Have we become too clean for our own good? Medical researchers suggest the war against germs in the hygiene-obsessed western world may be triggering serious illnesses in hundreds of millions of people. Unless we stop attempting to live in a sterile biological exclusion zone, we may prove to be our own worst enemies.

Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was the most shockingly disfigured person in history. For more than a century the cause of his deformities has baffled doctors and scientists around the world. Using forensic and genetic science, this detective story gives a unique insight into a tragic condition, and uses modern imaging techniques to reconstruct the face beneath the deformities.

No one knows exactly how cystic fibrosis destroys its victim’s lungs, but we do know that at the heart of the mystery lies salt: the salt that’s essential to the working of a healthy body. This is the story of biomedical pioneers searching for a cure to a disease that has killed people of European descent for millennia.

Diabetes is a blood sugar disease that affects 130 million people worldwide, and is fast becoming the world’s biggest killer. It’s a disease that starves our bodies of energy, causing blindness, kidney failure and heart attacks. This is the story of the attempts to find a cure for the condition, using cutting-edge research techniques.

This is the story of the fight against Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the genetic disease that kills more boys than any other. The disease is estimated to affect one in 3500 boys worldwide. There is still no cure, 140 years after Duchenne was first detected. Join medical pioneers on their quest to rescue sufferers from the death sentence they face.

One in a hundred people is a “hoarder”: a person who accumulates things and hides them away for future use, items that to the outside world are considered worthless and useless but to them are hugely valuable. This film is a portrait of four extreme hoarders. What happens when the obsession takes over? When the hoarding ruins their life?

Imagine having your body placed in an aluminium can to be kept in deep freeze storage for hundreds of years. It may sound disturbing, but not so for the hundreds of people who are paying hand over fist, to sign up for cryonic preservation in a bid to defy the final human frontier: death.

Luciana Wulkan, age 7, suffers from Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva. This rare degenerative disease triggers her muscles and tendons to turn into bone, immobilizing her body. The film follows Luciana and her mother as they confront the reality of the condition worsening and we see her dream come true as she is taken to Florida to swim with dolphins.

Shockingly tall, amazingly small, morbidly obese or conjoined. They are people at the limits of the human condition. Individuals whose extraordinary bodies have taken a course far different from the norm. Inside Extraordinary Humans will examine the lives these people lead, the problems they face and we’ll come to understand the challenges of being ‘exceptional’ in a ‘normal’ world.