YouSaid · the spoken record

Athene Donald

lines on the record: 53
first: 2009-03-22
most recent: 2009-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A bath I feel I shall get very dirty and sand on my skin and my eczema won't be terrible. I'd like a bath so I can sit and read.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd like to cheat slightly and take a box set of six the limmon novels by Dorothy Dunnet, because these are wonderfully intricate series of historical novels, and I think it would give me plenty to mull over on that long time I'm stranded there, I'm not.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the last piece of music it is music I sang when I was eighteen, but it's something I very much come back to recently. It's from Vaughn Williams Dona Nobis Parchum written in the run up to the Second World War setting poems by Walt Whitman. It's a plea for peace and it's still highly relevant and it still sends shivers up my spine.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will be tough, I think, because for all, I haven't got much of a social life. I like talking, I like being surrounded by people. So it will definitely be tough though.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose You look around she has two highly successful daughters and you look around and so many families end up being somewhat dysfunctional and I think she's surprised that hers has turned out okay.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the next piece of music again is a string quartet. When I went into hospital to have my son James, my husband put together what you might call a birthing tape, and this was one of the pieces of music we put on that. It's Schubert's string quartet, Death and the Maiden, and neither of us referred to the title, which is singularly inappropriate for a birthing tape.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely essential to a successful woman No, neither of them. My son has just completed a master's in finance and economics. My daughter is reading history at university.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I am not in the least methodical at home. I like to think I'm efficient rather than methodical, so I know where things are, but I am not a domestic goddess. I think one of the things you learn is how to cut corners. I make sure all our clothes are machine washable and non iron.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a challenge. I have good friends amongst my scientist colleagues, but I don't give dainty dinner parties at regular intervals, certainly.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of it will undoubtedly go on supporting my research group. I spent quite a lot on getting the family to Paris and having a good time there too. I'm glad to hear it.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand that point of view, but I think in a way I'm an FRS, I have got success in an absolute sense. So it is just a way of celebrating women. We are still in a minority, particularly in the physical sciences. Girls do still feel awkward about it, and if you end up being in a minority, you can feel very isolated. And I think it is worth celebrating.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is a very interesting award, and the answer is yes, I think it does. I think it's a very interesting award because it is for women and you can say, well, why should women be singled out? My view is that it's a wonderful platform to remind people and to remind young girls in particular that being a scientist does not turn you into some ghastly mad eyed man, value usually in a white coat that you can still be a relatively normal person and one can have a family. I think that's a hugely important message to give.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next track is some Grenada's piano music, and there is no real connection with anything with this one. It's just music I came to relatively recently, and I thought was absolutely wonderful”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, of course, guilt. One never gives enough time to one's children. And I know because I'm obsessed about my work at times, I can be short with them or come home really stressed by something and feel you're not as receptive to their worries as you should be. Yes, there would be guilt. And you should ask men that.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been times when it's been painful, yes, Cambridge is not a city that is very forgiving if you are at a dinner and someone says, what do you do? It's very uncomfortable. But it was a difficult decision that was worth making because he has seen my own career flourish, and so there is some sort of tangential reward for him. And we both believe very strongly that children need parents there in a very sort of always available way. So it's a decision that, however painful, at least both looking at me and looking at our children, I think he can feel very proud of.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, I don't think that's what we intended. He at the time was a college research fellow. And I don't think that was the initial intention, but my career took off and it made sense for him to put his on a back burner. I don't think he thought it would be sort of permanently on a back burner. And I think very often that's the trap that women fall into. It's very hard to get back into academic life if you've once stepped back.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably there was an element of naivety. I don't think I realised how hard being a mother was going to be, and I just felt my husband and I could work around this, as indeed we did manage to, but it's a challenge. It's very hard.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. My husband and I certainly felt that I am had come. I knew that there was this lectureship coming up, and I went to talk to the head of department who was also to some extent one of my mentors there, and I explained this to him, and he said, and it's a wonderful thing to be told, intelligent women should have children. And it was just brilliant because I knew that he would not hold it against me if I was pregnant at the time of interview, for instance. And it's that kind of single remark which can make such a huge difference if he had said, oh, well, if you're going to get pregnant, I don't know if we'd want to employ you, which at the time would have been perfectly imaginable. I wouldn't be here now.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the next piece of music is part of a Haydn string quartet. When I was living in the States in particular, my husband and I formed a quartet, I mean a very amateur one with another couple who were the other half of the quartet and we played Haydn and Mozart's string quartets and we had great fun.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I got hatemail on the back of it. It was a sort of completely unnecessary fabrication. And I was deeply upset by it. And this, I felt, was the result of trying to make my science accessible.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It up a bit Well, the lumpy custard story was a particular disaster when I was trying to explain what a colloid was to the press, and I won't try and explain it now, but essentially colloides are things which have a lot of surface area and they tend to stick together. And so Lumpy Custer was a nice everyday example. And the press said, Cambridge scientists work on lumpy custard. I didn't talk to the media for about 15 years after that. I really hated what was done because they would not let me say that was an analogy. That is not what I do.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right, and I think it's hugely important to understand that an awful lot of that work needs to go on in order to make progress which one day will make a headline.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roughly speaking, I think a lot of what I do is making connections between things that look to be very different, and I think that's important. So when people ask me what have you done, I say it's not a single eureka moment. It's trying to draw together ideas from different branches.