Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the Medic Academic and Policy Advisor, Professor Dame Carol Black.

Impressed by her clutch of titles, I hate to say it, but you probably should be.

In addition to being the principal of Newnham College Cambridge, she's an international expert on a rare

tissue autoimmune disease and only the second ever woman to be president of the Royal College of

Physicians. From the get-go it was clear that mould-breaking would become something of a habit.

She was the first in her family to pass the 11-plus, becoming the grammar school's

head girl for good measure. Then, too, the first in her family to win a place at university, where she was

president of the Students Union.

Later, as head of rheumatology at London's Royal Free Hospital,

she established a worldwide reputation in her chosen field.

You get the picture.

She says, perhaps my earliest achievement was to defy limited family expectations.

I was meant to stay living in my hometown and work in a shoe factory or shop,

but I had a stubborn belief that more was possible.

So welcome Professor Dame Carroll Black.

As well as the rules that I mentioned there, you're currently conducting a government health review on

addictions and obesity you chair the board of the Nuffield Trust which is a

health policy think tank you're a trustee of the National Portrait

gallery and it's clear from all of that you live a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

...