2024-03-20
28 分钟Professor Charles Godfray, Director of the the Oxford Martin School tells Jim Al-Kahlili about the intricate world of population dynamics, and how a healthy obsession with parasitic wasps might help us solve some of humanity's biggest problems, from the fight against Malaria to sustainably feeding a global community of 9 billion people.
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Hello, I'm Jim Al Khalili and this is the Life Scientific.
The deal is I get to talk to some of the amazing men and women who are trying to understand our world and to make it a better place.
And you get to find out what makes them get out of bed in the morning.
Hello.
Charles Godfrey has described himself as a natural historian, in the sense of studying natural history, who throughout his career has followed his nose, and only accidentally, he says, ended up as a senior academic.
Now the professor of Population Biology at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Martin School, he is involved in all sorts of groundbreaking projects, exploring everything from the impact of AI to the future of organ printing.
From childhood adventures in the South Downs to a scholarly obsession with the strange and gruesome world of parasitic wasps.
Charles has maintained his fascination with the complex web of insect interactions and behaviors.
But a knack for weaving together diverse scientific strands shines through too.
Whether helping to uncover a malaria eradicating gene using mathematical modelling, or investigating the UK's approach to tackling bovine TB.
In recent years he's taken on one of humanity's greatest challenges, feeding a world population set to exceed 10 billion by the end of the century.
And as Charles says, the race is well and truly on.
So join us as we sprint through, because we're going to have to the incredible journey of my guest today, Professor Sir Charles Godfrey.
Welcome to the Life Scientific.
Pleasure to be here, Jim.
As I mentioned in the intro, Charles, you've had an incredibly varied career, moving seamlessly, it seems, between field research, academia and science policy.
But your broad field was and is population biology.
What is population biology?
You can think of biology as a spectrum and some people study molecules or cells or tissues and some study ecosystems, whole assemblages of species.