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

and shown that they would tick away in a dish on their own in terms of electrical activity and indeed turning on and off of genes.

No, no, it is the master clock.

And now we know that a bunch of genes, which are turned on, make their proteins, those proteins form a complex, and then they enter the nucleus and turn their genes off.

The proteins are then degraded, and then the whole cycle starts again.

So there's a molecular feedback loop.

And we thought that it was only SCN cells that had this capacity.

And then a wonderful chap called Uli Schibler, who's based in Switzerland, showed that actually lots of different sorts of cells have a clock.

So you can think of a master clock within the brain coordinating the rhythmic behavior of literally billions of individual cellular clocks throughout the organ systems of the body.

So you've got this incredible hierarchy.

I mean, it's sort of a bit, the analogy I've sort of used is it's a bit like the master clock in the brain is a conductor of an orchestra.

She is producing a rhythmic temporal signal from which the rest of the orchestra, the body, takes its reference cue.

Okay, you ask a really central question.

One of the big questions in the field at the moment is, what are the signals from the master clock that are coordinating the rest of the body?

And we know that the sympathetic nervous system, that bit of the nervous system that is sort of under involuntary control,

that is regulating heart rate and a whole bunch of other sorts of things.

It's via those projections which are influencing the activity of organs and cells.

But there are also humoral, chemical messengers that are produced by the master clock that are regulating various tissues.

So we don't fully understand.

There are direct nervous connections.

There are hormonal outputs.

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