People Of Science. Take one.
You started as a doctor but you left medicine for a while.
What brought you back into medicine and public health? Did you miss it?
I missed it immensely, actually.
I stopped medicine and went and was a wife in the diplomatic service.
Then I did research strategy in management.
I then became Chief Medical Officer, which is public health.
So actually, as my husband would say,
I'm a political activist who's landed up in government.
And who is the scientist you have chosen?
I'm actually really interested in antibiotic resistance
and penicillin is the original antibiotic.
So I've chosen a combination - Fleming and Florey.
Both of whom were Royal Society fellows.
What do you admire about them?
Start with Fleming.
He comes back from a holiday
and he's thinking of throwing away his microbiology plates,
on which bugs are growing, and one of them showed something odd.
Now most people would throw that away, but not Fleming.
He said, "That's different".
And he explored what it was and he found penicillin.
He would have left it there,
but actually then Florey picked it up
and managed to show that it worked in humans
and it was he who went to the States on Rockefeller money
and found the way to get it produced in order to save lives.
Of all the discoveries that we've chatted about in this series,
Fleming must be the one who's had the biggest impact
on everybody's lives, I suspect.
It's a very direct impact
because modern medicine is underpinned by antibiotics.
Most cancer treatments diminish your immunity, so you need antibiotics.
Modern surgery. Any transplants.
So modern medicine would be lost and would not have happened
if we don't have antibiotics that work.
What do we know or what do you know and respect about them individually?
So let's start with Florey.
One of the wonderful things about Florey was
he knew not only his science and how to build this
multidisciplinary team that was well before its time,
but how to go out and get money and make it happen.
That's inspirational.
And Fleming. What's the sense of the scientist?
I like the fact that if you read about him, he was very understated.
He did, in his Nobel Prize acceptance,
highlight that it wasn't serendipity and it was a team.
But of course, for the work I do on antimicrobial resistance,
it's also very important that he understood
that resistance could happen, would happen
and he described in his Nobel Prize lecture how it would kill people.
This is a wonderful couple of montages
of the actual Nobel ceremony.
"Beware of breeding outlaw germs."
So that's the resistance bit, isn't it?
Yes. "Unskilled use".
"Its unskilled use may develop deadly microbes
"the wonder drug can't cure."
So there it is. And that's 1945.
So that came after his speech when he warned it
and they've picked it straight up.
That's interesting, isn't it?
That's the bit that they focus on straightaway.
Yes. That's fascinating.
By 2050, if we take no action,
10 million people each year across the world
will die of antibiotic resistant infections.
That compares with eight million dying at the moment of cancer.
I want to know why that is. Why do you think... It's a market failure.
No new class of antibiotics has come into clinical practice
for the last 30 years.
Everyone thought, "We've cracked it",
and they forgot about Fleming's advice or premonition
that people would die because of resistance.
So part of my role now is trying to reinvigorate the market.
I know you work in government now, with government.
I think it's a very valuable idea that actually politics,
science, the whole thing really is there to do good.
To make people's lives better ultimately.
I went into medicine
because I wanted to make the world a better place
and so of course I look to people like Fleming and Florey
because they have made the world a better place.
I recently was given the Lister Memorial Medal. I was the 16th.
And I couldn't believe it to find that the first was actually Fleming.
And I thought here I am following in his footsteps,
not doing the science,
but trying to make sure modern science is done
to solve a massive crisis.
So Fleming didn't entirely solve the problem.
No.
He saved a lot of lives and he showed us the way forward.
And he predicted antibiotic resistance,
which I think is before his time.
I wish I'd known him.