Prof. Matthew Cobb

BIOGRAPHY

Matthew Cobb is a British zoologist and professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books "The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex", "Life and Growth"; "Life's Greatest Secret": "The Race to Crack the Genetic Code"; "The Idea of the Brain: A History", "Smell: A Very Short Introduction", and "The Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life". Cobb has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. Cobb earned his BA in Psychology at the University of Sheffield. During the second year of his undergraduate studies he read an article about the recent discovery of the Drosophila melanogaster dunce mutant in New Scientist and decided to focus on behaviour genetics in fruit flies, later saying he, "went on to do my PhD there, in Psychology and Genetics, looking at the mating behaviour of seven species of fruitfly. Psychology in those days was as much about animal behaviour as it was about human psychology, and I was lucky enough to be in one of the few places in the UK that studied [it]".