"This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing" "# When I see you alone" "# I see what's in your mind" "# You love me, yes, you do" "# You don't need to tell me" "# I know you love me most" "# No-one else take my place" "# You need me, yes, you do" "# Forever and ever" "# We are in love, baby love child" "# I take you so high, groovy love child" "# Give me a kiss, baby love child" "# Do it again. #" "At the beginning of 2000, one of the world's most famous scientists flew from London to the Congo." "He was a British biologist called Bill Hamilton." "Hamilton went to Kisangani." "Once upon a time, it had been called Stanleyville." "Now it was one of the most dangerous places on Earth." "GUNFIRE" "It was full of armed militias, all killing each other to get their hands on precious minerals in mines around Kisangani." "One of the most precious was a mineral called Columbite Tantalite, otherwise known as Coltan." "It was an essential component in all new digital machines - mobiles, laptops and games consoles." "And its price around the world was soaring." "Part of this was due to the coming launch of Sony's PlayStation 2." "PlayStation 2." "Because of demand in the United States and Japan, it's thought some of our kids could miss out this Christmas." "But Hamilton didn't care about any of this." "He ignored the war going on around him because he was convinced that human beings were killing each other in a completely different way." "He believed that AIDS had been caused 50 years before by experiments carried out by American scientists in the jungle around Kisangani." "And to prove this, he had come to collect chimpanzee faeces." "Surrounded by the fighting, Hamilton doggedly collected the chimp excrement from the forest floor." "But then, one day, he caught malaria." "He refused to take anti-malaria pills and instead took an aspirin." "But the aspirin lodged in his gut and caused a haemorrhage... ..that killed him." "But even as he died, Hamilton knew he would live forever." "Because he had shown that human beings are really just self-replicating machines, like computers, whose function is to transmit a vital code across time that will live throughout eternity." "Meanwhile, the chimp faeces waited at Nairobi airport for someone to come and claim it." "And everyone got their mobile upgrades, their new laptops and their PlayStation 2." "CHEERING" "# I close my eyes" "# Then I drift away" "# Into the magic night" "# I softly say" "# A silent prayer" "# Like dreamers do" "# Then I fall asleep to dream" "# My dreams of you" "# In dreams" "# I walk" "# With you" "# In dreams" "# I talk to you" "# In dreams you're mine" "# All of the time" "# We're together in dreams... #" "And here in the lower house of the Congo Parliament, the Members of Parliament here are discussing, have met to discuss whether Mr Kasavubu or Mr Lumumba's government is the authority in the Congo." "Their procedure is extremely chaotic." "Over probably about two thirds of them are here." "And they're waiting, I think, to hear Mr Lumumba speak." "And that's Mr Lumumba, sitting second from the left, among his ministers." "For almost 80 years, the Congo had been ruled by Belgium." "But in 1960, it became independent." "Its first Prime Minister was Patrice Lumumba." "He held out an heroic vision of a new independent Africa." "But the country was completely unprepared for self-government." "Within weeks it collapsed into chaos." "The Congo was central to the modern world because hidden in its forests were an extraordinary range of minerals." "The uranium for the atom bombs exploded over Japan came from the Congo, while its vast reserves of copper were crucial for the new electronic systems and computers that ran the Cold War." "And the old colonial towns now became battlegrounds where rebels and soldiers loyal to Lumumba fought for control of the precious mines." "It's an incredible atmosphere here at night in Elisabethville." "It's the atmosphere of a wartime air-raid, in some ways." "Yet there's no blackout." "The aerial attacks by the canons of the Canberras are done in daylight." "Some of the shops, most of them no longer operating, keep their window lights on." "Another mortar bomb falls nearby." "The Americans were worried that Lumumba would ally with the Soviet Union." "So they and the Belgians helped to organise a coup." "Lumumba was kidnapped by rebels from the mining areas." "He was taken into the forests of the Eastern Congo where he was killed and his body dissolved in acid." "The country collapsed into violence and terror." "It would lead to the rise of one of Africa's most corrupt dictators," "Mobutu Sese Seko." "But, amidst the chaos, the western mining companies carried on their operations unhindered." "Above all, the giant Union Miniere." "A spokesman for Union Miniere is at this moment presenting his report to the shareholders." "We have seen more than 500,000 people butchered, mutilated, raped and torn limb from limb." "Only this week we've read of massacres in Stanleyville, of mass shooting down and of unarmed women and children being murdered." "Of the burning alive of 60 men, tied together and soaked in petroleum." "Through all these events, your directors and I have asked ourselves only one question - to what extent will the operations of YOUR company be affected?" "We are pleased to record that the events of this particular