Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult?

What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are?

I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas.

Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth.

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

Hello, today on the Life Scientific, I'll be talking to Professor Sir Michael Marmot.

Michael grew up in Australia and trained as a doctor, but his major scientific discovery came

from following the health of British civil servants over many years.

The Whitehall studies, as they're known, challenged the myth about executive stress,

and instead revealed that far from being tough at the top, it was much tougher for those lower down the pecking order. This wasn't just a matter of rich

or poor or even social class. What Michael showed was the lower your status at work, the

shorter your lifespan. What's more this social gradient of health or

status syndrome isn't confined to civil servants or to the UK but as a global

phenomenon and to address this imbalance

Michael now travels the world persuading governments to tackle inequalities in

health. He wrote the highly influential report, Fair society and healthy lives. Social injustice, he says, is

killing on a grand scale. Welcome Michael. I'm interested in why a young doctor treating patients in a busy Sydney

hospital abandons the wards and ends up studying British civil servants.

What drove you I mean was, was it, you know, early on this desire to make the world a healthier place?

I think that was part of it. I discovered a few years ago a letter that I'd written when I was a junior doctor in

...