Professor Monica Grady

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the space scientist Professor Monica Grady. Life on Mars and Stardust aren't two of her chosen disks, but rather the subjects she has devoted her working life to understanding. The geochemistry of primitive meteorites and the possibilities of life elsewhere in the cosmos have been her passion and preoccupation for thirty five years.

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When the robot probe Philipp made history landing on a comet last year, she was part of the European Space Agency team that made it happen.

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The Venerable Professor's reaction of ecstatic jumps, fist pumps, whoops, and even a few tears were all captured by the T V news cameras and went viral.

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No wonder she was chuffed. The spacecraft had taken ten years to make its journey and safely reach its destination.

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She grew up the eldest of eight children in Leeds, and her first research project was good preparation for the patience and precision her profession now demands. As a youngster, each night she'd note down the precise time the sun went down and the street lamps outside her bedroom window came on. She did it for a year.

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Awarded the CBE for services to space science back in 2012, she also has an asteroid named after her. She says.

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No way was I brilliant at school, and not many of us did science. I was near the top of the class, but worked hard for it. I was a studious little swat. So welcome, Professor Monica Grady. We are talking today, only two weeks after this Feli lander started speaking. It's woken up unexpectedly after seven months. It said, Hello, Earth, can you hear me? Which was such a charming thing to see. Had you given up hope? No, no, no, definitely never given up hope. When Feli landed in November, it had two batteries on board, a permanent battery and one which could be recharged by the sun. But unfortunately, it landed in the wrong place on the comet, basically somewhere in shadow. So we've had to wait for the comet to get closer to the sun. So the strengthening sunlight falling on Phili's solar panels has now charged up the battery. It needs 25 watts of power to actually do stuff and then communicate the results to Rosetta. And what is it you're hoping it communicates? Well, there's 12 instruments on board Philippe, but the one that I'm involved with is called Ptolemy. And so we're hoping it's going to communicate what compounds there are in the surface of the comet and in the gases coming off the comet. It's important because it's going to tell us what sort of compounds there are and how they relate to the compounds on Earth from which life is made. Fascinating. Now let's just talk about this footage. It's not very often that we see a former president of the International Meteoritical Society lose their cool on the telly and hug a reporter. What did you think when you saw yourself on TV? Oh, I was horrified. And poor old David Schuckman, who I hugged, I'm sure he flinches when he sees me in the same room as him now. When I got back, I was appalled at the fool I seem to have made myself, you know, punching the air and yelling it's landed. But in my defence, you know, we'd been waiting for a long time to do this. And since then, I have been absolutely knocked out by the response I get from people who say how pleased they were to see this unconscious and unself-conscious outpouring of joy. Well, it was completely unself-conscious. I don't think you made a fool of yourself at all. To me, watching it at home, what I thought it communicated was not just a moment of significant personal achievement for you and your big team there, but also this sense in which science is rock and roll. You know, it's really, very, it's really very, very exciting when you're at the sharp end. Yes, yes, it is. I mean, we've been waiting. You know, the probe was launched in 2004, so we've been waiting 10 years, but we've been waiting much, much longer than that, you know, building the instrument, getting the mission accepted. Basically, a 30-year programme. And suddenly, it's happened. It's landed. It's fantastic. You know, well, yeah, it's bringing tears to my eyes even just sort of revisiting it here in the studio. Let's then hear your first piece of music, Professor Monica Grady. What are we going to hear? Bat Out of Hell. This is my karaoke song, the two minutes of air guitar at the start. It has to be seen to be believed. You know, it does bring tears to the eyes, but not necessarily of pleasure.

Speaker 45:08

How do you solve a lot of black?

Speaker 45:10

How did you

Speaker 45:14

Happy gun when the morning comes.

Speaker 45:19

It's dark and sunny, the moon that's turning low When I hear the sin before The gates of heaven now come crawling home

Presenter5:35

That was Meatloaf and Bat Out of Hell and Professor Monica Grady. I should tell listeners that I was treated to a bit of your air guitar there and it was perfectly in time. Let's talk for a moment then about this thing called Ptolemy. It's got these instruments that are analysing, hopefully, the data that is collected from the comet. And is it right that it's sort of sniffing its way around this comet? Yeah, let me talk about the international scale of weights and measures, which is used to describe space instruments.

