My greatest inspiration growing up was my grandfather. He is still today. Vladimir Sokolov was an ecologist, zoologist and a pioneer of the USSR’s environmental movement; an early sustainability advocate who did much to advance the global interest in wildlife conservation.
As a child, I would frequently join him on field trips for months at a time, participating in scientific work along the steppes of Mongolia, deep in the Amazon Rainforest or the reefs of Vietnam. My very first trip with him was to Chernobyl, where we went to hunt ducks with a Geiger counter to measure their radioactive levels following the 1986 disaster. I was nine at the time.
The next year, we travelled to Africa for the first time: the start of a lifelong love affair for me with the continent. Dedushka and I camped out in the Ethiopian savannah where I helped to collect samples.
He was not the only scientist in the family. His wife, my grandmother, was a botanist and biochemist. Visiting Moscow’s botanical gardens with her in the Eighties remains one of my happiest childhood memories. Their daughter, my mother, was a microbiologist at Moscow University. When I wasn’t on faraway expeditions, I could often be found in her lab, observing science and discovery and constantly yearning for more.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Bernard Marx put it thus: “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” I am lucky to have known such passion from a young age — and it is this passion that is behind The Standard’s new podcast, named after Huxley’s great book, and out tomorrow. I have long-held admiration for those eager to change the game. My guests on Brave New World are just that. Gabor Maté, who kicks things off, is transforming the way we tackle mental illness. Wim Hof, up later on, is an extreme athlete whose method of cold water immersion is providing relief for millions around the world.
Amanda Feilding and David Nutt, experts in psychedelics, are innovating the world of therapy via their research. Dr David Sinclair and Professor George Church, both at Harvard, are pioneering new risk-identifying technologies to work out how we might live better for longer. Professor Church is also trying to find a way to clone the Woolly Mammoth.
These are exciting developments that make me hopeful about our future. Amid the doom and gloom of Covid and its aftermath, here are champions of progress making a difference with science that can change the world. Amid the stress of modern life and rising rates of suicide and auto-immune disease, there are people doing all they can to turn the tide around.
I have been a lucky student of these initiatives and explored their potential by making changes to my own life. I begin every day with Hof’s breathing exercises. Then I work out following an ice-cold plunge. I meditate, and have used psilocybin and ayahuasca and experienced the wonderment which they bring to the mind.
Here are champions of progress making a difference with science that can change the world
Of course, there are more adventurous guinea pigs: Ben Greenfield, Davinia Taylor and Bryan Johnson have told me about their extraordinary reinvention as biohackers. Their stories — each one madder than the next — are all on Brave New World, and I am thrilled to share them with you.
I am not suggesting that we all need to spend hours every day on the treadmill, or install saunas in our living rooms. That is not what Brave New World is about. Some of the ideas mentioned may sound totally outlandish, fantastical and out of reach. But personally I have found that smaller, more manageable changes — to diet, sleep and exercise routines — tend to have the biggest and most positive impact.
Dr Russell Foster is a world expert on sleep, and has kindly offered some of his wisdom for the podcast. Dr Rhonda Patrick is a biochemist with key insights into food, exercise and longevity. We will hear from her, too.
It has been a great privilege to speak with such brilliant minds. Each new conversation inspires me to learn more, and I hope this podcast will inspire others to do the same. I have been surprised by how little has changed since Covid: we may be more panicked about health, but since the vaccine we developed in record time, we seem to have stagnated — worse still, regressed. The NHS is collapsing before our eyes, with enormous waiting lists and junior doctors striking for better pay. We are crushed with obesity and mental health crises, and Health Education England says that 43 per cent of adults do not understand written health information.
I hope listeners will come away enlightened about the changes they can make to live a fuller, happier life
I hope Brave New World will help demystify some of the discoveries that are being made, and go some way towards democratising the seminal technologies taking us into the future. More widely, I hope listeners will come away enlightened and empowered about the changes they can make to live a fuller, happier life.
I also hope it will resonate with those in charge. There is a dichotomy between the dire state of healthcare, and the leaps and bounds being made in the lab. And that is not by accident. The scientific establishment has always been conservative. During our chat, Maté recounted the story of Dr Semmelweis, who was hounded from the profession after he instructed maternity doctors to wash their hands. All innovations, no matter how vital, start out as radical ideas that many seek to squash.
One revolutionary idea that has recently gained traction is to treat ageing not as an inevitable condition, but as a disease. This is something which Australia and the World Health Organisation have already recognised. Ageing is not just upsetting: it is costly. Britain spends tens of billions each year on care for the aged. But what if we invested more in the younger generation, empowering a healthy workforce to look after their well-being now so as not to get sick later, when treatment is less likely to work? What if we invested in preventative medicine to help people live more healthily for longer? And, crucially, to alleviate the burden on our health service?
Brave New World will continue this conversation, and others that are vital too. I do hope you will tune in.
Listen to the trailer here and get ready for the first two episodes tomorrow with Gabor Maté and Sam Harris. Search ‘Brave New World Evening Standard’ and hit follow’ on your podcast provider.
