Is your clock dictating your health? The struggle to implement circadian science in medicine.

It's a tricky one. We're certainly more aware of circadian science, and you'll find clinicians now thinking about time of day — when it's an appropriate time to vaccinate, when it's an appropriate time to take chemotherapy. Is this being rolled out generally? No, it isn't. And I think the problem is that my clinical colleagues — and I work very closely with clinicians — are running as fast as they can just to stay where they are.

What we're now doing in Oxford is trying to establish a center, an Oxford Centre for Circadian Health. We will endow chairs for clinician-scientists who will research in an area — let's say cardiovascular medicine, let's say cancer. They'll do the research and then convey that information to their colleagues. Medics are just too busy to come to us to understand the fundamental science, so we need to find mechanisms that will go to them.