John Speakman

John Speakman
FRS FRSE FRSB FRSA FMedSci FRSS
Speakman in 2018
Born
John Roger Speakman

November 1958 (age 67)[1]
EducationLeigh Grammar School, University of Stirling
SpouseMary Speakman
Scientific career
Fields
WorkplacesUniversity of Aberdeen
Chinese Academy of Sciences
ThesisThe energetics of foraging in wading birds (Charadrii) (1984)
David Bryant[3]
Websitewww.abdn.ac.uk/energetics-research/speakman/

John Roger Speakman (born 1958)[1] is a British biologist working at the University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, for which he was Director from 2007 to 2011.[4] He leads the University's Energetics Research Group,[5] which uses doubly labeled water (DLW) to investigate energy expenditure and balance in animals.[6] Between 2011-2020, he was  a '1000 talents' Professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, China, where he ran the molecular energetics group. In 2020 he moved to the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, China where he works at the Center for Energy Metabolism and Reproduction and Head of the Shenzhen Key laboratory of Metabolic Health.

Education

Speakman in 2015

Speakman was educated at Leigh Grammar School, near Manchester, and then went to the University of Stirling where he was awarded a BSc in Biology and Psychology in 1980 and a PhD in 1984 for research on the energetics of foraging in wading birds.[3] He was subsequently awarded Doctor of Science (DSc) degrees by both the University of Aberdeen in 1996 and University of Stirling in 2009. in 2017 he obtained a BSc in Maths and Statistics from the Open University.

Career and research

Speakman's work focuses on the causes and consequences of variation in energy balance, and in particular the factors that limit expenditure, the genetic and environmental drivers of obesity and the energetic contribution to ageing.[6] He is an internationally recognised expert in the use of isotope methodologies to measure energy demands and has used these methods on a wide range of wild animals, model species and humans.[6]

During the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Speakman contributed to the development of the DLW method, culminating in the book Doubly labelled water: theory and practice,[7] published in 1997. Since 2018 he has been the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency doubly-labelled water database management committee, which manages a database of over 7500 measurements of human subjects made using the DLW method. A paper by Pontzer, Yamada and colleagues utilising this database, on which Speakman was a co-corresponding author, summarised the metabolic rates of humans between 8 days and 96 years old, was published in Science in August 2021.[8]

Speakman's work on obesity criticises a long-established theory for obesity known as the thrifty gene hypothesis. His alternative hypothesis proposes that the modern distribution of obese phenotypes arose via the release from predation and random genetic drift: the drifty gene hypothesis.[9][10][11] This idea is controversial and has been criticised by others who support the original thrifty gene hypothesis.[12] A test of the ideas involved searching for signatures of selection at loci linked to body mass index and showed consistent with the ‘drifty’ but not ‘thrifty’ gene ideas there was no evidence of strong selection at these loci. Since 2018 he has published a series of studies of responses of mice to different diets, disputing the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, This work culminated in a perspective article in Science with co-author Kevin D. Hall (in 2021) highlighting the inadequacies of the carbohydrate insulin model. In 2023 he led a paper using data from the DLW database which showed total energy expenditure has declined over the last 35 years [13] surprisingly this was traced down to a reduction in basal metabolic rate rather than a decline in physical activity expenditure, which has actually increased.  

Speakman's group was the first to link genetic variation to differences in food consumption in humans by examining polymorphic variation in the fat mass and obesity associated FTO gene.[14]

With Aberdeen colleague Ela Krol, among others, he has published a series of over 30 papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology, which culminated in a novel hypothesis that animal energy expenditure is limited by the capacity to dissipate body heat. This idea – the "heat dissipation limit hypothesis" (HDL) was published by Speakman and Krol in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 2010.[15] The idea is claimed to have wide implications for our understanding of many aspects of ecophysiology and ecology – such as limits on range distributions, maximum possible sizes of endothermic animals e.g. dinosaurs, Bergmann's rule, effects of climate change etc.[16] The idea shifts the fundamental locus of control over energy expenditure from extrinsic factors outside the animal (e.g. food supply, fractal supply system, uptake capacity), to intrinsic factors inside an animal (heat dissipation capacity). An independent review of studies of energy expenditure concluded that the HDL hypothesis provided a better explanation of the patterns of energy expenditure in endotherms than does the metabolic theory of ecology.[17]

Speakman writes a monthly popular science column for the magazine ‘Newton’ (translated into Chinese by an ex-student Lina Zhang) and has also published three popular science books consisting of the compiled English versions of these articles.[18][19]

Speakman's publications can be found at Google Scholar,[2] Europe PubMed Central,[20] Scopus,[21] The University of Aberdeen,[22] ResearchGate,[23] and academia.edu.[24] Speakman was co-author with Patrick Butler, Anne Brown and George Stevenson of the textbook Animal Physiology published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Awards and honours

