”f: “aid 1 “fig“ ”furur ii‘ul‘ei ”figur" of going out and finding the funds, finding the institution that's willing to take it to the next step. that's right. and thanks to the integration of the national health service, we're able to do that at high level. you're talking five to ten years. everything is always ahead to adjust give us a sense of how quickly in recent years we've made progress in cancer because sometimes it feels it's one of the things we talk about them or have lots of good news stories about new ideas, new thoughts, but actually people living with it but it's the immediate commit to be here and now they're thinking about, the family members, friends, all the rest of it. they think, how much progress has really been made?” it. they think, how much progress has really been made? i think improvements in cancer outcomes are the direct result of research finding the last ten, 20 years. again, patients should be heartened by that. there is no doubt that in an improved understanding of the cancer at a basic level will always lead to improving the treatment eventually. samra turajlic, thank

you for being with us. fascinating stuff. the actor alex beckett — who starred in ma — has died suddenly at the age of 35, his agent has announced. the comedy star was best known for his role as barney lumsden from perfect curve pr in the tv satire. jessica hynes, who starred with him, paid tribute to him, as a "wonderful, clever, kind and brilliant person." he had been due on stage in the way of the world at london's donmar warehouse. the princess royal has visited her father, the duke of edinburgh, in hospital as he recovers from a hip operation. princess anne left the king edward vii in london after seeing prince philip for 45 minutes. she said the duke, who's 96, was in good spirits. he's been in hospital sincejust before the operation, which took place last wednesday. turtles that breathe through their genitals and pink snakes are amongst the weird and wonderful reptiles heading for extinction unless urgent action is taken, according to the zoological society of london.

this is the mary river turtle, which is ranked at 30 on the zsl‘s so—called edge list. it focuses on unusual and at risk animals. as well as breathing through its genitals, the turtle has algae growing on its head. ranked at 16 is on the list is the gharial, i hope i said that correctly, although i suppose it might not be around long enough to tell us i got it wrong. a type of crocodile with a slender snout. the round island keel scaled boa is at 23 and is found on only one small island off the coast of mauritius. it has colour—changing skin. so it's not necessarily something you want to run into, i would have thought. and at number 6 on the list is the roti island snake necked turtle, fairly obviously named after its lengthy neck. i've heard people say those are think with their genitals but never that they breathe through them. the headlines on bbc news: cabinet ministers agree that the use of chemical weapons by the assad

regime should not go unchallenged, and that action must be taken to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in syria. president trump says a decision on air strikes will be made soon as us warships move into the region. the international chemical weapons watchdog has backed the uk's assessment of the nerve agent used against sergei and yulia skripal in a poisoning incident last month. now it's time for meet the author. how little we know still about the brain. suzanne 0'sullivan is one of our leading neurologists, and she's called her new book brainstorm: detective stories from the world of neurology. the investigation of strange symptoms, puzzling behaviour by patients, the hidden secrets in the wiring that makes us who we are. it is a book about medical science, but much more than that about people, their personalities, their behaviour, their brains. a journey of discovery where many of the answers

are still tantalizingly elusive. welcome. you say in the book at one point that neurology sometimes doesn't feel very scientific, because you're actually trying to think of the person and not the mechanism that is the brain. yes, that's right. i think that it's very surprising how little we actually know about the brain. up until the end of the 20th century, we didn't even have a mechanism by which we could look at how the brain was arranged or how it worked. so we had scans that showed still pictures of the brain, but they don't show you anything at all about how the

brain is organised. we are really in the infancy of neurosciences in some ways, and also then, you are taking a person's in the context of their personal experience, and that requires a lot of listening and lot of detective work to try and understand what you're being told. i love that phrase "detective work", which you use in the title, because what we have here is a series of stories about patients — obviously not their real names — who were exhibiting puzzling symptoms, slightly weird symptoms. they see things or they behave in a strange way that they can't explain, and you've got to start to work out what's going on from ground zero. yeah. absolutely, and i think that's something that is wonderful about being a neurologist is that you're listening to your patients, and if you can hear the symptoms properly, that will actually take you on a journey into their brains in order to try and get an anatomical understanding of what's going on. without knowing it, they're often performing a self—diagnosis. well, they are telling you what's wrong with them if you can just listen clearly enough, especially people whose symptoms are fleeting, and you're

relying upon their language and the way they tell the story for you to try and figure out what's wrong. well, let's give readers a flavour of this. you tell the story in here of a man who gets from time to time, fairly irregularly, goose bumps on his arm. and then they go away. he can't work out what's going on, nor can you. this was when you were a relatively young doctor. and the consultant said, "well, have you scanned the brain?" and the discovery was that there was a brain tumour which was causing this, so the thing you see and what's going on inside are miles apart. absolutely. so if you have a problem in your arm, what you have to be able to do as a neurologist is to track that anatomically. that problem in your arm may not exist in your arm. it could be a problem in your neck, it could be a problem in your brain, and the quality of the symptoms and the way they behave are the clues as to where exactly the process is happening. and you're learning all the time, because there's a new one coming along every minute, i assume. well, precisely. because if you think of all the brain does when it's healthy.

