Audio producer James Peak presents and produces documentaries on BBC Radio 4. He co-wrote ‘John Cleese Presents’ for BBC R4 with John Cleese and is currently writing a BBC R4 feature with Michael Palin. He lives in North London.

Lancelot Thomas Hogben was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and popularised books on science, mathematics and language in his later career. During the Second World War he had responsibility for the British Army’s medical statistics. Two of his books were bestsellers: Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. He died in 1975.

Leo Buscaglia was a native of California and an acclaimed professor of education at the University of Southern California. Beloved by millions for his influential message of the limitless power of human love, he authored fifteen books, including the 3-million-copy bestseller, Love. He died in 1998.

Hans Zinsser taught bacteriology and immunology at the universities of Stanford and Columbia before going on to teach at the Harvard University Medical School. As well as researching extensively into cholera, allergies and rheumatic fever, he was a pioneer in isolating the micro-organism that causes a form of typhus. To Zinsser, scientific research was high adventure and the investigation of infectious disease, a field of battle. He died in 1940.

Sir Peter Medawar shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960, for work which helped pave the way for transplant surgery, and was recognized later in life as a scientific philosopher and writer. He died in 1987.

Harry Overstreet was an American lecturer, and popular author on modern psychology and sociology. He died in 1970.