Professor Christine Winterbourn's talk: "Life with oxygen and the battle against free radicals"
This Royal Society of New Zealand event will be at 7pm on Tuesday July 10, Suter Theatre.
Entrance is free and seats can be booked through the Eventbrite website.
Life depends on oxygen. We use it to “burn” food and extract the energy required to keep our body functioning. Most of the oxygen is reduced to water, but by-products of this process are harmful free radicals. The only reason we survive in oxygen is that the body has antioxidant defences that protect against radical damage.
Winterbourn’s work on free radicals began when it was just becoming apparent that they are produced as part of normal metabolism, when her team showed that radicals are generated from oxygen in red blood cells as it is transported around the body. In this lecture, she will discuss the development of knowledge since that time on the sources and consequences of free radical production and on health problems that can arise when antioxidant defence is inadequate.