Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 40: Dr Catherine Green OBE

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

My guest this week has just helped save the world! Dr Catherine Green OBE is one of the team in Oxford who developed and began manufacturing the AstraZeneca vaccine. Together with her colleague Professor Sarah Gilbert (now a Dame) she has just written a book 'Vaxxers' which explains in a rather thrilling and readable way, just how they did this, in the hope of communicating the science behind it and reassuring those who are vaccine hesitant at the moment. I was due to speak to Dr Green in person but two of my children got covid that very week, so instead we spoke down a line. Very frustrating not to actually meet her but with scientist Catherine Green - or Cath as she is more often known - even a glitchy line can't dampen her energy, enthusiasm and humour.We talked about how she's never felt particularly 'mumsy'; how her friends looked out for her at the height of her work on the vaccine, leaving flowers or food on her doorstep for her; and how her 10 year old daughter Ellie has insisted they install a disco ball in the kitchen of their new house. Ellie sounds fabulous - clearly a girl after my own heart! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Sophia Lispector and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work. I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself. Being a mother can be the most amazing thing, but can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Well, this is risky business.

Oh, God, I've just realised what I've done. I thought, right, in order to record the intro to this week's podcast, I'll quickly give something to two-year-old Mickey to keep him happy while I chat. And in the big boys' rooms, we've got all these little boxes. You know, like those little kids' suitcases, and they've all got different toys inside. And I've by accident given him the one filled with Lego men. And I don't mean like a couple. I mean like maybe like 300 in a little box um yeah Mickey we can't play that game he wants to just chuck them over the banisters this is a

disaster uh I am home with all of my kids because last week two of them came down with COVID um and would you believe it? It was also the week I was scheduled to talk to my guest this week, which is Dr. Catherine Green. Now, Dr. Catherine Green, she is one of the people on the team who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine. So I was always going to say thanks to her anyway, because it's the shock that I've had and my mum's had

and lots of folk in've had and my mum's had and um lots of folk in my family and my friends but also um yeah now I can say thank you again because we basically have managed to get through this virus in our house under our roof highly contagious virus very very quickly and smoothly with no one getting too ill. And Richard didn't get it at all, which is amazing. So anyway, so I'm a bit distracted with the blooming Lego men going down the stairs. But yeah, she was so lovely. So she and Dame Sarah Gilbert, she who has just recently been made into a Barbie, sort of inspirational AstraZeneca Barbie. Sorry, that's quite a funny juxtaposition, isn't it? It is funny, Mickey.

Yes, they worked as part of a big team to develop the AstraZeneca vaccine and it's a fascinating story and Catherine herself is a single mum she has a 10 year old Ellie the her colleague who wrote the book Vaxxers Sarah she is mother as well she actually has triplets but they're quite grown up now they're just finishing uni so these are two women who know firsthand a thing or two about being spread thin and working through a pandemic with all the stuff that you have to deal with with raising a family but also knowing that your work is really important and you need to get out and get it done so three cheers to them for what they've done more than cheer actually I'm actually. I'm actually thinking, you know, the Damehood is right. Oh, for goodness sake, Mickey, what a stupid, stupid thing I've done,

giving him this box of Lego. I thought Catherine was completely lovely. I was originally going to go and meet her in person. I was going to go with my producer, Claire, to Exeter College and speak to her in person but obviously we couldn't so we did it on Zoom and I must confess parts of the recording are a tiny bit glitchy hopefully not too it hasn't happened too often my memory of it is it doesn't happen too often but I'm just letting you know in case it's a little bit annoying but I think it's to do with

internet speed and as my editor husband says it won't be our end because he's feeling very happy about our internet these days um sure i'll go and put that on mickey anywho we have had a week at home with the kids it has been quite intense we haven't managed to get as much done as you'd like but hey sometimes you're just getting by aren't you we've definitely done lots and lots of playing and the weather's not been too bad and uh you know hoovering the place can wake on it it's just not that important and i hope you guys are all okay this i feel i should probably say at the beginning as well this podcast recording was not intended as um sort of, you have to be so careful. And basically, every time I put anything online about vaccine, I get a lot of people who feel very strongly about the vaccine, not always in a positive way. So I feel I should say, you know, I didn't record this

as a sort of, you must get your vaccine, although clearly, you don't have to hear me speak very long to know that I am someone who's very much hurrah for science. But I did feel that information is good. It's reassuring to hear the story behind it. The book is hugely reassuring. I have some very, very close girlfriends who I would not describe as anti-vaccine, but they are hesitant. They're concerned about it. They've got issues that they feel haven't been quite addressed. They don't reassured if you are one of those people i think listening to katherine speak and reading the book vaxxers will definitely help to put your mind at rest about wherever your query may lie really whatever bit of it is making you feel a bit hesitant about taking the vaccine anyway i'm going to stop now because we've had how many Lego men over the side? Let's see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Oh, it's not too bad. Only eight. I've got to go and pick them up. And I will see you on the other side. Enjoy. So basically, I was supposed to be speaking to you in person. And we're doing it remotely because... So I'm really glad you still made time for me.

Thank you, because, yeah, I'm actually sat at home. Two of my kids got COVID last week, and I was always going to start with a thank you because my husband and I both have AstraZeneca, which is quite... The only reason I'm laughing is because I've done loads and loads of these interviews but it's the first time where the person I'm talking to has had such a direct impact on my life and I suppose for you it must be like the idea now

that you're meeting so many people where they have had received the vaccine that you helped to create I mean what does that feel like? It's really, I mean, it's really overwhelming sometimes, to be honest, and it's very humbling. And I think everybody that starts off a career in science always imagines that you're doing that for some kind of public good. You imagine that you're there to learn stuff, to find things out and to tell the world about them, to make the world a better place in some small way. And then since I've been doing this vaccine development job, which I've only been doing for three years, I guess that gets a bit closer to having a direct impact on somebody's life because you really are working on developing new medicines. But yeah,

none of us ever imagined really that you would be having a medicine that you've made in your own arm because I've had AstraZeneca and my friends have and my friends' parents have and that we now get emails from strangers just saying thank you into our inboxes. It's a really lovely and humbling experience. Obviously we would prefer not to have had to live through a pandemic to get there but yeah it's something that I think will have changed me and changed my team. Yeah and presumably three years which is you know, pretty recent history. The last thing you're thinking when you start vaccine development is that you're going to so quickly find yourself in the midst of something where one of the recipients will be you and your loved ones. The team that I work with at the university have really over the last 20 years been focusing on making vaccines against diseases that really aren't likely to impact our everyday lives because they're vaccines for emerging diseases,

outbreak pathogens or diseases that affect low middle income countries. So malaria, TB, Zika, chikungunya, Ebola, plague. And so although they're important that we tackle those and as a university it's our job to do that yeah the idea that we would be making a vaccine that then would be in deployment in the UK hadn't really ever crossed our minds. No and it sounds like as well the last couple of years for you have been full of lots of changes as well and your personal life as well as obviously everything you've been doing with in the vaccine department so do you think you've really had a chance to sort of catch your breath a little bit and take stock of what's been going on so we're often asked that Sarah and I because I think we did I mean obviously the book was mostly about vaccine manufacture but in in

order to tell that story we did need to tell a bit about what we were going through. And we wanted to place our own personal lives in it to a small extent to humanise us, to let people know that we are just two middle-aged women having meetings most of the time. And also to place it into the context of what everyone else was doing over these 18 months. When nobody could get toilet paper, could they? Nobody could get pasta and Tesco. It was all a bit of a mess and so yeah it has been hard um and I've moved house and I because I'd separated from my husband just before it that before the pandemic hit which was you know in hindsight probably a good thing because that's being locked down together probably in a worse relationship than we have now yeah um and yeah and my daughter was off school

the same as everybody's and then there was key worker school and then you know everything was just completely complicated on top of us having to deliver the biggest project of our lives we had to do it in a pandemic yeah i mean i suppose it's funny because i know you say the book is is predominantly about that but actually there are lots of themes that come through it um one of them is definitely a love of food which I just very much resonates with me I mean we start the book with pizza and we even there's even a brilliant analogy for creating the vaccine that's based on making your own bread um but I think that whole thing of breaking down the walls of the sort of formality of how we

interact that's something that's been happening so much with the pandemic at large you know when you go into I remember during I must have been through in the first lockdown I went to the bank and I ended up having a whole chat with the guy that's working there about desperate to speak to somebody absolutely and he was talking about how his kids were all off school and what was happening with that and I think you know this sort of humanizing of all these different roles and how we normally interact that's been happening everywhere but how how how has it been do you did you feel like you were sometimes having to you know balance this you know your daughter and the two of you together and I know you say in your your book that most of last year was the two of you together

and that she was your rock and a lot of it, but also you're having to go off to work. I mean, one of the phrases that really surprised me is you said one of your favourite phrases for 2020 is there are more hours in the day. Can you please explain how that's a favourite phrase? Well, I think that's right. I think you can surprise yourself under extreme situations that one of the things that Sarah and I just had to do was just get on with it. So although we didn't have the time available to us to think, to go around multiple iterations of thinking about things,

sometimes and certainly at the beginning when we were really up against time pressure to get this vaccine delivered as quickly as possible, when we were really up against time pressure to get this vaccine delivered as quickly as possible. Perhaps under normal circumstances, we might have run those meetings a few more times. But this time we just had to get it done, get on with it. You can, Ellie's 10 now, my daughter, so I can get her home. And you know what? The Internet sometimes has to be my friend. Sometimes, you know, she likes to watch tips of minecraft on youtube and that's okay i have to run a meeting with astrazeneca in the us in an evening so it was just a matter of being flexible to that and not saying you know i don't have to get everything done perfectly let's let's

get things done well enough good enough was good enough i think the last 18 months and for all of us i think that's something that we had to adapt to there was no there was no way to be perfect parenting and perfect schooling last year yeah so we just had to get a bit done every day good enough was enough sometimes and Ellie knew that she's she's she's now an age where I can explain to her you know she knows that she's the light of my life but she also knows I have other things that I need to do too so sometimes it was like can you just go and play on the iPad for an hour because I've got to speak to Sophie Ellie Spex still on a zoom call oh god please don't lump me in with that oh god I feel terrible is she not actually doing that now though is she she's no she's on holiday with her dad so she's having a proper holiday this week so I've got loads of time this week

because there's no money so I'm catching up on all my work backlog um which is great yeah and I think you know did you find because I've I took a little while to come to that um good enough is good enough uh realization I think I it probably took me a few weeks of thinking how are people supposed to parent in a pandemic but do you think because your work was so vital did you feel like you were just able to just focus like all those years of training and sort of readiness was there something that sort of kicked in do you think so I mean I was very lucky so the school was open for key workers at the beginning so Ellie although Ellie was very unhappy to be required to go to school when her friends weren't required to go to school at the beginning after a couple of weeks of that she soon had realized that all her friends

were bored and miserable at home and that it was better to be going to key worker school than not so I was at least from like nine till half past three I did have have have child care during the day because otherwise it would have been impossible I needed those first you know the first March April May last year I needed to be at work there was no there was no getting away from that but then by by the kind of second lockdown when a lot more of my work was at home I was I was keeping her at home and she was doing you know quizzes and things okay and that's right it was some part of that was nice I think we we built a new relationship and she, I think she learned to be quite independent and to work. Some things they have learned. We despair a bit. They haven't done enough maths or they haven't done enough science,

but they've learned some resilience and some other ways of working that we all have a bit. We've all learned to work in different ways, haven't we? Including the kids. Yeah. Oh, definitely. Definitely. And I think, as you say, the fact that she is old enough to be able to understand things and you know she already presumably knew what you did for a living and the significance of how that plan out but I know I know that you wrote about when she saw the documentary that you did so what was it like when she was finally that's the panorama yeah it's shown in december i think last year um and obviously we haven't seen the seen it before it's aired so she and i sat down on the sofa to watch it together

and i was very impressed by the panorama i felt it really told the story in a thorough way and what they were doing was they were as they were going through the timeline they were um putting up the the caseload so how many cases had been reported in the UK as the pandemic progressed? And the numbers started getting really, really large. And I think Ellie had picked up on that and was like, mum, because some way they're protected. We protect them, don't we, from the worst of it. We don't really want them to see the horrible news. And we don't really want to see them to see the TV of the people on the ventilators because it's scary.

