You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

Early on in her career, my guest today, the physicist Dame Athene Donald, shocked her colleagues

by choosing to apply physics to the messy world of biology. Since then she's taken the emerging field of

biological physics out of an unfashionable rut in the 1980s and turned it into one

of the most exciting and promising areas in science today. and of everyday stuff from plants to plastics. Named after the goddess of wisdom

Athenie excelled at school but quite where her scientific talents came from is a

mystery. Her family's passion was music, which led

Athena to a parallel life as a performer playing viola in the prestigious

London Schools Orchestra and singing in a barber shop quartet in New York.

Alongside her research career, she's become a famous advocate for women in science

through her popular blog and by sitting on influential committees such as the Royal Society's Equality and Diversity Group and the

Athena Forum which aims to advance the career progression of women in

science. Athena Donald, welcome to the Life Scientific.

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