People of Science with Brian Cox - Dame Sally Davies
Transcript
- Sally: People of Science. Take one.
- Brian: 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?
- Sally: I missed it immensely actually.
- I stopped medicine and went and was a wife in the diplomatic service
- then I did research strategy and 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.
- Brian: And who is the scientist you've chosen?
- Sally: 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.
- Brian: And what do you admire about them?
- Sally: 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 it was he who went to the states on Rockefeller money and found the way to get it produced in order to save lives. and found the way to get it produced in order to save lives.
- Brian: Of all the discoveries that we've chatted about - I think - and scientists in this series,
- Fleming must be the one who's had the biggest impact on everybody's lives, I suspect.
- Sally: 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.
- Brian: What do we know or what do you know and respect about them individually?
- So let's start with Florey.
- Sally: One of the wonderful things about Florey was
- he knew not only his science
- and how to build this multi-disciplinary team that was well before his time
- but how to go out and get the money and make it happen.
- That's inspirational.
- Brian: And Fleming, what's the sense of the scientist?
- Sally: I like the fact that if you read about him
- he was very understated.
- He did in his Nobel prize acceptance
- highlight that it was a 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.
- Brian: 'Beware of Breeding Outlaw Germs'.
- Sally: Oh so that's the resistence bit isn't it.
- Brian: Yeah.
- Both: Unskilled use.
- Brian: May develop deadly microbes the wonder drug can't cure.
- Sally: So there it is.
- Brian: And that's 1945.
- Sally: So that came after his speech when he warned it and they picked it straight up.
- Brian: That's interesting isn't it, that's the bit that they focus on straight away.
- Sally: Oh, 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 8 million dying at the moment of cancer.
- Brian: I want to know why that is. Why do you think...
- Sally: Oh, it's a market failure.
- No new class of antibiotics
- has come into clinical practice for the last 30 years.
- Everyone thought we'd 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.
- Brian: I know you work in government now or 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.
- Sally: 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 sixteenth and I couldnt believe it
- to 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.
- Brian: So Fleming didn't entirely solve the problem?
- Sally: 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 know him.
Dame Sally Davies talks to Brian Cox about her interest in antibiotic resistance and admiration of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey for their development of penicillin.
Explore our Google Arts and Culture collection on Fleming and Florey's lives -
See our collected archive papers of Alexander Fleming & Howard Florey's work -
With special thanks to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum.
About the Royal Society
91TV is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.
/
Subscribe to our YouTube channel for exciting science videos and live events.
Find us on:
Bluesky:
Facebook:
Instagram:
LinkedIn:
TikTok: