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.
My 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 Cavley 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.
She 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.