'Snakebitten': Tale of the serpent
Prof Nick Casewell |
TEDxLSTM
• November 2019
Nick Casewell is a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow based at the Centre for Snakebite Research & Interventions at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Nick's research focuses on understanding the processes that generate toxin variation in the venoms of snakes, and how this knowledge can be applied to inform the design and development of new therapies for treating the world's snakebite victims.
Snakes strike both fear and fascination in people. These emotive responses are likely the result of the long co-evolutionary interactions that have taken place between snakes and our primate ancestors over millions of years. In this talk Nick provides an overview of the biology that makes snakes fascinating animals, and detail the consequences of our interactions with them both historically and contemporarily, including the great impact that bites by venomous snakes have on the world's tropical populations today.