And I think maybe it was the first time that she had realised the severity of the pandemic in the UK because we kind of bubbled them. They knew they were off school, but they didn't really know why to protect grandma, yeah. So I think it was the first time she really was at home to how serious it was and how serious it was on a global level. Yeah. Yeah, she really liked the machines. So there's a couple of

shots of at the end where when the vaccine's in full production it's at a at a plant in in Wales at Wachau where they're filling millions of vials on a conveyor belt in a big factory she's like mummy do you have do you have a machine like that and I have to say to her no we do it very slowly and one at a time um so not quite the same scale so maybe maybe she'll be as a big science engineer when she goes up she likes the machines yeah i have to say i remember that shot those those scenes i think at something mass fill like that with those machines is really it's quite hypnotic and i think i mean i know you say we protect our kids but i suppose for you you might have been dealing with an extra layer of that because you're actually

actively seeking out and privy to a lot of information where you're really analysing that data and maybe understanding what that means in a way that actually for most of us we maybe didn't know. I think early on, yes. I have a lot of colleagues who are clinical scientists and clinical doctors and we were getting reports from hospitals and global reports and we knew really early on I think that it was this was going to be a serious

event and once it was in the UK it was not going to be you know there's no way going back from there so it was only going to grow and that's why we were taking very seriously very early and a lot of the time yeah I did have information they couldn't talk about so when we're running the trials we don't talk about the data that's not ethical while the trials are running and they haven't been properly analyzed so we don't really have the full picture not so on the on the school runs or seeing seeing the other mums that were at key worker school so they're also NHS workers so we were able to kind of get together socially distant and say oh my god this is awful isn't it because we were all in the same kind of situation i guess the the other parents down at the school playground but everybody was asking

me all the time I mean I think Ellie and every all of my friends got really bored with and we always being asked whenever we met new people what's going on how's the vaccine coming is it ready yeah it was always the same questions Ellie would roll her eyes and so I was asking mum about her work but I suppose that was there a bit um quite near the beginning where you felt like you could see what was happening but everybody else was still continuing life very much as normal it was really it was really hard because I'm not an expert in infectious diseases so I was listening the same as everybody to the to the the press conferences from the government or to announcements on the news the same as everybody

and yet I could see in my professional work that people were appearing to be more concerned than were than the noises that were coming in the press and that's hard to know what to what to do about that because obviously I don't have a voice to say to my friends look guys probably shouldn't be going to the pub um I'm sure that my medical colleagues are not drinking in the pub today um and I think I was also naive at how serious it was going to get I think in the early March we were taking it seriously at work but I hadn't really conned on that this was going to you know this was going to shut down life as we knew it for a significant amount of time. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I suppose as well, it's sort of whilst you're, you know, going to work and in the lab working on the vaccine, you've simultaneously got going on in you the same thing that's happening in everybody and how humans tend to work when we're faced with things that are scary and big and seem seem really quite unimaginable so that whole thing of going but surely that can't be yeah yeah and I suppose in the book you know I mean I mentioned one thing but the other two things that come through aside from the vaccine itself is definitely what Ellie means to you and being a mother that's all laced throughout the book. And also how you want to break down this idea that science,

and particularly women working in science, is a sort of otherworldly thing. So I think, in a way, the last 18 months has sort of brought all these strands together in the most extraordinary way. Because it sounds like even before the book, even before joining the vaccine team, this idea that you wanted to encourage a different understanding of how women in science are perceived and getting girls to feel empowered about working in science. Is that something that came through your own experience of it when you were growing up and how you felt when you first started working in that field? I feel there's sometimes a disconnect between the portrayal of science in the media, for sure, and how it's really done. And I also think that science has changed dramatically over the last,

say, 20 years in terms of the collaborative international and real team working of it. So there perhaps was a point in the past where it was a single quite often male quite often perhaps independently wealthy could have been to the good schools and could afford to do science as a career if you think if you look back 100 years it wasn't any way that people who didn't have funds themselves really do science so that idea of a single eureka moment and a boffin alone in a laboratory figuring something out I mean it's great for the movies yeah because it has it has but it's not it's not how we do things these days and so this I try to get across to people that what we what you need to be as a scientist is a real collaborative team player who can find good people to work with rather than to work against and this was something that Sarah and

I were always trying to get across that there was never a race against other vaccine inventors for example that we were all trying to pull together to get to the point where we can beat the virus so we were trying to race the virus rather than race other manufacturers and that's clear now as we see global rollout we need all the vaccines we can get so it was never a race against each other um so yeah so science isn't only for one type of person and if you look at our team we have computer scientists we have statisticians people that do the real hands-on um nurses clinicians people that are interested in in the engineering aspects of it so we need people that like taking pumps apart and putting them back together um there's a huge variety of different skills and different personalities that go into building a team

to take on a project this big and succeed yeah i think it's like when you're saying about you know people not seeing it as a race but seeing it as like everybody is sort of the science world is at one just trying to work together and when you have breakthrough moments and things start to to roll out is that how it's received you know it's like across the board your sort of colleagues and everybody sort of feeling like this is just wonderful for science in general I think so so I think so if you think about the first clinical trial data which came out which was in November which was from the Pfizer Biontech trials that were running in the US when we saw that we were as we were as a team

incredibly happy because that was real evidence that the the process was going to work that it is going to be possible to make a vaccine against coronavirus and therefore that ours is much more likely to work so you know that data is informative to us and will go on to inform us and also that technology will transform the vaccine landscape because that RNA technology is clearly amazing and had never really been shown to be working in human populations before. So that's transformative for the field. And I am sure that the scientists I work with at the Jenner

will now use that technology going forward as well as our adenovirus technology. Everybody wins by progress. And the whole point of science is we share it and we build on that foundation to grow new things. Yeah, I mean, that must be, sort of when you were younger, the idea of being part of something that's that groundbreaking,

that much of a milestone in the scientific community, that must be something that, I mean, can you imagine if you'd known that growing up? Yeah. You know? That's right, I don't think you do. I think, so, I mean, I am a, you'll have gathered, I'm naive and I'm, you know, I believe in there is some utopia where humans are good people and work for a greater cause and do

good things. And I have that, I think, intrinsic, like, naivety or belief that people are generally good and altruistic. And for me, science always felt like that, the idea that you would find something out and then tell people so that they can use it always felt to me that that was the route I was going to take. So I never saw myself working for a pharma company that was going to keep its results secret. I'm not saying I won't ever do that. One of the things I have learned a lot this last eight months is actually how pharma operates and how industrial science can be hugely utilised for the public good and it's completely changed my view of some

aspects of non-academic science to be honest and I think yeah it's it's been an interesting 18 months yeah that's a that's a good yeah understatement I'd say Catherine actually but I suppose I mean I'm like you as well I feel like that kind of people intrinsically good and that altruistic and the idea of you know sort of I remember actually you know when when everything started to roll out and the vaccine my mum is very you know is all hurrah for science you know that was very much our sort of family's take on it and I feel that all the people that feel positive about the science and about what's going on I sort of all feel positive in the same way it's a sort of collective positive happy and then on the other side of the fence obviously you've got people that are I think actually Sarah

summed up really well in your book you've either got the sort of anti-vax brigade but then you've also got vaccine hesitancy which I actually think is a really clever phrase because there's a lot of people that don't want to really be caught up in the idea of being anti something they're just not sure if they're they're ready themselves but I think that you know the idea that um that we've got this murky aspect of a political aspect the pandemic must be incredibly frustrating to people working in your field where you just don't want to politicise it. It's difficult and we always do reiterate it's perfectly normal to feel hesitant about things which are new and things that you don't understand and I think that that is of course a normal human response and the only way for us as scientists who are not hesitant

because we know we really truly believe that we've we've made these vaccines in entirely the right way um and that they are necessary to get us out of this pandemic situation so it feels to us now as the as we see the virus spread particularly with the more infectious variants there feels to us now as we see the virus spread particularly with the more infectious variants so effectively it's going to be very challenging to ever get to a zero COVID situation anytime soon so you have two choices you either get vaccinated or you get infected and we see we've all seen that COVID infection is very serious and we know now with real world data that vaccination reduces the severity of COVID. So it reduces the chance that you get infected.