week, taking place as they did in Stanleyville province, over 1,000 miles from the main seat of OUR mining operations, need not in any way directly concern us." "Bill Hamilton was a solitary man." "In the early '60s he lived alone in London, obsessively studying Darwin's theory of evolution." "Hamilton saw the world through the prism of Darwin's ideas." "He believed that everything could be explained by the desperate struggle of all living things to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation." "But as he watched the behaviour of teeming masses of ants, he realised that there was a problem." "Why did some of them offer themselves up to the jaws of predators in an apparently selfless sacrifice to protect the rest of the group?" "And why did some humans behave in the same way?" "What was in it for them?" "Hamilton was convinced that human behaviour could be explained genetically." "But to prove this, he knew he had to explain the puzzle of altruism." "He went to Waterloo Station." "He sat for hours on the platforms, staring at other human beings and thinking." "Hamilton would sit there 'in Waterloo Station in the evenings, a lonely man, looking at people.'" "What this was enabling him to do was, at some level, look at humans as though they were another species." "As though they were ants and he was not part of this." "So, although his concern very much is with humans, at some level he's able to take the emotion out, if you like." "He's looking for patterns, he's looking for ways to make sense of all these people that he sees around him." "The lovers that he sees kissing and then parting, the person he sees dashing to the train." "Even the person who approaches him to go off to the public lavatory." "These are all different individuals." "He is of their species, but he's not of their species." "Then, at the end of 1963," "Hamilton suddenly realised what he was actually looking at." "He looked through the skin and bone and saw something inside that was much more powerful and important than our individual identities - our coded genes." "And when he looked at the world from the genes' point of view he saw that human beings were just temporary carriers that allowed the genes to pass on copies of themselves and live forever." "Hamilton was no longer thinking like a human being." "He was thinking like a gene." "And genes were not like people." "They were like machines, tiny, calculating engines that could work out the mathematically best outcome." "And that explained altruism." "A gene would destroy itself if, by doing that, it would let more related copies of itself survive." "I think that he really felt that he was seeing a pattern to the way the world works that others weren't seeing." "This is how he really truly functioned as a man, almost from a different planet, looking at humankind." "Absolutely convinced that there was some force, hidden from the rest of us, which motivated them, which drove them." "We are now on our way to the country of the giants." "Behind this tremendous barrier of volcanic mountains, there lived a most mysterious people, a race of seven-foot giants." "Climbing again towards the mysterious summit, now hidden in the clouds." "Well above the great trees, a region seldom touched by sunshine." "Enchanted woods full of ferns and moss." "It looks like the home of fairies and goblins." "But there is no life here." "Through these woods, an icy wind, laden with fog and sleet, ever blows." "The hills of Rwanda." "In the 1930s an intrepid Belgian, Armand Denis, made films that told the western world about Africa." "But in Rwanda, he helped to create a myth that would have terrifying consequences." "It said that the Tutsis were a noble and intelligent race who had originally come from Egypt." "And that the Hutus were a separate race of ignorant peasants." "A rich land discovered no-one knows how long ago by tall, majestic men who came from the north - perhaps all the way from ancient Egypt - to preserve here the civilisation and beauty of another age." "The court dancers." "When the giants arrived in Rwanda, they found it already thickly settled." "But so great was the superiority of these tall people from the north that, although outnumbered 1,000 to one, they established complete domination over the mountain tribes which inhabited the region." "The blacks became their slaves." "But how superior their flowing rhythm, compared with the crude shuffles of the forest tribes." "In reality, there was no evidence for this at all." "The Tutsis were a ruling elite, but the two groups had always shared the same land and did not see each other as separate races and many Hutus shared equally in government." "But the Belgians who ran Rwanda took the myth and used it ruthlessly." "They brought in scientists to prove it biologically." "They measured skulls and said that the Tutsis had larger brains and so were the natural rulers." "They then made each group carry racial identity cards and created a segregated system in which the Tutsis ruled the Hutus with a brutal arrogance, encouraged by their Belgian masters." "But then, at the end of the 1950s, the Belgians decided to give independence to Rwanda and a terrible thing happened." "These are there few film fragments that record the events." "They show hundreds of Tutsis sheltering from the onslaught of a massacre by the Hutus." "But the massacres had begun