Professor Monica Grady5:58

Yeah.

Presenter6:06

I'm involved with an instrument called Ptolemy. The detector is the size of a cotton reel, which sits in something the size of a shoebox, which is on feli, which is the size of a washing machine, which is launched onto a comet the size of Heathrow Runway. So, you know, that's the sort of international scale we use, sort of a mixture of white goods. So, the Ptolemy, if you think about how you sniff, you know, you breathe in the air around you, and the detectors in your nose say, Oh, I've detected something, and the computer in your brain interprets it as lilac or curry or dirty nappies or whatever. So, that's what Ptolemy does. It takes in the gas and the fine particles through the detectors, which then interpret what molecules there are. So, what compounds there are in there. Is it carbon dioxide? Is it water? Is it something like benzene? Is it something like maybe an amino acid? And so, that's what it does. To directly quote Professor Brian Cox, he says, Science has got very big and very complicated. And as I'm listening to you, I am struck by your ability to communicate it in ways that are entirely understandable to ignorant people like me. Do you spend much time going out and talking to normal people, as it were, about science?

Presenter7:24

Hey, scientists are normal people as well. You know what I'm saying? I'm using normal people slash ignorance, is what I'm really saying. I do. I've been doing a lot more since Feli landed in November. I love talking to people about science because we need more scientists, more engineers. And if I can talk to people about that, it's great.

Professor Monica Grady7:26

You know what I'm saying? I'm using normal slash ignorance is what I'm

Speaker 47:30

And the same.

Presenter7:45

More on that, I'm sure, to come. For now, Professor Monica Grady, let's hear about your second disc this morning. This is from The Pirates of Penzanz by Gilbert and Sullivan, and it's When the Foeman Bears His Steel, which is a duet eventually sung by two groups, the policemen and the the women.

Presenter8:06

What I love about it is it brings home my family to me so much. My father, who died 15 years ago, he used to sing a lot, especially on car journeys, and we'd all join in. I love the harmony, and I love the fact that it brings my father back to me so easily, so quickly, with hearing him singing the tarantaras and us all joining in.

Speaker 48:30

We will say farewell forever. God to glory.

Speaker 48:38

Oh, supporting us.

Professor Monica Grady8:48

Read the mess.

Professor Monica Grady8:54

We observe too great a stress On the risks that on us press, And a preference a lack To our chance of coming back. Still, perhaps it would be wise Not to carpooticise, For it's very evident these attentions are well

Professor Monica Grady9:10

Yes, it's very dead.

Professor Monica Grady9:15

Yes we let or yes moment

Speaker 49:32

That was it.

Presenter9:38

Part of When the Foaman Bears His Steel by Gilbert and Sullivan from the Pirates of Penzance, sung there by the Doilycart Opera Chorus and accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Isidore Godfrey. And you said you sang that in the car. Now, given that these were family trips and you were the eldest of eight, I'm wondering what the heck the family car was. Ah, well, the family car, we had a remarkably disgustingly beige-coloured transit van, apart from the driver's door, which is pale blue. Those were the days, eh? Those were the days. I mean, seat belts. Well, dad had a seatbelt. My father was a teacher, and the kids at the school he taught used to call this the Jake Mobile. He was known as old Jake. You describe yourself on social media as short, round, bespectacled, busy, and bossy.

Professor Monica Grady10:05

Yeah.

Professor Monica Grady10:07

Days, I mean

Professor Monica Grady10:16

He was known.

Presenter10:23

Now you are a very, very eminent scientist, and I don't think there are many who would have such a public sense of humour about themselves as that. I think that it comes from my my family. Being the eldest of eight children, I mean, you don't get to have much ego at all, to the extent that one of my nicknames from my sisters was Moto, which stood for Matron of the Orphanage, which they reckoned I was going to be when I grew up.

Presenter10:52

So this would have been sort of through the nineteen sixties. You'd been born in nineteen uh fifty eight, as you say. Your father was a teacher. Your mother had originally also uh been a teacher, but she had eight kids in ten years. So I'm guessing she gave up teaching, did she? Uh yes. She stopped working and she started bringing up eight children.

Professor Monica Grady11:03

Think she gave

Presenter11:10

or from the age of when I was about eight or so, I guess. Mum went to work in a nursery school. But, you know, tea was always on the table. Everything was ironed. It was a calm

Professor Monica Grady11:17

People live.

