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The Economist.
What kind of person do you have to be to run Europe's largest biomedical research laboratory?
Well, first, you have to be an accomplished scientist at the upper echelons of your field.
You probably also need a lot of resilience and resolve.
Things are not going to go your way for most of the time.
And finally, you also need to understand how to lead.
Scientists are a famously, shall we say, independent group of people and potentially quite hard to manage.
You need to know what it takes
and not only do you need to know what it feels like not to have good.
Well, what it feels like, what it takes to keep encouraging not just the scientists, the individuals,
but also the infrastructure required, you know, what are the technologies that we need?
Edith Heard is an accomplished scientist.
Her decades of work illuminated how the X chromosome actually works in people
and how and why one copy of it is usually silenced in the cells of women.
Is she resilient?
Well, she spent a decade in the scientific wilderness, developing and testing her ideas about the X chromosome to destruction,