Roughly 10,000 people are reckoned to die every year from aneurysms.Surgeons can already repair aortic aneurysms using keyhole surgery, in which a probe is inserted into the femoral artery, in the groin, and pushed up towards the heart. It will use keyhole surgery with VR techniques to repair a weakened section of the aorta’s wall.The aorta is the main blood vessel leading from the heart, and a weakness – or aneurysm – can be fatal if it bursts. British surgeons will lead the world by using virtual reality (VR) systems to repair damaged arteries, a technique that could be available to thousands of people within two years. “We had always thought the simplest anaesthetic was to give an overdose of alcohol and render the patient senseless,” the professor said.Dr Moffat said: “Our research provides proof positive of the use of anaesthetics 500 years before [medical circles] recognise it.”. The reason you may not have heard of it is that drug companies cannot make a profit out of something that grows on every Scottish hilltop,” Dr Moffat said.The findings have stirred debate in medical circles over whether the medical history books will have to be rewritten.

Professor Adam Smith of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh told BBC Radio 4’s Today that Dr Moffat had provided a new picture of medieval anaesthetics. Tincture of tormentil is still available from chemists as a treatment for worms and as an astringent for diarrhoea.”What this means is that in 800 years, that treatment has not been improved on. He had wanted its story of a world drowned after ecological catastrophe to say something important, to express his own philosophy. He had wanted its hero, the Mariner, played by Costner – though their friendship was by now horribly strained – to be a loner, barely human at all. “We had discussions about how much of a big action hero Mr Costner should be,” he says acidly. The film went to sea, as awesome and insane an idea for a location as Easter Island had been, without a finished script Egos clashed, budgets ballooned, tempers frayed. Finally, Waterworld’s terrified investors and powerful star took Reynolds’s film away from him.

He could feel it slipping through his fingers, and let it go. “When it starts to be taken away from you, you pull away from it,” he says. “Because it’s not yours, and you’re wasting your time and passion It’s going to hurt too much. So you go numb.” Did he disconnect before he got close to making the film he’d wanted to? “Yes Yes, I did.” Does he regret that? “I do. But I couldn’t do anything else.”Reynolds left Waterworld’s editing to Costner. He found the star’s behaviour during shooting unforgivable, and will not speak to his one-time friend again He wouldn’t want to set eyes on him. Looked at with a little perspective, the film he helped make out on the water isn’t bad, and it was a massive hit, against all expectation It still hung like an albatross round Reynolds’s neck Until 187 came along, and redeemed him “I used to think, the hell with anything else,” he says “I’m going for the vision It was the all- important thing in my life.

In 187, we managed to keep the angst in front of the camera, where it belongs I paid attention to the story I paid attention to the characters. It’s less painful this way.” Did he gain something as a person on his previous films, while the films lost out? “Yes.” So is he putting less of himself on the line now, on the film’s behalf? “You’re exactly right Every film changes you Making films is how I live my life. 187 put me at peace with myself.” And those other films, the films that nearly finished him? “They’re still part of my life They’re still me I may make one like that again No one’s in control of their fate”n. The America we have become used to, from The X Files and its many sibling programmes, is a twilight America, packed with vampires and aliens, cults and conspiracies, a fantasy America which corresponds to what a surprising number of actual Americans believe. Wolfgang Petersen’s new film, Air Force One, is a throwback to an earlier doctrine of national identity, by which America is a noonday place, free of troubling shadows, where all threats are external and authority is not only reliable but in the know.

Action thrillers are usually preposterous, but Air Force One is so preposterous that it begins to seem like a science-fiction artefact in its own right, the product of a parallel-universe 1990s which somehow by-passed the decades since the 1950s, in every area except technology. Harrison Ford plays President James Marshall, a composite of every dreary virtue that America imagines it would elect if given the chance: man of conscience, man of vision, man of action, devoted family man who feels for all the families in the world, profound patriot who speaks Russian. Ford badly needs to play a few villains if his acting isn’t going to become permanently presidential, largely a matter of strong jaw and sombre expression. At a Moscow banquet early in the film, held to honour his courage in committing American troops to a raid that kidnapped the rebel president of Kazakhstan, he dissents from the mood of celebration to lament the lateness of intervention While politicians hesitated, babies died. Never again will he allow political self-interest to blind him and America to human rights violations. Anyone who’s read the occasional newspaper will know what happens when the United States mistakes itself for the United Nations, but this President seems to confuse his country with Amnesty International – an organisation which could justifiably take offence.
It isn’t just the President.