YouSaid · the spoken record

Ijeoma Uchegbu

lines on the record: 32
first: 2026-04-18
most recent: 2026-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Can test how much glucose is in your blood at home. You can do so many things at home. So you can see that the way diagnostics have moved out of the laboratories into our homes. Wouldn't it be great if medicine manufacture moved out of the laboratories into our homes and serviced just us?”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“out will come the white powder which is the compound and eventually the drug that I'm to use and it will tell me how to use it Highly personalized, highly individualistic. Everybody has their own and can dial up their medicine according to their own history. No privacy concerns because it's all contained in your device. And that will be fabulous. It's not beyond the realms of possibility because at the moment we do have home diagnostic kits that 40 years ago we didn't have. 40 years ago you felt you were pregnant. Oh, you had to sort of hang about blah blah blah go give a urine sample. They'd inject it into some animal. Ah, you are pregnant some days later. But now we can do that in an instant in our homes.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one thing that people don't realize is that when we make a medicine, It doesn't treat everybody. Sometimes it only treats a very small number of people, but nevertheless it's approved because there's nothing else. Sometimes as little as 30% of people would respond to a particular medicine. My dream, and I've had this dream for a long time, is that I could sit in my house, put my symptoms into a device. And my device will say, okay, if you put powder A and powder C and powder B into your device, I will synthesize the molecule. Just for you, because I know all about you, I've got your genomic data, I've got you the data about all your genes, I've got the data about all your history. I understand how you interact with your environment.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“machine learning algorithm. Your machine learning algorithm, which has been trained to look at toxicology, to look at the beneficial ways that molecules actually work, will then spit out a handful and say, I think you should focus all your efforts on these five or ten. So the 5,000 that you would have had to test gone. And we're told this could be done really quickly. Then you get your molecule of your few five molecules, you test those, and we are told that that will lead to something that will get onto the market and treat patients. This is the promise, Helen. It remains to be delivered that has to be said. Many people are attacking this problem, trying to use machine learning and other forms of generative AI to come up with molecules that will be beneficial as medicines”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What does the future hold? Well, first of all, the first thing that has come out in the last 30 years is that you don't have to synthesize lots of different molecules and throw out the problem. You can harness them from biology and you can make them in biological systems so you can get a bacteria to manufacture your molecule and these molecules are antibodies. The same antibodies that were mounted when we took the COVID vaccine to make sure that the COVID virus didn't kill us. So you can make all sorts of antibodies and one very famous one is Hesectin used in breast cancer. Works really well. Now AI, you mentioned AI and machine learning has come along and this is the promise, hasn't been delivered yet, but the promise is this. You're not going to have to make 5,000 molecules anymore. You're not going to have to make 50. You're going to be able to throw all these structures at your...”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you go into the laboratory, you make more of those compounds that all look the same, then you begin to test them against the disease. And you have to test at last time of counting about 5,000 molecules to get one that will go to the market. Incredibly laborious. What we do in our work is that we're not looking for the molecule that will change the disease. We're looking for the molecules that will be used to make the actual medicine. We're used to make the tablet, the injection, whatever is going to be. And so we design molecules that work really well in that respect.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's disease. You understand that, you then say, okay, I want to change this by having different molecules that will either attack the problem, get the protein out of the way, or correct all the defects that the protein has caused. So what you do is that you make loads and loads of molecules and you throw them at the problem. And literally, you're looking to see if one sticks. So just imagine throwing a whole bunch of things at a wall. one sticks. Yay, this is the protein that is, sorry, this is the compound now that is going to change the course of that disease.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the chemistry of the process and just looking at drug development as a sort of starting point to develop a medicine, first of all, you have to understand the biology. You have to understand the difference between the healthy biology and the sick biology. Now, but even that boils down to a chemical, and normally it boils down to a protein. A protein in health is working very well, delivering all the benefits that that protein should deliver. A protein which is slightly changed and it could be slightly changed because an amino acid is missing or an amino acid is in the wrong place. And solidly that protein causes disease. There are examples. There's sickle cell anemia, one amino acid is changed in the whole thing, and that just changes the way hemoglobin works. There's cystic fibrosis, again, the proteins that are responsible for moving things in and out of cells are changed.