RNZ: Saturday Morning

David Sedaris's new book is compendium of his diary entries from 1977 to 2002,Theft by Finding. He tells Kim Hill that everything he writes gets read aloud he needs to add humour so he'll hear laughter. 

Irish director Emer Reynolds' documentary, The Farthest, picked up three awards at the Dublin International Film Festival earlier this year. The Farthest tells the story of NASA's Voyager spaceships - Voyager I and Voyager II - through some of the women and men who worked on the mission from the launch in 1977. It has survived countless near misses and continues to beam information across huge distances with less computing power than a modern hearing aid. Its nuclear generator will work for perhaps another decade before the lights on Voyager finally go out - but the craft could travel on for millions of years, carrying the 'Golden Record' - bearing recordings and images of life on Earth. The Farthest is screening at the NZ International Film Festival.

Dr Mariano Sigman is interested in how our brains, think, feel and decide. He talks to Kim Hill about his new book The Secret Life of the Mind.

Dr Arie Havelaar is a professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida, specialising in microbial risk assessment and epidemiology of food-borne diseases. He is affiliated with the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems and the Emerging Pathogens Institute. His research covers the broad field of public health aspects of pathogens in food and the environment, and the effectiveness of preventive measures. Currently, his attention is mainly focused on development and application of microbiological risk assessment and the burden of food-borne illness. He is co-author of more than 100 scientific publications, several books and numerous scientific reports. Also a director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Risk Assessment of Pathogens in Food and Water, Havelaar was in New Zealand to speak the inaugural meeting of the new Food Safety Science and Research Centre (NZFSSRC), a national virtual centre of science hosted by Massey University and established after the false botulism scare of 2013, and also the NZ Institute of Food Science and Technology conference, both of which were held in Nelson this week.

Dunedin teenager Issie, or Isabelle, Robertson has had a paper arguing against genetic modification to prolong human life, published in the prestigious international Journal of Medical Ethics. The 16-year-old student at St Hilda's Collegiate School became interested in genetic modification after interviewing bioethicist Julian Savulescu, a professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, for a school project about people with interesting careers. She disagreed with the professor's support for parents selecting genetic traits for their children - including to make them live longer. In her paper, Robertson questions whether modifying human embryos to extend a person's lifespan can ever be considered ethical practice.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

On 16 July, broadcaster and writer Noelle McCarthy has a new RNZ series out, looking at immigration. Slice of Heaven was made in collaboration with McCarthy's fiancé John Daniell and Massey University.

Dunedin-born Gerald McGhie served for 40 years as a diplomat for New Zealand, including two postings in Moscow - during Brezhnev and the Cold War years, and later during the fall of Gorbachev, the rise of Yeltsin and collapse of the Soviet Union. He has also been posted to Western Samoa, New York, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, and Tonga over his long and eventful career. McGhie has just produced an insightful account of 40 years of service as a NZ diplomat, called Balancing Acts: Reflections of a New Zealand Diplomat, in which, he says, he attempted to answer the question "what do diplomats do?" Retired in 2003, McGhie speaks and writes frequently on his experiences as well as on today's geopolitical environment.

David Diamond is the artistic and managing director of the Vancouver-based company Theatre for Living (TfL) and the originator of TfL techniques, which have grown from Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. A pioneer in the development of live, interactive television and web casting, he has directed over 550 community-specific projects on issues such as racism, civic engagement, violence, addiction, street youth, inter-generational conflict, homelessness and mental health. He is also a Visiting Theatre Director in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta, where TfL is used to shift the culture of the learning environment. Diamond has just been in New Zealand to attend the annual conference of Australasian Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA), where he was a keynote speaker on notions of belonging, performance and reconciliation.

Professor Tom Gilbert is an evolutionary biologist and ancient DNA expert at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. He is visiting New Zealand as a guest of Allan Wilson at Otago, with the support of the Genetics Society of Australasia and Genetics Otago. Gilbert has focused his most recent work on a broad range of evolutionary questions involving humans and domesticated plants and animals. He has also studied the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1850s, and which is related to kauri dieback disease. Gilbert will give a free talk at the University of Otago in Dunedin this week, where he'll discuss modern genomic analysis and how, from comparisons of just a few key DNA sequences, DNA technology itself has evolved to now allow evolutionary biologists to compare the entire genomes (all of an organism's DNA) of species, including humans, dogs and maize. http://www.otago.ac.nz/allan-wilson-research/index.html https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/me-my-dog-and-maize-dunedin-tickets-34844393519

Kate Camp has published six collections of poetry - her latest, The Internet of Things, was released earlier this year. She is the recipient of the 2016 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and is currently in Menton, a town on the French Riviera. Camp will discuss living in Le Pen country, terrorism and security, and, in her words, "bread, bread, bread! And other food, but especially bread".

Professor Johan Rockström led the team of scientists who worked out the planetary boundaries framework. He tells Kim Hill we haven't made a disaster of the planet yet, but it's critical that we move very fast towards sustainability.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Eighty year old Swiss-born goldsmith Kobi Bosshard has been called the grandfather of New Zealand jewellery. His daughter Andrea  Bosshard has just made the film about him, Kobi.

In April 1938 Agnes Moncrieff, New Zealand YWCA foreign secretary to the YWCA of China, wrote to her mother - "You do not travel in China at the full moon if you can help. There are always air raids." Agnes, or Nessie, Moncrieff arrived in China in 1930 and was part of humanitarian aid and reconstruction work there during the second Sino-Japanese war, when Japan invaded China and millions were killed in the ensuing conflict. Barbara Francis met Nessie Moncrieff in Wellington in 1956 and they remained friends up until Moncrieff's death in 1988. In 2007, Francis discovered that the Alexander Turnbull Library had a collection of Moncrieff's letters and reports sent home to Aotearoa, and she set about editing them, sharing her friend's story in a new book You Do Not Travel in China at the Full Moon: Agnes Moncrieff's Letters from China 1930-45.