Where did that start?

Okay, I'm gonna go right back.

When, when I was a child, I was brought up a relatively strict Catholic, and I used to sit in the church on Sunday and listen to the sermons and think, "That makes no sense to me whatsoever." I know it's some people's things, and certainly support anyone whatever they believe, but for me as a young child, I just thought, "This does not make any sense." And I started being very inquisitive about how the planet formed and how we formed and how everything else fitted together.

So science became a real interest to me at, at quite a young age.

And I then decided I wanted to do a science degree, and I went to do a PhD, and I did, I did all those things.

I then started my first job at age 25, and it was in a fertility clinic.

It was very new then, so this was, um, 1987, and the world's first IVF baby was born in 1978, so it wasn't even 10 years since IVF had started.

So, uh, I'm assuming they're very well educated, are they, on, uh, on what it's like to be a woman?

And then you've got people left, right and centre sort of, you know, with... sharing misinformation so when do we need that education?

I love that scroll hole I'm going to use that that's a great that's a great and just to say before I talk about when we should start education I try to if something's wrong on social media I try to put the facts right and then people loads of people start arguing with me and I've got this very common saying now that I say what do i know i've worked in women's health for 40 years i'm a professor at ucl what do i know don't you don't listen to me i i you know more than me it's fine so a bit sarcastic obviously i get it's a bit frustrating right schools we need to learn this in schools and we are really lucky in the uk we have this in the curriculum in our uk curriculum department for education has said We need to teach about menopause.

So we're very, very happy.

But just rewind a bit.

We actually need to also talk about puberty and periods and things like endometriosis and how to get pregnant, because at the moment we're not quite there.

So it's in there now in the last seven years now.

It's been in the curriculum and it's been updated recently to have more about difficult periods.

Finally, what for our listeners... are the two takeaways that you would give them right now from your latest book, Your Joyful Years? What are the two biggest takeaways from it?

Joyce.

Thank you.

I'm not against engineering a healthier human being, but I am against engineering a better human being.

So for me, this debate is about the word better.

Now, I've been working in the fields of IVF and preimplantation genetic testing for 40 years.

I have biopsied hundreds of embryos for numerous couples who were at risk of transmitting a particular disease to their children, and I helped them have a healthier child and a healthier family.

But we're debating today the word better, and I've got three points I want to make, and the first is that genetics is not that simple.

Joyce, four minutes, take us away.

Yeah.

So I went to join the Hammersmith Hospital team, and then later the UCL team, and did, started doing real lab research, and also started teaching.

So a few years after that, '90...

So that was 1992 that I started in the Hammersmith, and by 1996 I started my first master's course at UCL, and we're still running loads of courses.

It's really exciting and a real passion of mine.

So then really from '92, I was doing the job that I always wanted to, to do.

But things do change, and the specific thing that we were doing was something called pre-implantation genetic... testing, it's called now.

Yeah.

What made you look into this?

Well, comments from Kate are exactly why we're doing this work.

So myself and Shima Tarek, my co-worker, we've been researching around menopause and asking thousands of women around the UK what they feel and what they think about menopause and what they know.

And...

We're not surprised to know that they were very uneducated about it.

When were we ever taught about it? So we have been working for the last couple of years in trying to set up a co-designed evidence-based and very inclusive listening to every woman so that we can run an education and support programme that we hope will be free to everybody.

And as you said, not just women, also people with ovaries that may not identify as women will go through the menopause as well.

But where would it be? How would they access it?