Susan Greenfield is not a fellow of the Royal Society. She has very little to say about that. On the other hand she is a force in British science, and she knows it. She is a professor of pharmacology at Oxford, which even in the bitchy world of British academics counts for something.
She is also a baroness and a member of the House of Lords, one of the "people's peers" appointed by Tony Blair to put oomph into the upper chamber. She has launched three academic start-up companies, named Synaptica, BrainBoost and Neurodiagnostics, all of which are concerned with aspects of Alzheimer's disease.
To cap all that, she is director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, whose base is in Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, London. This is the laboratory founded by Count Rumford, the man who 200 years ago gave the world the coffee pot, the kitchen range and a proper theory of heat. Its first lecturer, Humphry Davy, started discovering elements seemingly at the rate of one a week. Thomas Young, another lecturer, overturned Newton's theory of light, developed a modulus of elasticity that engineers still use today, and started deciphering the Rosetta Stone. And a third, Michael Faraday, launched the modern world by demonstrating the power of electricity.
Like electricity, Lady Greenfield can be shocking, but also illuminating. She is a star turn on the lecture circuit, delivering rapid-fire commentary on the neurochemistry of the human brain, taking people through the mysteries of memory, cognition and perception while flashing up famous people and paintings and lurid images from favourite childhood comics such as the Beezer.
She steps up to the podium, petite and persuasive. She is funny and irreverent - quite often about about male scientists and the challenges that women face in science - and provoking. She also sends herself up, citing a poll which once described her as the 14th most influential woman in the world and then adding, after a perfectly judged pause: "Dolly Parton came ninth." She has a lot to say about science, and says it volubly, in books, on the radio, on television, at the literary festivals, at lectures.
What she cannot say, however, is that she is about to become a fellow of the Royal Society. Her name is not on the list of candidates to be put forward for election by those who are already members of the club of Britain's most powerful brains. The Royal Society is not everyone's ambition. "Nine men out of 10 would flee from a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom," wrote Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim in 1901, and he would be unlikely to say otherwise today.
But election to fellowship has almost mystical status for scientists: it is an endorsement of their science. Conversely, non-election might be taken as a comment on the quality of that science. Only 32 fellows are elected each year, and hundreds of other deserving candidates do not make it to the list. But it says something about the effect that Lady Greenfield has upon people that the information about her non-appearance was promptly leaked: it made headlines.
The normally forthright baroness yesterday would only say that she knew she had been nominated but understood the process to be confidential. "I don't understand how or why my nomination has been made public. I think it is a great pity that those who do not have the courage to identify themselves can make unsubstantiated criticisms both of my science and of my activities in public communication," she said in a statement.
She points out that as well as being a professor, "people's peer", entrepreneur, and director of one of science's great historic showcases, she is also a working scientist, with six papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the past year and three in the press awaiting publication.
But high-quality science is not the only reason for election. Fellowship is open to those who have raised public understanding or appreciation of science, or rendered conspicuous service in the cause of science, for instance by appearing in the media to talk about it or undertaking the reinvention of the once great but somewhat decaying Royal Institution. Lady Greenfield is concerned with both.
"What I would like to think is that I am opening it to sectors of society that previously thought it wasn't for them. That's what I am really trying to do. I am trying - as the government wants very much, everyone does - to bring mainstream science to people so that we have a scientifically literate society," she says. "My dream for the Royal Institution is that people should go to it like they go to a cinema or concert or play. I want people to leave there after an event excited, frightened, worried, inspired, involved, and above all disagreeing with each other, like you would after a good play. Because once we have science talked about -and people thinking about it and in a sense owning it - then we have a chance."
She does this by being herself. Being Susan Greenfield has involved dressing in designer clothes, appearing in Vogue and Hello, and occasionally being photographed in demure miniskirts. It has involved talking to the press when her marriage, to the Oxford chemist and professor Peter Atkins, ended last year. She is, of course, popular with the media. She knows what happens when scientists start popping up in newspapers as if they were celebrities, and she doesn't mind too much.
"I think in life you just have to be yourself and the most important person you have to square up to every morning is yourself. For me the most important thing is personal integrity," she says. "I wear what I wear. It is predicated on a curious assumption about scientists. If I was an advertising executive, would that be an issue?"
She is festooned with honorary degrees, she has served on the Royal Society's council for the public understanding of science, she has been awarded the Royal Society's Faraday medal. Last year the French gave her the Legion d'honneur ("They just said lots of very nice things, I think it was for my general contribution to science ... as you might imagine I am very proud and delighted.")
She is also an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. And this year, she says proudly, she is president of the Classical Association. "They alternate," she says. " They have a professional classicist and then every other year they have someone with some kind of claim to classics." She began her university studies in classics.
She was born 53 years ago into a Jewish family, in London. Her father was an electrician, her mother a dancer. She started at Oxford with entrance exams in classics, and Greek studies got her interested in philosophy. "At Oxford you have to do philosophy with something. So I did psychology: obviously I couldn't do physiology, I didn't know what it was," she says. "Then I changed to straight psychology and that is how I got to work on the brain and so on."
Her research career of late has run parallel with another as writer and publicist for science. She started appearing on television, in glossy magazines and on public platforms. In 2000 she wrote The Private Life of the Brain, and last year Tomorrow's People, a provocative book about how technology could alter the human mind-set.
People whose careers have promoted science - people like David Attenborough and John Maddox, the former editor of Nature and former science editor of the Guardian - have been proposed and elected to the Royal Society. This year, for the first time, someone put up her name, not particularly for her science but as a "general candidate". The proposal cited a number of things, in particular her leadership of the Royal Institution and "more broadly as an icon demonstrating to younger people in particular that not only science but scientists can be lively and interesting ... "
Such proposals in theory are always secret. This is because it is almost unheard of for fellows to be elected the first time they are proposed. The first list is circulated in confidence and exhaustively studied by specialist committees. The final shortlist is also a matter only for the fellows, who get until the end of May to consider it. This confidentiality means candidates can stay on the lists for election for up to seven years.
Significantly, the only name on the list of 535 original candidates to be revealed is Susan Greenfield's. Significantly, the only name now known to be not on the final shortlist is hers.
Unidentified fellows let it be known that her election would be an "insult" to more eminent scientists awaiting election. Others, of course, do not see it that way. Some see Lady Greenfield as symbolising the struggle between traditionalists and modernisers.
"You need to leaven the cake of boring old men with people like her," said one fellow, who did not wish to be named. "She performs: lights, camera, action and she is there, doing it. She is enthusiastic. She works her bottom off. That is what she was put up for. You don't get a chair in Oxford for doing nothing."
Life in short:
Born: October 1 1950
Education: Godolphin & Latymer school; Oxford University
Career: Travelling scholarship to Israel 1970;
MRC resident scholarship Department of Pharmacology, Oxford, 1973-76;
Dame Catherine Fulford senior scholarship St Hugh's College 1974;
JH Burn Trust scholarship, Department of Pharmacology, Oxford, 1977;
MRC, Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, 1977-81;
MRC-INSERM French Exchange fellow, College de France, Paris, 1979-80;
University of Oxford, junior resident fellow, Green College, 1981-84;
tutorial fellow in medicine, Lincoln College, 1985;
lecturer 1985; professor of pharmacology 1996- ;
deputy director Squibb Projects 1988-95;
Gresham Chair of Physic Gresham College, London, 1995-98;
director, Royal Institute of GB 1998- ;
Awarded the CBE in 2000 and Life Peerage in 2001