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even some people decide, okay, we're not going to wait for the bacteria, we're just going to burn the body. We end up with the ash that comes from a burnt corpse. I thought it was important to add this, otherwise there was a part of the book that was missing. And that's a bit that happens at the end. So I hope that people don't feel too traumatized. I do joke a little bit there when I talk about Tutankhamun and how he was, I remember this when I was a young girl all going down to the British Museum to see Tutankhamun and being full of wonder that just an 18-year-old was buried with all this splendor. And I try and make it a bit light by bringing in those subjects that people are not consumed by their own grief.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are very difficult to degrade our bones. That's just 18% of our weight. The rest of it completely disappears. And it completely disappears because bacteria that have been kept at bay suddenly have nothing to keep them at bay. There are no immune cells. There is nothing to stop them from just going completely crazy. And so completely crazy they do go and they start to degrade everything. I didn't really talk about other things like insects that come in and rats that come in because I think that would be just a bit too gory. But the bacteria, and they do a fantastic job.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there is a beginning and there's an end and death is the end for all of us. So that's the first thing. I knew that it would be a little bit traumatic, for example, if someone is recently bereaved. You really don't want to read about what happens when someone dies in the chemical is there. But I thought I couldn't miss it out because it is quite important for us to understand that whenever the heart stops beating, the brain stops working and death is confirmed, something else begins to happen to that body. And I kind of frame it around my own bereavements so that people understand that, well, you can be bereaved, but still have a very grown-up conversation about what happens to the corpse at the end of it. And so I kind of try to make people understand that there are some parts of our bodies which”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whole system will come unstuck. So it needs more creative thinking about exactly what we're going to do to replace these fossil fuels, some of which you've heard, well, maybe they've got 50 years to go and then everything's going to change. So it should be an area where we put a lot of focus, not in the sustainability way where we say, oh, well, let's just replace it with solar panels and let's have wind farms. Where are the chemicals going to come from? It's a great point.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, is a problem. So we have to start looking at the parts of plants that we do not eat and seeing whether we can take the cellulose in wood and try then to see whether we can somehow get to a similar sort of chemistry that is used in our industries to make all these other ingredients. I know some companies are making surfactants. These are these schizophrenic molecules I talk about that they love oil and they love water but they are so important. Without them we can't make body cream. Without them we can't make mayonnaise. Now some people have started making surfactants from plants and this is a very good way to go. But I think that when you actually say, well, we need these number of tons every year and we need this amount of land to grow them. I think that's where the”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a big problem too because, first of all, we need to eat these carbohydrates to stay alive. And there is a particular statistic that's quite frightening that if we just decided to say that we wanted to make biodegradable shopping bags. Now, we've had a fabulous campaign and people are using less plastic bags because of this brilliant campaign we've had in the UK where you have to charge for them. It worked brilliantly. But if we had to replace all of those plastic bags with biodegradable plastic bags, we would have to use all of the corn produced in the US every year just for our bags. Now bear in mind that we can't feed all the people on the earth. There are about 700 million people that just don't get enough food every day.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, the first thing to think about is we probably have to consider our plants. Now, that is also not without its problems. So if you consider that you now have to start looking for a way to replace the various long chain fatty molecules that we use to make, as you said, shampoo, body cream and all other types of things. You then have to look at plants that produce oils. Oh my goodness, the first one that comes to mind is palm oil. Now, we're going to have enough palm oil to replace the fossil fuels for sure. And people say, oh, well, maybe we can work with carbohydrates and change those to ethanol. And then maybe that way we'll be able to then synthesize some of the molecules we need.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Microplastics really found in bodies, but there is a growing body of evidence that we are inhaling our clothes and we are swallowing our clothes and we are inhaling our cosmetics and swallowing our cosmetics. And these everyday items have been found in our bodies. So what is the right amount? I don't have an answer to that, but I do know that this wonder material has transformed our lives. And I have many more examples in the book around shopping and things like that and the fact that our food keeps fresh because of plastics. And then I do know that there is a hangover, but I don't know what the right amount is.