says it needs more time to properly install the system following the void result in august supreme court judges blamed voting irregularities for a knowledge the reelection of president two who are kenyatta. american maria is heading for the u.s. territory appear to recur after jamming other islands in the caribbean dominico was hit when maria was a category five hurricane and the island's prime minister says quote all that money can buy is lost or he has now weakened briefly to a category four storm but has now regained strength it's now categorized as being back up at a category five. donald trump is due to make his first speech at the united nations general assembly in new york in just a few hours time he made his debut at the u.n. on monday warning the world body isn't living up to its potential the u.s. president lame bureaucracy and mismanagement but also promised to help reforms. nine fro democracy activists in hong kong have appeared in court for a pretrial hearing charged with conspiracy to commit

a public nuisance for their roles in protests and twenty four teen if convicted could face up to seven years in jail. those are your headlines up next signs of a golden age change here top of the hour i'm back after that. modern high tech advances in medicine and health are of course the result of many centuries of development research and experimentation much of which took place in the islamic world between the ninth and fourteenth centuries a golden age of science during this time scholars in the islamic world made huge contributions to medicine and created a body of knowledge that was tremendously important and influential around the world for many hundreds of years i'm jim alchemy which is professor of theoretical physics but born in baghdad i'll be exploring states of the art biomedical science

and the covering the contribution made to the field by the scholars in the golden age. it was during your golden age that medicine started to be treated as a true science with emphasis on empirical evidence and repeatable procedures during that time medical books are written they became standard texts throughout the world . for many hundreds of years i've come here to the hum of hospital in bellhop to see how the ideas of the scholars in the medieval stanek world compare our modern

medicine. the hospital's neonatal unit deals with premature and newborn babies who are suffering from a variety of conditions is the only one of its kind and babies are referred here from across the country all in all through our doors we probably have. seventeen to eighteen hundred babies now so about ten to eleven percent of the total birth that occurs in this hospital so it is by comparison one of the biggest units in the world we do look after babies who are as small as twenty three or twenty four weeks gestation so you're looking at a five months pregnancy or someone with pregnancy and that in itself is incredible i mean not that long ago twenty three twenty four we call just days and there's no way that survivor and we've come a long way at this hospital there carrying out pioneering research to improve the

treatment of babies born with neonatal. that is babies born with serious neurological damage because of a problem with oxygen or blood supply in the womb. the gold standard of treatment is putting these babies on a cooling mattress to try to reduce the temperature and limit the potential ongoing damage that could ensue in the brain however it does not really provide an appropriate success rate worldwide here we're trying a simple remedy that we believe has potential which is that addition of a drug called magnesium sulfate but it's never been tried in combination with the cooling. to improve the reliability of their research the hospital is using what we call a control and bright. some of the babies receive magnesium sulphate whereas a separate group the control group don't receive it this allows the hospital to

compare fairly the effects of the treatment with and without the drug. so this particular study is double blind placebo control which means we are offering some of our babies a placebo and some who are getting the magnesium sulfate we don't really know which are which and that's otherwise i mean why the virus little boy is exactly one thing that of tremendous interest to me is that this idea of a control group actually goes all the way back over a thousand years to a persian physician by the name of a razi who built the first hospitals in baghdad who was looking into the causes and treatments of meningitis and i believe he had not only his sample of patients he had a control group to which he wasn't it minister in the treatment in one case it was blood letting you know isn't the way you treat meningitis but the idea of

a control group goes all the way back to to iraq this is actually one of the most important components of research that we do have. a control group to try to to ensure that you know our study has come out as non-biased as possible to comparing it absolutely absolutely. however as he was born in the city of ready to herat in the mid ninth century and he was an early proponents of applying a rigorous scientific approach to medicine during his distinguished career he served as chief physicians of hospitals in both ray and baghdad. in the early tenth century the ruling telling him back that looked iffy after razi where in the city he said build a new hospital so arise he designed an experiment he hung around different locations. to see how quickly they rotted and so determined the place with the cleanest air this was typical of a razi you have

a problem you design an experiment to find the answer. during the golden age the dissection of human bodies was considered disrespectful but there was one group of people who knew quite a bit about anatomy butchers albeit the anatomy of animal than human. well even though this is just the lambs of a human all we can still see quite clearly the different compartments the different chambers within the heart this isn't something very familiar to his early physicians of the medieval age. in the seventeenth century william harvey famously carried out his groundbreaking research into the circulation of blood in the function of the heart but in one

thousand nine hundred eighty four an ancient document was discovered this was a text written by him in the thief's the thirteenth century arab physicians in it he described the basics of pulmonary circulation how blood doesn't move across from one side of the heart of the other has to take the long way round around the body this four hundred years before harvey. building on the writings of physicians like in a nephew and william harvey our understanding of the heart has continued to develop harefield hospital in the u.k. is part of the country's largest center for heart and lung disease they're cutting edge treatments build on the work of professor matisyahu one of the world's leading heart specialists to set up the hospital's busy transplant unit and who's received a knighthood in britain for his services to medicine the heart is such like a magical the more i learn about it the more i respect it because it cause on