It reduces the chance that you pass it on. And it clearly prevents you going into hospital and prevents you dying. So those are real world effects that we are seeing in real people. And we hope perhaps that by writing a book, by putting ourselves out there, by trying to explain what it is that we've done, by writing a book, by putting ourselves out there, by trying to explain what it is that we've done, and that people now see the results of that. So people can see in the real world how vaccinated people do much better if they're then exposed to COVID. That some of those people who are hesitant will see that this was done properly, and that you can trust us, and that it is the right decision for them to make. But I'm not advocating for compulsory vaccination.

I don't think perhaps in certain circumstances that's reasonable. But it's not my job to tell you you must. It's just my job perhaps to say I have and this is why. Yeah, because it sounds like a lot of the motivation for wanting this book to be out there and available to people was a sort of encounter you had with a woman when you were on holiday with your daughter last August and queuing up for your evening pizza. And the woman obviously didn't know what you did for a living and was sort of expressing her,

I think she thought that it may be to do with 5G masks and all these other ideas and don't know what's in the vaccine. And you were like, well, actually, you don't know this, but I know exactly what's in the vaccine and you were like well actually you don't know this but I know exactly what's in the vaccine yeah that's right and that's and that's part of my job isn't it so I'm a university academic so we do science we do experiments we try and find stuff out I'm a university vaccine manufacturer so make vaccines and get them into clinical trials around the world but I'm also a teacher I'm here to to take my expertise and try and share that with my students but also it's part of our remit these days it's part of our funding

requirements that we explain science to the public and we get their input on our science and try and incorporate that so it's a two-way street public engagement and public communication so yeah it was frustrating to us particularly at the beginning it's probably less now because people have seen in the real world the consequences of the vaccine and the good that it can do but at the beginning when it was very new and there was a lot there was lots in the press nobody's ever made a vaccine against a coronavirus which wasn't true um we don't know what this technology is we don't know what's in this vaccine and obviously i did know so yeah to try to at least in a form that is accessible but is also completely accurate so we've tried quite hard in the book sarah and i to to use we have a really good writer who works

with us deborah and she would take our sciency writing and just make sure that we weren't using words that were not accessible so but but then we went round that editing process multiple times to make sure whenever we used a non-technical term it was still completely appropriate so we hope that although it's an accessible book it's also a completely accurate book and there's no there's no cheating in telling the story there yeah and I think actually you know the choice of words actually I think a lot of that has been so key because even the fact that there was a lot of talk about finding a vaccine is quite a misleading idea, isn't it? So scientists at the Jenner, Adrian and Sarah, have been working on developing this technology for, what, 20 years? Yeah. And Sarah's worked on MERS in 2017, so Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, another coronavirus.

And she had good trial data from that before we started with this one. So, yeah, the idea that she just found it in a field is quite frustrating to her because it's, yeah, painstaking years of research and endeavour and going through multiple processes of trials and tests. So, yeah, we didn't find it. She designed it and then we made it. Exactly. But that is, I think you're right, it does give this, finding it, gives this idea of people running into a lab going,

I've just had an idea. Have you tried mixing a garlic with a banana? You know, it's like, they're just sort of like going to stumble across it. Whereas actually what's going on is actually way more reassuring and as you say it's got it's backed up by years worth of data um but i think there's so much about rhetoric that introduces that you know you can't get away from the fact as well that the last

18 months there's all sorts of things that can can be scary and abstract and there's all different ways for that fear to come out and in amongst, you've got the fact that a lot of people have been quite alone with their thoughts. So a lot of the things that are underlying and anxieties you have about all manner of things can actually be channeled into something where it makes you feel like if this is a government-designed thing, if this is Bill Gates, if this is something otherworldly, then someone somewhere knows what they're doing, and I can say I don't like it because the idea of what's really been

going on is a lot more terrifying in a way because initially nobody knows exactly I guess that's right and and we were anxious yeah and I was April May last year we didn't know what we were facing and we were in this very unusual situation, not being allowed to leave the house. And we all have elderly relatives who were afraid because we knew that, I mean, for you and I, OK, it's a disease that would make us sick, but it's unlikely to kill us. But elderly parents, my parents were both in their 70s, I was afraid for them and they were very afraid. And it's true, I cannot understand why it would be easy to say, yeah, you're right, have somebody to blame it on. Exactly.

And there isn't anybody to blame it on at that point, apart from perhaps the systems that are meaning we're not responding well enough. And going forward, we need to look at how we responded and what went well and what went badly and try not to make those mistakes again next time. But yes, I can see the attraction in there being a an evil global core that's that's there doing this to us because then it gives you a target for perhaps an anger or a yeah somebody's doing this to us but of course that isn't the reality the reality is nature is complicated and viruses will always be emerging and we have called this disease disease x because we were always expecting that disease to emerge that would cause a outbreak or a pandemic and the reality is now we have to prepare

for disease y because there will be another one we can't stop that we just have to be better prepared next time hopefully the science we've done this time will set us up for that. The systems that we've built this time will set us up for that. And I think the public is much better aware. One thing, another thing that's happened this 18 months is we're all a lot more scientifically literate. I learned a lot of statistics that I hadn't really thought about before because they were in the newspapers.

It was discussed on the six o'clock news every every day we were hearing about our numbers and exponential curves yeah and that's something i think we all carry forward maybe we're all a bit cleverer than we were 18 months ago because we've had some training yeah and i think we've definitely been encouraged as well to think a lot more about what it is about being human that actually really makes the whole experience of it more than just the sort of lead in some of its parts. Because I know that in your writing about things you wanted to do, it was just like, I want to go out and I buy a round of drinks with my friends. I want to go dancing. You know, all those really, you know, I want to be able to hug my mum.

