The life scientific : 7/8 [Jenny Graves].

Part of a series of programmes in which Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at Surrey University, talks to leading scientists about their life and work. This part features one of Australia's leading geneticists, Jenny Graves, Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University, Canberra. She is also a singer. Her career has involved studying the fauna of Australia to gain an insight into humans and explore what it is that determines the sex of an individual. She talks about her work mapping genes in kangaroos, and how, because their genetics are simpler than humans, the research can take you a long way back in evolution. They talk about her education and inspirations both social and scientific. Andrew Sinclair, Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, and her former PhD student, describes her character as a scientist as having a willingness to let ideas allowing ideas flow whilst, at the same time, providing an evolutionary lens on those ideas. Jenny talks about how sex is determined at the level of chromosomes and genetics, including the sry gene. She then goes on to talk about her research on Australian marsupials and the platypus in particular because it has no sry gene, and sex chromosomes similar to birds. As such the sex chromosomes are a simpler version of those in humans and reflect the situation 145 million years ago in evolution. After considering the race to find the gene that held the testis determining factor, she talks further about how unusual the sex genetics of the platypus are, including the fact that they have 5 X and 5 Y chromosomes. Lecture tours about the 'unusual' Australian marsupials are one of the ways Jenny is able to popularise her work and get people talking about genetics. Andrew Sinclair, and Marilyn Monk, Emeritus Professor at the University College London talk about Jenny's work as a senior Australian scientist and how she makes Australian science more prominent. Jenny then talks about her personal life and her brain haemorrhage, before considering her argument regarding the human Y chromosome and how she thinks it is degenerating and shrinking. They then hear from Jennifer Hughes, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who disagrees with this viewpoint and has done studies involving human and rhesus monkey Y chromosomes. Jenny Graves counters the arguement. They talk about whether the disappearance of the Y chromosome would mean the end of men, and humanity. She hypothesises on various aspects including the possibility of developing a new sex determining gene. They finish by talking about her singing.