this unless i'm show business i'll see you then. on this edition of crossfire we conduct a post mortem of the recent us around conflict what has changed in what bodes for the future issues the mainstream corporate media refuse to discuss. they were going underground is amidst the continuing global crisis sparked by it all troubled it is has a nation in iraq bricks it comes up for debate in britain's out of lords ahead of the end of u.k. representation in the e.u. parliament in fewer than 20 days time coming up in the show u.k.

prime minister's former trade on boy conservative party former treasurer lord marland weighs up the chances of a 300000000000 pound or more deal with britain's biggest trade partner the rest of the european union and as a cancer breakthrough in london identifies killing cells a switched on we speak to templeton killed in the faraday award winning professor paul davis about how information will determine the future of immortality big pharma always welcomed today's going underground or 1st britain is due to not be represented by the european union from the end of the month despite being subject to either single market and customs regulations till the end of the enjoyment is chairman of the commonwealth enterprise investment council in the former trade envoy boris johnson's predicts as they were cameron lord moland thank you so much for coming on before we get to the 31st of january you are a key part of course of joints of the me oral candidacy complete vindication of the dominant cummings tactics presumably the general leg while i was his 1st merrill

counsel and a little bit involved in the thing. i'm delighted this recent thing. both you know i'm delighted i've always had a great face but i think it's a fantastic communicator he can make waves you can. reach parts of the others can't and that he's demonstrated the election so i'm really pleased i think he's got a phenomenal brain a great personality enormous energy we've got the right and have the right job because he may have reached out to the electorate of the tory politicians that didn't but cummings his senior strategic advisor has already been. making announcements that seem just suggest he wants a radical reform of the civil service which has long been suspected of a pro remain bias and a thing it was suspected i think i think it was i haven't talked to everybody i think you're. apparently we were always hearing that there were senior civil

servants that did not the despised the the largest vote in this country in this country's history breaks it how can dominic cummings really reform an organization like the civil service what is to be very difficult as you know when you get into government lots of forces come at you and a lot of them suffocate you right in the end so you think it's going to fought a very hard and determined battle he's going to take them on civil service does need reform it has been i think that in terms of achieving breaks it. proved to have that just you know talking to the civil servants i think much more importantly i think it's been completely frozen by the events rather than thinking of how can we prepare for the next phase and i think that is a really difficult position and in the commonwealth of course we brush with the u.k. government we do with 53 governments you also know how civil servants can sabotage

it is just they can leak documents they go and they will amerie hence my remark which you know is going to be a very. difficult battle for dominic called cummins to fight gen you. it is in a different space to most of the businesses in that it's very difficult to. sack a civil servant it's very difficult to move them out of the civil service is he we had douglas cause well one of dominic cummings's close colleagues in that campaigning on the show who kind of said only cummings was a sort of genius i'm not sure the you know him do you think he's up to the job i think he's a remarkable you know it's very clear sighted a very clear vision. the point about government though it isn't just about having ideas it's you've got to do the long strokes and it's like a rowing race you do a lot of this very early on to get speed then it's into this and this bit is not so

easy for the likes of dominic cummings or for many others as well long strokes are going to be going to be needed after 31st of january and what do you see as the significance of this date of the 31st of january because people could say that is the date from which britain will be subject to all customs union and single market regulations from brussels and so as burg and we will have no power whatsoever. as regards the regulations we now must know violet well a deal as you know for trade is going to be discussed i'm always amused by hearing politicians saying that they can do things within this timeframe all that time frame if the result will it will be done within the timeframe of 1011 months i don't think businesses will forgive politicians if they don't get home with this. because it's stifling employment and stifling countries stifling. activity and i'm not just talk about the u.k.

i'm talking about many of the european countries that will stifle german is. trade activity which is huge the united kingdom and it's a no brainer i mean we export hall for what we import for to be given and i want to know that statistic sorry to interrupt you. but if you just take that statistic you would have kind of thought let's get this thing done because it's actually in our interests to have a very harmonious exit exam because we're going to hopelessly wrong when he said that dr johnson had hitched his issues riders have to donald trump over the trade deal and that is why britain must support the united states on iran given johnson is actually double down on his support for the nuclear g.c. agreement i think koeppen labor of got it wrong quite a lawful boris johnson they don't really understand and they've tried to portray