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things underpin so much of our everyday lives. So, for instance, some of the work I've been doing recently on protein aggregation, this is when proteins stick together. Now people will be familiar with this kind of problem because it's what underlies things like Alzheimer's disease. I don't look at the clinical situation, but I'm trying to understand why the protein molecules things like proteins from milk, when you heat them up, they unfold from their natural state, which is as a sort of globular shape. They unfold, they stick together, and they stick together in ways that may be useful if you want to make yogurt. But if something like that happens in our brains and the proteins unfold and stick together, that's not good news. And so by trying to understand the rather simpler system in a test tube, I hope to get some understanding of what might be relevant to a clinician.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I look at is not individual molecules, but aggregates of them it could be on the length scale of a human cell, for instance, or one of the things we're looking at at the moment are the pores in plant leaves.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the next piece of music is by Hindermit, part of the symphonic metamorphosis. This was something that I played, we mentioned the London School Symphony Orchestra. This was something I played the first concert I played with them. And it was just fantastic to be surrounded by this wall of sound of brass instrument, wind instruments. We didn't have that many in my school. It was a wonderful experience.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they can try and encourage people to nominate more women, but I would hate the thought that they were going to lower the bar to try and get more. maintain sort of an even playing field for both sexes, no doubt about it.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are trying very hard to change that number. They would love to get more women nominated. The Royal Society is actually working really hard on this. They take it very seriously because they don't want it to remain an all-white all-male society, which it has been for most of its 350 years of history. The problem”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. It was actually after a school concert in December. And my grandfather, who hadn't come to the school concert, was walking up the road with a telegram. And he came up the road to tell us so I could run back to school and tell all my teachers. And”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I had much of a life outside, which is such a sad thing to say, but I think I worked and I have my music, and I did a bit of sport, but I think there wasn't that much of a social life outside really, so I didn't have to pretend.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think quite a lot. I think it has always been difficult for me to fit in in a certain sense. I've always felt as if I was on the fringes.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it did. I think definitely my primary school I was always called teachers pet. It's a terrible thing to stand out and you get rather shunned.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting you say that because a lot of people regard Cambridge academics as being quietly in a corner doing their own thing, but I think in science that's absolutely not right. And of course I have generations of students who've come through the group and you keep in touch with them, you remain close to previous students, particularly if they stay in academia. You want to see how they develop as people. And then they”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to have a community, yes, and at school being socially fairly isolated this was a way of doing it. And has that then become a”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've chosen the DA's here from Mozart's requiem, and this was the first full scale choral work we did when this music master turned up. He got us involved, I guess, in some inter-school event. I don't know, it must have been a choir of about a thousand, and we sang at Central Hall under David Wilcox.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, only with myself, I think. And I think that's something that people find quite hard because it looks as if I'm competitive. But I think it's me I'm competing with.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had a mop of grey hair. I think he just stood out in a way that everyone could say, wow. And he did wonderful music. That certainly stretched us. He took a girl's school and made us do really complicated things. And when you...”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when we got a new music master at the school, as I say, I was at a girls school, and all the teachers were female, and then suddenly this charismatic male teacher turned up again, probably when I was twelve or thirteen, and he just transformed the music in the school so the choir became something you want it to sing in.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right. I think she was quite relaxed about that. And it was my drive to go and do science to do physics.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I just naturally worked quite hard. I don't remember feeling I've got to work really hard to keep up with everyone else. Yes, you know that that's that”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the second choice is part of Beethoven's patik, which both my grandmother played and indeed much more recently my daughter”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she played pian Yes, extremely well, I think in another generation she might have become a professional pianist. And even by the time I knew her, she was still playing fantastically well.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was a very strong woman who surprisingly didn't seem to believe in education. I think she felt that she had succeeded without education, so why did my sister and I need it. She wasn't that supportive, but she was very strong.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, and I felt, if you like, very ashamed about it, and I never told anyone at school, and I can remember we had to write down at the start of the year our parents' address for emergency contact numbers, and I wrote two addresses down. And the girl next to me said, Why are you doing that? And I realized for two years I had never told anyone at school. And yet, in fact, at the school, Camden School for Girls, there were a fair number of pupils who had separated parents at that time it was beginning to get much more common, I think.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was absolutely determined, having left school so early when she would have liked to go to university, she was absolutely determined that if my sister and I wanted to go to university we should. But it wasn't a pressure to make us go.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had an elder sister, she's two and a half years older than me. I still have a very close relationship with my mother. We lived with my grandparents, and so they were also very influential in the background I had, and there was a lot of music around in the family”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a terrible name to have. It's a terrible name to have because if people know who she was, then you're a subject of mockery. And if they don't know, they simply can't pronounce it.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there is a cousin, a distant cousin, who had that name. I don't know, and if I say this, I will probably get the story wrong and my mother will complain. But my understanding is that she and my father could not agree whether to call me Anne with an E or without, and so they gave up and called me Athene instead. There is no Greek connection.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, my first choice is barbershop quartet, a song cult blue skies. When I was in the States I was having a fairly rough time and I threw myself into singing barbershop and again I made a group of very close friends they were all PhD students, three PhD students in the department and we sang in a barbershop quartet and we had great fun and it was practically sewing on the sequins by hand. I really threw myself into it and it was lovely stuff to do”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, because I think at school, when I got heavily involved in music both in the choir and the orchestra, it gave me a group of friends of all ages who were nothing to do with that sort of social peer pressure at all, and so I could belong and be part of a community in a very different way.”
2009-03-22 · Desert Island Discs · Athene Donald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source