Carol Robinson: Society doyenne (original) (raw)

Walk into Carol Robinson's office in the chemistry department at Cambridge and the first thing that strikes you is its size. While most academics have to fight for every square centimetre, Robinson's wouldn't disappoint the CEO of a plc. Her computer screen looks lost on the vast expanse of desk, and there's still space for a large circular table in the other half of the room.

The second thing you notice is the half a dozen or so empty champagne bottles neatly lined up on the bottom row of a book shelf.

Everything suggests this is the office of someone whose career is definitely on the up. For once, first impressions are spot on, for earlier this month Robinson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. She is delighted by the award, but slightly bemused by the attention. "You haven't come here to ask me about why Susan Greenfield wasn't elected, have you?" she asks, more than a little suspiciously, on my arrival.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Robinson that she might be interesting in her own right. This reserve almost cost her the fellowship. When she was first approached to submit her CV to the Royal Society, she dragged her heels somewhat. "I took some persuading," she concedes, "because it seemed like a large amount of work and I really didn't think I stood a chance."

She makes it sound like no big deal, but that is not the way others see it. She has had countless notes from other academics and the Cambridge vice-chancellor has also sent her own personal congratulations; there has even been a card - almost certainly sent with gritted teeth - from the Oxford department that let her slip through its grasp a few years back through its reluctance to offer her a permanent post.

In fact, the only other people who appear underwhelmed by Robinson's success are her three teenage children. "None of them has the slightest interest in chemistry," she says. "They don't think it has any relevance to their lives. They've been a little impressed by seeing my name in the papers, but that's as far as it goes. Still, I'm going to make them come along for the ceremony in London; I hope they'll get a sense of history when I sign my name in the same book as Isaac Newton."

But you can forgive her children for being slightly blasé, as the prizes for their mother are coming thick and fast at the moment. Only a few weeks before receiving the fellowship, Robinson picked up the Royal Society's Rosalind Franklin award, set up in 2003 at the suggestion of Patricia Hewitt, the secretary of state for trade and industry, to address the under-representation of women in science, engineering and technology.

Robinson is planning to use the £30,000 prize to bring leading women academics to give seminars at Cambridge and to establish a mentoring scheme for female undergraduates. "There is a genuine problem in attracting women into the sciences," she says. "We're working hard to get more women on selection panels here, but there's still a long way to go to achieve equality."

She is happy to put her money - or rather her research grants - where her mouth is, and makes a point of employing female postdoctoral researchers with children. "They're very good value for money," she points out. "Because they have to manage their time so carefully, they are extremely focused in their work.

"I know that gender shouldn't really be an issue," she continues. "But it is, and that's that. As the only woman professor in the department, I do rather stand out and I've sometimes felt that I'm being watched rather more carefully than some of the men, who can remain more anonymous. It can be stressful."

Even if Robinson hadn't been a woman, you still get the feeling she would have stood out in the department - for the quality of her research, if nothing else. Robinson is a world leader in mass spectrometry, a technique traditionally used for measuring the mass of individual molecules. Her current research is principally centred on the structural biology of ribosomes.

"There are parts of the ribosome that are still not well defined," she says. "Ribosomes are held together by weakly attractive forces and tend to fall apart in the mass spectrometer. We've developed a way of keeping them together so we can study their structures; ribosomes are an important antibiotic target, so the better we understand them the better the drugs that can be developed."

Her research also extends to the study of viruses, though she is quick to make clear that she is not working on anything too exciting. "With a live virus, you run the risk of contagion," she says, "so we're working on a very dull, dead virus to establish a model system.

"We did once work on an extremely toxic prion protein, and we had to devise some stringent safety precautions. Even so, it was work that no one really wanted to do, so I thought: Why put the students through it? Life's short enough as it is."

Robinson is a past master at cramming a great deal in to a short time. While most top scientists' careers have the appearance of inevitability, Robinson's CV is full of holes. She left school at 16 after taking her O-levels - "for personal reasons" on which she declines to elaborate - and went straight to work as a lab technician for Pfizer.

"I'd always been interested in chemistry and was often told off by my teacher for going into more detail than was necessary," she says. "So I made a point of seeking out a job at Pfizer." It was a hard schlep. She was living in Folkestone and the job was based in Sandwich, so there was a long bus ride at the end of each day. But there was an immediate pay-off, as Pfizer was one of the first companies to put the then comparatively new technology of mass spectrometry to commercial use, so she was able to get in on the ground floor.

Robinson drew up specifications for her own procedures. One day a senior technician caught sight of her workings and told her she would soon be bored stiff if she didn't get more qualifications. So for the next seven years she ground out her evenings and days off from Pfizer at first Canterbury College and then Medway and Maidstone College, taking a national certificate, a higher national certificate and, finally, a degree in chemistry. "I never really had a plan. I just wanted to learn more about the subject. So once I had finished one course, it just seemed natural to move on to the next."

She abandoned Pfizer after graduation to take up a year's MSc at Swansea, only to rush straight on to Cambridge, where she squeezed a three-year PhD into two years, as her funding was due to run out. It was here that she married and soon followed her husband to the west country, where she took up a training fellowship at Bristol to study cloning. Three children followed in quick succession and Robinson took eight years out: "It just felt like the right thing to do."

Many academics take a dim view of career breaks and in normal circumstances that would have been that. "I was in the library reading the New Scientist while the kids were listening to stories," she says, "and I saw an advert for someone to work in the mass spectrometry unit at Oxford. I was extremely lucky that someone I used to know was on the selection panel and said: 'Carol used to be good at that sort of thing'. So he gave me a chance."

She started off as a junior researcher, but was soon back on track working on her own projects. Her talent emerged to a wider stage when she produced spectra of a folding protein. "It was extremely challenging," she says, "and I can still remember the day the experiment worked. I was so excited that I kept leaving the students I was teaching to watch the results emerge."

Her position is now unchallenged and she commands a great deal of research funding. But it has been a hard slog. "The most difficult thing about the eight-year break was getting up to speed with the changes in IT," she says. "I took a course but it didn't really prepare me."

Even now, Robinson is as happy working things out on sheets of paper as she is computing them on screen; her table is covered in sheet after sheet of graphs and diagrams. So what would all this say to someone who knew about science, I ask. She thinks for a while. "That I'm a very messy worker."

The CV

Name Carol Vivien Robinson

Age 48

Job professor of biological chemistry, Cambridge University

Before that research technician, Pfizer; MRC training fellow ship, Bristol; postdoctoral research assistant, Oxford: professor of chemistry, Oxford

Awards fellow of Royal Society, 2004; Royal Society Rosalind Franklin award, 2004

Publications 120 and counting

TV & radio pending

Likes sport and gardening

Dislikes traffic, intolerance and predictable endings

Married with three children