  • 2010 Bing Zhi forum Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing[25]
  • 2014 the Irving-Scholander Prize lecture at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska[26]
  • 2015 first Briton to be awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences medal for International cooperation.[27]
  • 2016 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society of London.[28]
  • 2020 Elected foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is one of only 28 scientists in the world to be simultaneously a fellow of the UK, US and Chinese National academies.[29]

References

  1. 1 2 Anon (2005). "John Roger SPEAKMAN". companieshouse.gov.uk. London: Companies House. Archived from the original on 18 May 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 John Speakman publications indexed by Google Scholar
  3. 1 2 Speakman, Jonathan Roger (1984). The energetics of foraging in wading birds (Charadrii) (PhD thesis). University of Stirling. hdl:1893/2570. OCLC 499851672. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.352168. Free access icon
  4. ↑ "John Speakman". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
  5. ↑ "Energetics Research Group". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
  6. 1 2 3 Anon (2018). "Professor John Speakman FMedSci FRS". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11)
  7. ↑ Speakman, J.R. (1997). Doubly labelled water: theory and practice. London: Chapman & Hall. ISBN 0-412-63780-4.
  8. ↑ Pontzer H, Yamada Y, Sagayama H, et al. (August 2021). "Daily energy expenditure through the human life course". Science. 373 (6556): 808–812. Bibcode:2021Sci...373..808P. doi:10.1126/science.abe5017. PMC 8370708. PMID 34385400.
  9. ↑ J. R. Speakman. (2008). Thrifty genes for obesity, an attractive but flawed idea, and an alternative perspective: the 'drifty gene' hypothesis. International Journal of Obesity, 32, 1611-7. doi:10.1038/ijo.2008.161
  10. ↑ Speakman, J.R. (2006). The genetics of obesity: five fundamental problems with the famine hypothesis. In G. Fantuzzi, and T. Mazzone, (Eds) Adipose tissue and adipokines in health and disease. Humana Press, New York.
  11. ↑ J. R. Speakman. (2007). A nonadaptive scenario explaining the genetic predisposition to obesity: the "predation release" hypothesis. Cell metabolism, 6, 5-12. doi:10.1016/j.cmet.2007.06.004
  12. ↑ A. M. Prentice, B. J. Hennig and A. J. Fulford. (2008). Evolutionary origins of the obesity epidemic: natural selection of thrifty genes or genetic drift following predation release? International Journal of Obesity, 32, 1607-10, doi:10.1038/ijo.2008.147
  13. ↑ Speakman JR, et al. (2023). "Total daily energy expenditure has declined over the last 3 decades due to declining basal expenditure, not activity expenditure". Nature Metabolism. 5 (4): 579–585. doi:10.1038/s42255-023-00782-2. PMC 10445668. PMID 37100994.
  14. ↑ J. R. Speakman, K. A. Rance and A. M. Johnstone. (2008). Polymorphisms of the FTO gene are associated with variation in energy intake, but not energy expenditure. Obesity, 16, 1961-5. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.318
  15. ↑ Speakman, J.R. and Krol, E (2010) Maximal heat dissipation capacity and hyperthermia risk: neglected key factors in the ecology of endotherms Journal of Animal Ecology 79: 726-746 doi:10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01689.x
  16. ↑ Gremillet et a. (2012) Heat dissipation limit theory and the evolution of avian functional traits in a warming world. Functional Ecology 26: 1001-1006 doi:10.1111/j.1365-2435.2012.02048.x
  17. ↑ Hudson, L.N. et al (2013) The relationship between body mass and field metabolic rate among individual birds and mammals. Journal of Animal Ecology 82: 1009-2020 doi:10.1111/1365-2656.12086
  18. ↑ Speakman, J.R. (2014) Pandas – dead end or dead wrong? and eleven other short stories from the frontiers of bioscience, 2014. Create space publishing ISBN 978-1505548877
  19. ↑ Speakman, J.R. (2015) How dogs make us fall in love with them and eleven other short stories from the frontiers of bioscience 2015. Createspace publishing ISBN 978-1519681867
  20. ↑ John Speakman publications from Europe PubMed Central
  21. ↑ John Speakman publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  22. ↑ "Publications - Energetics Research Group". abdn.ac.uk. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  23. ↑ Genetics, John SpeakmanInstitute of; Biology, Developmental; DSc, CAS · State Key Laboratory of Molecular Developmental Biology 70 95 · PhD. "John Speakman - PhD DSc - Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, CAS, Beijing - State Key Laboratory of Molecular Developmental Biology". ResearchGate. Retrieved 17 May 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  24. ↑ "John Speakman - University of Aberdeen - Academia.edu". Aberdeen.academia.edu. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  25. ↑ "BingZhi Forum-Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences". English.ioz.cas.cn. 15 March 2009. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  26. ↑ "Institute of Arctic Biology::Irving-Scholander Lecture Series". Iab.uaf.edu. 16 September 2014. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  27. ↑ "Award for International Scientific Cooperation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences" (PDF). bic.cas.cn. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  28. ↑ Speakman, John. "Awards & Prizes". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
  29. ↑ "2020 NAS Election". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 28 April 2020. Retrieved 28 April 2020.

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