Instant Genius - Bill Bryson: What should we know about how our bodies work?

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we hear from renowned travel writer and science communicator, Bill Bryson. Beloved by readers around the world, his works have included Notes from a Small Island, an observation of life in England, and the best-selling science book A Short History of Nearly Everything. His new book is called The Body: A Guide for Occupants (£25, Doubleday), where he turns inward to look at the mechanisms that keep us alive. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Does data discriminate against women? – Caroline Criado Perez What does our skin tell us about ourselves? – Dr Monty Lyman Is an implantable electronic device the future of medicine? – Gordon Wallace What does a world with an ageing population look like? – Sarah Harper What does it mean to be a man? – Gary Barker Is gene editing inspiring or terrifying? – Nessa Carey Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I've always been kind of amazed at how your body looks after you and how little attention we generally pay to it and how ignorant nearly all of us are about what goes on inside us. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com

or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Today, we hear from a renowned travel writer and science communicator Bill Bryson. Beloved by readers around the world, his works have included notes from a small island, an observation of life in England, and best-selling science book, a short history of nearly everything. His new book is called The Body, a guide for occupants, where he turns inward to look at the mechanisms that keep us alive.

Here he is chatting to BBC Science Focus editorial assistant Amy Barrett, ahead of the body's publication. I wonder your previous books have been influenced by your, you know, particular experiences, so walking the Appalachian Trail. Was there anything that inspired you to ride the body? Yeah, a couple of things that inspired me to write the body. One was this nagging realization that I had known nothing or knew nothing at all about what goes on inside me.

You know, I've been spending six and a half decades or so just, you know, throwing beer and pizza down my throat. And yet, you know, here I am still upright and generally pretty good health. And I've always been kind of amazed at how your body looks after you and how little attention we generally pay to it. And how ignorant, nearly all of us are, about what goes on inside us. So I just had this feeling. I wanted to look into the body, literally look into the body and see how we're put together.

And then at the same time, over the last several years, my older son, has been, he's a doctor now, and he was at medical school. And he would talk to me often with great enthusiasm about the things he was learning about the body at a very technical level. But, you know, and he would just be excited about ribosomes and, you know, what goes on inside the cell and things like that. And I was kind of captivated by his interest in it and felt like I really ought to try and know a bit more about it.

But I also discovered in just in conversations with him that he knew, although he knows everything you need to know about the body in order to practice medicine, He knew and was taught very little about the kind of social history of the body. So I could say to him, you know, why is it called Alzheimer's? And he wouldn't know. Or, you know, why is it Parkinson's disease? And he wouldn't know that. I mean, he didn't know everything you need to know in order to treat Parkinson's disease.

But he wouldn't know the story of the original Parkinson or Alzheimer or lots of other things. So I realized that even for medical professionals, I mean, even for people who deal with the body at a very technical level, there's a great deal that they usually don't know because they don't get the cultural and social side of these things. And I think reading that, reading the body, you really realize it's not just a study of our bodies, but it's a study of the people who have studied and looked into the body, isn't that? Yeah, and that's, I mean, to me, that's the really fascinating thing. And it was the same thing with my earlier book, a short history, nearly everything. What really fascinated me as I got more and more into the research work, wasn't just what we know, but how do we know what we know,

what we know. And, you know, because I'm not a scientist, because I have no aptitude to be a scientist or a researcher or the kind of people who figure these things out, and fascinated by people who can do it and just full of admiration for them. And almost everything we know in any field of science, the body not least, it's because of lots and lots of people doing lots of very specific technical work. And I'm just so full of admiration for people who will spend their whole lives just looking at something, you know, very, very small. And occasionally they get big rewards. I like to think of myself as friends with Ban Ki Ramakrishan,

who's the president of the Royal Society. And he's a wonderful guy, and he got a Nobel Prize, but he spent his whole life just looking at ribosomes. And to me, that's just, you know, I couldn't do that. I wouldn't have that sort of application. But, of course, by doing that, he learns a little bit more about how the cell works, and you add that to all the other people who are doing lots and lots of other things around the world.

