Whether it is looking up at the night sky, or looking inside the human body, science has always fascinated Andrew Cohen. “Scientists go that one step further trying to answer and understand what is going on around them. I love sharing that understanding with the people around me,” believes the executive producer and head of BBC’s Science Unit (he has been with the team for 20 years now). His latest show, Secrets of the Human Body, provides answers to questions like how the human body blocks pain, why shivering can save your life, and such. Shot as a three-part series and hosted by Chris and Xand van Tulleken, the show also uses innovative and cutting edge CGI to show the inner workings of the body.
Originally inclined towards medical sciences, Andrew reveals that failure is what brought him so far. “I have always wanted to be a doctor, but I couldn’t get into medical school because I failed one of my exams,” he says with a laugh, adding, “Since I couldn’t be a doctor and study the working of the human body, I decided to do my research and make programmes on how the human body functions, in a way that everyone can understand.” So, with hundreds of shows in the same genre, not to mention the YouTube videos that break down the workings human body, we wonder what sets this series apart. “It makes you understand how the human body works completely as a unit, and not just systems or organs. So you start to understand just how the complex human body works across all its systems. I would say the show is about extraordinary visuals and cutting edge science,” the London-based producer affirms.
Inside out
From understanding how the minds of six-year-old prodigies work to figuring out how 85-year-olds can participate in extreme triathalons and how cyclists learn new tricks on their bikes, the show, Cohen maintains, not only films the human body, but films them in amazing places. “We also wanted to make the graphics, the CGI as innovative as possible, so we show the human body in its environment and then peer inside it. I think one of the typical examples of that is that we filmed 85-year-old Iron Mike in America who participates in extreme triathalons. He is an example of someone who is using his body at the age of 85 or 86 in a very extreme way,” says Cohen, adding that the show is not simply about how the heart works or the brain functions. “We had to layout the graphics into moving images. This was one of the major challenges. We used a technique of motion capture, where we captured the movement of the body so the computer could track it and then sort of merge the graphics on to those moving bodies. Whether it was children jumping in an ice swimming pond or Iron Mike's triathalon, you see throughout the series this technique of seeing the body in this real world environment with the graphics perfectly trapped into it.”
Matters of the heart
One of the first documentaries that Cohen ever worked on, he says, was a documentary on essential treatments for Parkinsons disease. “I was a researcher at that time and we had found a new type of surgery, where they were destroying a little part of the brain to try and help people who suffered from Parkinsons disease,” he says. He has come a long way from that, but he says that the little things he discovers every single day are fascinating. “For instance, for Secrets of the Human Body, we filmed in a US laboratory where they are actually growing human hearts. The idea is that you can take a donor heart strip it off all of its cells but you leave the intracellular matrix, the framework or the scaffold of the heart intact. They then use stem cells from patients so that they can grow a heart made of their own tissue. So when you put it back into them, it cannot be rejected because it is made of your own cells. That was one crazy things I discovered during the show,” says Cohen, who is now working on a show about the way food is brought to us from across the world.