him as another trumpy isn't he's actually a centrist by heart and i think. you know he's he's much more moderate than people think and that will probably be the tone of his coming to some extent but what you just said about european multinationals c.e.o.'s perhaps and boards believing that we've got to get this done now because as you said e.u. british trade is such a huge component of their businesses and world trade. then they have the pennies drop with them and they're going to still fight it because european bureaucrats i think the president already looks saying that this is a very good point very very good point pen it penny suddenly dropped the trade a business level but the european. governments brussels has been open jurors all the way through. and it will be interesting to see how much pressure they're bored by the leaders of the countries like macro

merkel to quickly speed up what should be a very sensible trade if not know who knows what's going to happen then it could be no deal which would be pretty disastrous for both parties but even more disastrous for europe but that if they still threatening yes but those are legal you look at they on that if you look at the german economy which is not growing it's going backwards it's been very reliant upon motor industry never once from says oh you can't use german most manufactures but what what is being demonstrated in the next in the last 6 months to 12 months the slowdown an almost recession the german economy has been entirely due to the motor industry failing to summon up cars if you see if you look at that alone how important the u.k. is to that motor industry then there will be significant pressures and they'll be significant pressures from the child's need to make sure that she has strong

trading relationships having been in business all my life the fact is the best type of people you can do business with are people who pay their bills on time. where the contract is supported by a rule of law somewhere you have a free market economy now britain takes all those boxes so we are a market that is incredibly desirable for all these countries but you save at the european commission is try. just sue the u.k. at the moment for billions of pounds for alleged fraud between 2030 to 2016 i don't know whether these legal cases you see is another delaying tactic and if as you say angela merkel is pulling the strings and why would the wonderland be saying the deadline as it stands makes will break that impossible of a brics a deal impossible already these procrastination. is going on there and on their own head be it in my view ok pull their finger out and get on with it well as you know

they can threaten britain by a whole variety of ways what about the 3rd country deals with the european. through 3rd party deals all existing with the european union and the renewal of those in the rule over of those for britain apparently japan is saying japanese companies will rule that we locate of course motor companies if there isn't no deal breaks it but that country treaties with the e.u. will not be permanently rolled over with a break so i find these things rather a paradox. in that japan supposedly makes these noises about. you know withdrawing the car industry and i'm not surprised they've shot a plant in swindon because the cars are not really a desirable car in the way they used to be in the old days but then they go and buy all or they then go and invest oh by a property and things like that but i don't see any signs of japan not being

interested in doing a deal with u.k. that will be a job for the trade own voice because honda would probably disagree with you there but that is that of course i wish. you well let's look at this evo as it is live on to live she says the price of a new deal breaks it is a distant partnership with the e.u. as a clean break bricks are chilling but she's bluffing there's more of this why boris johnson is such captivating. prime minister and leader is because he's positive. boss johnson's and come out and say we come to this and can't do that he comes out let's get this done let's get that done and by and large he has done everyone said no you can't redo the deal with trees or may go up he went did it yet there was a border in the irish sea but it's a very conscious rule if some but it's the rule but it's a far better deal than the trees made and the deal that was acceptable to the members of parliament and he had less of a majority in syria than she did

a good politician is someone who says let's do this let's try and do this let's let's see what's possible i've always said that why boris johnson would be leader of this country's gives hope you expect radio voice now to be going around the commonwealth which you have a specific interest in and all these countries to rapidly study creating new frameworks for the british businesses can work with businesses in the developing world and the point about trade and i'm sorry fun of telling my grandmother how to suck eggs but what about trade is that is activity. with trade you don't necessarily have to have a trade deal we've never had a trade deal with the united states our biggest single trading partner and our biggest relationship we've never had a trade deal with them you really need a trade deal where the rules of engagement between parties are not certain will there aren't similar rules of law about. where the relation can ship can take you

and you need happens in developing country which happens definitely developing countries and you need to have a very clear picture of it what i see needs to happen in a new global britain is for us too. embed all selves in markets where there is big population growth we talked about nigeria which could have a bigger population than the united states by 2030 we look at indonesia which is already north of 200000000 vietnam a very. fast growing population nearly 100000000 will be 120000000 i think 520252038 philippines a similar burgeoning economy and that's where we have to learn all over again of where we have to start selling product now if in order to support that activity we need a trade deal to give a certainty and in the relationship then of course we need to have that they won't be done overnight because they're not sort of necessarily off the shelf things you

know what is a mad chicken in one place is not the same chicken in another you know we have things we don't want to take they have things that they don't take from us but so they're not as straightforward as the last but there are the there is there is a basic framework and we countries like russia i mean there was a countries of britain sanctions and you britain sanctions china as well you know trade that there will be trade agreements or frameworks i can't see that as being top of the list can you. i don't know. but you know i think that. clearly relationships russia was. singing for the future but i'm talking more about britain getting you know much more global these are populations. the. potential. thank you thank you after the break british physicist reza paul davis exposes the

symbiosis of cancer in everyday life and how modern approaches a killing progress in cancer treatment told us of all going overboard to going underground. as we ponder the future and look into 2021 fascinating stories our way you know i've often said on this show that you can't have capitalism without capital capital without positive interest rates encouraging people to say and this next story this next whole show this next entire segment is going to be dedicated to this very notion. oh my name's in my.