incessantly beating quietly maintaining life professor yet who is also interested in the history of medicine as part of a paper he commission for a medical journal he's researched the life and work of it. here we have a scholar. born in syria in the early part of the thirteenth century he was a policeman because he was studying and he was. a few words and here was a scientist if you lie he was a discoverer but arguably his most important contribution was his comment. on medicine in which he looked at how blood moves through the heart so this is the heart and you can see quite clearly the right ventricle and the left then to go and

these are two completely separate chambers the question has been. how does blood go from the right ventricle to the left and from. the centuries the accepted view had been that of the renowned greek physician galen galen said that blood passes directly between the rights and left ventricles of the heart through tiny holes in the septum the dividing wall that separates them from the feast was the first to challenge galen's view he established that there weren't any holes so they had to be another way for blood to pass from rights and left the contention of some persons to say that this place is porous it's pieced on that preconceived idea that the blood from the right men to him had to pass through the process. and they are. just as he's

quoted as saying that for somebody as young as this person at the time when he was twenty nine to have the courage to state. such a thing it's absolutely remarkable. galen said that there are holes in the septum. but. if you open the right ventricle like i'm doing now it is solid there on no channels whatsoever him in a few swiss absolutely right. in the feast stated that the blood must first pass through the lungs where he said it mingled with them before it came back to the heart and was pumped around the body and now we know. the blog from the rice ventricle goes into the pony all three ways here. goes around the long. comes back. into the

reference so this is the primary circulation which comes here. that is discovered it's now obvious what it was and then. evelyn if he says description excepted at the time and it wasn't until his manuscript was rediscovered in the twentieth century his work was universally recognized it's now part of the long history of medicine that continues to evolve today we have learnt a lot. and we have to stop it. how to replace or how to mend the. person or. the journey continues. early hospitals did exist in the ninth century baghdad but these were little more than hospitals for the sick offering care but not much in the way of cure however

hospitals as we recognize them today giving treatments and offering medicine for free they begin to appear around the empire in cities such as cairo and damascus. in order for these hospitals to provide care they needed a knowledge of medicines and surgery the most important work of the golden age was written by the great tenth century philosopher and physician been seen or better known by his latin name at the center this is my personal copy of his great text the talent of medicine for. the full work was a multi-volume group of texts that took on where the greeks left off. in this first book he describes human anatomy in great detail and what i love is that he talks about things like. the muscles of the face and then the muscles of the foreign. the muscles of even the muscles of the. heathen works his way through

the human anatomy in other texts he describes surgery describes illnesses and treatments it's medical knowledge as they understood it then they contained a lot of superstition but a lot of common sense as well the point is this text was so important it was still being used around the world over five hundred years later. even though today we know that not everything had been seen a road was corrected his work was the pinnacle of medical knowledge at that time in his canon he includes a large number of medicines and remedies that use common had. during the golden age herbal remedies weren't an alternative to mainstream medicine they were all very new and as the empire grew travelers will bring back new plots from far and wide so new drugs were discovered and administered rima has met is based in our june in jordan she cultivates medicinal herb some of which have been in use since

the golden age. live and is good for. and is very good for. so even though they would have used this in the golden age i wouldn't understand about bacteria. and this is. wormwood. what is this useful for the call over to treat cancer. and this was known from. this is. this. yeah this is good for. what i find so fascinating is that during the golden age every hospital would have had a herb garden just like this with a drug store and it's interesting that we're hearing those same devotees the still

describe and in use in modern times. even seen as great canon of medicine describes a variety of her. one thousand years after the canon was written dr detlef quinn turned his growing some of these herds in a park in istanbul so that he can study the medical remedies the even seen it described we planted following the canon of medicine twenty six. plans out of hundreds which had been described by. twenty he worked for six years of the company so. they had medicinal properties what. they were unto toxic. and some of them up today that have this active ingredients we say i can show you one sample it is called now.

you can find it also on the bread on the turkish bridge. small black sea yeah. human. right. it was also anti toxic for example mentions it against bites probably snake bites it was used for. still tissues. other important works during the golden age it been seen as canon of medicine spread across the islamic world and young as the process of knowledge transfer was revolutionized one reason read so effectively. the islamic empire was because it suddenly became much easier to produce copy text the islamic scholars had adopted the chinese technology of paper making and paper is much cheaper to produce and use

the parchments piracy an important aspect of this is killigrew of handwriting so i've come to meet a calligrapher to tell me all about. a method and. that be this nami in the kind of stuff we do have to come come in and you know. a lot of.

