voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. in this programme, this year's nobel laureate in economics and medicine tell us why some countries are so much richer than others and what a worm tells us about how complex life emerged. this is nobel minds 202a.

nobel laureate�*s, welcome to the royal palace in stockholm. we are joined by some of your family and friends as well as students from here in stockholm. before we start, let's just give them a really big round of applause, renewed congratulations to all of you. applause. ok, so, let's start with economics and let's see briefly the research which was behind the award for this years' recipients of the nobel prize in economics. this year's prize in economics touches on historical injustices and cruelties as well as current events. the question of how economic development is connected to individual rights, equality,

and decent political leaders. when large parts of the world were colonised by european powers, their approaches varied. daron acemoglu, simonjohnson, and james a robinson showed prosperity rose with the colonial authorities built functioning social institutions rather than simply exploiting the locals and their resources. but no growth or improvements in lifestyle were created in societies where democracy and legal certainties were lacking. the research also helps us understand why this is the case and could contribute to reducing income gaps between nations. so, daron, when you're doing about the importance of democratic institutions, what institutions are you talking about?

the label that simonjim and i use is institutions that distribute political power and economic power and opportunity broadly in society and that requires political institutions that provide voice to people so they can participate, their views are expressed and also constrains on the exercise of that power. your talk about the checks and balances we see set down in constitutions like an independent legislature, a free judiciary, freedom of speech with the media being able to operate. absolutely, but that is not enough. partly because what you write in a constitution is not going to get enforced unless there is a genuine empowerment of the people, so constitutions are sometimes changed just like shirts. and it doesn't mean anything

unless it becomes enforced. but you have also seen countries prosper economically, which have been governed by fairly authoritarian governments, haven't you, often we talk about lee kuan yew in singapore, mahathir mohamad in malaysia, for instance. i think that is not the general pattern. so, there are examples like that, but for all examples like that there are former examples of autocratic societies that have not flourished economically. if you can create inclusive economic institutions even under a politically autocratic society, you can flourish economically that is what happens in china starting in the late 1970s, it was the movement was a much more inclusive economy giving people the right to make decisions, making residual claimants on their own efforts. that is generated economic growth. our view is that can't sustain an economy like that under an autocratic political system. it can be there for a transitory period, but it's not sustainable.

a lot of your research is based on countries which have been colonised and there has been a lot of debate, of course, particularly in the united kingdom because of the historic, you know, great british empire and whether it was good or bad for the countries that were colonised, graphically all of africa, but you say that colonisation often brought about a reversal in economic fortunes of the colonised people. so just unpack for us why you say that. it sounds like you are saying colonisation was bad for the people. i think colonisation was a disaster, absolutely. but, of course, did create prosperous societies in parts of the world — for north america and australasia, but for the indigenous people, it was a catastrophe. diseases wiped out 90% of the population in the americas, people were exploited, they had their lands and livelihoods destroyed, the communities destroyed stop absolutely, yes.

so, i don't think there is much debate about that, in my view. i think this notion of reversal. it is very clear in the americas. about 500 years, where were the prosperous parts of the americas? central america comedy central valley of mexico, andy ian, the inca empire, the valley of oaxaca, that you had writing, he had political complexity, you had economic organisations, sophistication. these southern code of latin america, north america, far behind. than this gets completely reversed during the colonial period and the places that were relatively poor then become relatively prosperous. they use see the reversal in a very clear way. right. i want to bring you in, because your mother was singaporean born, your brought up in britain, of course, what do you think

of when you hear about this kind of thing of democracy and prosperity? it is very interesting. i've heard from my mother this sort of economic miracle that l lee kuan yew brought - to singapore and he is now rightly revered for that. this is not my area, - how do you, how are these institutions going to be built on the places - where they aren't? is there going to be external, will it happen internally, - or will you be lucky- with finding the right leader, like a lee kuan yew? i think this success stories or come within. people built the institutions in their own contact. there are, think lee kuan yew is a sorta fascinating person, he is not the only person anyone like that up you had set see, in botswana, you have other kind of outstanding leaders, but i think, on average, the evidence suggests autocratic regimes don't do as well as democratic ones and, sure, people matter, individuals matter, having good leaders matter. when you find lee kuan yew?

that is what i was going to ask you. | if it has to come from . within, you are pointing out with your great work with the issues are, - but other than waitl for the right mandel or lee kuan yew to come along, which is very rare, as you say, . what else can be done - to encourage those institutions to be built? yes, but there are also lots of institutions built without famous leaders. i think the track record of external imposition of situations is not good. there are a few cases where you can point to but generally institutions are built organically. but there are influences out there. so, one of the casesjim already hinted about, botswana, and amazingly successful democracy in sub—saharan africa and amazingly successful country in terms of economic growth, very rapid growth on the whole. it was all existing, actually, precolonial institutions that were the basis of more democratic, but leadership mattered as well. so you need accommodation. so, i think facilitating institution building ethically, providing tools for them, and getting rid of our hindrances, often western and russian powers, sometimes chinese powers in other countries' domestic affairs is not conducive to better institution building, but at the end of the day institutions going to be built bottom—up.

a major theme of this year's nobel prizes has been artificial intelligence. james, let me ask you then, if you think technology, ai could help africa develop? africa has not been benefiting from all this technology. could it, i'm saying? it could. but to do that many things have to change. institutions have to change, politics etahjames, people's trust. all sorts of things have to change. and what about the impact of technology, ai, for instance on democracy, really? i'm talking about the impact on jobs, to what extent there will be displacement of human activity in jobs by machines?

yes, i think that is a huge risk. i believe that humans would have a very difficult time building the social systems and communities if they become majorly sidelined and they feel they don't have dignity or use or a way to contribute to the social good. from your perspective there have been a loti of advances in technology over the last hundred years. - have any of them really cause l massive displacement ofjobs? already a lot of these - technologies are out there, but have they reduced the number ofjobs? i yes, it has happened. the early phase of the industrial revolution where it was all about automation, there were huge displacements, huge wage losses. one third — people's wages in 20 years valter, for some people, one third of what it was. that is just a tremendous... but in the end it became better. crosstalk. in my view there will be

a lot of disruption, like the industrial revolution was. also, 90 years, it took 90 years! crosstalk. but there could be i new classes ofjobs. but those new classes ofjobs, they are not automatic. there are two ways of thinking on this, beyond the artificial general intelligence, you introduce these disruptive technologies in the system automatically adjust, nobody needs to do anything, the policymaker, no scientist, no technologist, the system will adjust. i think that is contradicted by history. the way that it works is that we all have to work in order to make things better, including technologists so that we actually use the scientific knowledge to create new tasks are more capabilities for humans rather than sidelining them. we have seen you talk about the lessons of history, but we saw with the printing press revolution people who were writing books were put out of business, but then lots of newjobs were created through publishing... look at the last a0 years.

the us is an extreme case, bars, roughly speaking, i'm exaggerating a little bit, but about half of the us population, those who don't have college degrees, have had almost no growth in their real incomes until about 2015, from 1980. so, no newjobs of import were created for them. there were a lot of newjobs in the 19905 and 2000, but they were all for people with postgraduate degrees and specialised knowledge. jeffrey, do you think this increase in productivity, socially, they will come with automation and so on and so forth, is a good thing for society? well, it ought to be, right? we're talking about having a huge increase in productivity, so there will be more goods and services for everybody, so everybody ought to be better off. but actually is going to be the other way around and it is because we live in a capitalist society and what will happen is this huge increase in productivity will make more money for the big companies and the rich and it will increase the gap between the rich and the people who lose theirjobs.

and as soon as you increase that gap you get fertile ground for fascism and so it's very scary that we may be at a point where we are just making things worse and worse. and it's crazy because we're doing something that should help everybody and obviously will help in healthcare and in education. but if the prophets just go to the risk that will make society worse. so, let's look at the last award, that is the nobel prize for medicine or physiology and this is why it was awarded this year. our organs and tissues are made up of many varied types of cells. they all have identical genetic material, but different characteristics.

this year's medicine laureates, gary ruvkun and victor ambros has shown how a new form of gene regulation, microrna, is crucial in ensuring that the different cells of organisms such as muscles or nerve cells get the functions they need. it is already known that abnormal levels of microrna increase the risk of cancer, but the laureates' research could lead to new diagnostics and treatments, for example it could map how microrna varies in different diseases, helping unlock prognoses for the development of diseases. so, gary, your research was based on looking at mutant strains of the round worm, actually it should have its own nobel prize, it's pitched so much in research that's led to nobel prizes butjust tell us, what is your work

with roundworm tell us about genetic mutations in humans? doing genetics is a form of doing whatever evolution has been doing for 4 billion years. our planet is a genetic experiment. it has been generating diverse life from primitive life over [i billion years by inducing variation to give you the tree of life that goes to bats, to plans and to bacteria and we do that on one organism and the reason it worked so well is that evolution has evolved away to generate diversity by mutating. that's what all around us, when you see a green tree, it's because of photosynthesis was developed to billion years ago, the reason we can breathe oxygen is because photosynthesis involved and it wasn't there beforehand. and so, what we are doing is that process and that's why it works i wasn't the reason that the one has gotten for nobel prizes is that — it's the one that got it, we are just the operators. yes, it's very tiny, it's a millimetre long. it has 959 cells.

