Worldleading microbiome scientist and surgeon James Kinross will show how to optimize the microbiome to protect your health, boost your immunity and safeguard your wellbeing.

Our microbiome – the complex ecosystem of bacteria, viruses and other microbes inside us – is critically important to our health and wellbeing. It is gifted to us by our mothers at birth, adapts with us as we age, influences our moods and appetites, determines how fast we run and even affects who we choose as a partner.

Surgeon and expert on the microbiome James Kinross joins How To Academy to take us on a guided tour of our extraordinary inner universe, showing how our relationship with microbes may hold the key to why we are increasingly succumbing to diseases of progress such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and bowel and autoimmune conditions.

He will highlight the disastrous consequences of our war on germs, the effects of globalization and our addiction to antibiotics, showing how it is only now, as we are beginning to discover the microbiome’s enormous potential, that we are realizing it is in grave danger.

Drawing on cuttingedge research and years of clinical experience, Kinross will show us that if we work with, not against, our microbes, we can live better, healthier lives.


James Kinross is a senior lecturer in colorectal surgery and consultant surgeon at Imperial College London and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. He leads a research team defining how the microbiome causes cancer and other chronic diseases of the gut. Dark Matter is his first book.

Hannah MacInnes is a broadcaster and journalist. Alongside hosting How To Academy’s live programmes and podcast, she presents a cultural show on Times Radio and interviews onstage at a number of other major literary events. She is the host of The Klosters Forum Podcast series and has written for the Radio Times, the Evening Standard and TLS. Before going freelance she worked for 8 years at BBC Newsnight, as Planning Editor and as a Producer / Filmmaker.