Robin Williams

Lift it up, and I can see through it.

And there within, at one corner, lies a small fly.

It is, of course, a piece of amber.

And I was given it by a girl, a refugee from Nazi oppression, who, in 1938, stayed in our house for a few weeks on her way to relatives in the United States.

She'd come from a town not far from Gdansk, on the Baltic Sea.

Gdansk is a city that's known all over Europe for its amber.

There's a street there lined with shops, some big, some no more than wayside stalls, that sell nothing but amber.

People living on this coast have collected and traded in amber since the Bronze Age 6,000 years ago.

They found it on the beaches, cast up by the waves.

Being lighter than sand and scarcely heavier than water, the pieces are deposited on the wet surface of the sand as if they are gifts from the sea.

David Attenborough describing his collection with heart.

More from him later in this science show, but Belle, what kinds of animal cells have you been pursuing in the cause of even better vaccines?

This is the Science Show on Radio National, where at the start I mentioned Professor Ian Chubb, former Chief Scientist and Vice-Chancellor.

And it was interesting at Anna Maria Arabia's farewell last week at the Academy of Science, she mentioned one of her life's lessons was that Ian Chubb is always right.

Well, he seems to have been right about helping lead the review of our science.

Fiona Wood, in fact, from Perth,

a former Australian of the Year, famous for spray on skin and fostering so much in the way of research.

It's quite incredible.

Now, when I was last in this building, we're sitting in the Academy of Science building in Canberra, you were celebrating the fact that via science and health research,

you have managed to come through some fairly severe medical problems.