And what you get in the end is a huge amount of knowledge. But it's because of lots and lots of people. You know, it's not just the world of science is not just Einstein's and Newton's. It's also lots of lots of people who don't get a great deal of attention because they're working in very arcane in specific areas. Is there anything in your research for the books that really shocked you about the human body? Well, quite, I mean, not shocked exactly, but I was surprised by just how much we don't know.

But, I mean, I mentioned Alzheimer's. And I think the closest I came to being shocked was realizing that, you know, Alzheimer's is called Alzheimer's because of a German doctor named Alois Alzheimer. In 1906, he diagnosed a woman with the condition and the disease was subsequently named for him. But he could do nothing for this poor woman. And now, you know, 113 years later,

anybody going to see a doctor with Alzheimer's with account exactly the same situation. The doctor where they understand a little bit about what causes Alzheimer's, but a doctor today can do no more for a patient with Alzheimer's than Alois Alzheimer's could do more than a century ago. And that was quite a shock to me, particularly when you realize how important Alzheimer's is going to be,

how much of our time and resources it's going to demand in the coming years because so many more. So many more of us are living to older ages and so many more of us are suffering senility of one kind or another, not least Alzheimer's. So, yeah, that was a bit of a shock to realize just how little we know about that. But in almost every area of the body, you don't have to ask, you don't have to delve too deeply before you come up against the wall of ignorance where we don't know why something happens.

Or even, you know, even such basic things says, why do we have a chin? Nobody knows why humans have chins. There's no structural reason for it. Presumably it's just we've, you know, in the course of evolution of history, we found them kind of dashing or lovely. And we do. I mean, you know, people who are comparatively chin lists

are almost always deemed to be less attractive than people who have a good chin. It seems like a lot of things that come out of evolution actually either have no sort of purpose that we know of or they actually go counter to what the purpose would be. So, for example, the I, you talk about in the world, book? Yeah, the eye is one thing, which is, you know, I mean, the eye is built almost completely back to front. I mean, because you, you know, in order to see now, you have to look through

blood vessels and all kinds of stuff that's in the way. And, you know, the brain has to filter all that out. I mean, if you saw, if you actually saw, in inverted quotation marks, everything that your eye is seeing, you would just be very confused. So what your brain does as it edits things out, the brain does a lot of manipulating the reality of the world in order for you to perceive it the way we do, which is a fantastic thing, but it's also quite a cumbersome process.

I mean, it would have made more sense if the eye had evolved so that all the blood vessels were behind the cornea, you know, that you did all the scene at the front of the eye rather than the rear. But it's just evolution doesn't work that way. It is a fairly, you know, it is a completely random process. and when things evolve, they don't necessarily evolve for the best. They just, you know, they evolve the way they do.

Is there anything about our bodies that we do on a daily basis that we don't realize is so incredible? Well, I think the thing that most blew me away was the realization of when I was studying about the brain. I mean, the hardest part of writing the book was keeping the brain from being the book because almost everything that is that is really fascinating and distinctive about us as organisms is from the neck up, you know. And, you know, I mean, you know, all other animals have livers and kidneys and pancreas and things like that. But what separates us from them is our brain. And the things the brain does is just amazing.

And yet it is, you know, 75 to 80 percent water and the rest is mostly fat and proteins. and you just think, God, you know, I mean, if somebody just gave you those ingredients and said, you know, make a brain out of this, obviously you couldn't come close. You couldn't get it to do any. I mean, as far as people in the world couldn't come close to doing anything with that. And yet somehow we do it, you know, in the womb quite spontaneously and naturally. I think the very fact that the brain exists at all and does what it does, I think, is just the most astounding, the most astounding fact in nature, possibly the most astounding fact in the universe. You seem so interested in the things that we don't know.

Have you never considered becoming a scientist or looking at it? No. And again, as they say, I have absolutely no aptitude for it. I don't have the patience to stick with things. One of the great things about being a nonfiction writer is that you can bough about from subject to subject. And I get really into these things. I mean, this book took me about four years of pretty steady application. And, you know, it's like, so it's kind of like going back to university all over again.

and really learning, working at least as hard as I do when I was at university. But now having done that, if I do another book, I would move on to something else and then really get into that. And as a consequence, you know, I can't keep up all my interests. I mean, I can't keep up with everything that I've done in the past. But during the time I'm doing it, I'm absolutely totally absorbed with that subject, whatever it is. But it allows you to move around. I couldn't spend my whole life just studying snails or liking.

or something like that. I'm glad, you know, it's a very lucky thing that there are people in the world who can do that. But for me, I'm much more of a magpie, or a moth or something. I flit around from place to place and think of the thing to thing. So do you know already what the next thing that you're kind of zoning on will be?

Well, the next thing I'm going to do is just not do anything. That's the plan. I promised my wife. This book turned out to be a lot more absorbing and time-consuming and sort of travel-intensive than I really had expected. And so now that I'm coming to the end of living with it through promotional period,

once all of that is done, then I'm certainly going to take some time off. And I've got a large number of grandchildren in a very big happy family, and I'm going to spend a lot of time, you know, just rotating among all of them and then traveling, as I say, with my wife. And we've also got a big garden,

that we haven't been able to attend to that as deciduously as we both would have liked because of me being away so much with this board. You've travelled to so many places where do you want to travel that haven't yet been? Well, I would love to go to lots of places. There's so many, you know, even though I have spent a lot of years traveling, I've been very lucky in that way, there's still lots of places. I've not been at all or I've barely been at all. In the latter category, the place that I've barely been would love to go back to his Japan.

in the category of places I've never been to at all. Russia, amazingly enough, and India I've never been to. I'd love to go to both of those places. But having said that my wife is more keen not to do a lot of long-haul travel, and it would clearly be better for the universe and the world if we all cut back on our long-haul travel. So I think probably we'll focus more on, you know,

just traveling within Britain, there's still an infinite number of things to see here, and also then just, you know, little trips to the continent. I particularly like those little three or four or five-day trips when you go in and have a fairly intensive time in Paris or Berlin or whatever. And then withdraw from that, go back to your normal life. And I'd rather do that than say spend three months traveling. And you mentioned society's views on long-haul travel and flights now.

Do you think that for someone starting out as a travel writer now, they wouldn't have the same opportunities that you did because it's not a done thing anymore. I mean, we've seen Prince Harry and Meghan, haven't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I think, I mean, they'll certainly have the opportunities, but there's much more of a guilt factor attached to it now.

And not just in terms of, you know, carbon footprints and all that, but also I think there's much more sense now that you are adding to an overload. You know, I was recently in Venice for the first time, and you realize this place certainly when I say Mark Square is, just impossible now. And, you know, I still had a wonderful time there, but I felt guilty for just, you know, taking up space and making it a less genuine place because, you know, I was there with all of these other tourists doing the things that tourists do rather than the things that locals do. And I think that that is a problem. I mean, lots and lots of places have just become overwhelmed

with tourists. And if you become, if you are a tourist yourself, I think you have to acknowledge that you are part of the problem. So there is that as well. So yeah, I mean, these are issues that I didn't have to be distracted by what I was when I was young and traveling. So in lots of ways, the world has got a lot tougher. And we're so much going on around us in the world and with the climate now. Why is now the time to look within ourselves and look at our bodies? Well, this is a special moment for looking at the bodies. I mean, I think any time would you know, any point in history would be a good time to do it. It was, this was just, this was something I wanted, I've wanted to do for a long time.

And as I'm now coming to the end of my productive years, I wanted to make sure I did this while I still could. So that was part of the reason for me. But it is something that's been a perennial fascination for me. And also a perennial sense of slight embarrassment and shame that I, you know, that I have all these things inside me that are keeping me. upright and sentient and, you know, allowing me to function. And yet, you know, I just take them completely for granted. And, you know, like most people, I don't look after myself anything like as scrupulously as I ought to.

And yet, you know, your body looks after you. I mean, even if you're trying to, as I mentioned in the book, is if you tried to kill yourself by lifestyle, it would take forever. You know, it takes a long time to drink yourself to death or to eat so much that you have a heart attack. Or, you know, you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can consume in a day. And the chances are still, you know, overwhelming that you won't get lung cancer. I mean, they're a much better chance of getting lung cancer.

I'm not suggesting anybody should do any of those things. But, I mean, it's not a certainty that you would get lung cancer. Most people who smoke a lot don't. They die of something else. Do you find you have a new appreciation for your body after research? it for four years. Yeah, I do. And not just for my body, but for life altogether. I mean, the thing that came across to me really powerfully in the book

a little bit unexpectedly was just how lucky we are to have life. And also, I don't know if this is from doing the book, or just because I'm, you know, I'm 67 years old and moving towards the end of my time on earth, but you also realize that, you know, your life is very precious. It doesn't, you know, you didn't exist for a long time before you were born and when you die you're not going to exist ever again. So, you know, every life is just this little brief spell in the middle of a great massive eternity. And so, you know, I really feel quite profoundly, and even more so now having done the book, that none of us should

let a day go by that we don't just, you know, revel in the fact that we get to have existence. It's a pretty amazing state. And most of us, you know, I think you and I, as we sit here now, and most people around us are in a state of pretty good health. I mean, you know, most of the time. So, you know, those of us who are reasonably sound in body should be especially grateful. You have this amazing way of kind of describing characters and understanding people, it seems like.

So why do you think people are so disinterested in what's going on in their own body and even to the point where they abuse their own bodies? Well, I think the things about the body, exactly the same things as with climate change and these other issues. And the problem is that the consequences aren't felt soon enough. I mean, the consequences are long term. Just as, you know, we can keep colluding the world and throwing things up into the atmosphere.

And it's not going to make the world unlivable tomorrow. It's going to be, you know, sometime in the future. And so we don't have to live with the consequences. We can have the pleasure of it now. and, you know, postpone the consequences to a future generation. And the body is much the same. You know, you can eat a lot of junk food now, and it won't, you know, you're not going to die next week. It's not going to affect you.

It's not even going to make you less healthy next week. It's going to take a long time for the consequences of that to build up. And so, you know, so if somebody hands you, I've just come back from the States, so I've been, you know, repeatedly served these massive portions and, you know, slices of cheesecake, the size of a house brick. and things like that. And you know you can eat it. And although you'll probably feel a bit queasy afterwards, you're not going to have any immediate consequences. It's not going to shorten your life just from eating one piece of cheesecake or doing these things. So I think that's the problem with the body, is that we can enjoy all these things now and really not. And defer the consequences as much further down and around. And there's not just a disinterest in the consequences, but also a distrust of maybe people that know the body better than we do. So, you know, the recent news, that the UK's lost is measles-free status

as people out there, they're a very anti-vaccine. Why is... Yeah, I think that's a more general... It's a real problem, I agree, and it's a real worry. And I think it's a more general problem than just with medicine and the body. I think there is this distrust of scientists now that has kind of

crept into the world, I think much more so in America than here, but it is creeping in here as well. And I think that's a great shame, and it's a worry. I mean, I grew up in a world in which you know, if a person had a white lab coat on, whatever they said, you just believed them,

and you just accepted it as fact. And maybe we would, you know, too trusting. But now we've gone on the other direction, and I think that a lot of people almost automatically suspect scientists and what they tell us is if somehow they've been corrupted or they're part of some massive, strange, vague conspiracy. And I just don't understand that at all. And I do worry that, really,

worried about people refusing to get vaccinations, not least because I have two very small grandchildren who, until quite recently, were too young to have vaccinations themselves. And it's because you're not only exposing your own children to risk, but then the wider community to risk. And I think that's very irresponsible. And it's a shame that the real messages about things like vaccines and climate and all that kind of thing aren't getting through to more people. And how can people like you or I that are ambassadors for science that, you know, write about science and research, how can we tackle the general distress in the population?

Well, I think just keep working at it. But I do sometimes think that it's not people like you and me who need to be worried about what to do. I think it's real scientists that are often not presenting themselves. I mean, you know, I can't speak with authority on these issues. I can just say what I believe, you know, that I trust what scientists tell me. But I do think sometimes scientists should work harder at engaging with the public and with making their feelings known. You know, who represents, among scientists, represents a pro-vaccine movement in Britain today

or the United States? Nobody. I mean, who's getting up and speaking out? Nobody. Nobody in particular. So we sort of need, you know, like a David Attenborough type. or somebody who can speak with authority for these things. And I think there's a real absence of those people doing that.

You know, academics do tend to stick in their ivory towers and not get out there and make themselves far. I think science is supposed to be seen as apolitical. It's supposed to be unbiased. And there's a fear that, you know, for any scientist to come out and even if it's their opinion, even if the science backs them up, it's still a difficult position to put yourself in, isn't it? Yeah, but we're talking about things.

really, really important. And of course, I mean, it would be different if somebody said, you know, I'm pro-vaccine and therefore you should vote for such and such a person. But I'm talking about people who would just be speaking out for sound science, for what we, you know, these are things we know. This is what we know about global warming. These are facts. These are things that are about, you know, vaccines and lots and lots of other areas where there's

general doubt and suspicion. I just think it's regrettable that more scientists aren't a bit more vocal about that. Going back to the effect that writing this book had on you yourself, are there any lifestyle changes that you've made and that you want others to make? I so wish I could say yes, absolutely, because there's plenty that I should have made. But in fact, exactly the opposite has happened to me. I mean, I promise you, I swear that as soon as I finish with all this stuff,

promoting the book and everything. I'm going to be Mr. Virtuous. But it's really hard to, when you're on the road promoting a book to lead a virtuous lifestyle. And so, no, at the moment, I just seem to be eating all the wrong foods and packing on weight to my great dismay,

but I will rectify that as soon as I possibly can. Because I am acutely aware from having done the book that, you know, It's very, very foolish to abuse your body in any way because it's the only one you're ever going to get. Most of it is irreplaceable. You're not going to get...

You know, I mean, you can get a replacement heart, but it's a really high-risk strategy. You know, you really should be looking after your own heart, the one you're born with it. And if you do, you know, it should last you for 80 years or more, which is pretty amazing. You think that it's going just non-stop, you know. One of the other amazing fact that I learned in the book is that the amount of work a heart does over a lifetime is equivalent to lifting a one-ton weight 150 miles in the air.

That's how much energy your heart spends over a lifetime. So, you know, the fact that the human heart in somebody who's 80 years old is still pumping away, that's just a miracle. It's incredible. I wonder, you mentioned the traveling that you had to do for this, but was surprising. I would have thought, of all of your books, this would be the one that had the least amount of travel involved. Yeah, well, I do.

For years, I've been writing two kinds of books. One is the travel books where I have to go somewhere and actually have experiences and do that kind of thing. And then the other is what in our house called My Stay-At-Home books, which is the whole idea of those, is that I can just go to the library all day and come home for dinner every year. evening. And this was largely in that category, but then it turned out that I really felt that I

had to go off and talk to experts. And the more I started doing the work on the book, the more I realized that it would have been a distortion just to do British experts. You know, I live in Britain, so it was obviously to be much more convenient just to go and talk to people in Britain who can answer these questions for me. And there wouldn't have been any problem finding people who could ask, you know, certainly enough expertise just in Britain. But I thought, that would distort things. So I felt kind of compelled to go and spend some time in America and also other places like Holland.

I wanted to spend some time interviewing somebody and things like that. So I tried to spread myself out a bit more. And so I actually ended up spending a lot more time away from home than I had expected. All of it, very pleasurable and profitable, I have to say, but it did take me away from my house. What was it like compared to your books where you travel and live in very different places, going from talking about a location to talking about the body with which you've taken to all those locations, how did that differ in the right?

Well, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. But the one thing I tried, I wanted you to do in this book, was as much as possible to make it a celebration of the body. Because, I mean, the one thing I'm absolutely convinced of is clearly all of us sometimes are going to be unwell, and eventually you'll be so unwell you die. I mean, that's life. That's an inevitability. But I think by and large, you know, your body looks after you. And mostly when you're looking at your own body, it's mostly a success story.

You have all of these things inside you that are working in this kind of miraculous coordination to keep you going. And so I wanted the book, I didn't want to dwell on diseases and. frailties and all the things that can go wrong. So I didn't, you know, although those things are in the book, I tried to be much more positive because I think the story of the human body is generally a positive one. Just while we're on that topic, and another fact that just absolutely amazed me

because I had no idea of it was that we all get cancer just constantly. You know, right now within you, probably somewhere there's at least one cell that has just turned cancerous. and if it slipped through the body's defense systems, then would proliferate and you would get cancer, you know, properly get cancer and have this huge problem that you would have to deal with. But actually, in the course of human lifetime,

that is a very rare event when cancer slips through and actually gives you problems. Most of the time your immune system just identifies these cancer cells and just wipes them out before they duplicate, you know, before they actually go, are able to get up to any real mischief. And I thought that's amazing, you know, but at least a couple of thousands times a year,

it's thought you get cancer. It's just it doesn't ever develop past a single cell or a couple of cells. A thousand times a year. Yeah, well, I mean, nobody really knows. That was an estimate was done by one with authority in California. And, but certainly, you know, many multiple times a year, your body, you've got trillions of cells

and they're constantly reproducing. So clearly there's going to, a lot of times something's going to go wrong. And nearly every time that something goes wrong, your body sorts it out. It just identifies those cells and kills them off, sends them away. It's just, you know, try again. And I thought that was pretty amazing. So this comes back to my overall point, which is that the story of the human body is mostly a story of success. And, you know, all of these things looking after you.

But how many times in your life have you said, oh, thank you immune system? I feel so well today thanks to all your tireless efforts on my behalf and of course we don't we just take it entirely for granted I actually got me thinking we've talked about evolution and how our body has adapted over the years

but I think there's this kind of belief that our body stopped evolving is there any evidence that you came across anyone you spoke to that had any idea of what could happen next for the human body well I'm clearly I'm no expert on this And I didn't pursue that really very much in terms of the research. But, I mean, it seems to me, talking is just obviously a non-professional,

but it does seem to me that evolution is a continuing process, and so that in some ways we will be evolving. I have read, and there's a certain amount of obvious plausibility about it, that because we are so good at manipulating things now, even if we can't stop evolution, we can actually contain it and manipulate. and you work around it. I mean, I'm wearing eyeglasses right now.

And, you know, so although my, I've ended up with defective eyes at my age, so, you know, it's a problem I can deal with. And so we, we as beings, you know, in a way that your dog cannot, we can do things to solve problems where our body fails is because of some evolutionary frailty. And in that sense, I suppose, you know, it's sometimes argued that we have reached the of evolution. But having said that, clearly, I mean, it's still, we're still mutating, we're still coming up with new things. And, you know, it would be really interesting to see how different a human being would be 50,000 years now. But surely there will be ways in which

we're physically different from now. I can't begin to imagine. I mean, I would just be guessing, but you would sort of hope that 50,000 years now would at least have evolved our way out of cystic fibrosis and things than that. books are so widely loved, what is it that you think makes them so appealing? Well, that's kind of you to put it like that, Amy. I mean, I don't know, and I'm not sure that it would ever be profitable for me to consider that too much. All I can say is that, you know, what I do is I write nonfiction, and I always feel that what I'm doing is exactly the same thing that we all do all the time reflexively, which is, you know, if you, if you were

reading a newspaper now and you're on your way to, you know, you're on your way to meet some friends and you read some remarkable story in the evening standard or something, you would want to share that with your friends. As soon as you got to the pub, did you see the story about such and such? Did you know this? And that's really all I'm doing with my books is I'm just, I'm reading and reading and, you know, delving everywhere I can think of to find information and very often I'll find something. I think, that's amazing. How did I go all these years without knowing that? Or why didn't they teach me this in school, I would have paid more attention. And then really just trying to share that with other people.

And so I don't think it's a special talent or anything, you know, very distinctive about me. But it's just what I enjoy doing. And luckily, a lot of people seem to enjoy reading that. They definitely do. I definitely do. Well, that's very kind of you say. Thank you. Your latest book, The Body, who do you think the audience you've got in mind for that book is?

Well, I'm hoping, I mean, I'm hoping that it would be pretty general. I mean, I'm hoping that it would appeal to almost any, you know, reasonably well-educated adult anyway. But also, I mean, my real ambition would be for people like my son, the doctor, to read it for him to say, I didn't know that. You know, because although he knows, you know, a zillion times more about the human body than I ever could, because it's what he spends his life dealing with. And he spent years studying it, and he understands the mechanisms of the body at a very elemental level in a way I never will. As I say, there's so much that he doesn't know about the sort of history of developments within the body and things like that. So I would be especially delighted if my son, you know, here reading the book now and said, oh, wow, that's amazing.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that about blood. I didn't know about, you know, like the history of blood types or something like that. why they're called, you know, why it's called type O, for instance, why do you have A, B, and O, what happened to see, and D, and stuff like that. And those are things that he's likely not to know. So that's kind of my goal would be to amaze my son or any other doctor. Do your family read your books then? Well, they say they do.

I don't always know if they do. Yeah, I mean, obviously I always give everybody a copy, and they all, you know, they always tell me how you had to really enjoyed it then, thanks. but I've never quizzed them too closely. It's unfair. I mean, I don't expect any human being, any particular human being anywhere to read my books because, you know, we all know what it's like. There are so many books in the world.

You can't read them all. And to expect somebody, even somebody, you know, very close to you, to expect them to read a book when they've got lots of other things to do, I think would be a bit demanding. You seem to have such a quite pleasant life and lifestyle. What's your secret? Well, I say that the real secret to me is to being happy in life is to be self-employed. I think that's just the best thing ever.

I mean, I was quite laid on in life when I discovered that. I worked, you know, I had a whole career as a journalist and working in newspapers. And I think I was, you know, in my mid to late 30s when I quit and started writing full time. And first of all, it was quite scary because suddenly realized you don't have any paid holidays anymore, you know, just because the rest of the world has a bank. holiday or Monday doesn't mean that you do. And, you know, you have bills to pay and you don't, yet you don't have a monthly paycheck coming in.

So that way, it's a little bit unnerving. But at the same time, it's just so liberating. You can work when you want to and you can take time off if you can afford to, you know, but you can structure your life completely in every way. And you don't have to, you know, you don't have to check whether you can have the third week in August off, whether you're senior enough to put your name down, you know, ahead of other people and all that kind of stuff. I just loved that. And to me, that was, that was really, as far as my ambitions went when I became a writer, it was just to be able to, you know,

keep our heads above water and to pay bills and to be able to, you know, have freedom to control my life the way I wanted to. The fact that I've ended up having me so much more is, it's fantastic, but it really wasn't necessary. But you need to be quite disciplined to make the freelance life work for you. You absolutely have to be disciplined. And one of the great exasperations for me is the number of people who write to me, and I presume to lots and lots of other authors, that sort of want to know what kind of fairy dust they have to get in order to sprinkle over themselves in order to have the same lifestyle.

And the fact is, you know, if you want to do something in life, anything in life, and do it well enough to be really successful at, you have to work really hard. And, you know, I mean, you have to work really, really, really hard. And part of the reason why I'm slowing down now is because it is hard work. And it's not something that I just sort of dash these things off. I mean, I really sweat blood to get a book finished. And it's tiring and hard. And I'm sure, you know, it's the same for anybody in any career. If you want to be, if you want to be, you know, at the top of that career, you have to work really hard in order to get yourself up there and to stay up there.

And yet lots and lots of people somehow think that it's just really a question of either being extremely lucky or of, you know, just somehow having some magical formula. You have to be lucky as well, but luck alone won't do it. Of all your books, then, which was the hardest to research and write? The hardest to research and write, unquestionably, was a walk in the woods, which was my book about trying to hike the Appalachian Trail. First of all, it was just physically really, really hard. The Appalachian trails

is the longest long distance footpath in the world and it's 20, 20 miles and I was hiking with a very unfit companion and we discovered early on that we were never going to do

the whole thing that it was really so that was physically really demanding and emotionally I didn't dwell on it much in the book but I was really quite I would say more

less devastated when I realized I'm not going to do the whole thing you know so what do I mean I've signed a contract to write a book about walking the Appalachian Trail. And I can't do it.

I can't, you know, I can't do the whole thing. It's just too much for me. So at that level, that was very, very demanding. And then when I came to write about it, there's nothing in the world that I've ever done that's harder to write about and maintain at an interesting level than walking. Because although it's a, I love to walk and it's the most relaxing and rewarding of human occupations, it's really hard to write about it. I mean, because you're just essentially putting one foot in front of another.

other and doing the same thing endlessly day after day. So trying to bring in some variety and can keep the energy level of the book up was a big challenge. And that's part of the reason why the book goes off in all these other tangents and talks about the history of nature and North America and how mountains are formed and all that kind of thing, which I hope is very interesting, but it was also just to kind of pump the whole thing off because descriptions of the walking alone, clearly, I mean, I realized very early on we're not going to do it.

And which was your favourite to write? The book that's been the best to me was a short history nearly everything because that sold really well and has continues to sell really well and it's done well in lots of different languages. So it's kind of my most universal book. But the book that I most enjoyed doing was probably the... my memoir, which is the life in times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which was just about growing up in the middle of America,

in the middle of the 20th century. I was very lucky to have a very happy childhood, and I led this really quite intensive fantasy life, in which I imagined myself as a superhero. I was quite a solitary little boy, and I imagined myself as the Thunderbolt Kid, who was this superhero who could vaporize people that displeased him and fly and do all kinds of things.

And I really enjoyed doing that book, partly because it didn't involve a lot of research. It was mostly just remembering what it was like to be a kid. And also because I was writing about a very happy time in my life. And I enjoyed revisiting all those old memories. It's funny. You mentioned that you grew up in America because obviously your book notes from a small line

was chosen by the British public as a book that most represented the British identity. How did that make you feel? Well, it was great. I mean, it was a really great honor. And then after that for a while, I was being referred to as a national treasure because of this book. And, of course, that's the sweetest honor you could possibly have. I think the advantage I had with that book is that as an outsider, first of all,

you often see things that the natives don't see, or you question things that they would always take for granted. I mean, I've noticed this in reverse at home. I know an English guy who moved to Des Moines, my hometown, married a local girl, and I'm friends with them. And he would often ask questions about Des Moines, I never thought, like, even like, why is it called Des Moines? And, you know, I don't know. I don't really know. I've never, you know, it just is. This is what I was born into, and I never questioned it.

So there is that, there is that sense that sometimes you're more curious about things because, you know, you've come to them as a grown-up rather than be born into it. And then also the advantage I have in Britain is that the British are not very good at praising themselves, which I think is a wonderful trait. I mean, there's nothing more insufferable when the person who thinks everything about them and the world around them is great. The British are really not very good at being boastful. It's very attractive quality. But then I think they do appreciate it

when somebody else comes along and says, you know, here's something you really are. You're pretty good at a lot of things and you don't give yourself credit for it. That's what the book really was, was a kind of a love letter to Britain. That was writer Bill Bryson talking about his award-winning career and how the body,

might be his last book, at least until something else piques his interest. If you're still curious about the body's inner workings, there are still plenty of things scientists don't know about yet. In the November issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we look at sleep and the questions researchers are still asking about its origins. We also dive into the research that will help us save our oceans from threats such as pollution, acidification and climate change. Of course, if you can't wait to see a copy, why not listen to another episode of the Science Focus podcast? Might I recommend our interview with Sir David Attenborough, where he talks about the wonders of our natural world

and why it is important that we act now to save it. As always, let us know what you think about this episode in the comments and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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