Triumph for a medical guinea pig

Life Changing

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Laurie Peake loved the outdoors, provided it involved speed. She had discovered a passion for skiing in Canada, and back home in England she loved water-skiing, dancing and motorbiking. That is, until a serious motorbike crash on a wintry day in the 1980s changed everything.

Rushed to hospital, it looked as if Laurie would lose her lower leg. But a pioneering orthopaedic team thought otherwise, maintaining there was still hope. In a long battle which involved a technique only ever tried behind the iron curtain, they fought against the odds to save her leg.

Laurie tells Dr Sian Williams how, during the process, she discovered a passion for art and art history – and reveals whether the experimental Ilizarov technique really worked.

Producer: Tom Alban

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift,
0:23.6	we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:28.8	They did know that I was different.
0:31.7	You had kids together.
0:33.0	Yeah.
0:33.5	Then you met.
0:34.3	Then we met.
0:35.2	The Gift.
0:36.1	Listen on BBC Sounds. You're about to listen to the latest series of life-changing.
0:43.4	Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But if you can't wait, you can listen to the latest episodes a whole month earlier than anywhere else.
0:54.8	First, on BBC Sounds.
0:57.5	Hello and welcome to Life-Changing,
0:59.8	the series that explores powerful moments in people's lives that transform everything.
1:05.3	That moment can come around a corner and leave you flattened,
1:09.4	just as it did for my guest today. A young woman
1:12.3	in her 20s, a self-confessed speed freak, looking forward to a life full of adrenaline and
1:19.0	excitement. But things turned out very differently and took Laurie Peak down a drastically
	...

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