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Kwasi is the Member of Parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey in the UK.  He is also a historian and his new book War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt argues that the economic rise of the West depended on gold and silver raided from the Americas.  He also explains how the absence of a ‘gold standard’ has contributed to the volatility of today’s financial system.

Maria Alicia is the director of the Museo del Oro, or Gold Museum, in Bogota, Colombia.  She is in charge of an unrivalled collection of pre-Hispanic artefacts, including ones made by the Muisca people, famous for their metalwork and stunning golden objects. She says recent research has shown that the lustre and shine of the gold was much less important to the Muisca than how the object was made and what proportion of gold and copper it contained.  Photo c/o Museo Del Oro/ Maria Alicia Uribe Villegas

Nicholas is professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan in the US, and his lab is conducting several research projects involving gold nano-particles.  He says in the last decade, gold at the nano-scale has become a powerful agent in the treatment of cancer and other devastating diseases such as Alzheimer’s; but that the techniques they use to obtain these tiny particles of gold have not fundamentally changed for centuries.

In this week’s 60 second idea, scientist Nicholas Kotov says some people’s fascination with real gold clothing has gone too far, and should be stopped. Celebrities wear all-gold dresses, nouveau riches make all gold-metal shirts, athletes have all-gold sneakers.  We should openly laugh at such fashion statements, which show a lack of taste and imagination, and use up precious gold that could be treating diseases instead!