Professor Dame Carol Robinson, scientist

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:51My cast away this week is the scientist Professor Dame Carol Robinson. Her pioneering work uses a machine called the mass spectrometer, which she's employed in new ways to study complex macromolecules in their natural state, paving the way for innovations in drug discovery and novel ideas about the way our bodies work. Today she has a global reputation and works at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, an organisation she founded. She's been awarded scientific prizes from all over the world, is a former president of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was the first female professor of chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, but her path towards this scientific life of excellence has been unconventional.

1:36She left school at 16 and started work as a laboratory technician, studying for her degree in the evenings and at weekends. She took an eight-year career break to bring up her three children against the advice of many of her peers before picking up the mantle once again, achieving scientific breakthroughs and pushing mass spec technology to places previously thought impossible. She says, as a scientist, I've always been quite fearless about going in my own direction. That has been my mantra throughout my career. I never wanted to follow the crowd. Professor Dame Carol Robinson, welcome to Dazz Island Discs.

2:11Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. Carol, we're delighted to have you here. And you are fearless then. Also, I hear extremely competitive. Where does that come from in you, do you think? I think competition came really from my sporting career, which was not always that good, but I always liked to run and I always wanted to win. So maybe it coming from there and my father would have liked me to be playing at Wimbledon. He was very competitive on my behalf. So he was a good tennis player and I think wanted the same for me. And what about at school? You know, I heard you were quite competitive about your grades.

2:44I was competitive at maths. I think that's one of those things where you can sort of start a race to get through all the thumb cards and then people would try and catch me up and then I would push on and try and maintain my lead. There is a bit of an assumption Carol especially among non-scientists that labs are sterile controlled environments but you've said that labs can be unruly places where magic happens. Tell me more about that. That sounds a bit dangerous but magic is I suppose it's that breakthrough when you get really excited that something that nobody thought would ever work finally works and they just wow that's so exciting it's so um yeah magic but magic is unbelievable whereas this is believable but we never quite thought we would get there so maybe magic you also see a lot of beauty in these spectra you know in observing the data that the mass spectrometer creates tell me about that because i find that very interesting.

3:43I'm glad you find it interesting. Most people can't understand why I would find it interesting because you look I'm looking for patterns and I look at peaks and signals so yeah I find it quite beautiful when they arise from the sort of noise then out pops these peaks and it's just a magical moment. I do like patterns I like symmetry I'm very into understanding patterns and what they're trying to tell me and often we say we can't interpret at my spectrum but that's because we're not thinking about it correctly so I like that what's it trying to tell me what can I read in these lines you mentioned um being sporty as a kid and your dad encouraging you to go down that route um you are a runner still I think tell me about that part of your life running I was a sprinter at school so I've always loved running I think there's a sort of thrill about the speed that you can get from your own body um and then And as I got older, of course, I wasn't very fast at all, but I still enjoy it.

4:42And I like to run. I like to run every other day if I can, because I like to think about something in the lab that I can't understand or a meeting I'm going to. You know, what are the points I'm going to make? So it's a time when you work out problems. It is. It is. And it's, you know, often people want to run with me and I try and make an excuse because actually I quite like the headspace that I get from running. Do you listen to music? I do. Yes, quite often. And if I do run with my daughter, we have certain tracks that we really like. Well, I think on that note, we should dive in then, Professor Dame Carol Robinson, with your first.

5:19What's disc number one? So it's going to be Girl on Fire by Alicia Keith. And I find this a very motivating song. It's something I run with my daughter to for a while. And I think it's quite empowering. And if I've got a difficult thing going on, I often play this. This girl is on fire. This girl is on fire She's walking on fire This girl is on fire

5:59Looks like a girl but she's aflame So bright she can burn your eyes Alicia Keys and Girl on Fire. So, Carol Robinson, you were born in Beckenham, 1956, the middle child of three. Tell me about yourself as a little kid. What were you like? I was inquisitive, probably... I wouldn't say naughty, but too inquisitive. So I would break rules by trying to find something out, and one day I remember climbing out of my bedroom and sort of escaping out the window. Out the window! and trying to look down on the people on the street just as a sort of different view of the world. My mother came in and was horrified and coaxed me back in and then put bars up on my window.

6:48So I think I was explorative, perhaps, better than naughty. OK, so your poor mum finding you out the window on the ledge and then having to put bars on the window. So it sounds like she had her hands full with you. What was her attitude to this inquisitive little girl that she had? I think probably not great because she wanted me to be more of a little girl. So she would make me dresses and I would tear them. She would do my hair in curls and I would run around and it would be straight again. I think she wanted me to be a proper little girl and I probably wasn't. And you were, as we've already mentioned, very good at maths from an early age.

7:29What did you love about it and how did that go down with your friends at school? I would have some cards in my bedroom and I'll invite them around, but mostly not interested in coming to my house. But we used to play in alleyways between houses in those days and get up to all sorts of things. Explorative science, I'd call it. So, Carol, you were one of three, you know, two brothers either side. What was it like for the three of you growing up? What was the family dynamics like? Oh, I idolised my older brother, David, I think, and my younger brother, I was very protective, Richard. And your mum, was she a homemaker?

8:06She was. I mean, I always thought she was very smart, but obviously the war came along and they didn't really get the chance to do so much. But she was, yeah, she was at home. And she had, by the sounds of it, quite a traditional outlook. She did. Tell me a bit more about your relationship and what she was like. It was an OK relationship. I don't think we always saw right eye. I never really felt she was all that proud of my career. She would have preferred me to be the mother at home with my children. And I was starting to move on. I didn't want to be that person. I wanted to have both things, I wanted to have my career and my family.

8:41And I think she didn't think that was great. You said that she was very shy herself. She was, yes. She kind of visited that on me quite a bit, quite a self-conscious person. And she would always say to me, don't show off, don't put yourself forward for things. One time I was chosen for the lead part in a play and she said, oh, you don't want to do that, be showing off. I was, oh, I thought it would be good. So there was that kind of conflict between this, I think. And if ever I gave a lecture, she would say, how can you give a lecture? You're so quiet. And I said, no, I can get there. I can do this.

9:16But I think that did undermine my confidence quite a bit in my early career. I don't think she meant to, just did. and well and it sounds like it was her own her own anxiety actually projected onto you rather than really who you were yeah I think that was true because she was very self-conscious and her father when we went there we would just sit there and we weren't allowed to say anything you know it was very austere sort of upbringing and you sit there with a nice dress and behave I mean she got to see some incredible success in your career and she did celebrate some of it I know that there was one moment that she marked with a gift to you she did in fact I'm wearing it today it's a watch that she gave me and I was actually so surprised because I became a Royal Society Research Fellow and this is the sort of junior fellowship that you get and I was so happy because it was an independent career for me you know it meant I could start my own group and I remember thinking well that's the biggest award I'm ever going to get and she said oh we must mark it because my father had sadly passed she said he would have been proud we must buy you a watch and so she put me a watch that you know she couldn't afford really but I'm so happy that she did because it's a great memory and then you know you went on to be the head of the Royal Society of Chemistry so you know many more kind of yes landmarks but we just marked the first one because we thought that would be it you thought you got to the top of the ladder but actually I thought oh this is amazing I never thought I'd get this and then of course yeah Let's have some more music Carol this is your second choice today tell me about track number two Yeah so She's Leaving Home I think is a sort of beautiful narrative tale by the Beatles and it reminds me of when I left home and my mother was clearly upset and then my all three of my children I found it quite heartbreaking when they left home although of course I was proud of them and they were all going off to university and you sort of hold it together and say, oh, it's fabulous, go and enjoy yourself and then sort of cry all the way home.

11:21But, you know, it just always reminds me of those moments. I think it's a really great, beautiful record. She, we gave her most of our lives Is leaving, sacrificed most of our lives We gave her everything money could buy She's leaving home after living alone for so many years.

