STEPHEN LEWIS talks to Heinz Wolff, the TV professor and lifelong science fanatic who is about to launch this year's York Festival of Discovery

PROFESSOR Heinz Wolff has his own theory about why so many people these days are switched off by science. Schools and teachers are afraid to teach it properly.

"The inspirational part of science teaching are the bangs and the smells," he says, in that German-accented voice familiar to a generation of youngsters from TV science programmes such as The Great Egg Race.

"But they have become impossible. Schools have become so afraid that somebody will sue them that teaching has become more boring."

A note of wry amusement enters his voice. "If you compare it with what I was allowed to do at school 60 years ago... it was certainly more interesting!" he says.

He has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the deadening effect on teaching of a society afraid to take risks. So much so that when he was invited to launch this year's York Festival of Discovery, he planned to give a talk entitled "Risk is not just a four letter word".

Then the organisers asked him gently if he would mind talking about bioengineering instead and, ever courteous, he agreed.

As the man who virtually invented the term back in 1954, there are few better placed to do so. But what is bioengineering?

Just what it says on the tin: the application of engineering know-how to biological theory so as to make things which can be beneficial to our lives.

He gives a vivid example. "I have one inside myself!" he says cheerfully. "A defibrillator, an electric device which can wake me up from the dead - and has done so."

It's no different really than the device used by doctors in programmes such as Casualty to get people's hearts beating properly, he says - except his is tiny and fitted inside his chest. "The heart can take it into its head to cease pumping blood and to vibrate uncontrollably," he says. "You use an electric shock through the chest to stop the heart, and the hope is that when it starts again, it will be beating properly."

His own built-in defibrillator has saved his life three or four times, he says. "It is like being kicked by a mule in the chest. But I've managed to survive to the age of 75." He slips into that dryly humorous tone again. "One could argue it has been a boon to mankind even if it only preserves me."

Bioengineering has mostly been used in the medical world, he says, to make everything from heart pacemakers to artificial hips.

More recently, it has begun to enter the territory of science fiction. There is the possibility now of using a patient's own cells to 'grow' a new liver, heart or kidney to transplant into that patient, he says.

Even more amazingly, special metal alloys that can 'remember' their shape can now be used for repairing arteries or veins and for knitting together broken bones.

How? A kind of staple can be made for broken bones, he says, that remembers its closed position. It can be chilled and opened, then put in place across a fracture by a surgeon. The patient's own body heat causes it to revert to its remembered closed position, so that it pulls together the two fractured segments of bone.

Medical science, however, isn't the only area where bioengineering can bring benefits. It can be used to improve quality of life, too. At the Brunel Institute of Bioengineering that he founded in 1983, Prof Wolff and his team have been working on the Millennium House. It is a house run by a tiny computer, that is designed so older people can live independently for longer.

The computer looks out for the person living in the house. If they forget to switch off the oven, or go to sleep without locking the back door, it will remind them. If they forget to eat - it can tell by monitoring whether the cooker or fridge have been used - it will remind them of that, too. And if they fall or injure themselves, it can send out an alarm call.

There is a pilot house at Brunel University in which the professor lived for a while, "pretending to be an 83-year-old." Essentially, he says, it is like being in sheltered housing - but without having to have a human warden watching over you.

He was only pretending to be 83. He's actually not quite 75, and while he may no longer be so much in demand on TV - "we live in a youth culture, and you find very, very few people who in their seventies still do TV" - he has no intention of retiring just yet. He still loves science, and he still has a contract with Brunel - you can almost hear him waving it down the telephone line. "And I will go on working until I go gaga!" he says.

Prof Heinz Wolff will launch this year's York Festival of Discovery at a special Caf Scientifique event at the Merchant Taylor's Hall on March 5 at 7.30pm.

York festival of Discovery is a two week long series of free events organised by Science City York. The first week coincides with National Science Week from March 7-16.

Updated: 11:34 Tuesday, March 04, 2003