Professor Russell Foster

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92 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Feb

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

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · Recap: The hidden clock controlling your health | Professor Russell Foster · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

Let's start with why do they matter?

If you think about our biology, what it has to achieve is the right substances at the right concentration delivered to the right tissues and organs at the right time of day.

And it's the sort of temporal time structure that is delivered by our circadian system, our body clocks, that allow us to do this, that allow us to essentially optimize our biology.

So they're incredibly important.

Essentially, they influence every aspect of our physiology and behavior.

What they are has turned out to be really fascinating.

We've sort of known about rhythmicity for a very long period of time.

The first sort of description of a circadian rhythm goes back to about 1729 in plants with a rhythmic opening and closing of leaves under constant conditions, under constant darkness.

In fact, this French astronomer popped a plant in a cupboard and would peek in from time to time.

That was the assumption.

The light-dark cycle drives this rhythmic behavior.

But in fact, and he was completely puzzled by this.

There must be some internal mechanism.

And he was dead right.

And it took us quite some time to try and understand what that mechanism was.

I mean, in the early days, we knew that there was a master clock within the brain.

in the hypothalamus, an area called the suprachiasmatic nuclei, mercifully abbreviated to SCN.

And it comprises about 50,000 cells.

And when I started in the business, it was assumed that circadian rhythms were the product of cell-cell interactions, a sort of a circuit property that would generate a 24-hour oscillation in electrical activity.

And then, I mean, it was so exciting because people had isolated individual SCN neurons

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