Hannah Fry

Okay, let's take a break.

And then when we come back, I've got my little story for you.

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

It builds on TRACERX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs.

Lungvax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops.

Welcome back.

Michael, frankly, I'm astonished that it's taken me this long to tell you about one of the most extraordinary coincidences that has ever happened.

Okay, so in around 2017, 2018, I was working just as a mathematician at UCL.

When you do mathematical modelling,

One of the things that a lot of people spend time making mathematical models of is epidemics, is the spread of disease, right?

Because it's a dynamical system, it's something that changes over time, something that is, you can actually write the equations for it incredibly simply, you can teach them in an undergraduate course, and yet you can also make the models

incredibly sophisticated and complicated.

So much so that there are people whose entire careers have been in the study of the spread of epidemics.

The problem was at the time, the kind of cutting edge research in the UK, this is like 2007, 2018, right?

The cutting edge research in the UK

had to be based on data.

By the way, I should just add, just a quick reminder for everybody, this is two years before the actual pandemic.

I sort of think that the date of 2020 is probably seared into the minds of everybody, but we're talking before the actual pandemic.

The data that everybody was using at that point was essentially a paper survey that had been conducted some 20 years earlier that essentially said to a thousand people in the UK,

Hey, how many people do you reckon you were in contact with last week?