Life At The Extremes: The Science Of Survival by Dr Frances Ashcroft is full of derring-do and really mad scientists trying to prove what they think they know. You know QI (Quite Interesting)? Well this should be VI because I find it Very Interesting. For example, when they tell you to put on your mask first in a plane it’s because the 15 seconds before the oxygen becomes too thin is the only time you are capable of doing anything. That’s worth knowing!
GMTV presenter Penny Smith is passionate about books and is now a novelist herself; her latest fiction, After The Break, is published by Harper Perennial.
Man can only tolerate a limited range of environmental conditions, whereas other lifeforms thrive in the most intense conditions - in extreme heat or many, many leagues under the sea in utter darkness or deep in the middle of rocks. Why is this so? How do people survive extremes of heat, cold, depth and height? For the geneticist, inheritance is all. But for the physiologist, extremism is all. This book explores the limits to human survival and the physiological adaptations which enable us to exist under extreme conditions.
Frances Ashcroft is a professor of Physiology at Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College and the Royal Society. She divides her time between research on insulin (the hormone that controls the blood sugar level), teaching and writing books. She has experienced several of the extremes discussed in Life At The Extremes, but has yet to try spaceflight. This is her first work for the general reader.
