Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the chemical signals coursing through our bodies throughout our lives, produced in separate areas and spreading via the bloodstream. We call these 'hormones' and we produce more than 80 of them of which the best known are arguably oestrogen, testosterone, adrenalin, insulin and cortisol. On the whole hormones operate without us being immediately conscious of them as their goal is homeostasis, maintaining the levels of everything in the body as required without us having to think about them first. Their actions are vital for our health and wellbeing and influence many different aspects of the way our bodies work.
With
Sadaf Farooqi Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reynolds Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh
And
Andrew Bicknell Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading
Produced by Victoria Brignell
Reading list:
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (first published 1962; Penguin Classics, 2000)
Stephen Nussey and Saffron Whitehead, Endocrinology: An Integrated Approach (BIOS Scientific Publishers; 2001)
Aylinr Y. Yilmaz, Comprehensive Introduction to Endocrinology for Novices (Independently published, 2023)
The May Fourth Movement
The Battle of Trafalgar
Plato's Gorgias
The Decadent Movement
William and Caroline Herschel
The Song of Roland
Corals
Iris Murdoch
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
The Manhattan Project
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Herodotus
The Evolution of Crocodiles
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Edward Gibbon
Booth's Life and Labour Survey
Kant's Copernican Revolution
The Interregnum
Journey to the West
Longitude
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
History Extra podcast
Empire
Economist Podcasts
The Intelligence from The Economist
Not Just the Tudors