Centre for Life

Create your very own glowing slime, catch a star-spangled planetarium show or scare yourself silly with the new Frankenstein: Escape the Monster 4D ride. 

The Science Centre's permanent exhibitions focus on different aspects of scientific process and discovery.

The Curiosity Zone is a 100% hands-on exhibition which encourages creativity and experimentation, inviting visitors to play with the exhibits, collaborating and communicating to make discoveries and creations. 

The Human Life exhibition explores the origins of human life and our adaptation to extreme environments, as well as some of the challenges humanity may face in the future.

Every summer a new exhibition is hosted or launched, often a major touring exhibition such as Age of the Dinosaur in 2013, from the Natural History Museum. During the winter months, smaller scale exhibitions are hosted, either on loan from other museums or created in-house.

As well as the exhibitions, The Science Centre contains shows throughout the year. The Science Theatre hosts live, interactive and humorous science demonstrations linked to the main exhibition, and the planetarium - the largest in the North - utilising its 360° domed ceiling and immersive projections to present a range of shows and films from traditional astronomy demonstrations to specially created animated films on a range of science-inspired subjects.

Science Explainers

The science explainers are a team of science graduates working in the Life Science Centre who present the shows in the Science Theatre, host workshops, perform live science demonstrations around the Centre, and who are on-hand to explain exhibitions and answer your science questions.

Educational aims

Learning programmes are offered to schools, aiming to raise standards in science education for young people and reach up to 40,000 school children annually.

Workshops aimed at specific levels from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4 are offered to tie in with various aspects of the national curriculum, while the Centre also teaches the practical component of an MSc in Genetics at the Institute of Human Genetics. School groups who visit the Centre for a lab or workshop are also able to enter the exhibition at a discounted rate.

As well as workshops on-site, the Centre for Life also operates an Outreach Programme. Scientists from the Centre visit schools who are unable to organise a trip to the Centre or do not otherwise have access to laboratories or science equipment, sometimes in impoverished or extremely rural areas.

A variety of educational activities are also open to the public. There is a monthly "Science Club" for children aged 8–14, and a lecture series aimed at adults.

Some facts of Life:

• The ICFL Trust is a registered charity and is governed by a board of trustees.
• Life’s patron is Dr James Watson, Nobel Prize Winner and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
• The £90 million landmark site was designed by Sir Terry Farrell. Previously it had been a Roma settlement, a hospital and a livestock market.
• Life is now established as one of the most successful of the country’s 14 landmark Millennium projects.
• It is an independent and self-funding charitable trust with a robust business plan that eliminates reliance on public funding for its operating costs.
• Since 2000, teams based at the Centre for Life have earned worldwide headlines for advances in stem cell technology.