Simple things. Really simple things. And actually, you know, when you take away all those bits and you've just got work and maintaining, you know, roof over your head and food on the table, it's really tough without the other interactions that actually... I felt that very much. I realised more and more what a sociable animal I am

and how much I missed my friends and how much I missed my family. And so we were Zoom baking as I described that we were doing something together every week because my parents were by themselves in Kent and I'm here and also show my sisters in London we just didn't weren't allowed to see each other and and weirdly we we actually are not that close of family in that I don't speak to my mum every day I probably don't even really speak to her once a week in normal times. But because we were all on our own, we were making an effort to join up and cook the same recipe every day on a Sunday for an hour and then come back when it was cooked

and eat it together. And some of them were disasters. It was just a nice idea, though. I like that. And it made me realise, I think it brought us closer together as a family, this enforced distance. And technology, of course, enabled that enormously brought us closer together as a family, this enforced distance. And technology, of course, enabled that enormously. But I miss my friends a lot.

I miss just being able to pop round to a mate. When you've had a bad day at work, I would go to my friend Sally's and we'd have a glass of wine. And I wasn't able to do that. And then when my friends noticed I was having a hard time, which I really was because I was working really hard but also it was quite stressful at home um sometimes my friends would notice because we're good on whatsapp so we have a lot of whatsapp chat and I'd just come downstairs in the morning and somebody leave me a bunch of daffodils in the in the porch or a sandwich from the co-op because they knew I wouldn't get any food that day and just having that connection with other people was was the thing that got me through, I think, some of the tough times last year.

Oh, they sound like really good friends. Yeah, I have a good crew. You do. And I think also that thing, you're right, it's the casual stuff that I've realised was the hardest. Just being able to just say, as you say, just pop around to see someone. And you've mentioned your family. When you were growing up, were they both working parents? Have you got a science background in your family when you were growing up they were they both both working parents you they say have you got a science background in your family so my dad so my dad's a river man so he used to work at the docks in tilbury so on the thames unloading the the heavy

ships that come in and transferring it to barges and taking it up the river so a river man so he would work strange shift patterns. So he'd either be not home or home when I was young. And then all the docks closed in the 80s and he had to retrain. So he retrained as a London taxi driver. Oh, cool. So he was around and not around. And also when you're a cab driver, you work strange shifts.

So he would either be there all day or we wouldn't see him at all for weeks on end, it felt like. And my mum just worked part time in a school kind of setting up the science labs. She has a degree in maths, but didn't really use it after we were born. So they're both, I think, interesting, like, what's a curious people. They're curious about the world. My dad particularly is curious about the world. Didn't have very much formal education, but he they're curious about the world my dad particularly is curious about well didn't have very much formal education was very curious about the world so i definitely have traits of both of them in me but science wasn't really a thing that i knew was a career

when i was young i suspect because i didn't know any scientists really though we did have in kent some big factories that did like um chemical manufacturing so I kind of could understand that chemistry was a job so when I went to university I thought I'd be a chemist and then I discovered that biochemistry was a thing and then everything changed but um I was always just interested in how stuff works and it felt to me that science was the route to figuring out how stuff works and so when you were having your first baby is that what you were doing at the time you're working in biochemistry yeah so I, so I was in, well, so genetics. So I did a degree in biochemistry and during that degree, I discovered genetics as a concept.

And then a PhD in London in genetics. And then I worked in Paris for a bit. And then in Brighton, still working on human genetics and how it is that your DNA manages to stay the same, mostly, but occasionally changes. And that's a mutation and that's the underpinning route to cancer development. So my research has always been understanding how genetic information changes over time in your body and how sometimes that leads to cancer and how we prevent that. So I've been all over the place with my career. And then, yeah, so I moved to Cambridge to start my own research group, studying that, the process of copying DNA and keeping it as accurate as possible.

And so I had my paddely when I just got started, really, on setting up that lab in Cambridge. I was going to say, did you always think you'd be a mum? Oh, I don't think you'd be a mum? Oh, I don't think I'm a very traditionally mumsy person in that I don't really like children. I mean, I totally don't like small babies. I was never a babysitter, you know? I was never going to babysit other people's children when I was a teenager. Sorry, it's just such a brilliant set. I'm particularly mumsy in that I don't really like kids. I don't actually know exactly what you mean.

You didn't fetishise the idea of a baby. I'm not going to hold other people's children. Yeah, fair enough. I don't want to go and get in there and poke them. I'm not like, oh, they're so cute. I don't really think they're that cute. And so I never necessarily, it wasn't part of my absolute life's goal, I must become a mother.

But I remember very clearly my sister saying something similar. We were walking around a shopping centre in Cambridge many years ago. And my sister saying something similar. Oh, I don't really like babies. And my mum just turning around to the two of us saying, right, you two, I'm not having this. I want to make it very clear. Clever women must have children. So that was it, we were told.

So we're often set on the path of procreation oh I like your mum's take on it as well you know clever women must have children like pass these genes on you must have your legacy yeah yeah and so yeah Ellie Ellie's great but she does she's not the only thing in my life motherhood I have to do other things too she knows that and that hopefully gives her resilience for the future yeah definitely and I think actually that kind of pragmatism about that because I think um when you have a child it's it means you probably always spoke to her as her own person rather than having this sort of like oh I've had this cute baby and

then you sort of get like some sometimes people can really try and hold on to that childhood and not actually just let the kid just dictate who it is that they are and it sounds like maybe you and Ellie have got quite a special relationship because it's like right you're here I'm over here doing my thing as well I've got time for you

do you think that's a sort of ability to compartmentalise or just knowing yourself and knowing what it is you need I hope I hope so she's she's hugely important to me and she you know I'll drop anything if she needs me I hope she knows that I'm there at any point now you know you'll move a mountain you'll get on any plane you'll square up to any bully you'll do anything for her but yeah it's not in her best interest that I am unhappy because I'm not able to do other things. She likes to see me out with my friends.

She likes to see me working, I think, and being successful. And so writing this book was most of my Sundays from like, no, probably like five months. Every Sunday I would be in my office and she would be out in the garden or playing with her friends. So she knows that it's part of what makes me able to be a good mum to her is me not having to be a mum to her all the time. Yeah, I think actually that ability to be a bit selfish with yourself

is actually really, really good, especially if you know that work is so much more than just work to you. It's vocation. And I don't think anyone can argue with that when they see the passion and dedication that you've put in with with everything you've done with the vaccine I mean that's that's going to shut anybody up really isn't it but it is that it's it's not being able to I don't know I haven't always found it easy to say no to things and I think some point that's good because it means I get a lot of opportunity to get things done.

