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 feels most at home in the wilderness of South America, collecting and

studying new species of plants.

And she's been doing this most of her life. Her parents would

often say that she was majoring in field trips when friends asked what she was

studying at college. Early on in her career, Dr. Sandra Knapp lived in Peru

collecting plants amidst an intensely charged

political backdrop. But as we'll hear, such difficulties that she encountered were never

more than temporarily problematic. She always seemed to be able to take everything in her stride.

When not on her travels, Sandy's based at the Natural History Museum in London as the

head of the Plants Division.

She works on the family of plants called Solanasi, which includes

potatoes and tomatoes and even tobacco. During her career, she's collected many

...