name because it doesn't mean. that. when we were in the fight. scene that i'm going to fit in but i'm before. him but. you know by now i'm by the i'm not move on. welcome back we're may have begun with threats to life on earth coming from war catalyzed by u.s. assassinations and climate change destruction scene of course australia but some scientists are asking not so much about the end of life on earth or even the origins of life on earth but what is life itself joining me is award winning professor paul davies whose new book the demon in the machine the hidden webs of

information and solving the mystery of life is out for welcome to going underground who are the demons of james clark maxwell well maxwell was a giant of theoretical physics lived in the 19th century where it's not very far from where we're sitting now at king's college in london unified electricity and magnetism and contributed enormously to the theory of heat and he came up with a weird idea in a letter to a friend it was just an idle thought that if there was some sort of tiny little being who could see individual molecules as they rushed around colliding with each other and could have some sort of shot a mechanism to manipulate where they went then without expending energy could accumulate all of the fast moving bollock your was over here all the slow moving molecules over there so this will get hotter than that and any competent engineer can tell you if you've got a temperature difference you can run an engine off it a heat engine and do work so maxwell seem to come up with

a sort of perpetual motion machine something where just by using the information of the molecular motions you could produce a source of work a type of fuel information as a type of fuel very radical idea cindi paradoxical of the time well what's amazing about this book of course is then you use that to talk about the definition of life why do you think it is that we don't have a definition of life people though presumably what it is you say in the book when the mouse is dead you know it's 90 percent alive nobody can really say what life is or how it began and there are plenty of books about what life does but this is a book about what life is about living matter how does living matter differ from non-living matter current scholarship. is and you explore that is it's about information yes so the key to understanding the difference in living and non-living and to unify these 2 great here is of science physics on the one hand the biology

on the other is this concept called information but it's also an abstract concept and it's branch of science called information theory that's about 60 or 70 years old. and that treats information a little bit like the concept of energy we use energy in everyday life we talk about it in sort of colloquial terms but we also know it has a technical definition as an abstract quantity that can be passed from one system to another and it's always conserved something with information and we know that life is invested in information because d.n.a. for example is like the rulebook of life it's an instruction manual to build an organism but that's only just the start if we think about gene as set of instructions for something to happen building a protein for example genes coupled together to form complex networks that switch each other on and off information swirls around these networks information is

transferred between cells signal each other and then there's that great information process between areas that's probably the best example people can think of as biology vested in information and information processing so it's a very bad biology but it's not there in physics when you think about you know what is an atom doing processing information well you know it's that some sort of sitting there in a collection of atoms. don't have anything like a purpose or goal and yet living organisms do somehow information is the glue that is going to unite the world of physics and the world of biology is as huge relevance for the treatment of cancer before i want to. you about it you retell it here story by yuri love's a big which is kind of relevant to this i think we use a kettlebell just fix a radio you might have to explain that which is why it's taken so long for us to

get to where we are today that's a wonderful essay and the essence of this is that as we now understand it when you think of a of a cell it's really a collection of moguls and functional components if we think less about the individual molecules more about the signals and the information flow inside the system. and that's exactly the sort of approach you would take with the radio now let me give an example the particular essay referred to a transistor radio and say you had all these components together and if you went wrong for example you had a distorted sound well how do you fix it and you wouldn't go about fixing it by examining the atomic structure inside a transistor on something you would know that there are certain rules of radio rules with electronics and you could fix it a competent. radio technician would be able to identify 40 component and rewire

it'll tweak it and and fix it up if you try to to understand what's gone wrong for example in cancer what's gone wrong well it's just a me tayshaun on this particular gene this is a very an adequate picture that we have to try to understand it in terms of like electronics of modules wired together of circuits the around which information swirls of these circuits can become distorted or unbalanced. one political biological theme especially one's evangelical christians in the united states were i do you teach has been darwin if the if one of them picked the book. granted it opened it to see that you were costing down to at least showing that you had doubts on that over 3 or 4000000000 years the human eye could have been created by doe we need natural selection just tell us

