Robin Williams

That's very interesting, yes.

But do you accept that association with being a detective, trying to work out a big story from tiny clues?

It's very much detective work.

I mean, I said you're a bag of isotopes, and a lot of the work with isotopes is related to your isotopic composition.

So I could tell from your hair...

Not that you have that much left, but if you went to Finland and came back and you didn't cut your hair in the interim, I could take your hair and I could tell you you'd been to Finland.

And if you ate a lot of fish there, I could tell that.

And after you're dead, I could do the same things with your fingernails, your bones, with your teeth.

And this is actually used forensically in the modern day, but it's also used widely in archaeology.

And that's one of the things that we're getting into.

And finally, a story we did a couple of weeks ago about a chemist, actually an astronomical chemist, who was brought in in LA to work out why there was so much lead around after the fires.

You wouldn't have been surprised, would you?

No, because the way you would track that lead is, you guessed it, it would be the lead isotope composition.

And they would be relating that, I believe it was related to houses.

So it would be lead pipes or lead flashing or whatever that would have come from somewhere different.

And it would be distinct from the lead isotope composition in the soil or in the water.

And you'd be able to tell that.

Professor Michael Bird from James Cook University, how do you feel about being described as a big bag of elements, Belle?

Well, for reasons you know, nowadays it's kryptonite.

The Australian Academy of Science is led by its president, Professor Jagadish, who often on this programme has said in terms of support, our science is broken and to fix it we need a science champion.