so a healthy brain sort of creates art, orfalls in love, or cries or it does maths, and therefore, everything that your brain does when it's healthy can go wrong when it's unhealthy. and symptoms can occur in any possible combination, which means that people with brain diseases can have almost any combination of symptoms. well, give us an illustration. there are some wonderful ones in the book of the kinds of things that can happen that ordinary people would find inexplicable. yeah, so one of the people that i talk about is a young woman called august. so august has had something very bizarre happening to her since she was about 16 years old. she gets these really odd running attacks. so most of the time, august is perfectly well, but once or twice a week, she suddenly bursts into a run that is utterly outside of her control. she has no idea where she's going or how long she will run for. it stops, and she's back to normal again. that's the entire breadth of her disability. it's incredible how much it destroys her life, because if it happens in the street, she could run right in front of a car. if she's upstairs,

she could fall downstairs. so although it only takes up two minutes of her week sometimes, it has been utterly life—destroying. and trying to do something about that is extraordinary difficult, because that is a one—off. yeah. i mean, with regards to brain disease, we really are very poor at healing the brain at this point. i hope there will be great strides in the nearfuture, but at the moment, we can't make people better and we're trying to teach people to live with disabilities that we've never met before, and that's very challenging. but i sense that you love that moment when you confront someone for the first time — or they confront you, rather — and you're trying to work out what's going on, how are they reacting to it, what's it doing to them? and starting to put two and two together. yes, well, i meet people who have very, very odd stories to tell. you know, certainly people can see, have hallucinations, but such lucid hallucinations in a mind of an intelligent, orientated person... yes, and it's not as if he was on drugs or had been drinking or whatever. he was perfectly normal. yeah, it was very bizarre. i'd never heard a story like it before and it transpired that he was having little epileptic

seizures arising in a part of his brain important to both memory and imagination, and those seizures were producing the hallucination. and it was the same one each time? yes, and that's a feature of brain disease and seizures is that they tend to be stereotypes. you get the exact same thing every time. and that's where the clue, the biggest clue lay. i couldn't read this without thinking about, you know, second sight and apparitions and all the paranormal stuff that, you know, people can argue about until the cows come home. but in human history, you can sense how people who've had visions may simply have had the kinds of conditions that you are still, in the 2ist—century, trying to understand. yes. well, there's nothing a neurologist likes more than to make retrospective diagnoses, going back hundreds or thousands of years. so we do love to blame apparitions. i mean, many people have tried to attribute joan of arc‘s experience to hallucinations related to epilepsy. lewis carroll is said to possibly have suffered with epilepsy,

and certainly had migraine. and there is a syndrome called alice in wonderland syndrome which is attributed to his epilepsy. and you think that maybe, the kind of imagination that produced that extraordinary work may have come from activity in his brain which wasn't simply an intellectual working out of the story but something medical. well, people have a very unique experiences during epileptic seizures. and i once saw a journalist describe his feeling during a seizure as if he took the toy box of his brain, threw it in the air and it came down, and bits of lego had combined with a rubik's cube, so that he'd created something utterly new that he would never have thought of in any other state. so it's possible it has a creative influence. finally, it must be a wonderfully rewarding field of medicine to be in, not simply because you're dealing with people at a very high level in terms of their experience, but you're also discovering something new everyday. yes, i still see things every week

that i never thought i would see and that are astonishing to me, and i work with patients who overcome things i never thought i would encounter, so it's astonishing all the time. suzanne 0'sullivan, author of brainstorm: detective stories from the world of neurology. thank you very much. thank you. good evening. it has been a bit of a struggle to lift the gloom over the last few days in many places. a lot of clout, some mist and merck and drizzle. that's how it looks great weather watch in staffordshire a little bit earlier on but it was not like that everywhere. the scottish highlands were bathing blue skies and sunshine, and the satellite picture shows what happened throughout the day. many areas saw this relentless stream of cloud. as

we go through this evening and tonight, we will see that cloud sitting in again and we also see some bricks of showery rain in the east anglia, the midlands, up through northern england and scotland. some of these showers could actually be on the heavy side. into tomorrow, this showery rain will continue out of northern england and northwards across scotland. further south, something drier, yes, but still large amounts of cloud. later in the day, something a little bit brighter across the south coast. perhaps not quite as chile in eastern england by the east coast of scotland still seen the breeze over the north sea, system seen the breeze over the north sea, syste m o n seen the breeze over the north sea, system on the cool side here. through the weekend, things will warm some spots of sunshine. so the risk for some heavy showers but saturday does that look like a bad day at all. and after all because that many of us have had to begin with recently, there is a much

better chance of seeing spells of sunshine. a warmer day as well. 50 degrees in edinburgh, 18 perhaps in london, and that's a sign of things to come —— 15 degrees in edinburgh. as the low squeezes between income and the winds will start to pick up so and the winds will start to pick up so it will be quite windy day in northern ireland on sunday. some sunshine again but also a scattering of showers this time in some of these could be on the heavy side, but still with that slightly warmer feel, with temperatures just about wherever you are up into double digits. and that's a theme we will ta ke digits. and that's a theme we will take with us into next week. southerly winds drawing warm air up from the south. i will show you some of our city forecasts for the next seven days and you can see the temperatures are going to climb. in fa ct, temperatures are going to climb. in fact, in parts of the south, well up into the 20s as we get into the middle part of next week. and neither further north and west, not far away from 20 degrees. so some spring warmth is on the way.

this is outside source. us security chiefs are still deciding whether to strike syria in response to the alleged chemical weapons attack. after raising expectations of imminent action in recent days, president trump now strikes a more cautious note. we're looking, very, very, very closely at that whole situation and we'll see what happens, folks. we'll see what happens. the russian military says the syrian flag is now flying over douma, the town where that alleged chemical attack took place at the weekend, and the last rebel stronghold on the eastern edge of damascus. we have an amazing story from china, a baby boy is born to a surrogate