But sometimes I have in the past struggled when I've taken on too much. When you're moving house and you're moving job and you've got a new baby and you're trying to support the husband and you're trying to be at home all the time and trying to be a mom and a mentor. And there's a lot of things there and sometimes I think I have spread myself too thin and as a consequence have suffered um and so learning a bit as I get older and where to where to say actually I can't do this right now or how to pass on things that other people would do better I've got in the last five years much better at delegating tasks that other people would actually be better

at you know this understanding that you don't have to do all of it there are other people around who can help you and you've hired them because they're good at their jobs so maybe you should just let them do their jobs instead of having to take it all on yourself and it doesn't matter if you haven't hoovered the stairs that's very true and I think it's quite hard to teach that to someone actually I mean I was thinking if you saw Ellie in a similar situation when she's older what can you say but I think I think sometimes some of it comes from learned experience because you're sure if you look back on it times when I've been in you know quite difficulty I had a period of quite significant depression and it was because I was doing too much and I hadn't realized that I shouldn't be doing that much

because I thought that I had to, that I was the only person who could do this. And it isn't true. You're never the only person that can do this. But I don't know how you pass that knowledge on because if somebody had said to me at the time, Kath, you're just doing too much, let somebody else do that,

I wouldn't have believed them, I don't think. No, and I think it's very hard to delegate when you're not ready to, actually, because also you feel like you've sort of set yourself up with this challenge and then sometimes you can feel like you're in the middle of an experiment on yourself, like how much can one person actually take before I just sort of crumple? And actually you can kind of keep going through a lot of storms, and I'm speaking as if we're on the same field.

I think actually what you've been dealing with is a level of stress I've never experienced because I've never had it where, you know, I'm trying to develop something that can actually help to save humankind. So forgive me for my... No, but actually this year was quite... But this year was... It was surprisingly...

Although we were working like mad, I think the cause, and everybody was in it together, there was no competing there were no competing priorities so i think for the team on some level although we were working crazy hours because we knew what we had to do and we knew the importance of it and we were like empowered to prioritize that above all things it actually wasn't that bad i think some people are struggling a bit now we're trying to go back to normal and kind of the adrenaline in the court is always gone a bit.

And we're like, OK, now we've just got to go back and do our day jobs. And I'm trying to encourage everyone to take their holidays this year and make sure that everybody gets some time off so they can come back in September refreshed and ready to start again. But this year, weirdly, I think wasn't the most stressful part of my life perhaps just because I had been through that phase you're saying I've got to the place where I'm confident enough to delegate and to trust other people to do their things well. Do you think there are some sort of life skills you did pick up from from being Ellie's mum that you were able to use when you were doing when you're doing your are you suggesting that Oxford's university professors are sometimes like toddlers

actually I wasn't but I love that idea just put all your toys back in the pram don't sit over there and think about what you've done yes we should instigate a naughty step for departmental meetings i think what ellie what being a mum teaches you like i say is it teaches you patience um and that you can't always have your own way and i think that's the thing good enough is sometimes good enough don't sacrifice the perfect don't sacrifice the good for the perfect yeah i mean i think in a lot of ways um the fact that all this stuff has kicked off in good enough. Don't sacrifice the perfect. Don't sacrifice the good for the perfect.

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, the fact that all this stuff has kicked off at the same time I entered my 40s has actually been quite handy because I think I've been able to sort of separate out those things a little bit quicker than I probably would have done if I'd been 10 years younger. I think that's right. I think Sarah and I, so Sarah's in her 50s and I'm now 46 um and we are starting to feel that we can you know we should be running this place middle-aged women middle-aged women rule the world yeah maybe we we should be doing more of that um we look around us um certainly at the top levels of management in universities and we start to see female representation it's certainly not 50 50 yet and I don't think the world would be a worse place if we had more

females at the top end of the responsibility spectrum oh no I mean that's basically yeah my podcast has got a lot of tributes to that and I think you know one of the things that's obviously happened alongside the work you've been doing in the lab and the success of it is that you've now found yourself with more of a platform to put things out there and to be heard. So do you think you're finding the significance of that and actually being able to promote that? Again, it's such a new thing for me and for Sarah. for me and for Sarah we've been for our careers in normally quite dark laboratories in our safety specs at our lab coats getting on with doing science and so it's it's hard to know yeah it's hard to know what whether we are the right people to take a platform whether what we have to say is is of interest or is in any way profound or if we do take a platform it's hard to know what

what we haven't always thought about it because we're quite academic technical people um and so it comes back to this i think this idea that i think science needs to be seen i think that that it's important for us to put ourselves out there in a way that we can be trusted and we can be interrogated and that we are always going to answer questions that people will put to us so we don't have things to hide. And that, in fact, is how science works. Science is public domain. We publish it, but we tend to publish it in quite esoteric journals that nobody else is going to read because it's technically complicated stuff.

And all universities, of course, do have a comms department now now in the press office but maybe we as scientists never really wanted to engage with them because it's just a bit of effort and it's outside of our comfort zone and we don't really know how to do that or if we should or if we stick our head above a power pit if we're going to get shot down um but i think that's one thing that i will take forward is that yeah we have a job to do to do the science but we also have a job to do to do the science but we also have a job to do to communicate the science and I'll try to do that better going forward yeah well I think that's part of a general wave though because I feel like in the last I don't know let's say 10-15 years of things being becoming more and popular like TED talks and podcasts and

I think people are enjoying the idea of broadening the information they have and their knowledge about something and being educated into adulthood. We didn't really use to prioritise it in the same way, I don't think. No, it's great, isn't it? Yeah, it is great. I think we've really seen this. That terrible phrase from Michael Gove, the public had enough of experts, is completely not what I see in the people that I interact with um and that's not just I don't think I live in a particularly academic bubble I mean I know I'm an academic at Oxford but most of my friends are not um and and from what I see as I said with people sending

us emails or sending us notes people are responding to the fact that we're we're talking about science and that we're trying to teach it. And I think that's right. There's loads of great science programming out there and there's loads of great information and content, even on Twitter or TikTok. TikTok was doing these amazing little vaccine understanding videos. Some guys called Team Halo. Great content available that's really accessible.

And I think we all want to learn and I want to learn I want to learn much more about all of the other aspects of pandemic responses that I don't know and then going forward into yeah continuing to learn because that's how we grow absolutely I think actually Michael Gove couldn't be more wrong about that really because I think that the miss the misplaced thing is I think people are bored of not always knowing where to get reliable data. But I think when it comes to experts, I think people are really, really open to that. I think everybody wants to feel reassured and given lots of information, actually. The issue is, of course, when experts don't agree.