the chinese paper was jury. and more easily bound into books which created a thriving publishing and copying industry manuscripts had to be duplicated by hand and this produced a great demand for slimy calligraphers. to music and then there were only used to him you claim to be having. fun. with that again and again on the. floor in the good of the forgotten was over thing and i think. there was a belief in the. meaning of. well calligraphy clearly remains today just as important an art form as it was back in the golden age the scholars then not only perfected the art of paper making they also developed simpler forms of calligraphy means of preserving their paper and

binding blues' to hold their books together in that way these technologies came together enabling them to produce books in large quantities this is how their knowledge propagated so effectively throughout the world. the manuscripts of the golden age influence scientists after the decline of the islamic empire for instance had been seen as canon of medicine was translated into latin. was still being printed in circulated well into the sixteenth century these texts influenced the great thinkers of the rene songs who in turn laid the foundations for our modern world. this impressive building is the weill cornell medical college an offshoot of cornell university in new york based head. of come to find out more about their genetic research how their mapping the human

genome to find out more about genetic and hereditary diseases pertaining to people in this part of the world. the genome is the complex genetic code contained in every cell in our bodies it determines all our inherited features such as what we look like in heritage diseases we might be vulnerable to it's unique for every person so this is a microscope that allows you to look and different depth inside the cell. professor. has great expectations of what sequencing genomes will reveal the program is about six years old now the focus is on problems that are of importance in the region particularly into other where there is a lot of families that have inherited diseases. and diabetes is a critical importance there in your genetic disorders or critically important so we've chosen to take those families and sequence both affected on affected members and that will help us been pointed gene that causes

a disease. the key to understanding these diseases is to analyze people's genomes to look for differences and to do this they use a d.n.a. sequence or connected to a supercomputer all living organisms i made up of cells each cell has a nucleus and within the new pieces the genetic material that defines the features that make a few of. these genetic material is a code made up of over three billion components called bases. is too long to be analyzed in one piece so first they need to split it into smaller sections these machines is does a process called shotgun sequence so essentially here what we do is take that genetic material chop it up into small pieces and load it into the instrument it will and chirp read the information and put these pieces back together so rather than trying to follow the full string awful but the billions of bases on one d.n.a.

molecule is chopping it up looking at different bits and then putting it back piecing it back together genetic technology is evolving rapidly the lab has recently installed their most advanced piece of equipment for d.n.a. sequencing is the first of its kind to be used in the middle east this is the third generation sequencer and what it does is it sequences or fragments of the genetic code this one can give us as you see here the tail goes all the way to forty thousand or two thousand as a model one handed out in that one so that will give you more structure information on the chromosome this equipment makes it possible for the lab to sequence the gene . ans of large numbers of people is a huge advance since one thousand nine hundred ninety when the first projects to sequence the human genome officially began their original human genome reference was sequenced in ten years it was a huge international feeling yeah it was

a big accomplishment and now we can sequence the human genome within six to ten days with this technology so the advances are huge within ten years. going on here puts the university at the forefront of modern research building on the scholarly spirit of the golden age were over a thousand years ago the flow was from the west to the arab world where people were coming to. the other side andrea in damascus centers of learning and learning about the latest technology and what's going on and then taken it back home and improving their own health care or mathematics or understanding of astronomy or whatever of this do you feel personally a sense of pride that now in the arab world in the muslim world there is this cutting edge research going on again after so many centuries of decline where it was once the center of of knowledge and research you know very much so very much so

i think that's a huge incentive for a lot of scientists who are originally from the region to come back and contribute back but i also see it as a bridge to you know science tend to be a good subject to bring different. people from all over the world together because everybody is seeking new knowledge so it's a great platform to kind of build connectivity and build a multicultural environment where everybody can discuss and talk about these things . while my head is spinning not only of the head the most advanced and well equipped that i've probably seen anywhere in the world. but they've brought together researches from around the world different cultures different backgrounds to work together collaboratively in a way that's so reminiscent of what happened in the house of wisdom in baghdad during the height of the golden age.

from astronomy and optics to chemistry. and medicine. we trace the journey of scientific discovery that links the scholars of the golden age to the cutting edge science. what you have here is a handheld model of the sky their achievements book groundbreaking this is a particular favorite of mine it's beautiful and their discoveries still resonate today almost a thousand years after the golden age of song as. for the nomadic jacka tribe survival is about reaching their destination. if we don't hurry the lever be able to get the top up in the storm we follow the mongolian

herdsmen on a treacherous migration. is dangerous the ice is then as they strive to preserve their traditional way of life. or sometimes lose or get there with a cold or because of the storm risking it all mongolia at this time on al-jazeera. business update brought to you by cats are always going places together.

business updates brought to you by cats are they always going places together. this is al jazeera. and i'm jane dutton this is the news live from doha came up in the next sixty minutes.