Briefing Chat: How Dolly Parton left her mark on science

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:04)
Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Friday edition of The Nature Podcast. It's The Briefing Show, where we talk about a couple of stories from The Nature Briefing. Joining me this week is Lizzie Gibney. Lizzie, how are you doing today?

**Lizzie Gibney** (0:16)
Hello, Ben. I am good, thank you.

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:18)
Well, first story this week, I mean, it's a sad story on the face of it, of course. The world lost an icon this week with the death of Dolly Parton, who I think it's fair to say, universally loved across the board, and perhaps not the most obvious choice to talk about on the Nature Podcast. But Lizzie, you've been diving in to the scientific aspect to her life, I suppose.

**Lizzie Gibney** (0:42)
Yes. So when this news came through, I don't know what it was like for you, but all of my WhatsApp chats lit up, like everybody seems to have loved Dolly Parton from all walks of life and in all ways.
And then I found myself in this quite unique situation of writing a story about her and her connections with science, which are maybe not obvious, you know, a country and western singer from Tennessee who is known for all kinds of things, for her incredible warmth and personality and kind of welcoming of everybody on this planet. But she really had an impact on science, as sad as it was to see her past. Like it was a wonderful thing to be able to celebrate the impact that she has had.

**Benjamin Thompson** (1:23)
Well, let's go through a few of these things then. I think we have to start with the COVID vaccines. And she was a face of the vaccination drive, but also she was behind the scenes as well.

**Lizzie Gibney** (1:37)
That's right. So it stems actually from she had a friendship with a clinician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Tennessee. She was from Tennessee. And in talking to this researcher, you know, she asked right at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, like, is there anything that I can do?
And he said, well, we could do with some money. And so she gave $1 million in March 2020 to the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre and they use it create this COVID-19 research fund, the Dolly Parton Research Fund. And at the time, they were working with a whole group of different researchers including Moderna, the biotech firm, to develop one of the first mRNA vaccines for COVID. And so actually researchers at Vanderbilt said that this money was really critical for that early stage of research in getting this off the ground back in the early days of the pandemic. And we did a little bit of digging into the actual research papers that stemmed from that and found 37 different papers that cite this fund as supporting their work.
So 37 different papers were in part produced through this money, and certainly it helped to spur the actual creation of the vaccine.

**Benjamin Thompson** (2:55)
And she took a shot of one of these vaccines live on air, right?

**Lizzie Gibney** (3:00)
Yeah, she kind of filmed herself and then uploaded it onto a few sites. And I mean, what a wonderful thing to do. Because I think she crossed the divide so much, and she was seen as like of the people, she was really a great person to be out there as an advocate.
And her like candour and this kind of like joy that she brings to everything she brought to that as well. So she had a little cutout bit in the top that she was wearing so that the needle could just go straight in without having to roll her sleeve up. It was a genius kind of fashion choice. She talked through why it was such a good idea. She reworked her famous track Jolene to be a vaccine. So bringing down people's levels of worry, I suppose, because there were people concerned about this is quite, you know, an experimental vaccine back then. It's very hard to say if she affected, you know, how much people actually ended up taking the vaccine. But you could imagine that somebody like that is going to put people's minds at ease about it.

**Benjamin Thompson** (3:51)
Yes, and it's worth going back to watch the video of that occasion, because it is absolutely spectacular. Wonderful. But it's not just vaccines and vaccination. I mean, she did a lot of philanthropic work for science as well.

**Lizzie Gibney** (4:03)
Yeah, she played a big role in public health. A comment that a lot of people made was that she chose not to be super rich. She gave, I don't even have a figure on it, she gave an awful lot of her money away. She came from very humble origins, and obviously became this superstar and earned huge amounts of money. But all the way through her career, she gave pots of million here and there to lots and lots of different causes, to paediatric infectious disease, to paediatric cancer care, to women's centers. There are different hospital departments that are named after her. She also contributed a track to a charity album that was raising money to fight HIV AIDS.