arm. And the plaster on your arm - ow! - has got this little device like a radio and if you haven't taken your pill... I get a message on my phone saying "You haven't your pill today." But there's a darker side to all technology. The sheer proliferation of the microchip does bring some concerns. It's worth considering that within yards of where I'm standing in Piccadilly Circus there must be at least surveillance cameras recording every movement we make amassing a huge amount of data over which we have no control. How we deal with these issues is an increasing challenge. Storage of personal data is largely unregulated and fraud theft and loss of privacy in the virtual world worries many people. But in spite of all this the chip is on my list and we shouldn't forget that without it many of the other advances wouldn't have been possible. Including this next one.