for the strangest of reasons." "As independence approached, liberals high up in the Belgian colonial administration had encouraged the Hutus to rebel against their Tutsi overlords." "They had done this because they felt guilty about their imperial past." "They believed the right thing to do now was to promote self-government, to make amends and help the Hutus become free individuals." "But because the Hutus had been taught that the Tutsis were an alien race, the rebellion quickly turned into an orgy of revenge which the Belgians couldn't stop." "The myth that they had created had run out of control." "Today, we received more news and more evidence of the horrible events going on in central Africa." "This time it concerns Rwanda." "It became independent when Belgian control was suddenly withdrawn in 1962." "For years, a minority tribe, the Watutsi, had been supported by the Belgians as the local rulers, although they represented only 15% of the population." "In 1959, Belgium switched her support to the majority tribe, the Bahutu, who later seized on the independence of the country as a chance of revenge." "No-one knows how many Watutsi they've slaughtered." "Now, this lady took part in getting together this fragment of film which is the only film record of any of the horrors of which people have been talking from the Rwanda territory." "What we are looking at now is a mission where a large number of the Watutsi people took shelter." "Where all of these people, at whom we're looking - they look happy enough on your film now - where they in fact all safe?" "No, they weren't safe at all." "It doesn't matter if they were men, women or children." "They killed everyone who was Tutsi." "6,000 of them fished out of one of the rivers." "One department, 10,000." "That's like one county in this country. 10,000 dead." "10,000 dead, yes." "Are you sure that these stories are true of the massacre?" "There's no doubt about this." "There's no doubt about this." "Have you any idea how many of the Watutsi have been killed altogether?" "Altogether, it's very difficult to estimate because all this was organised and supposed to be unknown, you see." "In 1967, a strange and brilliant man came to London from America." "He was called George Price." "By chance, in a library," "Price discovered a scientific paper written by Bill Hamilton" "It was full of equations that show that human goodness and altruism were really survival strategies devised by our genes." "It had been ignored by the scientific establishment." "As Price looked at the equations, he had a sudden shock of recognition." "He realised that what he was looking at was a description of machines he already understood - computers." "Price had worked originally as a chemist on the Manhattan Project, but then in the 1950s, he had gone to IBM, where he helped design the graphics for early mainframe computers." "Price was an obsessive rationalist and in his spare time, he became a freelance science journalist and he specialised in attacking the myths and superstitions in society." "Because he believed that rationality could explain everything." "It was something that Daddy would do." "He would, um... you know, take a subject..." "He was always attacking sacred cows in society and he would take a subject and just explore it in a very rational way." "And things other scientists, you know, wouldn't deal with, he would just explore, and was quite fearless in his scientific endeavours." "He would go where most people wouldn't." "Above all, Price loved the cold logic of mathematics and computers." "He believed that computers gave scientists like him a new power to analyse the world in a completely rational way." "He wrote an article proposing that America could mathematically measure unhappiness levels among populations in the world." "This would allow them to spot where communism might take root and so prevent it." "Price's ideas were part of a powerful belief that had grown up in the electronic laboratories of the Cold War - that computers could be the salvation of humanity." "The godfather of this belief was the man who had done more than anyone to create the modern digital computer, the mathematician John Von Neumann, who had also built the H-bomb." "Johnny von Neumann enjoyed thinking..." "..in the clear and complete manner of mathematicians, in every field." "This also explains his effectiveness in connection with computing machines." "Because computing machines apply logical processes to fields, not only mathematics, but to others as yet untouched by the logical part." "And it is very significant that this revolution, the revolution of the electronic brains, was practically initiated by Jonny Von Neumann." "And when, in 1967, Price found William Hamilton's paper, he realised that what Hamilton had discovered was a new rational way of looking at human beings and their behaviour." "They were simply soft machines, controlled by on-board computers." "Price took Hamilton's mathematics and developed it." "But as he did so, he realised that the equations also worked in reverse." "That it was not just logical to be good, it was also logical to be spiteful." "It made sense to kill yourself, if in the process you also killed people distantly related to you and allowed those closely related to survive." "Price's mathematics explained murder, warfare and even genocide as possibly rational strategies