But experts often don't agree. This is the case. Science is done by making mistakes and getting things wrong as well so there has to be some understanding of the fact that a data set which exists as a as an object can be interpreted in more than one way particularly when it comes to things like modeling and trying to predict the future which are always of course extremely challenging but and then trying to interpret what a thing means and then trying to decide what we should do as a response to a data set obviously none of these things are easy questions um and so the interplay between science and policy and journalism are all complicated spaces to be in but that isn't to say that we

shouldn't try and get good quality information and then get lots of different voices of opinion out there um and and perhaps stop some of this false equivalency whereby if 90% of the world's scientists agree that A is A and then 10% think A is B, maybe we should give a bit more weight to A. I don't know how we quite manage that. Yeah, I think it's also about making sure that people feel that the information is imparted to them by people as enthusiastic with you as you are about people actually understanding and getting to grips with it. Because I think that's what's really important. When you watch the best teachers are the ones that don't actually,

it's not about having all the answers, it's the ones that just really want all the people listening to feel empowered by any information from it that they're grasping and to build on it. So that, you know, that's actually what your book is about. You get that on every page. It's just going, look, it's all here. Everything you could need to read. It's here. If that, if you weren't sure about that, let's put it in these terms. Let's put it in these terms. How can we get you to feel reassured and empowered by what you're reading so that you understand something that

you might have injected into you and what the process has been on. I think it's completely fascinating and just incredible, actually. What you've done is absolutely amazing. I think it's, I think it'll probably take a really long time for the, I know you said the adrenaline and the cortisol started to, you know, to decrease, but really the implications of what's gone on is absolutely absolutely huge it's huge when I think about how we felt March last year and how terrifying it was and how bleak and the fact that you know really all things considered touch wood and all that it wasn't too long to wait to hug hug my mum or go and sing at a festival um I mean you mentioned that you you know all that time you're really looking forward to hugging your mum how did that feel after you'd both had your double vaccines and you were able to

actually physically interact yeah i i do i realized that i missed that um being a single person during the pandemic means i just had no no human touch it was there was nobody to have skin-on-skin contact with and and when that's not with you, you realise how much you miss it, even though previously you've taken it completely for granted. We're going to hug all the time. Whenever I get an opportunity to see them, I'm going to hug them because you never know what's around the next corner. And, yeah, so last week we had a huge milestone.

So last week a billion doses of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine have been delivered globally. So we went from that day in April when we injected the first volunteer of a single dose, at which point there were 500 doses in existence because they were the first 500 that my team had made, to just over a year later, we've got a billion doses in shipments around the world. A lot of them in India and going out to low and middle income countries because of the commitment from Oxford, from AstraZeneca to deliver those at no profit during the pandemic. So they're going out to the world. So we hope that we're continuing to do good. That's amazing. A billion doses. It's such a big number. I remember the first time somebody from astrazeneca used the word a billion in a in a meeting it was it was probably only in may last last year

very soon after they'd signed up with us um and and that obviously is it's not a number that we had ever considered really oh that actually makes me feel weepy that's insane you know i actually got a bit weepy when i went for my vaccine as well. I did too. I get very emotional. I had to say to the lady, I'm going to have to tell you, I made that. Well, not the actual one, but it does all come from the very initial stock that we made in my tiny little lab in Oxford. So that's the seed stock that then goes out and seeds larger and larger reactors to make the dose. So every dose that anybody ever gets did originate from the very first batch that we made back in March last year. So when you sat down and the woman was doing it

did you say to her like? Yeah I said I'm gonna tell you this you won't care I'm gonna tell you this my name's Kath and I'm part of the vaccine team and we made that and she was like oh my god so we had to do a selfie so there's a selfie somewhere I think it's probably on Twitter of me and the nice the nice nurse lady who was a radiologist and had come back into the NHS to volunteer to do vaccination centres. Because everybody there was volunteers. That's amazing. That is amazing. And I'm surprised you haven't printed up a T-shirt.

I've got my sticker somewhere. They gave us a sticker. I've got my sticker. I've kept it. So what are you working on at the moment? Are you working on the one for the Y? So we've been doing some work with developing vaccines against new variants. So that's obviously now really AstraZeneca's project. So we've been teaching them how we do the very first steps so that they can then take that and lead with that going forward. So that's not something that we will be doing in the long term because that's now AstraZeneca's project.

And then we're going back to all of the projects that we were working on before. So I work with whichever Oxford academic needs a new vaccine manufactured. So we're doing we've just started some trials against plague, which is a very serious disease, because if it goes into the lungs and you don't get antibody treatment within 24 hours, it's generally fatal. So vaccines against plague would still be really useful. A Nipah virus, which is another really nasty virus that causes outbreaks. And a really interesting and important project tackling gonorrhea, because gonorrhea will soon probably become antibiotic resistant and that will have very serious health impact

if you can't then use antibiotics to treat gonorrhea. So we're working with a team at Oxford to see if we can manufacture a gonorrhea vaccine. Wow, there's a lot to be thinking about there. There's always a lot to do. I know, I wonder, you sort of picture you guys like, good news guys, they've just found out there's a lot to be thinking about that there's always a lot yeah i know you're wondering you sort of picture you guys like good news guys i've just found out there's a new it's a new place i mean there's so many so many diseases that often they don't affect us because because vaccines work so well we almost don't realize the huge impact that

infectious diseases have for people around the globe. Absolutely. Because we are vaccinated against everything when we're children. And so we don't understand how awful infectious diseases are. 50 years ago, people were getting polio, people were getting measles, people were getting mumps. And people in our country understood the costs of infectious diseases, but not so much anymore, because they're either treatable or we're vaccinated against them but in in poorer parts of the world these cause untold suffering i mean malaria kills 400 000 kids a year i think um and and adrian hill at university of oxford has just run the first phase two trials with an effective malaria vaccine so there's huge work being done still now these haven't gone away but we've still got a lot to do in the future to start to eradicate hopefully some

of these other diseases that cause real harm and if if you had been able to operate your lab back in the time of things like spanish flu would that have been something that would have been worked with a similar style of vaccine i guess i guess's right. So we have made vaccines on the same platform against influenza. And there is definitely scope for better influenza vaccines. And there is research being done by teams looking to improve influenza vaccines and see if we can try and get one that then doesn't have to be upgraded every year to suit the new strain. So there's lots to be done with influenza for sure we're also running programs with HIV because an HIV vaccine would be hugely important as well so

there's and TB so there are still you know things diseases that we have heard of that we need to tackle and there will be lots of diseases that people in this country haven't really heard of that also cause great harm. And if you could sort of go back to like young you, what's the thing that you hope any young girls, particularly sort of getting involved in science, what do you think, what do you hope they take away from what's going on? Well, I always like to say that science actually is really fun.

