Science looks at the body’s nerve impulses

Press, 4 March 1981, Page 15

Science looks at the body’s nerve impulses

Myasthenia gravis is one of the auto-immune diseases where nerve impulses are interrupted so that commands for movement do not get through and healthy muscles thus fall into disuse. Researchers at the University of Bath have been looking at ’ the biochemical changes which occur when the body's immune system is turned off by immuno-sup-pressive drugs and they, talk on the 8.8. C. science programme (Concert. 7.30 tonight) about the strange antibodies which cause myasthenia gravis. Other topics on this week's programme are the study of Martian geologv resulting from pictures sent back by Mariner 9 which may help us understand the earth and the hydrated electron which may have been the active scavenger in what is called the ’primordial soup'' which produced the first living cells on earth.

Songwriting Rodgers and Hart were a most successful American songwriting team: and Malcolm McNeill pays tribute to their work tonight (National, 8 p.m.). All of Rodgers' songs (including those later written with Oscar Kammerstein II and other lyricists), were written for the theatre or films, and his collaboration with Lorenz Hart was an unequalled association of lyrics and melody. Malcolm McNeill will be joined by the vocalist. Denise Harris, and accompanied and directed by Dave Fraser. Scheherazade Scheherazade was. of course, the sultan's wife in the Arabian Nights who managed to ward off execution by entertaining her master with stories. Rimsky-Korsa-kov based his symphonic suite on Scheherazade's tales

and they are heard in vivid musical pictures in the suite. Tonight on the Concert Programme at 8.38 Yevgeny Svetlanov conducts the London Symphony in the RimskyKorsakov suite with solo violin played by John Georgiadis. Double bill A room-to-let is the prelude to violent upheaval in the suburban home of Tom and Edith, an apparently staid and respectable married couple in Julian Dickson's ‘Cannibal Rat" The catalyst is Edwin Tanner, played by Grant Telly, as predator and Cannibal’ Rat. Producer:’ Gilbert Goldie. The second play, “The Recruit" has been written by James Edwards. Human frailty and helplessness are captured as a tragic story evolves of the effect of a broken marriage on a child. The familiar pattern cm-

erges: foster home. Social Welfare care, escape, and finally, the police. The play does not analyse nor justify, it simply presents the consequences of this common plight in a compassionate wav. Producer: Stephen Riley. National, 8.45 p.m. Schubert on stage Schubert, though perhaps thought of primarily as a writer of songs, symphonies and music for piano, also wrote some 17 works for the stage. On a Rotterdam Philharmonic recording sampled on tonight's Concert Programme at 10.30 the topranking Dutch soprano, Elly Ameling, and the tenor, Claes-Hakon Ahnsjo, present excerpts from Schubert's stage works. The conductor is Edo de Waart.

Listening