Presenter11:21

Loving family home. And church was a big part of family life, was it? Church was a big part of family life, is a big part of my life still. I'm a Catholic. One of the few trips we went on as families was on Sundays to Mass. Dad would take us all in the old Jake Mobile. Yeah, I mean, church, very, very important to me, a strong thread that runs through my life. Let's have some more music, Professor Monica Gready. Tell me about your third piece this morning. Well, this is a variation on St Anthony's Chorale, and the variation is by Brahms. And this brings back my school days. I can see Miss Lawton, our deputy headmistress and my maths teacher, I can see her sawing away at the double bass in the school orchestra as this hymn was played.

Presenter13:11

The Royal Concert Gabbau Orchestra conducted there by Bernard Heitink and playing part of Brown St. Anthony's Chorale. So both of your parents were teachers. Your mother had given up teaching to raise her big brood and eight children.

Professor Monica Grady13:22

Later.

Presenter13:23

I'm wondering if high achievement from their children, especially the eldest, was sort of non-negotiable. Did they expect you to perform well in exams and at school? No, they expected us to do our best. But teachers tend to band together anyway. And of course, the Catholic teaching community in Leeds in the 1960s and 1970s was quite small. And so dad knew all my teachers. And it's just our Jim Grady's daughter, right? And if I had misbehaved, if any of us had misbehaved, my parents always took the side of the teacher.

Presenter13:58

So it was a sort of non-negotiable. And space and space travel and our understanding of space in the mid and late 60s, you know, it was sexy stuff. It was brave new frontiers. Do you remember watching any of that? Well, I remember certainly watching Neil Armstrong on the moon. Now, my memory of this, which is possibly faulty, I don't know, is I remember watching it in the afternoon and it was in July and it must have been really bright sunshine because we'd closed all the curtains to watch it on the television. I don't know whether it was relaying it later on on the news, but I remember us sitting there in the semi-dark watching it and being absolutely fantastic. And I had no realisation then.

Presenter14:47

Clue what it meant. I was eleven. You yourself, as a space scientist, have worked with samples of moon rock.

Professor Monica Grady14:49

You can speak.

Presenter14:55

I have, yeah. What a curse to you as you hold it in your human hands.

Professor Monica Grady14:55

Yeah.

Presenter14:59

Well, these rocks are so beautiful and it was looking at moon rocks that actually got me into the meteorite and asteroid side of stuff. Why are they so beautiful? Well, geologists look at rocks, they cut a very thin slice through them, polish it, so when you look at them under the microscope you can shine light through them. Now, rocks from the Earth are all cracked and broken and they've had rain and they get a bit rusty and stuff like that. It's still very beautiful colours that you see of the minerals in them.

Presenter15:28

The rocks from the moon, the Apollo rocks, were are beautiful because they haven't been rained on. Some of them are a bit shocked, but they've got beautiful crystal faces and deep, very clear colours. Absolutely superb. When I hold a meteorite, though, in my hands, you hold it and you think, if I break this open, I'm looking at something which is 4,567 million years old.

Presenter15:57

Nobody else has ever seen this. This beautiful capsule, which is telling me about the history of the solar system. You know, it's just, it's just amazing. Oh, I wish you'd been my science teacher. Time for some more music then. We're going to hear your fourth. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen this? This is Bridge Over Trouble Water by Simon and Garfunkel. And this was the first LP I bought. We didn't have a record player, so there was no point buying any records. Then we were given some 78s, so we then got a music center. And then I'd saved up my pocket money. And I used to listen to the radio all the time, Radio Luxembourg, all that sort of stuff. And I heard this. And this is my favourite track, Bridge Over Trouble Water.

Speaker 416:41

It is all around I comprise over troubled war.

Speaker 416:55

I will lay thee down like a bridge over troubled water.

Speaker 417:07

And lay me down.

Presenter17:17

That was Simon Garfunkel and Bridge over Troubled Watty. You were about to finish your degree, Monica Grady, and a job caught your attention.

Professor Monica Grady17:20

Uh

Presenter17:25

It happened to be working for the man that we would all come to know as Professor Colin Pillinger, um, who became a very famous British scientist, indeed, the late Colin Pillinger. What was it uh that appealed to you at the time about that job?

