Gareth Cornick’s show, Can Science Make Me Perfect?, challenges everything you thought you knew about the perfect body. By Team Viva

Anatomist Alice Roberts embarks on an audacious scientific stunt — to rebuild her own body, editing out errors left behind by evolution. With the help of one of the world’s best virtual sculptors, Scott Eaton, and top SFX model maker Sangeet Prabhaker, Alice creates a life-size model of the perfect human body. She meets leading experts to find out what the body’s biggest problems are, and how adaptations in the rest of the animal world could inspire her new, improved design. Ambitious, audacious and packed with cutting-edge science, Can Science Make Me Perfect? challenges everything you thought you knew about the perfect body. Producer Gareth Cornick talks about the show. Excerpts:

Tell us about the show and how is it different?

Well, it’s the first time in my knowledge that anyone has tried to redesign a human body to make it better. And it came from the idea of the perfect body. One day, I was thinking in the office that ‘what do we call the perfect body?’ Is it, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie? And that’s kind of beauty. Then I thought, that we can actually design a perfect body. And what are the pieces of your body that are just not fit for purpose anymore? For a 21st century human? So that’s how Can Science Make Me Perfect was conceptualised.

What draws you to be a part of science shows?

I always had a keen interest in science. I actually trained as a physics teacher to begin with, and just got the feeling that I wanted to make television shows because I’d get a wider audience. For many people ‘Science’ is an off-putting word. But the fact is science is everywhere in everything. So, I like to know things, I am always curious. And so, through the programmes I make, I try to break down that barrier, and show the audience that science is something that everyone should be interested in. You don’t need to be a genius to understand it, you just need to have a thirst for understanding things. So, I like to go far out on ideas, get people excited and get them to teach science — this is what really drives me crazy.

Which are the most striking discoveries revealed in the show?

Well, I think as a part of the skeleton, one thing we really went for were the hips and knees. And in our research, we realised that virtually everyone, by the time they’re 70, or 80’s will have a problem with their hips, knees and back. So, we decided to create alternate designs of a human body, through the process of anatomy. We also looked at the animal kingdom because in terms of evolution, there is a lot of inspiration to be taken from other animals. An ostrich’s legs are fantastic, they don’t break down at all. A chimpanzee never has a backache, and so the lower spine of our skeleton was inspired from a chimpanzee. Did you know we have a blind spot in our retina? And if you were to redesign an eyeball, you wouldn’t want to design it like the eye we have. In that sense, an octopuses eye is a better design and that’s what we have used on the skeleton. That’s fascinating to see how many times evolution has tried to overcome the same problems which humans face in different environments.

Can science make one perfect?

The aim of the show is — can you make a person perfect to live in the 21st century? And that depends on what your idea of perfection is. If it is Brad Pitt’s body or Angelina Jolie’s body, then we haven’t achieved that. And that’s totally subjective. We have designed a body that won’t let you down in 21st century human life, you won’t get any age, you won’t get back ache, your hips won’t need to be replaced, your ears will last you’ll be able to hear till the age of 80, a body that’s fit for purpose, right into old days to 80 or 90 years old. And we’ve debased that by looking at animals in the animal kingdom, how they age and their systems work. It may look freaky, but we think we cracked it.

What are the key takeaways for the audience from this show?

The takeaway is to look at your own body, lifestyle and the modern world arena. It will inform and help inspire people to look after their health better or understand what’s happening to their body they get older.

(The show will air on National Science Day i.e February 28 at 11 am on Sony BBC Earth.)