BBC HUMAN BODY

Watch a documentaries series journey from birth to death using time-lapse photography, computer graphics and state-of-the-art imaging techniques, first shown on 1998 and presented by Robert Winston, a medical scientist and leading commentator on medical matters. The series explores every aspect of the human body in its various stages of growth, maturity and inevitable decline. Conception, toddlerhood, adolescence, the complexities of the brain and finally death are all documented and explained. Episodes:

1. HUMAN BODY | Life Story movie description: Every second, a world of miraculous microscopic events take place within the body. You'll journey with me on the road that your body takes. Through dangers. Through miracles. And through time. We'll see the human body in all its forms, fom our beginning to all our ends. Each person is one year older than the last. All of us have a place somewhere along this line, looking forward, looking back, or perhaps a bit of both. Seen like this, stripped of the trappings of wealth and status, we have one thing in common, the one place we all inhabit, the one vehicle we all travel in: it's the human body. Seeing your body in ways you've never seen before, perhaps you'll share my sense of wonder at how it shapes us all into who we are.

2. HUMAN BODY | An everyday miracle movie description: This film is the story of the unique relationship between mother and baby which is at the start of every new life. Over a hundred million acts of sexual intercourse take place each day in the world. These result in around 910,000 conceptions and, nine months later, 400,000 babies. Many of those babies will be first glimpsed like this, with ultrasound. But we can see them differently.

Stack a hundred ultrasound pictures together and a new image emerges: a remarkable three-dimensional picture of a child yet to be born. Today, new technology is letting us see the world of the unborn in a completely new way. It also lets us retrace its past from a baby just before birth to a foetus of thirteen weeks.

3. HUMAN BODY | First Steps movie description: For nine months, the baby's been fully equipped for life in the warm liquid world of the womb, relying on its mother for food and oxygen. It's in for a rude shock. As the baby is squeezed down the birth canal, dramatic changes have to happen.

4. HUMAN BODY | Puberty Raging Teens movie description: What you are about to see is one of the miracles of nature, the extraordinary transformation that will turn this caterpillar into a butterfly. But we human beings go through a transformation that is just as dramatic. Over four agonising years, our bodies and minds are transformed. At the end of it, like the butterfly, we'll be sexually mature. This incredible change is called puberty.

5. HUMAN BODY | Brain Power movie description: The adult human brain is the most complicated - and mysterious - object in the universe. Even so, there will always be some questions that it just cannot answer. As a scientist, I believe that science is the most powerful way of finding out about the human body. As a religious person, I believe that much of what makes us human will forever remain mysterious, even spiritual. I call it the soul.

6. HUMAN BODY | As time goes by movie description: In the wild, animals don't grow old, but we humans have evolved to live long lives - longer than any other mammal, in fact. Why is something of a mystery, but for humans at least, there might be something more to growing old than a slow decline.

7. HUMAN BODY | The end of life movie description: Our bodies are built from organised colonies of cells. In an incredible act of harmony and organisation, they work together.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | Life Story movie

There is one thing that everyone on Earth has in common. We all live, eat and breathe within the human body. For two years, I have been exploring this unique dwelling place. I want to show you what I have seen. To come with me, you'll have to cross the globe, from Australia, through Africa, to America. You'll have to journey into space, and into a place as mysterious but much closer to home. We've developed new techniques to help you get there. New cameras to show you the way. And we'll look at familiar things with a fresh eye.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | An Everyday Miracle movie

You're looking at a baby's heart. It's beating 120 times a minute. But, amazingly, it's not the only thing keeping this human being alive. That's done by the most sophisticated life-support machine on Earth. To find that machine, we have to leave the heart and travel through an artery the thickness of a drinking straw. Every one of us has an almost identical network of arteries and veins. Identical, that is, except for this one. And we'll show how, time after time, the human body has to overcome the most daunting of obstacles to complete the everyday miracle of new life.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | First Steps movie

Childhood - from newborn baby to infant. From toddler to the first day at school. To crawl, to walk, to talk, to become an individual, it is four years of miraculous achievement. Never again will the human body This is the story of that remarkable time. It all begins with the most treacherous journey of our lives, from our mother's womb to the outside world. All movement of the human body is surprisingly complicated and difficult to analyse. But in order to understand motion, analysis is what you need. That's what these little markers are all about.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | Puberty Raging Teens movie

This programme tells the story of the human body's enormous changes during puberty. It's also about what it feels like to experience puberty. If I'd grown in the same way, I could have fathered a child at the age of four, and would be completely grown at the age of six. The reason I didn't do that is because the human body does something very unusual. It breaks the journey from baby to sexual maturity when we're tiny, just six months old.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | Brain Power movie

Between the turmoil of puberty and the decline of old age, the human body reaches its peak. In biological terms, as adults, we are the finished article. So, all the triumphs of human endeavour stem from one thing. It's the most mysterious part of the human body, and yet it dominates the way we live our adult lives. It is the brain. The human brain is a miracle of evolution. It's the most complicated object in the known universe. It's easy to laugh at him now, but Aristotle was the first person to think seriously about how the human body worked. We've come a long way since the fourth century BC. We never looked back. Standing tall on two legs happened very early on in the development of the human body, before we had opposable thumbs, before we had stone tools, before we had language. As a scientist, I believe that science is the most powerful way of finding out about the human body.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | As Time Goes By movie

If we take a line of people, one from each year of life from birth to a hundred, what we see is the remarkable development of human ageing. As we journey through the first stages of our lives, our bodies develop to meet the challenges of each new age. Year by year, we're continually developing, growing stronger, becoming more intellectually alert and more sexually mature. The copying process is not perfect. In terms of the human body, we call these mistakes ageing. Moreover, the older the person, i.e. the copying machine, the more frequent are the mistakes. And of course, if we carry on copying for too long, we'll eventually reach the point where we disappear altogether. We tend to think that the human capacity for art, science and technology is what marks us out. But though we don't often see it this way, perhaps our ability to live to a ripe old age is the human body's greatest achievement.

Watch BBC HUMAN BODY | The End Of Life movie

We go about our daily lives hardly ever considering our final fate. We seldom witness death. We are reluctant to face up to our own mortality, to confront the truth that in the midst of life, we are in death. In this final part of the story of the human body, we take a difficult journey to see what happens when this mass of biological activity ceases to be, to see how all the previous ages of our existence are undone in the final act. The processes of death in the human body are remarkable. This is what it would look like if you could see the human body cool down over 24 hours. Long before we stop breathing, our brain may die, our personality lost for ever. But the biology of death can seem cold, and distant from the human story.