Presenter17:39

Do you want the truth? Yes. I'm only interested in the truth.

Speaker 417:41

I only w I'm

Presenter17:44

Alright, okay. I loved being at Durham where I did my BSc. And it was chemistry and geology. Chemistry and geology. And it wasn't until I got my degree that I realised that actually I could possibly do a PhD. And I went to the careers office and I saw this advert and it said wanted physicist or chemist or geologist or astronomer or mathematician to come to work with Dr. Colin Pillinger at the University of Cambridge to study lunar samples and meteorites. Now I'd already seen lunar samples and realised how beautiful they were. But what really attracted me to this was the job was in Cambridge because the guy who was my boyfriend at the time had got a job in Cambridge.

Presenter18:25

Which is a bit ignoble, especially as on the first day when I was in Cambridge, I saw a fellow student and I thought, wow, he's really nice. Oh, so this is why you didn't want to tell me the truth, I guess it. And not long after that, I ditched my boyfriend and then we got together and then eventually, you know, Reader, I married him. 1981 was, I think you would have been about 23 and I think it was when you would have given your first talk at a conference. Did you I mean you are a communicator by nature, you have a gregarious personality. Did you from that moment realise that, well, I'm a I'm a duck to water with this stuff?

Presenter19:06

No, the very first talk I gave at a conference was in Bern in Switzerland at a at a conference, and I was absolutely petrified. Absolutely terrified. Well, you know, I was a PhD student, I was talking to an audience of really senior scientists.

Presenter19:25

And you're telling the details of your science and your latest research, and you've got ten minutes to do it, and then they ask questions of you for five minutes. It's absolutely nerve wracking. Fortunately,

Presenter19:39

They

Presenter19:40

Chair of the session, you know, he could see I was a trembling student. And, you know, now I guess I'm a senior scientist. I can tell. And you ameliorate your comments and you help the student. And that's what you have to do. You have a responsibility as a senior scientist to help more junior scientists, to make them comfortable and to reassure them that they are important scientists and what they are doing is every bit as important and probably

Presenter20:12

More important than what senior scientists are doing, because by the time you're a senior scientist, you're on committees and you're writing grant proposals and all that sort of stuff. You're often not at the Coalface anymore. Let's have some more music, Professor Monica Grady. It's time for your fist.

Presenter20:27

My fifth is Vienna by Ultravox. I've already referred a bit to Ian, my husband. We started we got together in nineteen eighty one, and this is our song.

Speaker 220:45

The warmth of your hand and the cool grey sky Fades to the distance

Speaker 420:59

And life means nothing to me.

Speaker 421:06

This means nothing to me.

Presenter21:21

That was Ultravox and Vienna and dedicated Monica Grady to your husband, who is also a space scientist. You gave a very intriguing snapshot there of this significant time when you took your first faltering steps out into the limelight of presenting your findings and the work you were doing to senior scientists and the support that you were given by the people around you. You will be more than well aware, of course, of the Nobel laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society, Sir Tim Hunt, being mired in this recent controversy.

Professor Monica Grady21:35

Into

Presenter21:52

Over his public comments relating to, to use his phrase, the trouble with girls in science. What problems have you had through the decades as a woman in science and engineering, in those environments that are so often male-dominated? None.

Professor Monica Grady21:57

Mm-hmm.

Presenter22:10

I have been very, very fortunate. I did a degree at university and I was encouraged by my tutors there. I did a PhD at Cambridge with Colin Pillinger, who probably never even considered gender, never even thought about it. So what's the problem here? Because of course, as we know, you know, young women in in schools engage in science, they're fascinated by it, they they do the subjects and then they drop out gradually as the stakes get higher. Is the problem their perception or is the problem that they are meeting prejudice?

Presenter22:49

I think part of the problem is perception. Now in the national curriculum, school students are expected to do some science, but it's often not promoted in the way it should be. Teachers are getting better, but I can't stress enough the importance of school teachers and the influence they have. And okay, science and engineering isn't for everybody, but I think there is sometimes a perception that, oh, if you go into science, all you're going to do is science, without thinking of all the other applications that a science education gives you, where you use it in absolutely everything. And what about combining, because this can so often be the problem, the very long hours and the dedication it takes with also being a mother, which you have done. Yes. How did you overcome it? Oh, right. Well, I overcame it because I'd got a very, very supportive husband who knew my career was important to me in the way his career is important to him. At the time, I was working

Presenter23:56

At the Open University, but then I shifted jobs to go and work at the Natural History Museum. I had a long commute every day.