not everyone of ourselves has not a name. every cell in a one has a name and that attracted a concordant people who like names, names are important and we were thinking about, we can learn a lot about how biology works by following cells, what their history, what are they becoming, how do they talk to each other but we figure it out by breaking it. it is extraordinary that a human has about 20,000 genes and a worm has 20,000 genes. that's why we are to self—important. we're just not... humans are not that great.

we are fine, i'm happy to be a human, i don't want to be a worm, you know, a bacteria has 4000 genes. that's not too different from 20,000. people say, if you could look for life in other planets, its bacteria. how boring. you've got it all wrong. bacteria's totally awesome. so, what you are saying is a mutation obviously can be bad because they can lead to salts of genetic illnesses and someone but they are not always bad and some are quite actually relatively significant like you're colourblind, i'm sure? for instance, that a genetic mutation. it is, it is a debilitating mutation for me because in the days of black—and—white publishing, i was king, things were fine and then, everything became colour, you know,

i have to say, our little worm, i will go to a seminar and people presenting graphs with red and green and i go, that was just complete... people say, it's fantastic, didn't see it? i wrote to google maps and said, you guys who do traffic is red and green means, i can't see it. you're losing li% of the users and it's the best li%. i mean, you actually... you wanted to be an electrical engineer originally, didn't you? yes, i did electronics as a kid because i loved electronics and are built kids — i've built a shortwave radio with $39 kit made with vacuum tubes, this was before transistors but the resisters have a colour—coded and it tells

you how many it is and how much resistance it has. and so, i didn't know it, i didn't know i was colourblind at the time so i put it together and the test for how well you are — whether it's going to work is you turn it on if it doesn't that's good. my electronic assembly did not pass the smoke test. we've got some student in the audience here and i know that some of them want to pose a question to you. what do you want to ask? was this an unexpected find a part of your hypothesis, while conducting your research. no hypothesis on that, no, no, no, no. it was a complete surprise and i love surprises. that's the beauty of doing

genetics is that what comes out is what teaches you, right? you do a mutagenesis, get an animal that looks like what you are looking for, part of the surgery saying, what am i going to look for? the art of it. how did your research along with victor ambros go down in the 19905? it was this biology and there was a sense that you would deliver a paper — go to talk about it that, well, it's a worm, who cares, and it's a weird little animal until discovered that it was in human genomes and very other genomes and it's been embraced and what was especially empowering to it was that it intersected without interference which is an antiviral response and people really cared now, of course, about antiviral responses. how did you all find doing your research and listening to what gary is saying, did you encounter setbacks? can you define particular moments when your research

really felt that you were on a winning streak, did people discourage you from what you were doing? all of the above. really? i mean, academia is really hard at some level. you work sometimes three years on a project and then somebody anonymously destroys it so that is very, very difficult to get used to so, i do a lot of coaching with my graduate students to get them ready for it, on the other hand, i found academia to be quite open—minded as well. whenjim, simonjohnson and i started doing work, i think there was not much of the sort in economics and people could have said, no, this is not economics, that some people didn't. and people could have said this was crazy and some people did but that lot of people who open—minded especially for young researchers, they are hungry for new angles angles so i found academia to be quite open—minded as well but it is a tough place.

david, you both said that research and proteins is kind of seen as, at the time, on the lunatic fringe of science. how did you cope with that kind of perception that you were doing something that was a bit out there? well, i think when we started trying to design proteins, everyone. there a crazy way to try and solve heart problems. the only proteins were new at the time were the ones that came down the revolution, the ones on us and all living things so the idea that you can make completely new ones and they could really seen as lunatic fringe as you say but i think the way you deal with it is you work on the problem and you make progress and now it's gotten to the point where every other day, that other companies saying the adjoining the design revolution and they are going to do something so you can go from the lunatic fringe the mainstream faster than you might expect.

