Survival of the Kindest: Professor Steve Cole - How Does This All Work? Human Social Genomics

This week Julian talks to Dr Steve Cole, Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences who has a fantastic understanding of precisely how stress, and life in general, changes us on a cellular level. Having discovered in his some of his earliest research that gay men with HIV in the closet were getting sick and dying ‘20 to 30% faster than those who were out of the closet’ he came to realise that there were huge gaps in our understanding of how illness affects people differently and genetics was not answering all of the questions. In his work since, and throughout this podcast, Dr Cole has elucidated the historic and evolutionary reasons that our immune system shuts down when we are dealing with stress, or lonliness, or PTSD, and the like. He talks about what is happening in our cells that means that people who live under duress develop certain illnesses at much higher rates than those that don't, how this plays out in racialised communities, and what the opposite is of this on a cellular level. What are the types of happiness, and what do they bring? And how can we plan for that at a population level.ELEVATE COMPASSION - FREE Lunch and Learn Join a unique session with three leading compassionate community developers in Canada, expect a lot of conversation, resources to help create more compassion within your community, and a new network of people in Canada and North America.Register HereEmail us [email protected] Survival of the Kindest on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen to get our episodes as they are released.