Presenter24:02

We limited our family to one child. It was a decision we took.

Presenter24:07

You know, was it the right decision or the wrong decision? I don't know. But childcare is much better now than it was then. Employers are much more open-minded and much more flexible, but the woman has to do the childbearing and the labour and the feeding afterwards.

Presenter24:28

You have to take a career break, even if it's only a month, you know. And it's supporting women coming back after that break that that's really, really vital. Time for some more music, Professor Monica Grady. Tell me about this. Your sixth.

Presenter24:44

This is a piece of music which I hope will be familiar to a lot of people, or at least the opening bits of it will be. They might not have heard the rest of it. And the reason I want to take this to a desert island is because I do want to remember my workplace. It's um well, let's just play it and see if people recognize it.

Presenter26:07

That was Leonard Salzedo's Divertimento, also known more commonly to lots of people I would expect as the fanfare for the Open University. It was played there by Philip Jones Brasse Ensemble. Let's talk for a moment, Monica Grady, about science funding. The Rosetta project, all in, cost what, about a billion Euros dollars? Euros. Euros. Here we are, at a time when all over Britain, indeed all over Europe and beyond, people are having to tighten their belts. The question might reasonably be asked why on earth would we choose to spend a billion on something that's out there and means very little to us down here?

Speaker 426:27

Yours, yours.

Presenter26:44

If we took a billion Euros and put it in a sack and set fire to it, yeah, that would be outrageous. But we didn't. We took a billion Euros and we used it to employ people, to build the rocket. We used it to buy the components for the rocket. Those components have to be ma manufactured somewhere.

Presenter27:05

People have to actually build the instruments, design them. And then there's the other aspect of it, which we've touched on a bit.

Presenter27:14

So many people have been following the Rosetta mission and Phili. They've been inspired to actually find out a bit more. Teachers are getting resources from the European Space Agency to teach their children who are going to come on to become scientists and engineers in the future. What about the implications of the research that's being done? Will there be opportunities for that research to be applied to our everyday lives? Absolutely. So you've got your third prong then. You know, you get your spin-offs. Teflon was the famous spin-off from the Apollo programme. But our shoebox-sized instrument, Ptolemy, once you've taken something enormous, the size of this radio studio, which was our laboratory prototype, shrunk it down to a shoebox, you can do other things with it. You can take it out into the field to test for TB. You can put it on a submarine to check on air quality. You can look for bed bugs in hotels. You can check for air quality on transatlantic air flights. Are all these things being done with this? These are things that we're doing with it, yeah. And there are all sorts of side benefits that you can't plan for. What is the likelihood, do you think, of ever finding life on another planet? And I guess here by life I'm talking about evidence of, you know, of maybe long-dead organisms rather than little green men with fishbowls on their heads.

Presenter28:38

My hope is that we'll see herds of dinosaurs roaming across the plains of Mars, because once we've done that, our funding is sorted forever. Okay. But sadly, sadly, that's not very likely to happen.

Speaker 428:50

Let's talk probabilities here, shall we?

Professor Monica Grady28:54

Yeah.

Presenter28:56

The idea that there is life elsewhere in the solar system is really one of the aspects of studying this comet because these comets have delivered carbon and water to all the planets in the solar system. So all the building blocks of life are there. The opportunity has been there for life to get going on Mars, on Mercury, on Venus, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now some places it's more likely than others that life could get going. I don't think we'll ever find extraterrestrial intelligence. But life, oh, I think there's a really, really good chance of finding some type of simple life form.

Presenter29:34

Let's have some more music, Monica. We are on your seventh piece of the day. Tell me about this disc.

Presenter29:40

This is The Armed Man, A Mask for Peace by Carl Jenkins. And.

Presenter29:48

The music that I like is is all harmonious and this is again a a a beautiful choral piece which which I love.

Speaker 430:37

I will stay on stay by your stay stay on your street.

Presenter31:07

The Agnes Day from Carl Jenkins, The Armed Man, sung there by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Paul Benniston on trumpet. You spent 14 years at the Natural History Museum, Professor Monica Grady. What was the most interesting work that you did whilst you were there? What really stands out was just being able to go into the meteorite collection, open the cupboard doors and just look at the meteorites and being like a kid in a sweet shop and being able to choose the material that I wanted to research, which is absolutely fantastic. Didn't have to write begging letters to a curator like I do now. It was really great. I had a fantastic time there, but 14 years of commuting from Milton Keynes was just too much. And I went back to the OU in 2005. And you were a research leader and professor of planetary and space sciences and you... I don't know if you still do, but you shared an office by that time with your husband, Ian. How is that? Have you always worked lots of harmony in the choices today? But I'm wondering if it's been harmonious in the office together. Yes, yes, we've always been harmonious in the office. He's a designer and a builder, takes a scientific problem and looks at it, and how am I going to tackle that?

Professor Monica Grady32:06

Sister David, I want

Presenter32:18

He designed the Ptolemy instrument. And I'm a user. I'm a like, okay, hey, yeah, this is great instrument, you know, let's use it to do this. He's incredibly creative and I love working with him. We have great discussions over the dinner table, which is why I suspect our son did a degree in art.

Presenter32:38

Let's talk a bit about the matter of creation then, because it's been very interesting t to hear you occasionally this morning talk about religion and the fact that you are still a practising Catholic. When you look at these incredible slivers of rock, or when you look through a telescope out at the night sky,

Presenter32:58

I'm imagining that reinforces your sense of where religion is, does it? I don't know whether it does, actually. My faith is it just permeates everything. It's just there. And so I can't separate science from it. But I'm not a creationist. I can't ever, ever be, you know, and I'm very happy with evolution and Darwinian evolution and all that sort of stuff. I think one of the most powerful documents that I've read recently was the encyclical that Pope Francis put out in mid-June about the Earth, our common home, warning of the dangers of climate change. And to me, that's where my faith comes in. We can't care for our Earth, our solar system, our universe, if we don't care for the people on it and go for social justice and all those sorts of things. It's difficult for me to articulate, but to me, it's so important. It's all bound up together. Let's talk then before we finish today about this little thing, Phili, which has taken up so much of your life. There's his sitting on this comet, sniffing away, hopefully finding out things that will be significant to all mankind. Ten years in the planning to get it literally off the ground.

Professor Monica Grady34:07

So much.

Professor Monica Grady34:14

Constall.

Presenter34:21

You must be very patient.

Presenter34:23

Oh, I don't know about being patient. I always find things to occupy me.

Presenter34:29

I would not have a problem being on a desert island. I'd start writing a book called A Thousand and One Things to See and Do on a Desert Island.

Professor Monica Grady34:31

Yes, I see that's what I'm doing.

Professor Monica Grady34:37

Yes, it's

Presenter34:37

Uh

Presenter34:39

I wouldn't have any problem with weaving myself a a distractingly sexy ras skirt. I could boil water out of coconuts. Let's then go to your final disc, Professor Monica Grady. What are we going to hear to see us out today?

Presenter34:56

We're going to hear the second movement from Smetena's Marvlast, which means my homeland. I love listening to this particular movement because it's about a river and you can hear the young river and then it becomes a middle-aged river, then an older river, and it sweeps into grandeur. I just love hearing the youth turning into middle age.

Presenter36:23

Smetna's Mav Last, played there by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by James Levine. So, Professor Monica Grady, I'm going to give you the complete works of Shakspere and the Bible, and you get to take another book too.

Professor Monica Grady36:33

Yeah.

Presenter36:35

I'm going to take a book I've never read. I've borrowed it from the library loads of times and always taken it back after I've read the first three pages. It's Ulysses by James Joyce. And I reckon, you know, on a desert island, I might be able to make sense of it. If I can't, I'll just tear it up and use it for sanitary purposes. All right. That then is your additional book and a luxury too. My luxury is my flute. I'm learning to play the flute. My husband gave me the flute on my 50th birthday and I love it. Right, it's yours. And which one of these eight discs of the morning would you save? It would be the last one, Mavlas. Right, it's yours. Professor Monica Grady, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. It's been a huge pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Presenter37:58

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