Chris van Tulleken grew up in London and trained in medicine at Oxford University, specialising in infectious disease and tropical medicine. He has a PhD in molecular virology from Greg Towers lab and in 2016 he won the Max Perutz award for his HIV research.
Initiated by Michael Faraday when organised education for children was scarce, the Chrismas Lectures established an exciting new way of presenting science to young people. World-famous scientists have given the Lectures, including Nobel Prize winners William and Lawrence Bragg, Sir David Attenborough, Carl Sagan and Dame Nancy Rothwell, and they were first broadcast in 1936 (the oldest science television series). They have been broadcast every year since 1966 on the BBC and in later years on Channel Five, Channel Four and more4. In 2010, the Lectures returned to BBC Four.
The video chapters are the following:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 00:14 Why does food need to be digested?
- 02:09 Why does food taste better when I'm hungry?
- 03:11 Why does food make me sleepy?
- 04:55 Why does food make me feel sick?
- 06:10 Why does food turn into poop?
Chris van Tulleken concerns about antibiotic resistance and over-reliance on prescription drugs led him to create a campaigning series for BBC One in 2017; ‘The Dr who gave up drugs’, and in 2018, he turned the focus of the topic to children with the second series, which received rave reviews. Following on from the success of ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’, the lecturer investigated the impact ultra-processed foods has on our children, in ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ for BBC One. In 2023, Chris published ‘Ultra Processed People’, which became an international bestseller.