11:54Father snores as his wife. The Beatles and She's Leaving Home. So, Carol Robinson, we've heard about your mum. Tell me a little bit about your father, Dennis. He worked in insurance. Is that what he wanted to do with his life? No, he always said you don't really do that because you've got a vocation for doing it. you just do that because he wanted to be a vet. And then, of course, the war and either that or a professional tennis player, but neither of those came along. So he went into insurance. Do you know much about his wartime experiences? No, he never talked about it. And I guess the only time he talked about it was when he was teaching me to drive, which was always an angst moment.

12:36And he would say, well, don't argue because I taught people to drive tanks. I said, yeah, but I've got a mini. It's not the same. And so the whole sort of father-daughter thing broke down during driving lessons, I would say. But he was quite, I guess, quite modest, didn't really talk about it. I always think he was very smart. He came very high up in the grammar school rankings, you know, so I was super proud of him. But, you know, he never really talked about it or, unfortunately, had the opportunity to make much of it and then went into insurance which was he told me never really wanted to go into insurance that's just what you do and there isn't anything else open to you.

13:17And did he ever talk to you or allude to the frustrations that he had about those lost opportunities? No sadly not I think he didn't really open up to me. Sometimes I like to think he would and I'd try and engineer opportunities where we would talk but he was quite a closed person I think. Yes and you've already you know used the word modest which obviously chimes with your your mum you know it sounds like they were quite similar personalities then. They were and they they played tennis together and you know I think they were happy-ish as much as can be expected and my mother managed to get him as her tennis partner so she was good at maths she worked out how the draw was going to go and When they met?

14:02Yes, that's how she did it. She worked out how the draw was going to be done and then sort of fixed it so that she would be his partner, which I like that story because it shows that she was actually not as modest and as quiet as I thought she was. Strategic, I love that. So when you were 10, the family moved to Folkestone. Did that new environment broaden your horizons? It did. I do remember being brought up in back-to-back streets and then having countryside and the sea and the Romney Marsh. It was beautiful. So I suddenly started being very interested in nature, collecting lots of different plants.

14:38I'd never seen them like this before. I just had the park, which was grass, and the garden, which was small. But then suddenly I thought, oh, wow, look at all of this, and picked them all and brought them home and identified them all. It became a bit scientific because I started putting them into classes and, you know, sorting it. And what about animals? You said, you know, plants. I did. Shells and stuff. And then I started to have almost like a mini zoo, which didn't go down very well, but I did like breeding animals, or they would breed themselves. I just gave them the opportunities, and we used to buy mice 5p each and put them in a thing and then see what you had.

15:16It was quite an experiment, actually, because you get some beautiful crossings going on. I always cared for them. I didn't mistreat them in any way. What was in the mini zoo then? So you had mice? I had mice, rabbits, guinea pigs and hamsters. You said, Carol, that your friends weren't that interested in doing competitive maths with you, but maybe the menagerie encouraged them to come and visit. A little, but not as much as I'd hoped. I'd made signs, I'd put things up on all the cages. I thought you might be interested in the names of all these animals, but no, not really, no. Were you quite solitary then, as a kid?

15:50Potentially, I think, sadly. and it did bother me because I would see other people were much more popular than me and maybe they didn't have weird things going on like menageries and some cards and so yeah I had some close friends but I wasn't like the popular girl in the class. And when were you happiest do you think as a little girl? Perhaps when I was out with my father at the tennis we would go and watch something at Wimbledon he would go on the outside courts and so that was super exciting so yeah I think I enjoyed those days Let's have some more music Carol it's your third choice today what are we going to hear next?

16:28So growing up with my children every Saturday was influenced by how Sunderland Football Club did which as you know can be a bit up and down but this tune when they run out onto the pitch just is so moving for me so it is Dance of the Nights from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet And how did you come to support Sunderland? My husband, the father of my three children, is from Sunderland and I think you cannot get away from supporting Sunderland if you have that in your bones

17:22Thank you.

18:01The Dance of the Night from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Claudio Abado. Carol Robinson, you passed the 11 +, but you didn't go to the local grammar school. Why not? Well, this was really my father's choice. He felt that if I went to the grammar school, I would learn Latin and all good things. But if I went to the technical school, I would learn a skill set that would get me a job. So he was keen that I did needlework, cookery, typing, all of these things that at that time had a lot of cachet, I guess. And my brothers were really expected to do extremely well and they didn't really care what I did.

