John Krebs

Private Passions

John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes.

In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering.

Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on high-profile public roles: he was the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, where he faced the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He’s also a cross-bench peer and was principal of Jesus College, Oxford, for a decade.

His musical choices include Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Corelli.