for the genes controlling your behaviour." "Well, because it meant that you could have genes that were... evolved that were coded for... murdering people." "Such a gene, even if it was bad for the possessor of the gene, as long as it was worse for distantly related people, it could evolve and we might be genetically programmed to be murderers." "This was actually what George had been wondering and he sort of proved that in a mathematical sense, it could exist." "It grew out of Hamilton's theory because Hamilton had seen that you could harm yourself as long as you helped your relatives." "But this was different, you could harm yourself as long as it harmed distantly-related people that we had...genetic ways of recognising our closer relatives and our more distant relatives and we were programmed to hate and kill our more distant relatives." "These are the implications of the theory." "Then who would that help?" "The gene, only the gene." "It's the gene's-eye point of view, it would really only help the genes." "The genes would grow in the population." "That's what this was all about." "Price showed his equations to Hamilton." "Hamilton was fascinated and together they developed their theory." "It would become known as the Selfish Gene." "They also became close friends." "What Price had done was an incredible piece of mathematics." "As Von Neumann had predicted, what Price has also done was bring rationality and a clear logic of mathematics into a new field, into the heart of being human." "But with the strangest of consequences." "20 years before, as computers were being developed," "Von Neumann had dreamt of the future where machines would be able to replicate themselves." "He had written out a description of what would be needed for what he called self-reproducing automata to be invented." "The extraordinary breakthrough that Price and Hamilton had made was to discover that self-reproducing automata didn't have to be invented." "They were already here, they were us." "The equation has had enormous implications because if everything we did, whether good or bad, was actually a rational strategy computed by the codes inside us, then religion with its moral guidance was irrelevant." "And it demolished the Enlightenment idea that human beings were above the rest of nature." "In reality, we were no different from all the other animals." "All this had a very strange effect on George Price, the convinced rationalist." "He decided that the discovery was so powerful, it must have been a gift from God." "But he feels that this breakthrough could only have been given to him by..." "..God." "What breakthrough?" "Well, discovering, like, what he quantified altruism." "He felt that he was..." "when he looked at something and he was able to see it in such a simple way..." "He felt that... ..he felt it had been a gift and the only way he could interpret that was because of a gift of God." "But the equations actually showed God did not exist." "Hmm, that is a dichotomy." "At the same time on the top of a mountain in the eastern Congo, another American was setting out to prove that human beings were far closer to other animals than they imagined." "She was Diane Fossey and she spent her days alone, watching gorillas." "Fossey's aim was to show how connected we were to the gorillas." "She was part of a movement among biologists to prove" "Darwin's theory of evolution, not just through fossils, but by observing the behaviour of the primates." "They wanted to show that gorillas and chimps were not just blind brutes but complex animals, intimately connected to us." "But just as Fossey began her work, the human world below began to descend into chaos, driven by the forces of politics and power." "INDISTINCT CONVERSATION" "This is the Congo." "This is the hottest place in the capital of the Congo," "Kinshasa, tonight, the nightclub St Helier." "I'm able to report that the jungle bunnies at least are friendly." "MUSIC PLAYS" "But this also is the Congo today." "Yet once more, the terrified and injured men and women, white and black, are brought back in distress by plane to the Congolese capital, from the centre of the northeast," "Kisangani, the former Stanleyville." "In 1967, a new war broke out in the Congo." "White mercenaries who supported a rival of President Mobutu were leading a rebellion." "Their aim was to create a separate state out of the mineral-rich area in the eastern part of the country." "Behind the scenes, they were being supported by the western mining conglomerates." "But the rebellion turned into horror." "As the mercenaries fought their way into the town of Bukavu on the Rwandan border, they tortured and killed their prisoners with extreme brutality." "You say you wanted to make them suffer, how did you make them suffer?" "Well, in the company we were in, we took no prisoners." "If they did take one," "I had the pleasure of handling him." "And it was my pleasure." "What sort of things did you do?" "I used to make them torture stick a..." "Stick a hot bayonet through him." "Stick him on hot coals and cover him with mud." "Make the mud cake around it." "And just crack the mud off and stick a red hot bandit into a human body and make him walk with that." "Did you feel differently because you were doing this to black men?" "Could you have done it as easily to a white man?" "No, I don't think so." "Why?" "I just never had the