Professor Robin Condliffe

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497 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Professor Robin Condliffe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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What's Up Docs? · How can we look after our amazing lungs? · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

And if you were to open me up and get those half a billion alveoli and to spread them on the floor, and I hope you don't do this, but if you did, it would fill half a tennis court.

So we have half a tennis court worth of surface area within our two lungs.

I think that's quite impressive.

Yeah.

So you've touched on it already.

The aim of taking a breath is to get air, which as we've said contains oxygen, into the lungs.

and to get rid of carbon dioxide which the body has made.

So the lungs are like bellows.

You've got to open the bellows to suck in air.

We have a muscle, the main muscle we use is not the muscles in the chest, it's the muscle below the diaphragm.

So the diaphragm goes down and

air is sucked in now that air we've talked about that air might be quite mucky the body has some some ways of trying to clean it you've got hairs in your nose you've got mucus all the way down it's what we call in the profession snot and um and that traps so particles and actually have tiny little little hairs all the way down your windpipe the trachea and the

from the trachea down the bronchi and these little cilia just waft and they move this mucus all the way to the back of your throat and then you can either blow it out or you swallow it and it goes in the stomach.

So air is brought down, it's cleansed down the windpipe, the trachea, bronchi, they divide until we get to these half a billion alveoli and that's where the magic happens because those alveoli are really, really, really thin

And they're next to tiny little blood vessels called capillaries.

So blood from the right side of the heart, which is low in oxygen, pumps blood through the pulmonary artery.

And then it goes very, very slowly through the capillaries.

It's so narrow that each red blood cell has to queue up and go very slowly next to the alveoli.

And that is where we pick up oxygen into those red blood cells and where carbon dioxide is excreted.

Those blood vessels also filter the lungs.

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