Matt Elliott 
In 1956, Denham Harman proposed that ageing was caused by the accumulating damage of free radicals, the reactive molecular fragments produced as byproducts of cellular metabolism. The hypothesis was clean, testable, and it generated enormous research interest. It also produced a corollary that became one of the most commercially successful ideas in health history: if … Read more
Chemistry students encounter redox reactions early and often find them confusing in a specific way. The definitions seem simple — oxidation is the loss of electrons, reduction is the gain — but applying them consistently requires remembering that the two reactions are always paired and always simultaneous. You cannot have one without the other. When … Read more
In 1991, Helmut Sies published a paper that gave a name to something biologists had been circling for years. He defined oxidative stress as an imbalance between the production of reactive oxygen species and the biological capacity to detoxify them or repair the resulting damage. The definition was precise enough to be useful and broad … Read more
In 1888, a French chemist named J. de Rey-Pailhade noticed that a substance in yeast cells could react with elemental sulphur. He named it philothion, from the Greek for sulphur-loving, and published a short paper describing its properties. The compound did not receive a proper chemical characterisation for another forty years. When it did, the … Read more
In 1994, a team of researchers studying a protein involved in red blood cell development stumbled onto something larger than they were looking for. The protein, which they named NRF2, turned out to regulate not just one or two protective genes but hundreds of them. It sat at the top of the cell’s defence hierarchy, … Read more
Your body contains approximately 37 trillion cells. None of them act alone. A muscle cell contracting, an immune cell hunting a pathogen, a liver cell clearing a toxin — each of these is a response to a signal received from somewhere else. Cellular signalling is the communication infrastructure that makes coordinated biology possible, and understanding … Read more
Your cells are talking to each other right now. Not metaphorically. Chemically. Tiny reactive molecules produced inside your mitochondria are carrying signals across and between cells at this moment, telling some cells to divide, others to repair, others to die on schedule before they cause problems. This signalling system is called redox signalling, and researchers … Read more