experience of killing a white man." "A black man is like an animal to me." "But then Mobutu's forces counterattacked and destroyed the rebellion." "The mercenaries either fled or were captured, and then disappeared." "The mercenaries behaviour had enraged the Congolese soldiers, and they unleashed their hatred on the Europeans." "And then in a raging temper with all things and people European, they went back into the town, and they started smashing up the European houses, pillaging, looting and killing." "And then the Congolese soldiers found Dian Fossey watching the gorillas on the mountain." "The soldiers detained her and took her down to a military camp where she was imprisoned for two weeks." "What happened during that time is uncertain." "Fossey told some people that she gang-raped by the soldiers." "But to others she denied this." "But then she tricked the soldiers and managed to escape." "And fled across the border." "But Fossey was still determined to live with the gorillas, and within weeks she created another camp high up on another mountain." ""It is," she wrote, "as if I have finally discovered paradise."" "It was in Rwanda." "Fossey now retreated from almost al human company." "She spent all her time with the gorillas." "And to get closer to them, she tried to behave like them." "To make the gorilla feel more at ease, I imitated their feeding activities by making the same type of noise that they make when they obtain a leaf or a stalk." "And since they've heard a sound like this all their lives, to hear it from a human couldn't help but pacify them in some ways." "Fossey became obsessed by protecting the gorillas." "She tried to create a world where they would be perfectly safe, not just from poachers, but all human beings." "She patrolled the forest, destroying the snares that the local people had set to catch small antelopes because they might hurt the gorillas." "And she began to terrorise the local people." "She kidnapped them, spat on them and hit them." "And sprayed them with tear gas." "She also put on a mask and told them that she was casting black magic spells." "Fossey would never have called the Africans animals because she loved animals." "But she was following the tradition of so many westerners in Africa." "Maltreating Africans in the interest of a higher western ideal." "And the local people began to hate her." "In 1973, George Price decided to devote his life to helping the homeless of London." "As a result of the equations he had developed, Price had been given a job in the genetics laboratory of the University of London." "But he had also converted to Christianity." "And he had done so in an extreme way." "Price decided that he was going to follow the teachings of Christ as if they were an exact code." "He set out to help the poor and destitute to give them all his worldly goods." "He also walked the streets, offering the homeless a place to stay in his flat near Oxford Circus." "He was extraordinary." "He was like a saint, really." "He would give anyone who needed anything anything he had." "I mean, at the end, he would be in the park and if someone needed his shoes he literally took off his shoes and gave them his shoes." "He was barefoot in the park." "Give me a hand when I've crossed the way." "Give me a shoulder to cry on." "And then he started to take them into his flat, which was very nice, but they started stealing from him like crazy." "I don't even think at one point he had a warm coat, that he'd given it away to an alcoholic." "There was no artifice." "If he was going to be a Christian, then he was going to be a complete Christian and he was going to give away all his possessions to the needy." "And really help people." "William Hamilton became desperately worried about Price." "He was convinced that his religious belief was a mad superstition, and pleaded with Price to give up trying to help the homeless and do more work on genetics." "But others believed that Price had been so shocked by the implication of his and Hamilton's theory that he was in some desperate personal way trying to disprove it." "I think it's too easy to dismiss him as insane, which many people want to." "He was taking control of his genetic destiny." "He was sort of transcending his genetic destiny in those actions." "In what way?" "Well, he was just proving the theory because he was giving everything to genetic strangers and helping those by..." "By helping them, he was in no way serving the interests of his genes." "He wasn't looking for genetic relatives." "It was anyone at all he would help." "Of course, he was right." "This is the way we should be, but that's another point." "It's an important point." "What do you mean?" "Well, I mean this theory that we only help our relatives has a sort of bankruptcy in it." "You know, it's like we're all going to go down unless we sort of realise there's a larger community." "It really shouldn't rely on the extent to which we share genes with others, and yet we may be programmed to feel that it does." "There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla" "than any other animal I know." "We're so similar." "Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that we see the world in the same way as they do." "And so if ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively..." "..in another creatures' world, it must be with the gorilla." "David