Janet Vaughan has led a very full life. In her early work as a doctor in the 1920s she helped establish the cure for anaemia, a common blood disease which used to prove fatal. Just before the Second World War she helped set up Britain's first National Blood Transfusion Service, and she treated the victims of the blitz. When the war ended Janet Vaughan went to Belsen, and saw the horrors of the concentration camp. After the war she became Britain's expert on the effects of radiation on humans, with her work on strontium and plutonium. As Principal of Somerville, the women's college in Oxford, Janet Vaughan was instrumental in raising the number of women and getting the women's college the same status as those of the men in Oxford. An eminent scientist and a brilliant academic, Dame Janet Vaughan is also a witty talker.