Lonesome George, Sleepyhead and teaching are happy bedfellows for alumnus

  • 10 January 2025

Henry Nicholls (Natural Sciences 1992) has lived with narcolepsy since his early twenties, but he has not let this prevent him from enjoying a rich and fulfilling career as a journalist, author and secondary school science teacher.

It was during his second year at the University of Cambridge that Henry developed narcolepsy, a neurological disorder resulting in pathological levels of sleepiness. He also suffered what was subsequently diagnosed as cataplexy, a related condition in which strong emotions such as laughter trigger muscle atonia, often resulting in a full-body collapse.

This condition was “incredibly disabling” to Henry during his time at university, although he was not officially diagnosed with narcolepsy and cataplexy until after graduating. “If you went to the doctors and said that you were sleepy, they would say, ‘Well, yes, you’re a student’. Everyone was sleepy. We were doing what all students do: working and socialising with little regard for the importance of sleep. But I now know my levels of sleepiness during this period were not normal at all.” 

A man in a patterned green shirt, his arms crossedSuffering from narcolepsy and its accompanying symptoms has not, however, prevented Henry from living an exciting and fulfilling life. Having specialised in Zoology for Part II of his Natural Sciences degree, he volunteered after graduating for the Kalahari Meerkat Project, run by Professor Tim Clutton-Brock at Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. For this he spent a year living in a tent in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, studying meerkats to enhance our understanding of the evolution of sociality in mammals. Feeling “unbelievably privileged” to have had this opportunity, Henry was inspired to undertake a PhD in Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Sheffield under Professor Tim Birkhead, studying sand martins on the wild and beautiful Tisza River in northeast Hungary.

After his PhD, Henry decided to move into the field of science writing. He became a reporter for the science news website BioMedNet News and editor of Endeavour, a magazine specialising in the history of science, both owned by Dutch academic publisher Elsevier. This opportunity to remain connected to the world of science while also working as a journalist turned out to be perfect for Henry. He says: “It was a dream job to be able to go to international history of science meetings, to sit through amazing papers and then commission interesting features. It reinforced my love for the history of science, a subject I studied in the second year at Cambridge.”

This fascination led to Henry’s debut book, Lonesome George, which focused on the eponymous sole-surviving member of a species of giant tortoise from the Galapagos archipelago. Using Lonesome George’s story as a narrative thread, the book addresses global issues of conservation and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and the Royal Society General Book Prize. The Galapagos has remained a key area of interest for Henry, owing to its being a “cradle of evolutionary biology” and “relatively untouched, retaining a lot of its original biodiversity, with huge levels of endemism”. Since 2007, he has been editor of Galapagos Matters, the magazine of the Galapagos Conservation Trust and is also an ambassador for the charity.

Following Lonesome George, Henry has authored three more books: The Way of the Panda, which uses the history of the giant panda to chart the parallel rise of modern China; The Galapagos, a history of the archipelago; and Sleepyhead, which builds on his personal experience of narcolepsy to examine what sleep disorders can teach us about sleep. He also spent eight years as a director and trustee for the charity Narcolepsy UK.

In 2017, Henry made a career change and since then has been a teacher of science, first at Woolwich Polytechnic School for Boys in Thamesmead, with a more recent move to Eltham College in Mottingham. He has found this to be a fresh, enjoyable challenge. “Having written my sleep book and improved my sleep through understanding my condition better, I wanted to see if I could hold down a job where I needed to stay awake,” he says. “I thought I wouldn’t last from September until Christmas, but I needed to know. And I’m still here doing it seven years later, and I love it.

“It’s incredibly rewarding and fun, the students are great, and I’ve loved the challenge of learning new skills, which is something I always want to be doing. That’s partly me but partly owing to the privilege of going somewhere like Cambridge, where learning is given such priority and you’re surrounded and inspired by such brilliant people. It was an amazing experience for me, and one that will remain with me forever.”

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