LGBT history special

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear how a comic book fan and his friends began the very first comic convention in New York in 1964. Our guest is comic book expert Dr Barbara Postema, from the University Gr ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes.This week, we hear about the first solar-powered flight around the world, and discuss other moments in the history of solar power with Prof Laura Herz, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, in th ...  Show more

In the 1990s, doctors in Berlin began a cutting-edge treatment programme that led to a patient being cured of HIV/AIDS. The so-called "Berlin patient" was Timothy Ray Brown: he was suffering from leukemia as well as HIV/AIDS, and was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor wi ...  Show more

In 2007, a man known as the "Berlin patient" was cured of HIV through a stem cell transplant. It was an incredible accomplishment that researchers all over the world scrutinized for years to come. He was the first and only documented case of a person who has been cured of HIV unt ...  Show more

In the 1980s, the world was gripped by a virus that was killing people in their thousands; savaging communities and creating a climate of fear, blame and ignorance. That virus was HIV, and here to sift the facts from the fiction and explain how the AIDS crisis transformed everyth ...  Show more

Peter Staley was a 24-year-old, closeted finance guy when he was diagnosed with HIV. Having been handed a death sentence, he quit his job and devoted what life he had left to fighting the homophobic governments that were letting him and his friends die. Peter tells us about livin ...  Show more