18:43It was in some ways, you know, I wasn't under any pressure. So that was quite good for me. And I could just do what I wanted. I was a bit under the radar. It wasn't in our plan for her to go to the grammar school. She could go there and she could do this. How did you feel about that? And how did you feel about that attitude? Did you resist it? No, I don't think I knew any better, actually, because my mother said, well, you know, being a secretary is a very good job. And typing and sewing and cooking, these are all skills that you're going to need. and I didn't really challenge it. You went to the technical high school then in Folkestone.

19:17Tell me about your time there. How do you look back at it? I look back at it as a very odd place, to be honest. Why did I learn how to set a tea tray that had all the cups in the same direction? And it was almost like we were supposed to be at a finishing school, but we weren't. And what about the academic subjects? Because you did have some of those. And I know you enjoyed chemistry lessons with your teacher, Mr Lester. Oh, yeah, he was great. So we had not good chemistry for a long time, and I thought it was a really not interesting subject at all. And then we had a newly qualified teacher come in, Mr.

19:50Lester. He was very good looking, very sort of dashing, and we all thought, well, let's work hard. Suddenly chemistry was... Yeah, this is the thing. We all loved it. I guess it doesn't matter where your motivation comes from. If you get interested, you will work at it. And this is when I started looking at the periodic table because he introduced it, but he introduced only what we needed. And then I'll tell him a few things that he doesn't think I know. And then he would say, no, stop, stop going there. Just keep it within the syllabus. I had one in my bedroom and I would, I don't know how much to go into this, but elements on the left and elements on the right of the table and how they would interact and what would happen to their atomic structures.

20:31And I drew it all out in books and things. And I was super excited. I thought, oh, it's such a logical subject. I love it. So you thought you'd discovered this, you didn't know that it was already known? I've been known for hundreds of years. You hadn't been taught it? No, I hadn't. It wasn't so much that it hadn't been discovered, it was more, oh, I remember thinking, oh, there's patterns arising here, you know, I can see why this goes here and this goes here. Because he told me, well, just think of it as waxy things, interacting with, you know, hard things or something. And I just, well, it can't be like that, there must be something, something that's governing this.

21:08It can't just be that those things like those. Why? Why do they like them? And so I remember trying to work all that out. You got back in touch with him later. I did, yes. What did you say and what did you think about the career that you chose? I wrote and said, oh, you probably found me a bit annoying, you know, at the back of your class. And he said, of course I remember you. And I shall follow your career with much interest. So if he's listening, you know, he really started a great career for me. So you left school, Carol, when you were 16. and you did pass some more levels. Why did you want to leave instead of carrying on in education?

21:41I didn't think that people who stayed on did very well at our school. I mean, there were examples, but they used to be announced from the stage. You know, so-and-so's got into university and we'd all clap and it would be amazing. But hardly anybody did. And I just remember thinking, well, I probably won't be one of those girls that makes it. So I might as well start working now and see what happens. And were your parents keen for you to leave or would they have liked you to stay on? I don't really think they had any idea what I was going to do and I didn't really either. But I saw in the local paper an advert for Pfizer and I thought I could do that.

22:18I like chemistry. I'll do that and see what happens. And also I needed a bus. Only just 16 couldn't drive and there was a bus to Pfizer. I thought that's the job I'm going to try and get. Well we'll find out where that bus and that new job took you next but first I think we'd better hear disc number four please Carol Robinson, what's it going to be? It's Sonnet, The Verve and I like this because it reminds me of all the friends in my life and how important those people are to you as you go through different phases of your life My friend and me Looking through her rare box of memories

23:20The Verve and Sonnet So Carol, let's talk about what happened after you left school. You answered an ad to be a gas liquid chromatographer at Pfizer, the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Corporation. What exactly is a gas liquid chromatographer? I just thought it was an amazing sounding name, but then it turned out to be not very interesting. It was actually an instrument that you put in a potential drug here and at the end you'd just have a peak and another sort of shape. And I remember thinking, well, there must be a reason why some things go through very fast and some things go much more slowly.

