in tuesday's quake rescue crews are working around the clock to reach an adult trapped under the rubble of a school in mexico city hurricane maria has been upgraded to a category three storm as it makes its way to the turks and caicos islands and the bahamas puerto rico bore the brunt of the rio on thursday residents are now returning to find extensive damage to their houses the northeastern part of the island was hardest hit parts of the u.s. territory expected to be without power for months. protests are showing no sign of letting up in spain's catalonia region where thousands of independent supporters are rallying outside a courthouse in barcelona. they're demanding the release of cattle and government officials detained over next month's independence referendum spain's prime minister mariano rajoy has called the vote illegal and says they'll be consequences if it goes ahead. and government says it's terminal to hold the post anyway but those are the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after

signs in a golden age statement that supported by them. from the tropics of southeast asia to the feral islands in the far north atlantic. meets the women who cross the world for love and stage changing communities. at this time i know it is iran. modern high tech advances in medicine and health are of course the result of many centuries of development 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 round the world for many hundreds of years i'm dramatically 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 of the golden age. it was during the islamic 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. the hum of hospital in bell hard to see how the ideas of the stone in the medieval stomach world compared to our modern medicine. the

hospitals neonatal unit deals with a 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. close to seventeen to eighteen hundred babies and that amounts to about ten to eleven percent of the total course 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 just ation so you're looking at a five months pregnancy part months and one week 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 wasn't 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 sulphate but it's never been tried in combination with the cooling method. to improve the reliability of their research the hospitals using what we call a controlling group some of the babies receive magnesium sulfate whereas a separate group the control group don't receive it this amounts to hospital to compare fairly the effects of the treatment with and without the drug.

so this particular study is a double blind placebo control which means that we are offering some of our babies a placebo or some or getting the magnets. himself and 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 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 but he had a control group to which he wasn't it minister in the treatment in that 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 studies come out as non-biased as possible to comparing it absolutely out of. iraq was born in the city of ready to herat in the mid nineteenth 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 them back that. after razi where in the city should build a new hospital so arise he designed an experiment he hung it up 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 butches. albeit the anatomy of animal one of the human. well even though this is just the lamb's heart not a human heart we can still see quite clearly the different compartments the different chain best 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 to 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 him in effie said 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 their cutting edge treatments build on the work of professor mag. one of the world's leading heart specialists who set up the hospital's busy transplant unit and has 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 goes 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 us. i feel roach and here was a scientist if you like he was a discoverer but arguably his most important contribution was his commentary 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 ventricle 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 person 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 at 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 in a few switches 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 poetry is here goes around along. comes back. into the

references so this is very circulation which comes here. to discover it's now obvious what it was and then. description the accepted 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 it 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 cord 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 techs that took on where the greeks left off physicians like. in this first book he describes human anatomy in great detail i love is that he talks about things like. the muscles of the face and then goes on to talk about 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. 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 correct 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 would bring back new plots from far and wide so new drugs were discovered and administered rema hazmat is based in our june in jordan she cultivates medicinal herds some of which have been in use since the

golden age. eleven. 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. oh. yes and this was known from. this. is a good thought. and. what i find so fascinating is that during the golden age every hospital would have had a herb garden just like this with a drugstore and it's interesting that we're hearing those things and it is a still described and in use in modern times. even seen as great canon of

medicine describes a variety of herbes 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 that even seen it described we planted following the canon of medicine twenty six. plants out of hundreds which had been described by. twenty he worked for six years of the company so. they had medicinal properties what sorts of things with. toxic. 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 bread. small black sea. black human. properties it was also anti toxic for example it. against bites probably snake bites it was used for. tissues. like other important works during the golden age it can see. his canon of medicine spread across the islamic world and young as the process of knowledge transfer was revolutionary just one reason so effectively throughout the islamic empire was because it suddenly became much easier to produce a copy text the islamic scholars had adopted the chinese technology of paper making and paper is much cheaper to produce and use the parchment piracy an important

aspect of this is killigrew of handwriting so i've come to meet a calligrapher to tell me all about. what lee county has done with a method and. that would be this nami in the kind of stuff we do have to come come in and you know. you're talking about. a lot of.

chinese paper was general. 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. in the music if they were in leave you for him you claim to be having this and. other than. that again and again on the. floor in the do the forget it 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 influenced scientists after the decline of the islamic empire for instance have 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 here. 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 it 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 the 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 numbers and that will help us pinpoint the 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 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 us using. 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 shutdown 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 interpret that 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 a third generation sequencer and what it does is it sequences are 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 to one handed out and that one so that will give you more structure information in the chromosome this equipment makes it possible for the lab to sequence the gene. knowns of large numbers of people it's a huge advance since 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 it was

a big accomplishment and now we can sequence the human genome within six to ten days with just acknowledging so the addresses 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. were over a thousand years ago the flow was from the west to the arab world where people were coming to. the xandra in damascus centers of learning and learning about the latest technology and what's going on and then taking 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. 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 modern world. what you have here is a handheld model of the sky their achievements were 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 science. for the nomadic jacka tribe survival is about reaching their destination if we don't hurry never be able to get the top of the story we follow the mongolian herdsmen on a treacherous migration. is dangerous the ices of them as they strive to preserve

their traditional way of life. are sometimes luser. there with the cold war because of the storm risking it all mongolia at this time on al-jazeera. they may. die but the feet if you look at. me. go to the show for. that but. it's something. that i did.

the top stories here on al-jazeera north korea's foreign minister says his country may consider a hydrogen bomb test in the pacific ocean follows new sanctions imposed by u.s. president donald trump on top of those by the u.n. north korea responded to those sanctions speech of the.