a little bit about the journey which obviously saying that we need evolution is wrong now you say there is a there is a crucial problem yes and i think this is why they reckon i mean it's not wrong it's just slightly and adequate in that case case of gravitation we need einstein's general theory of relativity which is a refinement of that and i think darwinian evolution his original theory has done wonders and so there's a whole chapter devoted to the new biology which is going beyond that and in particular the field of epi genetics as it's called which is those aspects of the g. which not captured at the genetic level but which are very very important for the way the system behaves. so that is now being widely recognised but this is still a battle there's still some die hard reductionist series say that you know ultra pure original darwinism is the only way to go and the difficulty you as you rightly

mention in the united states is if you're dealing with people who want a religious interpretation of what miracles to put it bluntly is that if you give the slightest impression while there's a problem about the original formulation of dogmatism they pounce on the but this is of course so for theologians call the god of the gaps just because it's might be able to explain something but the fact that science can't explain that there's a gap in our understanding that doesn't mean we want to rush in with god to fill that gap we need a miracle we don't need american we need better suns a better understanding of you the very serious nature of this book and you leave it till the end after talking about information and what the definition of life is impractical to the tree. and of cancer we may law for the evangelical writes about their views but actually you seem to be suggestion with a lot of biologist to may believe in a miracle cure for cancer which is not the pettus year this should be looking for

yes i think carrick cancer research is a very good example of how ova conservative thinking it in biology has not led to lack of progress but the progress has been matched lists of just 2nd biggest killer you say oh move yes sir cancer is a as also had to become the with the world's number one killer it touches a every family on the planet and and it's a city tragic of call some people the scared over than they won't something to be done about it i think there's been this naive few that if we just throw enough money of the problem will discover a pill that which is making go away and that's never going to happen as the we have to be much most awful in our approach to treating cancer new greenwood sinister ugly when you read the book is your was saying that using all this information lady years a diffused of luck there was something intrinsic about life in cancer yes it's the

nature it's the nature of mountie said into life cancer is sort of britain into the whole logic of of life 2000000000 years ago there were just single celled organisms on this planet and a bacterium for example just has won imperative replicate replicate replicate it's in effect to mortal on that about one half 1000000000 years ago life organized itself rather differently of the of the sump organism stead in sue multicellular collected some what happens the air in old an organism's like a selves is that individual cells give up their individual immortality they outsource said immortality to special sit germ cells likes eggs and spend and they carry the information legacy into the next generation and the individual so-called somatic cells like cells in a skin and liver and so on they part of that contract is that they undergo

programmed cell death toward a pup texas and cancer is a breakdown of that ancient contract in which the individual cells return to a bid for immortality gould's worrying about that is. this is all going to be a magic pill for cancer there when to each individual cancer has to be treated in the same way a general purpose pill to make it go away i think is is you're on a hiding to nothing you think a lot of the problem is being capitalism the position of profit big pharmaceutical companies saying we've got to look for this pill because it budget a rich we become i think you're right that the funding model where the way that we totally capitalism because it is after all rigged market anyway. all over conservative government investments in cancer i should should mention that i was funded for 5 years by the us national cancer institute spends $5000000000.00 a year on cancer and. when i look at how that spends

a lot of it is just spent on sort of same old same old mainstream research very little on imaginative new approaches and the approach of i'm outlining in the book . has received some funding but it's a sort of tiny fraction and so there is deep conservatism in the cancer research community. and i give you an example which relates directly to the whole profit business that of course. if you have some way of combating cancer like through diet or. another approach we've looked at is hyperbaric oxygen therapy which is pretty patients in 2 atmospheres of pure oxygen for a short period of the some belief that. some evidence that this is efficacious so one of the most efficacious anticancer drugs is well known and the cancer community is aspirin but you know it's fair to the free over the counter.

getting clinical trials for things like aspirin it's not easy there have been some . but and little people say this is. it isn't difficult well i believe it is possible davis thank you and that's it for the show. 50 years to the eve of moammar gadhafi becoming prime minister of libya by social media don't forget to subscribe to a future. donald

trump tweet needed. me saying that even if he was not a threat to the us theory me in general its track record his fate also coming up on the program the leaders of libya's warring factions are in moscow for ceasefire talks brokered by russia turkey and war torn nation tribal administrations will sign an agreement. to infrastructure in east africa prevent immigration to europe is in the firing line for modern day slavery we speak with a human rights watch representative on the.