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.

My guest today is not only one of the UK's leading brain scientists and

physiologists.

For the past three years, Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell has also run the UK's largest

university as President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Manchester and when

she's not making decisions about its 800 million pound annual budget and 50,000 students

and staff, Nancy Rothwell oversees a lab of researchers developing and trialing and experimental

treatment to prevent death and disability caused by stroke.

And given that someone in this country will have a stroke every five minutes,

that adds up to a lot of people who might end up benefiting from Nancy's life in science.

Nancy Rothwell didn't start her career on the brain however.

In the 70s as a young scientist she made her reputation with original and high profile

research into the causes of obesity. But in the early 1990s, a shock finding from an experiment

...