Attenborough's encounter with the gorillas had been filmed at Dian Fossey's camp." "But what the film did not reveal was that a few days before the local people had killed Digit, Fossey's favourite gorilla." "It was a part of their ongoing struggle with her." "This was November 5th." ""I've come to realise that the direction I took in April of 1973 was quite wrong." ""I persistently, time and again," ""rejected attractive young women I might have come to love" ""to make myself the servant or slave of down-and-outs" ""and old people whom I did not love." ""The money and help that I gave probably did mostly harm rather than good." ""I believe that the Hound of Heaven right now" ""is starting to close in on me." ""Daddy."" "It's like..." "What is the Hound of Heaven?" "The Hound of Heaven is a poem written in 1893 by Francis Thomson." "He had been an opium addict and a vagrant in London." "The poem says that however much we think we are free individuals, we are, in reality, always running from God and he will pursue us till the end, and possess our souls." "It is a powerful assertion of the limits of free will." "He cut his carotid artery with nail scissors." "It was in this... this deserted tenement, a squatters' tenement." "He was all alone, and he bled to death." "And yet there's a sort of purity to it that's very..." "George." "I mean, you know, he didn't take pills and there was a sort of full consciousness of it as he went out." "We're talking about free agency, he really - who kills himself that way?" "Honestly - wouldn't we all take pills if we were going to do it?" "He decided to cut his carotid artery with scissors." "To me, that's very striking and horrifying but graphic." "It was just an act of... of pure, free will, wasn't it?" "That really was what it was." "So genes or no genes, God or no God, this was certainly... his genes wouldn't have told him to kill himself, and God didn't, he just did it." "The only people at George Price's funeral were Bill Hamilton, one other biologist and a few of the homeless Price had helped." "But his and Hamilton's theory was about to be taken up and transformed into one of the most defining concepts of our age." "A young biologist called Richard Dawkins - who had himself been a computer programmer - took their equations and, through vivid language, captured the public imagination with a new way of looking at humans." "Our old romantic idea of free will, he said, is grossly exaggerated." "And most of our actions are actually controlled by the logic of the onboard computers buried deep within us." "We are simply machines playing tiny roles in a vast strategic game played by competing computer codes over centuries." "I was wanting to conjure up in the mind of the reader the image of the organism, including ourselves, as a machine for passing on genes." "I wanted to shift the focus away from the idea of the organism as being the agent in life to the immortal replicator, which is the gene." "Cos that was the logic of natural selection - that is the logic of natural selection." "It's the selfish gene, but not the selfish individual." "DNA." "Exactly analagous to the binary digits of some computer code, unravelling like a reel of magnetic tape on some giant computer." "But at the heart of this supremely rational mathematical theory, there was a paradox." "William Hamilton, George Price and Richard Dawkins had reinvented the immortal soul - a part within us that would survive our own death, and whose eternal life was far more significant than our own temporary and limited existence." "But the soul was now a computer code that made no distinction between good and evil." "The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived." "DNA is the wisdom out of the old days." "And I mean very old days indeed." "We are the descendents of a tiny elite of successful ancestors." "We are walking archives of the African Pliocene." "Walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days." "In 1994, the ruling Hutu government in Rwanda set out to exterminate the Tutsi minority." "Most western reports described it as the sudden re-emergence of incomprehensible tribal hatreds." "The New York Times said it was "an uncontrollable spasm" ""of lawlessness and terror, in a failed African state" ""with a centuries' old history of tribal warfare"." "But this wasn't true." "The Germans were just repeating the old imperial fantasy which said that the Tutsis and Hutus were ancient rival races." "In reality, the massacres were the horrifying result of the Belgians' policy of divide and rule that they had begun less than 100 years before in Rwanda." "It was this policy that had led to the vicious modern civil war that began the moment the Belgians left in 1959, and had now culminated in genocide." "In the colonial era, the Belgians had deliberately exaggerated and distorted the divisions between the Hutus and the Tutsis." "And the identity cards that the Belgians had created, that divided the two groups biologically, now became passports to life or death." "TRANSLATION:" "But then the west got involved again." "And, as it would turn out, with equally devastating consequences." "The Tutsis fought back, and the country descended into violent chaos." "Thousands of Rwandans fled across the border into Zaire." "Huge refugee camps were set up." "Western aid agencies flooded in to help the innocent victims." "But