Dr Susan Greenfield
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 1997
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It was while studying for a degree in psychology that this week's castaway decided to change the direction of her life and become a neuroscientist. As she dissected a slice of pickled brain, she found herself wondering whether this was the part that generated a love of Beethoven, or held the memory of a sunny, summer day. From that moment, she determined to try to discover how our personalities and thoughts derive from this slurry of soggy tissue. Twenty years later, Professor Susan Greenfield is now one of the foremost thinkers on the question of consciousness, and a leading researcher into the causes of Parkinson's disease.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: The Ode To Joy (Symphony No 9) by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa Luxury: An endless supply of curry
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist. Science in a sense is her adopted subject. |
| 0:35.0 | She studied classics at A level and psychology at Oxford and only moved into science because |
| 0:40.0 | of her interest in the working of the brain. It was a happy choice since the early |
| 0:44.2 | 70s she's carried out pioneering work on the structure of the brain, becoming |
| 0:48.5 | professor of pharmacology at Oxford and the first woman to give the Royal |
| 0:52.0 | Institution Christmas lectures. |
| 0:54.0 | She's a fervent ambassador for all things scientific, |
| 0:58.0 | and for women and their work too. |
| 1:00.0 | The problem is not with women in science, she says, |
| 1:02.0 | it is with women at my level. |
| 1:04.5 | And the more senior I get, the more convinced I am that there's a problem. |
| 1:08.6 | She is Professor Susan Greenfield. |
| 1:11.4 | What do you mean by that, that Susan that women are only taken seriously |
| 1:14.2 | in science at a certain level? No I think that when you're fairly junior you're |
| 1:19.3 | not a threat to anyone and so therefore you fit into the order of things quite well. It's only when you get |
| 1:24.6 | older and you start challenging people and being rivals that that's when the difficulty |
| 1:28.6 | starts I think. What the men don't like it is what you're suggesting. |
| 1:31.3 | I certain well they're not used to I think people feel uncomfortable with women who tend to be |
| 1:35.3 | assertive. |
| 1:36.3 | They use words like strident, when for a man it'd be tough. |
... |
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