Because I think part of the reason that I do it is not just because I think it's important, which I do, but for me it is a real passion. And it's important, which I do, but for me it's a real passion and it's passionate because you work with some really clever people, some really quirky and funny and interesting and difficult, intelligent people. And you get to play, you get to follow your own instincts, you get to invent and be creative and think of solutions to problems. So for me, science is really fun.

It's not to say it's not really hard, but the only reason that you can get through it being hard is because it's actually great fun to do and I wouldn't do anything else. Oh, that's a good sell. Yeah, I think you're right. You forget that there's a lot of fun in that. And I suppose also, do you find it,

were you someone that was always quite satisfied by sort of the idea that there's almost like a neatnessness to things like if you can just figure out what the equation is then it's sort of quite tidy yeah and that is and that is true yeah part of biology is mess it's complicated it's messy but the idea is that underneath it all we can figure out where the mess comes from where the noise comes from because it comes from an intersection of reaction a with reaction b we are just chemistry and i find that fascinating and genetics is hugely complicated but it does come down to lists of four letters in a code yeah so yeah trying to get to how do we get this phenomenal, interesting and beautiful complexity out of what must intrinsically just be chemicals

is wonderfully fascinating to me. And it's a subject that's never going to end. So I'll never have to retire. No, no, no, no. There's still lots of scope. I don't see you retiring anytime soon. And also, I know you're only three years into working in vaccines, but I think you're quite good at it.

So please stay doing what you're doing. We loved your kitchen discos. Thank you for coming. It's very bad because now I'm just about to redo my kitchen because I've just moved house and I'm going to put the kitchen in the garage. And Ellie, my daughter, is insisting on a disco button. Hey, good on you, Ellie. So there's going to be a disco ball in the kitchen and I'm afraid it's all down to you. Oh, well, you know what I was going to be a disco ball in the kitchen, and I'm afraid it's all down to you. Well, you know what I was going to say?

Please send my best to Ellie, because she comes across so beautifully in the book. And I love, I can really hear your relationship in all the writing. And it's really lovely, because I think that there's this, I can see that this time in your lives with you is, you know, just the two of you is going to really form like a keystone for the rest of you. And that's what happened with my mum and I as well. You know, obviously in a slightly different way,

but we were on our own from, I don't know, for about three years. And it's honestly, we have such a good relationship because of it. And, like, I could really sort of pick up on that in what you were writing. So it's really lovely. And Minecraft tips are fine, you know. We've moved on now. We've got something called Friday Night Funkin'. That's taken over our lives.

It's like a sort of singing competition. I'm sure it'll come. It'll come. I can't believe your colleague Sarah is a mum of triplets. Flippin' hell. No, they're grown up now. They're 22, I think. Wow.

Just finishing it. But they're just finishing it at uni, which has been another crazy stressful time for them. Oh, my God. You just don't really hear many people who are parents of triplets, actually. No. I don't think I know any triplets.

I think she regrets having said it because now in every interview, she's always like, Sarah Gilbert, scientist, mother of triplets. But also, it is part of her life, too, and she writes about that in the book, so that's fair game. Yeah, yeah.

I know, I know. Well, yeah, people can ask, but they're not entitled to always know answers, are they that's a good tip I'll tell you that but you managed you managed to be very public and still having you know so everybody knows about your family a bit but you keep some of it back you've you found a way to walk that line pretty well you're comfortable yeah I mean the discourse intimate coming into your kitchen is a great thing to do yeah but you know it's funny because I would never ever normally do anything like that but one as soon as we were stuck here in lockdown I felt like nothing else really mattered about that

and I thought I just need to connect with people and I felt like there's such a such affection for everybody that's come round honestly it's like I never cry in my day job but I kept crying in the discos because it was like there was something so sort of sweet about it. It was very pure. It was daft. But it really meant something. And honestly, if I hadn't had that every Friday, I think I would have gone absolutely insane.

I think it just kept me, it gave me an outlet for a side of me that I felt I didn't really have. So it was not even just like day job me, just like actual me, me, you know, just being a like day job me, just like actual me, me, you know, just being a bit silly and putting on silly outfits and learning lyrics to Julie Andrews and stuff like that. And everybody needs a bit of Julie in their life. Oh, they do. And I think when you have your kitchen,

it's very easy to just put a little hook somewhere that you can put a disco ball up. Yeah, it's there on the plans. There you go. Where the disco ball is going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. And you can take it down ball up. Yes, it's there on the plans. There you go. It's where the disco ball is going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. And you can take it down when you need to,

but actually, once it starts catching the light, you're not going to want to take it down. Yeah, it might. It might. Oh, what a lovely woman. So warm. And I can't wait to see what her kitchen looks like with disco ball in it. And what an amazing thing she's done. I wonder if you've been part of that team

or any of the teams that have helped to develop the vaccines, if you can really take stock. Do you remember how we all felt in March last year where we were on lockdown and there was lots of heaviness in the news and we didn't really know how we were ever ever ever going to see our families again or hug our parents or any of those things and now look I know things are still far from plain sailing but we have come a long way and we all said it last year you know the thing we need is a vaccine and here we are and I can give testament to the fact that it does make a massive, massive difference if you've had it and you can catch COVID. So, anywho, big thank you to Catherine, Dr. Catherine Green. Big thank you to all my guests.

This is the end of another series. I cannot quite believe it. We started with a spy skull. We ended up with a scientist. You cannot say. This is not an eclectic range of women i speak to and guess what i've got some amazing people lined up already and a couple have already interviewed for the next series which will start in about a month i'm gonna go and try

and have a bit of summer holiday time and hopefully get back to festivals it's been laughable the festivals for me so far i've I've had five bookings. I've only been able to do one, and the other three, I've lost three to COVID and one to a thunderstorm. But I'm really hoping that I get back out and start singing for you all again soon. And in the meantime, thank you so much. You'll be pleased to hear that the Lego situation here

has remained pretty stable. I'm pretty impressed. Wish me luck for the rest of the day we're not quite out the woods yet with our quarantine here we've got one more day to go and then we are free to roam the world just like we used to mickey you're looking forward to going out and about and going to the park again all that kind of thing yeah look at that little guy. These Lego men are so brilliant. I do love Lego. Thank you so much.

I'm going to love you and leave you now and help Mickey make some more Lego men. Yes, Mickey? Something's happened. Oh, what happened? Nothing bad. Nothing bad. All right, lots of love. Thank you so much.

Mickey, thank you. Mickey, can you say thank you so much? Mickey, say thank you. can you say thank you so much thank you On each step with Peloton, from their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so. If you've got five minutes or 50, Peloton Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes led by expert

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