Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs 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 castaway this week is the scientist Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell.

She's probably best known for her work in the field of neuroscience and stroke research.

Now President and Vice Chancellor Manchester University,

it is a billion pound business that she's been running

for almost five years.

She claims her decision to enroll at Queen Elizabeth College in

London in the 70s was made not on the basis of their superior teaching on the

function of living systems but rather the institution's proximity to Kensington High Street, at any rate, he

gained a first, and then bagged a PhD in just two years.

Could it be that her interest in how we keep the human body alive and functioning

began when aged age she contracted primary tuberculosis and was so ill

that she spent 18 months at home?

Well, she says, like most academics, my fate was sealed during my PhD.

I fell in love with research and vowed I would do it until retirement.

I was also sure that I would do my utmost to avoid any of those nasty

administrative jobs and yet here you are Professor Rothwell doing just that, leading one of our

great institutions. It's reassuring I think to know that

even somebody who's risen to your heights has had this sort of career path that

seems to have been rather unpredictable really. Yes I don't think I was very good

...