almost immediately, they found what they were also doing was protecting the perpetrators of the genocide." "The Hutu assasins were hiding amongst the civilians in the camps." "When people crossed the border, we knew very well among them there were murderers, people we were helping every time we give out food, every time we give health services." "We know that among the people we're helping there are murderers." "So the Tutsis invaded the camps to take their revenge." "In response, President Mobutu sent his troops to try and stop the fighting." "But they just joined in the looting, and Mobutu fell from power." "At the same time, the consumer boom in the west was fuelling commodity prices throughout the world." "And the Congo's minerals become even more valuable." "Everyone piled in." "Troops arrived from Zimbabwe... from Angola... from Uganda, Chad, Namibia and Libya." "They all said they had come to stop the fighting, but actually they were all trying to get their hands on the precious treasure." "And behind them were western companies, and us, all demanding our new consumer goods and toys." "In all, four and a half million people died in this war between 1998 and 2003." "And into the midst of all this came Bill Hamilton." "Hamilton was by now one of the most famous scientists in the world." "He was given the highest honours by the scientific establishment." "But his theories had led him into a very dark place." "He had written a series of books called Narrow Roads Of Gene Land." "In them, Hamilton followed the logic of natural selection to its extreme conclusion." "The idea that we should use western science and medicine to prolong the lives of those who would otherwise die, he said, was wrong." "It would allow the genetically inferior to survive, and so would weaken society." "Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategy of the genes." "He believed that some people are genetically inferior to others, that it's certainly possible, thanks to modern medicine, thanks to modern social policies, not only to keep these people alive, but to help them to flourish and, more importantly," "to help them reproduce, and he thought that this is a bad thing." "And he thought that we should stand against this slide into degeneration." "Because if you didn't stand against it, what would happen?" "Because he felt if we don't stand against it, the human species is going to degenerate." "Then, Hamilton heard a story from a journalist." "The journalist believed that the AIDS virus had been accidentally created by American scientists in the Congo in the 1950s when they were testing a polio vaccine." "The Americans had set up a laboratory to make the vaccine by growing it in the cells of chimpanzees." "And the journalist's theory said that by doing this, the vaccine had become mixed with the chimp version of HIV, which then entered human beings when they took the vaccine." "Hamilton was fascinated." "He was convinced that the scientific establishment were trying to suppress the evidence because it was a challenge to the idea that modern medicine was always beneficial." "The medical profession and the scientific background to it doesn't like the idea that this might have been a human mistake." "My fear is that it's going to become harder and harder to investigate this type of hypothesis that has big implications for what I would call big science, because people are going to be afraid of it for reasons of litigation," "for reasons of losing their grant." "Hamilton decided to break the conspiracy of silence." "So he set out for the Congo." "He was going to track down the local chimpanzees, study their viruses and prove that modern medicine, in trying to save lives, had inadvertently caused the death of over 20 million people." "Hamilton's journey was a vivid expression of what had happened at the end of the 20th century to the western dream of transforming the world for the better." "The logic of his scientific theory had led him to a small ruined town in the eastern Congo." "He walked through the chaos, murder and looting, looking for evidence that western medicine was dangerous and misguided." "While all around him, the horrific consequences of the Rwanda massacres were being played out." "Consequences created not just by western imperialism and greed, but also by the best and noblest of liberal ideals." "Because it was liberals in the Belgian administration who had first encouraged the Hutus to rise up against the Tutsi elites." "And it was the aid camps set up in the wake of the massacres that had complicated the conflict and helped to spread the violence into the Congo." "Then, Hamilton died, by the freak accident of the aspirin lodged in his gut, that then caused a haemorrhage." "His theory about the origin of AIDS in the vaccination programmes of the 1950s turned out to be completely untrue." "Subsequent research has shown that it had no factual foundation." "But Hamilton's ideas remain powerfully influential in our society." "Above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programmes written in their genetic codes." "And the question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences?" "We know that it was our actions that have helped to cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo." "Yet we have no idea what to do about it." "So instead, we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"