23:57I'll try and work it out. I'll try and make the job interesting. Because basically I could do the job and, you know, a machine could have done the job. I didn't really need to do much. Dissolve it, put it in and then read the results. But trying to work out why. I started this notebook of observations and that for me was good because people around me noticed my book. of observations. So then in this role as a lab technician you were kind of rotated around the different labs at Pfizer. So at what point do you come across the mass spectrometer? Yes I walked in as the room was filled with this instrument it's huge in those days and I thought wow this is amazing it reminded me of some sort of car showroom on its side or something and all these bits and glowing valves and flashing lights and it was really exciting I can't describe it and you would look down the oscilloscope and and your peaks would arrive and yeah it was this stuff of dreams really so and the oscilloscope so that's the the like little viewing that's right yeah viewing port yes your window into the world is there and what exactly does the mass spectrometer do?

25:10So it tells you the mass of all the things that are in that particular sample that you're analysing. So if, for example, it was a chemist who'd made something in a synthesis, so he's trying to make a candidate drug, then he would give this to me and I would inject it into the instrument and then the peaks would appear. And then in those days we would have to count all of the different masses by hand and work out what was what. It was very satisfying So you enjoyed that right from the off. I did. And the machine in those days was quite temperamental, wasn't it? But you were good with it. I was, well, I don't know if I was good with it.

25:48I was very patient with it and I loved it. And so I, yeah, a bit like my temperamental mini. So I was always fixing it and trying to make it, tune it and make it better. So I felt an affinity for the instrument that, and I would have, you know, many electric shocks. You wouldn't get them so much now, but I'd have shocks. and one day I was sort of, my foot got sort of stuck in one of the electronic drawers and then it was a great big flash and, you know, it was a big shock and I was sent back in my seat. So yes, lots of things happen that don't happen anymore. And still you kept going? Yes, still liking it.

26:22Well, you know, that was its way of telling me, don't put your feet up there, that's not a good place. The technology was quite new back then, a new era, certainly for scientists in the UK. What was the data that was being produced actually used for? So initially we were using it to work out what small molecules had been synthesised by chemists, research chemists. You could also look at metabolites, so how drugs were broken down in the body. It was used for that as well. And then later it was moved into proteins and proteomics, so we could tell all of the proteins in human cells, for example. and your aptitude was spotted quite quickly by a supervisor who described you having green fingers and was he the person who encouraged you to go back to college and pursue your education yeah i mean i had this thing that if i couldn't get a spectrum i would work and work and work until i did and i think a lot of times people just say oh it's not working and give the sample back and just say that yeah sorry tried everything's not going to fly or it's not going to work but I said, oh no, there's other things we can do.

27:28Let's try this, let's try that. So I think he was impressed with that. Let's have some more music, Carol. It's your fifth choice today. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking it with you today? This disc, Wild Horses, The Rolling Stones, is when I met my second husband, David, and he sent me this track and I thought it had a really nice meaning behind it. How did you meet? Oh, we met at the Vice-Chancellor's house. I think she knows that, the current Vice-Chancellor. I was being introduced as a new professor in Oxford and he was there representing the Medical Sciences Division. Actually, at first I thought he was just showing me around as a fellow scientist and then I realised that we had more in common than just a scientific background.

28:15Childhood living is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you.

28:43The Rolling Stones and Wild Horses. So, Carol Robinson, you studied for a national certificate, then a higher national certificate, and then you got a degree from Medway College of Technology. All of that took seven years. How did you manage your studies while holding down a full-time job? Yeah, I sometimes wonder that. I worked every evening, pretty much, and then I did work weekends. What was driving you? I started to feel not having a degree was quite a big disadvantage because the people around me at Pfizer who had degrees were treated much better and given much more credit for things so I started to feel it was a bit all a bit unfair and if I wanted to this is the competing bit again I guess but if I wanted to compete I better get myself a degree and even when I got the part-time degree I still felt that they valued somebody who'd gone through the proper route or the other route I guess is the way to put it.