Question: Who are your influences in science?

Vicky Forster answered on 12 Nov 2013:

I have a couple of influences – both who are not very famous so you may not have heard of them. One is called Helen Sharman – she was the first British astronaut in space, and a chemist. She used to work as a chocolate-taster for Mars, but decided to apply to become an astronaut and succeeded! She now lectures at universities across the country. I just think she has had the most amazing career, and had the pleasure of meeting her when I was younger – she was very encouraging about my interest in science and medicine and really inspired me to pursue a career in science.

The second person is a lady called Janet D Rowley. She is an American cancer research scientist – and she part-invented a field of science called cytogenetics. This is where we look at the big bits of DNA in a cell called chromosomes. Sometimes in cancer (and even other diseases) there are problems with chromosomes – sometimes there are too few/many, sometimes bits of chromosomes are stuck together when they should be apart! Janet Rowley discovered that in two types of leukaemia, two chromosomes were broken and instead of being joined to the other half of the same chromosome, they joined to each other instead. This is absolutely not the way the DNA is supposed to be arranged, and causes leukaemia. Her discoveries led to the production of a special chemotherapy drug called imatinib, which particularly targets these wrongly joined together pieces of DNA in a type of leukaemia called CML. Before the invention of this drug, only one in twenty people survived CML for five years after being diagnosed. Now nineteen out of twenty people survive for five years, and even much longer than that – she has been so important in this discovery.