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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    The 'I Love You' computer virus

    How a virus created by a Filipino college dropout sparked global panic in May 2000

  2. Marburg virus

    A deadly new disease infected laboratory workers in a small town in West Germany in 1967.

  3. The SARS epidemic

    How the world battled a deadly respiratory disease in 2003.

  4. The polio vaccine

    Scientists in the US led by Dr Jonas Salk develop an effective vaccine against polio

  5. The Ebola virus

    The first documented outbreak of the deadly disease occurred in the 1970s in Zaire

  6. The 'Spanish' flu

    In 1918 an extremely deadly form of influenza killed millions around the world

  7. The Major and the VW Beetle

    How a British army officer saved Hitler's Volkswagen Beetle at the end of World War Two

  8. Battling Soviet psychiatric punishment

    One man's stand against the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the Soviet Union

  9. Strikers in saris

    How South Asian women workers won the support of the British trade unionist movement

  10. The petrol that was poisoning children

    The EU finally banned lead in petrol in 2000 - decades after the US, Canada and Japan.

  11. Womenomics in Japan

    Japan faces a demographic time-bomb. Could the answer be Womenomics?

  12. Freeing American prisoners from Iran

    The diplomacy behind the release of three US citizens who unknowingly hiked into Iran.

  13. The last smallpox outbreak

    Thousands of people died in the world's last major smallpox epidemic in India in 1974.

  14. The rebel nuns who left their convent behind

    A group of Californian nuns left their convent and set up their own community in 1970

  15. The first mobile phone call

    The American inventor who made the first mobile phone and the first mobile phone call

  16. An Antarctic mystery

    Human remains were found on a remote island in Antarctica in 1985 but whose were they?

  17. Saving Antarctica

    A 1980s campaign to preserve Antarctica for science.

  18. Saddam Hussein's 'Supergun'

    Building the largest gun in the world for Saddam Hussein's Iraq

  19. Fighting oil pollution with art in Nigeria

    "Battle Bus" was a sculpture in memory of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro Wiwa

  20. How meditation changes your brain

    In 2002, a landmark study on Buddhist monks showed that meditation can alter the brain.

  21. The Pale Blue Dot

    How the Voyager space probe captured a famous image of Earth as it left the Solar System.

  22. The Rules: A dating handbook

    The best-selling dating handbook was published on Valentine's Day 1995

  23. The best-seller Fear of Flying

    Erica Jong's best-selling book about sex, creativity and love, published in 1973

  24. Diary of life in a favela

    A shocking account of the realities of the slums of São Paulo

  25. The man who first published Harry Potter

    The man who spotted the potential of the boy wizard books in 1996

  26. Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

    The collected thoughts of China's communist leader that became an unexpected best-seller

  27. The release of Nelson Mandela

    The day that South Africa's anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was freed

  28. The Native American casino boom in the US

    How a small Californian tribe won the right for Indian communities to host gambling.

  29. Witnessing the birth of a new language

    In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language

  30. Cixi: China's most powerful woman

    The Empress Dowager Cixi ruled for 47 years until her death in 1908.

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