Professor Peter Piot

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2015

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the Director of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Peter Piot.

As a microbiologist he is known for his research into viruses and into the public health aspects of sexually transmitted diseases, and, more recently, on the politics of AIDS and global health. Born in Leuven in Belgium, he studied medicine and in 1976, as a young researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, he was sent a blood sample of a Belgian nun living in what was then Zaire who had fallen ill with a mysterious disease. On investigation, Piot and his colleagues realised it was a virus they'd not seen before which they went on to identify as Ebola. He then travelled to Zaire to help quell the outbreak.

Later, back in Antwerp, he developed an interest in sexually transmitted diseases and joined the World Health Organisation's Global Programme on HIV/AIDS in 1992. Appointed as Executive Director of the newly created Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS in late 1994 his major successes were putting AIDS on the political agenda and achieving a reduction in the price of antiretroviral drugs.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My customers My cast away this week is the scientist Professor Peter Piot, a microbiologist he says
0:40.0	he has spent much of his working life as an outbreak detective at the heart of Africa.
0:46.0	Almost 40 years ago, a little thermos flask, the type usually used for coffee, arrived in his
0:50.9	lab.
0:51.9	Inside was a sample of the blood of a nun working in Kinshasa
0:55.8	infected with a deadly and mysterious disease. It became known as Ebola.
1:00.8	HIV AIDS has been his other great area of pioneering research and policy development.
1:06.8	His early challenges, aside from the science, included ignorant politicians, the Vatican's
1:11.5	stance on condoms and tunnel-visioned bureaucrats not to mention
1:15.6	pharmaceutical firms focusing more on profits than patients yet along with the
1:20.3	struggles he says he has above all met incredibly passionate with the searching for scientific solutions. So welcome Peter Piot. For the past four years then you've been
1:36.0	director of the world-renowned London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For a microbiologist who in the past
1:42.3	has spent really a lot of time out in the field,
1:46.0	how does this sort of job suits you in a big institution I imagine sort of sitting in the office quite a lot?
1:52.0	Well first of all being head of the London School of Five G Tropka Medicine is going back to my roots because I started my career in Antwerp at the Small Assister Institute and I love it because people are there because they believe in
2:08.9	Improving health worldwide. You know they're passionate about that. It's like the United Nations in one
2:14.1	building, we have students of over 60 countries, and we work on health, but from
2:20.4	the molecule to health economics and clinical and everything.
2:25.0	That's what I feel so privileged, but also I don't spend actually that much time in my office to be honest I can't sit still and so I travel a lot I want to see
	...

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