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Picture the scene.
You've just been bitten by that most famous of venomous snakes, the King Cobra.
The venom is already working its way through your system and will cause paralysis and potentially death within minutes,
unless you're able to stay calm and take exactly the right steps to save your own life.
Think you could manage that.
To some, this might sound like the plot of the latest Indiana Jones movie,
for others, an uncomfortably detailed nightmare.
For today's guest,
it's just one story in a career full of close encounters with the world's most venomous,
rare and deadly snakes.
Mark O'Shea is a professor of herpetology,
the area of zoology focusing on reptiles and amphibians at the University of Wolverhampton,
and also a scientific associate in herpetology at the Natural History Museum.
After dropping out of college in his teens,
Mark managed to turn a boyhood fascination with reptiles into his profession,
studying and documenting snakes in their habitats around the globe.
He's also helped medical scientists study the effects of and antidotes to some of the world's deadliest venoms,