The centre of personalised medicine podcast is hosted by Jiyoon Lee, president of the Oxford personalized medicine society and Dr Anika Knuppel, JRF at CPM.
In the second podcast episode as part of our meet the advisory board series, we had the honour to talk to Dame Mary Archer, who started her career as a chemist with a focus on sustainable energy production and solar energy conversion, and taught and researched at Oxford and Cambridge. When Dame Mary Archer left academia, she held a number of appointments, among them chairing Cambridge University Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust and is currently chairing the Science Museum group. In 2012 she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire for her services to the NHS.
In our conversation with Dame Mary Archer we talked about her most notable career move and her views on the NHS and the future of the NHS. How having a grounding in science can be a perk in other industries, although “less usefully, it makes you obsess about details” making decision making hard at times. We discussed the role of science museums and why she now has considerable knowledge about railways. Furthermore, as a St Anne’s alumni, Dame Mary Archer could tell us about the changes in the university experience since leaving St Anne’s in 1966.
Finally, we spoke about personalised medicine and how the discovery of DNA has shaped our expectations of medical science and health. Dame Mary Archer’s career and personal health experience has given her a unique insight into the role of personalised medicine in patient decision making. She notes “Personalised medicine is here to stay, it is a force for good, increasingly powerful and should be a part of the clinicians and patients armoury in all appropriate cases to weigh that information and evidence and the balance what is the best way forward for that individual patient.”
Listen here for the full interview.