10. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz - from ward rounds to walruses via a New York Times bestseller

Most doctors never consider that a whale might get breast cancer, or a marmoset might get heart disease, or that common conditions seen in human athletes might also be seen a cheetah, a greyhound or an antelope.

 Barbara Natterson Horowitz is first and foremost a doctor but agter 25 years as a cardiology specialist the the UCLA Medical Centre, an unexpected turn of events took her via L.A. Zoo to a New York Times best-selling book, Zoobiquity, a TED talk watched by over 300,000 people and now to Harvard, where she is on a year-long tenure as Professor of Evolutionary Medicine. Barbara is interested in the links between human and veterinary medicine, and how what we know about one species can affect our diagnosis and treatment of others. This knowledge, this says, has radically changed the way she looks at her human patients and thinks about their care.

In this interview we discussed:

- How Barbara frames the questions she wants answered by comparing the human and animal kingdoms

- Her work as a cardiologist and how her new-found experiences as a consultant at the L.A. Zoo shaped the way she viewed and treated her human patients

- How it came about that she wrote a best-selling book on the subject

- Women in medicine in the USA and the pressures on family life that a busy medical career brings

- The future of the Zoobiquity movement and her new book!