Molly Stevens: ‘Our society is tremendously unequal’

My first degree was in pharmacy. It was really appealing to me because it had so many different subjects in one. In a way, my preference would have been medicine, except I was put off by the idea of having to spend five years in a university. I thought that was too many years. It’s so ironic, because I’ve been in a university most of the time since.

After my degree, I worked in a lot of different areas in hospitals. And then I went travelling for an extended period, particularly in Southeast Asia. While I was travelling, I decided that I wanted to do a PhD, mainly as an intellectual challenge. I chose single molecule biophysics because it sounded really difficult. It was really fun – it was very fundamental. I learned an enormous amount.

At the end of my PhD, I had a strong motivation to work on something where I could see the outcome directly helping people. I went to a conference abroad that was a Millennium celebration that had many different topics in one conference. I walked past an open door and saw a very striking picture on the screen of this little boy that had a liver disease. I went in and Bob Langer was giving a talk. I thought it was so amazing that you can work on developing science from great scientific principles, and that it can be so applied towards helping people. The minute I saw his talk, I knew that I wanted to do a postdoc with him. And thankfully, he took me.