This educational film from 1970 traces the inheritance of traits such as sex, eye color, height, and weight, showing the role of chromosomes and genes in determining their development.

If we compare ourselves with our genetically closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, we have few physical advantages. We are far weaker, cannot move nearly as fast, and do not have the same climbing capabilities. Instead, humans excel in areas such as architecture, religion, science, language, writing, art, culture, and ideas. These achievements are due to our larger brain that contain billions of neurons. It was the rapid growth of our brain, originating about 2 million years ago, that allowed us to be the predominant species of the world. What caused this rapid growth of our cerebral cortex? Researchers worldwide have asked this question for many years, but now there finally seems to be an answer.

Many geneticists and archaeologists have long surmised that human life began in Africa. Dr. Spencer Wells, one of a group of scientists studying the origin of human life, offers evidence and theories to support such a thesis in this PBS special. He claims that Africa was populated by only a few thousand people that some deserted their homeland in a conquest that has resulted in global domination.

The documentary tells two very different human fates in the 1920s Soviet Union. Nikolai Vavilov was a botanical genius, Trofim Lyssenko was an agronomist who made great promises and fake inventions. Each of them tried to solve the country's nutritional problem, but only one succeeded.

Earth teems with a staggering variety of animals, including 9,000 kinds of birds, 28,000 types of fish, and more than 350,000 species of beetles. What explains this explosion of living creatures—1.4 million different species discovered so far, with perhaps another 50 million to go? The source of life's endless forms was a profound mystery until Charles Darwin brought forth his revolutionary idea of natural selection. But Darwin's radical insights raised as many questions as they answered. What actually drives evolution and turns one species into another? To what degree do different animals rely on the same genetic toolkit? And how did we evolve?

The 1977 discovery of RNA splicing by Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, Kentucky farm boy turned Nobel-prize winning scientist, set the stage for a revolution in molecular biology, enabling research into a new class of medicines predicated on recombinant DNA techniques ranging from the development of synthetic insulin and human growth hormone to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Can science help us understand these crimes?

Spared by cancer, diabetes and possibly Alzheimer’s, men and women of small stature are intriguing scientists that are trying to postpone age-related illnesses. What mechanisms protect these small Ecuadorian from certain illnesses? From Quito to Los Angeles, via Tel-Aviv, the film follows the revolutionary research, step-by-step, that is attempting to understand and prevent diseases such as cancer. And outlines ways to live in good health… for as long as possible.