You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

Men could be on the road to extinction.

This is one of the arguments of my guest today Jenny Graves,

one of Australia's leading geneticists, and she says, although this apocalyptic

event may be a long way off, it could ultimately lead to a new species of human.

Jenny's career has led her to specialise in the weird and

wonderful creatures of Australia to gain insights into the human condition,

particularly what's behind the fundamental differences between males and females.

Much of her work has been focused on what determines the sex of individuals,

from people to platypuses.

And in the late 80s she was involved in the race to discover the gene that determines the sex of a developing mammal,

a race that was lost and won thanks to a kangaroo.

Jenny Graves is a distinguished professor at Latrobe University in Melbourne and

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