John Speakman


John Roger Speakman 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. He leads the University's Energetics Research Group, which is one of the world's leading groups using doubly labeled water to investigate energy expenditure and balance in animals. Since 2011, he has also been working as a '1000 talents' Professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, China, where he runs the molecular energetics group.

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. He was subsequently awarded Doctor of Science 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. 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.
During the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Speakman made many contributions to the development of the DLW method, culminating in the book Doubly labelled water: theory and practice,
published in 1997 that remains the standard reference work for applications of this methodology in humans and other animals. Since 2018 he was the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency doubly-labelled water database management committee, which manages a database of over 6000 measurements of human subjects made using the DLW method.
Speakman is well known for his work on obesity, in particular for criticising 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. This idea is controversial and has been criticised by others that support the original thrifty gene hypothesis.
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.
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" was published by Speakman and Krol in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 2010. 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. The idea is revolutionary because it shifts the fundamental locus of control over energy expenditure from extrinsic factors outside the animal, to intrinsic factors inside an animal. 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.
Speakman serves on the board of reviewing editors at the journal Science and is on the editorial board of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society. He was Deputy Editor in Chief of Biology Open.

Speakman writes a monthly popular science column for the magazine ‘Newton’ and has also published three popular science books consisting of the compiled English versions of these articles.
Speakman's peer reviewed publications can be found at Google Scholar, Europe PubMed Central, Scopus, The University of Aberdeen, ResearchGate, and academia.edu.

Awards and honours

In 2005 he gave the Royal Dick Vet memorial lecture during the Edinburgh Science festival, in 2011 the Clive McCay endowment lecture at Cornell University and in 2014 the Irving-Scholander Prize lecture at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska. In 2016 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society of London.
Speakman was awarded the Zoological Society of London scientific medal in 1995, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Society Scottish Science medal in 2003. In 1991 he was elected fellow of the UK Institute of Biology, later renamed the Society of Biology and latterly the Royal Society of Biology. In 2004, he was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 2008 to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, and in 2009 to the Royal Society of Arts in London in 2011 to the Academy of Europe, and in 2014 The Obesity Society of the USA. He was made a Bing Zhi forum Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing and holds honorary Professorial positions at the University of Wenzhou and the University of Dali . He was the first non-Chinese recipient of a ‘Great wall’ professorship from the CAS-Novonordisk Foundation and in 2015 was the first Briton ever to be awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences medal for International cooperation. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.. In November 2019 he became a foreign academician of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences, and in April 2020 was elected 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.