Professor Cobb is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester. He received Ph.D. in Psychology and Genetics from the University of Sheffield and had a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

He is known for his popular science books The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth; Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code; and The Idea of the Brain: A History.