John Speakman

John Speakman
FRS FRSE FRSB FRSA FMedSci FRSS
John Speakman FRS FRSE FRSB FRSA FMedSci FRSS
	Speakman in 2018
Born	John Roger Speakman; November 1958 (age 66)
Nationality	British
Education	Leigh Grammar School
Alma mater	University of Stirling
Spouse	Mary Speakman
Awards	Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2016)
	Scientific career
Fields	Physiological ecology; Energetics; Obesity; Aging; Lactation;
Institutions	University of Aberdeen; Chinese Academy of Sciences
Thesis	The energetics of foraging in wading birds (Charadrii) (1984)
Doctoral advisor	David Bryant
Website	www.abdn.ac.uk/energetics-research/speakman/

John Roger Speakman (born 1958)^[3] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Education

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.^[2] 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 peer reviewed publications can be found at Google Scholar,^[1] 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

• 1991 Elected Fellow of the UK Institute of Biology, later renamed the Society of Biology and latterly the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB)
• 1995 Zoological Society of London scientific medal
• 1996 Royal Society of Edinburgh Caledonian Research Foundation Fellowship
• 1999 Royal Society (London) Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.
• 2003 Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Society Scottish Science medal
• 2004 Elected Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• 2005 Kwarazimi International festival prizewinner, International guest of honour
• 2005 Royal Dick Vet memorial lecture during the Edinburgh Science festival
• 2007 Royal society of Edinburgh Lloyds TSB research fellowship
• 2008 Elected Fellow UK Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci)
• 2009 Elected Fellow the Royal Society of Arts in London (FRSA)
• 2010 Bing Zhi forum Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing.^[25]
• 2011 Fellow European Academy (Academia Europaea)
• 2011 Clive McCay endowment lecture at Cornell University
• 2011 Awarded 1000 talents A professorship, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• 2011 ‘Great wall’ professorship from the CAS-Novonordisk Foundation. First non-Chinese recipient.
• 2014 Fellow of The Obesity Society in the US
• 2014 Honorary professor, College of life sciences, University of Wenzhou (Zhejiang)
• 2014 Honorary professor, University of Dali (Yunnan)
• 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. 1. ^[27]
• 2016 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society of London.^[28]
• 2017 Elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• 2017 Elected fellow of the Royal Society of Statistics (FRSS)
• 2018 Associate member of the Institute of Mathematics and its applications (AMIMA)
• 2018 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
• 2019 Elected foreign academician of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences
• 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.1. ^[29]
• 2020 Elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society (FLS)
• 2020 Honorary professor, School of food science, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China
• 2020 TOPS award the premier research award by the US Obesity Society
• 2020 Osborne-Mendel prize for basic research by the American Society of Nutrition.
• 2021 Dokmanovic lecture, Columbia University, New York USA.
• 2021 Chinese friendship award, the highest level of recognition by the Chinese government to foreign nationals.
• 2021 Honorary adjunct professor, Yantai university, Shandong, China.
• 2022 Honorary professor, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
• 2022 Lazarow lecture, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.
• 2023 Dale medalist, The highest accolade of the UK Society for Endocrinology

• 2024 Solomon Berson medalist, Highest award of the American Physiology Society, section of endocrinology and metabolism

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f John Speakman publications indexed by Google Scholar
^ ^a ^b 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.
^ ^a ^b Anon (2005). "John Roger SPEAKMAN". companieshouse.gov.uk. London: Companies House. Archived from the original on 18 May 2018.
^ "John Speakman". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
^ "Energetics Research Group". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
^ ^a ^b ^c 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)
^ Speakman, J.R. (1997). Doubly labelled water: theory and practice. London: Chapman & Hall. ISBN 0-412-63780-4.
^ 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.
^ 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
^ 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. ^{[ISBN missing]}
^ 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
^ 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
^ 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.
^ 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
^ 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
^ Gremillet et a. (2012) Heat dissipation limit theory and the evolution of avian functional traits in a warming world. Functional eology 26: 1001-1006 doi:10.1111/j.1365-2435.2012.02048.x
^ 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
^ 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
^ 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
^ John Speakman publications from Europe PubMed Central
^ John Speakman publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
^ "Publications - Energetics Research Group". abdn.ac.uk. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
^ 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)
^ "John Speakman - University of Aberdeen - Academia.edu". Aberdeen.academia.edu. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
^ "BingZhi Forum-Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences". English.ioz.cas.cn. 15 March 2009. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
^ "Institute of Arctic Biology::Irving-Scholander Lecture Series". Iab.uaf.edu. 16 September 2014. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
^ "Award for International Scientific Cooperation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences" (PDF). bic.cas.cn. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
^ Speakman, John. "Awards & Prizes". University of Aberdeen, UK. Retrieved 13 March 2011.
^ "2020 NAS Election". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 28 April 2020.