utterly vindicated, aren't you? very similar. if you are fascinated enough and passionate enough about the area, and i was going to do it no matter what actually, i cannot think of anything more interesting to work on that nature of intelligence and computation and of principle like underpinning that someone we started deepmind in 2010, nobody was working on al. yes, very few people... the godfather here. ..people in academia and now, fast forward 15 years which is not very much time and the whole world is talking about it and in industry, no—one was doing that in 2010 but we already foresaw building on the great work of people like professor in turn that this would be one of the most consequential transformative technology is in the world if it could be done. if you see something like that, it's worth doing it in of itself.

you, with your co—recipient a noble prize, professorjohn hopfield was 91, a real pioneer in this field, what you just heard here resonate with you that work that at one stage was seen as being on the lunatic fringe and then here you are years later vindicated? yes. people — students will apply to my department to work with me another professed in my department would say, if you work with him, that's the end of your career, that suffers rubbish. how did that make you still — luckily at the time? i didn't know about. i think one another question from our audience and from the institute wants to ask this, what's your question? science is all about being motivated when things don't go the way we expect them

to so what kept you all motivated when things didn't go the way you expected in times of hardship and help you adapt? who would like to go? that's the best bit. that's when it — expect that something happened doesn't happen, that's when you really learn something. that's the best bet, it's really crushing the first couple of days and then you're like, oh, now i learn something, i didn't understand it. there was a nice attainment bias because you have people who have gotten the winning hands in the poker game of life, you know? gentlemen, thanks to all of you and renewed congratulations on your nobel prizes. that's all from this years nobel minds from the royal palace in stockholm, it's been a privilege having this discussion with you. thank you to their royal highnesses, the crown princess victoria and prince daniel for being with us.

everybody else in the audience and you also at home for watching. from me and the rest of the nobel minds team, goodbye. hello. saturday was a very showery and very windy winter solstice. let's take a look at some of those gusts of wind that we saw during the day on saturday, between around 60 to 80 mph, particularly around exposed coasts and hills in the north, and the west, too. 82 mph was the windiest spot in the hebrides. now, for sunday, we've got more of the same — gusty winds and wintry showers for some of us, and there could be some travel disruption on the cards. low pressure sits to the north—east of the uk, we've got these winds bundling

in from the north—west, bringing us plenty of showers, gusts of wind of 60 to 70 mph across parts of scotland, especially in the north—west, but elsewhere we could see 50 to 60 mph gusts for western parts of england and wales, a0 to 50 mph towards the east. so, plenty of showers, as you can see, blowing in on that breeze, they will be a little bit wintry, for the likes of the pennines, the peak district, the hills of wales and the north of scotland in particular, most of the showers turning back to rain later in the day, but blowing in with those very strong winds. but in the south and east, a lot of dry weather on the cards, but it is not going to feel warm — around six to eight degrees, but feeling colder when you add on that northwesterly wind, and those showers with a bit of a wintry flavour to them. now, later on sunday, into monday, the next front approaches from the west, but we've also got higher pressure trying to reach in. still windy at first on monday towards the east, but the winds will ease through the day, and sunshine holding on for central, southern and eastern parts, but clouding over from the west, with some patchy rain later on. eight or nine degrees,

the warmest spots down towards the south—west, but for most of us, another chilly—feeling day, four to seven degrees. but as we head towards christmas eve on tuesday, and christmas day on wednesday, that much milder air spills its way in from the south—west. so, temperatures are going to be on the up, christmas eve, we are looking at now, tuesday, quite a lot of cloud, low cloud, perhaps some hill fog, a little bit of drizzle, especially towards the west. but temperatures back up at around 12 or 13 degrees for most of us. we could see iii anywhere to the east of higher ground, and a similar picture for christmas day, as well. it is not going to be a white christmas, if you were crossing your fingers for one of those. rather grey, actually, quite a lot of cloud, some holes in the cloud, i think, not a bad day, most of us dry, perhaps a little rain in the far north—west. temperatures, 11 or 12, so probably not quite as warm on christmas day as it will be on christmas eve. looks dry into boxing day, too, and then perhaps just a little cooler towards the new year.

live from washington. this is bbc news. a memorial service is held at magdeburg cathedral attended by german leaders for victims of a christmas attack. a nine—year—old is among five people killed in the attack, 200 others have been injured. a senior palestinian official tells the bbc that a ceasefire deal between israel and hamas in gaza is 90% complete stop and after days of negotiations joe biden signs the us government suspending bill —— spending bill into law, officially averting shutdown. hello and welcome to the programme.

respects are being paid in the german city of magdeburg