Professor Dame Carol Robinson, scientist

·50 min·5 clips

Carol Robinson reveals the thrilling moment a mass spectrometer breakthrough felt like pure magic.

Lauren Laverne begins gently. She introduces Professor Dame Carol Robinson as a scientist whose work with the mass spectrometer changed how complex macromolecules can be studied. The list is serious: scientific prizes, the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, and first professorships in chemistry at Oxford and Cambridge. Then the conversation loosens. It lands in a bedroom, with a student staring at a periodic table and trying to work out why elements behaved the way they did. Carol sounds lit up by it even now. She remembers drawing interactions in books and being bothered by school explanations that made chemistry feel too rough, too simple. Why did some things seem drawn to one another? What structure sat underneath those attractions? Lauren catches the difference between discovery and recognition. Carol was not discovering chemistry for the world, but she was finding it for herself before anyone had quite handed her the map. That is the lovely bit. She was already testing patterns against answers that did not satisfy her. The teacher comes back into the story quietly. Carol later wrote to him, half apologising for having been annoying, and his reply remembered her with interest. Her gratitude is plain. If he is listening, she says, he really started a great career for her. Then Lauren asks why she left school at sixteen, even after passing some O levels. Carol answers plainly. At her school, university felt rare, almost astonishing. She did not expect to be one of the girls who made it, so she went to work and waited to see what happened.

As heard by us

A measured portrait of a scientist whose path was built the hard way.

Professor Dame Carol Robinson's path feels earned rather than preordained. The piece works best when it stays with the practical details: leaving school at 16, working as a laboratory technician, studying in the evenings and at weekends, and eventually becoming the first female…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Desert Island Discs