Social engineering

Heinz Wolff’s latest and most ambitious experiment might just solve the problem of care for the elderly

Heinz Wolff has been offered Maidenhead by the government as the laboratory for his next and boldest experiment, but it is not enough. ‘They should give me the Isle of Wight,’ he cries, domed cranium pulsing beneath his Branestawm specs. ‘All of it. It’s perfect for my purposes.’

As seasoned film audiences know, when a scientist starts making territorial demands in a strong German accent, it’s generally time to confiscate his Bunsen burners.

But at the age of 82, Emeritus Professor Wolff — the father of bio-engineering, the beaming genius of television’s The Great Egg Race — is through with science. It is now, he announces from his office in the Heinz Wolff building of Brunel University, ‘irrelevant’. ‘It has taken us as far as it can. Our biggest problems have no technological solution. We have come through the industrial age, the information age.