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A plastic free world is actually not where we want to be, but we have to acknowledge that this wonderful invention of the mid-20th century has a downside, for sure. And that downside is the fact that we do not know how long these plastics last in our environment. We have no idea. So what are we doing? We bury them. Now, if you can find the little pieces and pick them up and bury them, OK, we are storing up a problem for tomorrow, but we don't have to sort of choke our world with these plastics. But then let's think about the microplastics, the very small ones, two to three millimeters in size, which we cannot pick up. They're so small. Where are they? Well, they're in the soil. They're in the oceans, and they are in our bodies. Now, recently, there was a bit of debate about, well,”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then a nurse comes along and wants to give you an injection. She hasn't got a plastic disposable syringe. She has a glass one, where she's boiled. But hey, maybe she was in a bit of a hurry, didn't boil it for long enough, and she's got microbes from the last patient on the tip of the needle, which she then injects into you and so on and so forth. And even we're two women. How many nappies have we washed in our lives? We've got the disposable nappy, which has transformed our lives. When I had my children in Nigeria, my children are in their 30s and what is going to be 40 soon, I wash nappies. It's 24 nappies a day. It's unbelievable. And then you'd hang them out and you'd have to have another 24 for the next day. And if the weather was poor, oh my God, there was a panic. But now with plastics we have those. So really...”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so, and I did that deliberately because plastics, of course, are considered to be actually very, very detrimental to our world. That's the current belief. And so trucking back to illustrate all the advantages of plastic in this by painting the picture of this plastic free world, and I think one of the most powerful examples is our hospitals, where you go to a hospital and you do not have a plastic cover on the mattress. So you have to lie on where someone else died. And their fluid seeped out before they were found or where someone else bled. And it's been allowed to dry. It's had a good wash with some kind of soap, but the evidence of the bleeding is still there. You don't have this plastic cover. You have to lie on it.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are things that come out of nature which could be terrible for us. So there are, for example, certain plants that are poisonous, but nobody talks about those. Nobody talks about those plants at all. Instead, they focus more on the drugs that are manufactured that go awry, that don't actually deliver their promise. So there is that sort of almost a false demarcation between what comes out of what is natural, things that the chemicals that people are more associated with and the ones that are synthesized in the laboratory. And yet... The problems are the same. There are chemicals which are naturally derived that can be dangerous. There are chemicals that are synthesized in the laboratory that can be life-changing.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was never enough of a critical mass of chemists and infrastructure that allowed that to happen. 35 years ago, that was a huge problem. Currently, I'm not quite sure how far the country has gone down that road, but I do know that there is still that desire to change the economy from being purely extractive to more industrial manufacturing. That desire is clearly there. And should there be a good coalition of infrastructure, people, ideas, that would be fabulous for the country, for sure. I think in the UK, you're absolutely right. There is huge distrust. If it's synthetic, it has to be bad.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was imagining that in Nigeria, I've been away from Nigeria for over 35 years. So I'm talking about Nigerian as time warp. The idea of today. If I think about In Nigeria, of course, this is a country that really, really needs to add value to whatever's coming out of the ground and things like that. So for example, if there are crops, it's important for in the country for the value to be added to those crops. For example, cocoa is not really grown so much in Nigeria, but imagine if it was. It would be important to change that to chocolate before exporting it. And you think about oil, which is Nigeria's biggest export, it's probably better for oil and gas to be converted into petroleum products and then exported. I know when I was growing up, there was always talk about doing more with a petrochemical industry instead of just exporting oil by the barrel. Why don't we go into fine chemicals?”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about our homes. I talk about us buying our home. It was a mess when we moved in. We started renovating it. And with each step we took, we had more priding our home. We invited people around, whereas in the beginning, when it was a swirly mess of all sorts of decorations that we didn't like, we were loath to invite people around. So then again, we're interacting with the chemistry on the inside of our homes to give ourselves more confidence.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strike up a conversation because you know you're looking your best. Then you think about the clothes we wear and the clothes of course we use clothes to define us. We present ourselves with our clothing. If you have now gone to the, I don't know, a boutique and you bought this fabulous silk dress, it feels good, it rubs against your skin in such a nice gentle way. And as you move, it swayes because silk is a very light fabric. Again, when you're in a situation where you get up to do your presentation, you're feeling fabulous because you know you look your best. And the nerves almost disappear because you look down and everybody's looking at you and thinking, wow, she looks amazing. And so chemistry really changes the way you interact with the world.