Catching up with podcasts, the diabetes genetics and cell biology expert Frances Ashcroft, director of Oxford's Centre for Gene Function, explains on The Life Scientific half of the reason why I mostly blog about transport and towns instead of genetics and cell biology these days. Again, nothing groundbreaking, just a nice quote to save.
But the huge exponential rise in diabetes over the past twenty years has nothing to do with genetics. It can't do. The genes don't change on such a short timescale. It has everything to do with lifestyle. We are all getting heavier and obesity predisposes very strongly to diabetes. And to be perfectly honest I sometimes think that I would help more people with diabetes if instead of doing research in the lab I became an advocate for reducing the obesity epidemic.