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're absolutely right. And I talk about this in about two or three ways. So, first of all, cosmetics. And you think about the way we adorn ourselves with cosmetics. So basically cosmetics are, again, chemicals. And they've been used for thousands of years. And our cosmetics that we buy off the shelf are by and large relatively safe. They're safe chemicals to use on our bodies. And what you find is that if you, for example, colour your hair or you decide to use a chemical to straighten your hair and then have a different kind of curl with your hair, you actually feel a lot nicer. You feel that much nicer, more confident, and you're able to sort of do things that if you went out in your pajamas with your hair in a mess and your face undone, you probably wouldn't have the confidence to do so you can walk into a room with strangers.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't believe what I'd seen, and I thought, I want to understand what happened in that bag. Hence moving into the chemistry of medicines pharmacy.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a very specific thing that happened in my childhood that made me decide that it was the chemistry of medicines I was particularly interested in. And that was my witnessing a family friend that came to stay with us really fall gravely ill. I had never seen anyone so gravely ill that actually you had to prod them to make sure they were still breathing. And this was what happened to this lovely family friend. She went from a picture of health to being gravely ill. And one day a doctor came to the house, he set up a drip. By now our family friend is hardly breathing, breathing intermittently. And he injected into that drip bag a vial of stuff. To me it seemed to be water going into water. He mixed it around with his hand and the next day this family friend woke up, Lazarus-like, and asked to be taken to the toilet.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was born in the UK, born in East London in Hatney. And then when I was about 13 years old, my parents decided, right, they had come to the UK to study. And when they came to study, of course, they did their studying. They put me up for fossil fossil. To Nigeria. Well, the word back was very strange for us because as far as we're concerned, we were living in the UK and that was our home. We all went back and we went back to a country which was war-torn and we went back to a region which was war-torn. So getting to school in middle of secondary school and suddenly the curriculum is very different. But there was one thing that was always the same and that was physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Those subjects were the same. So I literally took refuge in those subjects.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buildings that we live in, the atmosphere that we take for granted is chocolate with chemicals. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. So what I want to do is to make people aware that when they look out of a window, and let's talk about the window, the window is chemistry itself, silicon dioxide mostly. When they look out of a window and they see a bird flying, they should see water, proteins, carbohydrates, fat. When they look at a tree, they should see cellulose, lignin, chlorophyll. These are all chemicals. And these chemicals are what make up our world. Everything you can think of is made of these chemicals.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you're absolutely right that when we think about chemistry, it isn't part of the popular science sort of canon. You don't actually go to your favorite bookshop and see books on chemistry. And it's quite difficult for me to say why that is. But I think that one point you make, which is absolutely true, is that the word chemicals needs a real rehabilitation. It is not just about dangerous things. It is not just about pollutants. It is not just about chemicals that are in our foods that we don't want. In fact, chemicals are everywhere. They are part of us, part of the food we eat.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are made of chemicals are happening in our bodies every single second, whether we're asleep or awake. Have chemical reactions happening. One chemical reaction that happens all the time is that we carry oxygen in our blood to our cells. And for that to happen, the oxygen in the air has to get into our bodies, into our blood, combining with a very special protein called hemoglobin. That's a chemical reaction in itself, that bonding. And then hemoglobin carries this oxygen all around us. Okay, let's step outside our bodies and think about the things that we put on our bodies, the cosmetics. These are all chemicals. Again, mostly water, some fats, some pigments which are chemicals. And think about our clothes. Again, chemicals make up our clothes. Proteins, for example. These are the components of wool and silk. And then some other synthetic”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this is what I sort of set out to change. This is a key attitude that I set out to change. And one way to think about this is to imagine that actually you and I are literally a bag of chemicals. Now, mostly, and I'll talk about myself, but it applies to every single living being on Earth, we're mostly water. So that's the chemical that really defines us. But there are other chemicals as well that define us. There are proteins. There are fats, there are carbohydrates, and there are a whole bunch of other chemicals, including our genes. They are all chemicals. And what are chemicals? Chemicals happen when we string a bunch of atoms together to make molecules. Then we end up with chemicals. So we are all chemicals. Chemistry is everywhere and everything is chemistry.”
2026-04-18 · Intelligence Squared · How Does Chemistry Shape our World? With Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT