Dame Janet Thornton is a Senior Scientist and Emeritus Director of EMBL-EBI. Thornton is a pioneer in structural bioinformatics, having been involved in the development of several widely used computational toolkits. She began her science career as a physicist, before transitioning to biophysics during her PhD. During her time as Director of EBI, Thornton played a pivotal role in launching ELIXIR, a pan-European infrastructure for biological data. Now, she remains at the institute working on protein structure and function and how these contribute to our understanding of disease and ageing.
Please note the transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
FLG: Hello everyone and welcome to the latest interview in the Genome Giants series as we take a look at the work and lives of some of the most influential researchers within the genomics field. Today we’re going to be talking to Dame Janet Thornton – a bioinformatic wizz. But before we do that Janet if you could just introduce yourself.
Janet: Hello, I’m Janet Thornton. I’m a Senior Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) which is just South of Cambridge. It is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), which is an international organisation spread across Europe. I’m a computational biologist and have worked in this field now for a long time.
FLG: You grew up in Middleton in the UK – what are some of your fondest memories growing up?
Janet: I’m afraid I wasn’t a very academic child and what I’d really like to do was to play with my friends – learning how to skate, going swimming in the local swimming pool – those sorts of things are my really treasured memories.
FLG: When did your interest in physics first begin? When did you become interested in science and see this as a career?
Janet: Actually, it wasn’t like that for me. It was more that I knew what I enjoyed doing. I like to understand things, I like to classify and group things. But I never thought of myself as a scientist I have to say. In the end I decided to do physics, maths and geography for A Level at school because I was interested in the world around us. I didn’t do biology because, basically, the lessons consisted of trying to draw daffodils and things like that and I wasn’t very good at drawing (even though I love flowers). But there didn’t seem to be any understanding in there. Whereas the physics was the thing where you could really understand about how things worked and that was what I liked. But right up until university, I did it because I enjoyed it. And then when I got my degree, I enjoyed it and I thought I would go on and see whether I could become a scientist. But I was never convinced that that was what I wanted to do. I actually always thought I would be a teacher.
FLG: What would you have taught if you were a teacher?
Janet: Well, now of course I would teach molecular biology! Then, I don’t know, I think I probably thought about teaching younger children actually – the basics – rather than secondary school.
FLG: You completed your degree in physics at the University of Nottingham. What was it like being in a field that still today is heavily male dominated?
Janet: It was certainly male dominated then. I do not think over the three years of the degree we had a single female lecturer. And in a cohort of students (there were about 90 of us), there were nine girls. So, it was biased. I went to an all-girls school so of course this was very different from being in an all-girls school. But it was just the way it was, and I really didn’t think about it. I didn’t particularly feel discriminated against at all, I just got on with it. And fundamentally, science is gender neutral in terms of whether women or men can do it – they perhaps do it in slightly different ways, but the variety of the ways that scientists, as a whole, approach their subject is radically different between different scientists. And so, it’s not surprising that there are differences between men and women. I don’t know how strong those differences are. Although, I was conscious there were many more boys than girls – but really, I didn’t think about it. I think that is the bottom line.
FLG: What made you transition from physics to biophysics?
Janet: I hated physics practicals! Also, I really don’t like machines. I don’t like getting dirty hands and things like that, which sounds pathetic. But I also knew that I had various options going through my mind. One was my last project as a physicist, which was to look at the 21-centimetre hydrogen line, so it was more like astronomy, and I was always interested in the stars. And at one stage I was going to do geophysics, but I went for an interview and the interviewer said ‘Well there aren’t any jobs for women so there’s no point you doing geophysics’. So, I thought alright I’ll just do straight physics. But I knew that I really wanted to understand more about life on earth I would say – nature. And so, going to do biophysics seemed like a very good option. I didn’t realise, of course, it was an extremely good option – it was the perfect option for me. And I got a PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, and I was interested in medicine, although not practicing medicine. I don’t think I would have been very good at that.
FLG: After you got you PhD, what was your early career like? What challenges, if any, did you face?
Janet: The changing from physics to biology was quite difficult. I mean it’s easy to say ‘Oh, I’ll change’. But actually, the whole language is different, so it took me quite a long time to settle in. And in fact, I nearly left my PhD because I thought I could do something more useful as a hospital physicist. I even went for an interview, but they took so long about it that in the end I thought I’ll finish my PhD and then decide what to do. By the time I’d written my thesis I was sort of hooked on doing this, and then an opportunity came up in Oxford – I went from the National Institute of Medical Research to the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics in Oxford. For me, that was a great transition. Again, you don’t realise at the time. But of course, most of the early crystallographers (the people who determined protein structures) were physicists and so to me it felt like going home. I was with a group of people who I could understand what they were talking about. I obviously learned a lot during my PhD, so I had a reasonable background, and I loved these protein structures that were being determined (and they were just being determined). So that was really, for me, a very good transition to move into the protein structure world. And it’s really where I have spent most of my academic life.
FLG: Many consider you a pioneer in structural bioinformatics, and over the past few decades the field has really boomed – what has it been like watching this field expand?
Janet: When I started there were about 20 known protein structures, and now there are over 170,000 structures in the protein data bank. It was fun! Oxford was one of the few labs in the world where they were determining structures and everybody when a new structure came out would rush to look at Nature or Science to see this structure because we didn’t have many. And of course, during my PhD, I had done quite a lot of computing and programming and I enjoyed that because, fortunately, at Mill Hill there was a very small computer in their loft of the building. But now, I mean it’s infinitely smaller than the power on the iPhone, infinitely smaller. But that computer had some graphics, and I could display my molecules and rotate them round and I really loved writing these programmes and seeing these molecules in three dimensions turn around and trying to predict their confirmations. I think that’s probably what really hooked me. Although I did experimental work as well, both at Mill Hill and at Oxford.
But then I had my two children and only worked part time for many years, and it really wasn’t very practical to do experimental work when you’re part time – it’s very difficult I think. But of course, computational work is much easier. Although we didn’t have the Internet or anything like that, so it was a case of writing my programmes at home and then going and running them and hoping that they compiled on the computer. Now of course, people don’t worry so much because they can just recompile and recompile until they get rid of the bugs, but that luxury wasn’t available then. I think one of my proudest moments was when my programme worked first time – no errors – I was so pleased! But that’s because I had done it at home, and I had gone through and tested it and found the errors and corrected it. It was a very different computing environment then, than it is today.
FLG: You have been involved in the development of many widely used bioinformatics tools during your career, including PROCHECK and CATH. What impact have these tools had on the field, and did you expect them to be so widely used?
Janet: Well, no because when we were developing some of these tools, of course, it was less easy to share code because every machine was different. The transition really happened in the 80s to 90s, when people began to share their code. I mean I’m not boasting about this, but I naturally share things – it’s just in my character and so we always made our programmes available. And some of them have had a huge impact and many of them are used around the world. The biggest one is this suite of programmes called PROCHECK that my long-term collaborator, Roman Laskowski, authored after we had done a lot of analysis to know what to do. And this is just to check the stereochemistry of protein structures. People still use it today, although I have to say there are now more sophisticated programmes to do the same sort of thing.
FLG: You have worked in many established institutions, including the University of Oxford and UCL. What was your experience like at these institutions and how do you feel they shaped your skills and career?
Janet: So perhaps we should go back to Mill Hill where I did my PhD because that was a research institute, not a university. And I went to King’s College to do a course in biophysics, that was really critical. But that experience was in a research institute, and it is very different from being in a university where you have the flood of students and you do your teaching and that side of things. So, I knew what it was like to be in a research institute, and I was used to having access to a brilliant library (open all hours). You could basically spend anytime you liked there. It was a really excellent place to do research. But Oxford had all the students – so there was a much younger cohort. My colleagues there were a lot of young people, and that was fun (there were at Mill Hill too but probably less so). In Oxford, it was being surrounded by the experimentalists who were determining the structures that were so critical. So, I was part of their community which I really liked, and I am still in touch with many of those people today. I have always lived in the same place, in Hemel Hempstead which is North of London, and I commuted to Oxford during the week until the children were born and then I commuted two days. Then, moving to London was, of course, quite different because it’s a central London university, and that also has positives. I didn’t enjoy the commuting very much, but I enjoyed being in central London being able to go to the bookshops and the British Museum.
I went from Oxford to Birkbeck college, which is a college that does education for people who are at work. So, the teaching was all in the evening. In Birkbeck, although it was exhausting teaching in the evening, the people you were teaching were so diverse, from all sorts of backgrounds – both ethnically, but their life stories were very different – and they were fascinated by the subject and it was just great to talk to them. Then, I went to UCL and that is a traditional UK university. I guess what I learned at UCL, I was kind of in charge more. So, ones career as a scientist changes very radically for when you’re a PhD student and I certainly spent at least half of my time on my own, working either in the library or on computer (probably more three quarters), and then when you become a group leader and you have all these people who are dependent on you, you spend a lot of time talking to people and teaching them in a way, but learning from them as well. I mean that’s one of the great things about research, it is this collaborative effort, and you often learn more from your students than they learn from you. I still enjoy that part of being a scientist most – having my own research group.
Then of course, I went to EBI which is part of this international lab and that was great because I got to work closely with people from all across Europe. Up to then, I would say most of my contacts had been with the US, which was good – I spent a lot of time going to meetings in the USA, but less so in Europe and I think that’s because of the funding that we have through the now Horizon Europe (hopefully). At the EBI, I was the Director of the Institute, so instead of being just director of my own research group, I have this Institute that grew from, when I joined it, about 160 people to be about 600 people. It has grown even more since I stepped down. The science really is a constant, it doesn’t change. But your role in this scientific endeavour changes as you get older.
FLG: What was the process like getting your job as Director of the EBI? What were the challenges?
Janet: Getting the job! There are two parts – getting the job and doing the job. Getting the job was quite strange. I was sort of asked ‘Well, would you be interested to apply, Janet?’. I thought – I could do. Actually, at that stage I didn’t think anybody else was interested to do it because it was quite a challenge. In fact, other people did apply, but I didn’t find that out until years later. The challenge was going from a university environment to a research institute, so it was like going back to Mill Hill in some ways. The EBI is collocated with the Sanger Institute, so we were part of this Genome Campus, and the focus was very much on genomes and genetics rather than on proteins and protein structures. So, there weren’t people who were themselves determining protein structures at EBI, but of course there were many people within EMBL, within the broader lab. So, that was quite a change. And of course, being in charge brings different challenges and coming into this community was quite challenging at the beginning.
Structural biology has always had a lot of very senior women in it, probably because of Dorothy Hodgkin and all the impact that she had because she won the Nobel Prize for Structural Biology. So, there were always a lot of, both young and older, women involved. In the bioinformatics field – which I think started with protein structure, but for many people it only started when we got all the sequences – it is much more computer science led. So, it’s a different environment. I found the people and the way they operated were rather different than at UCL. It was challenging, shall we say, in the first few years, but one grows into it with the job. When I took the job, I took it on secondment because I was very uncertain whether this was what I wanted. But you can’t go back once you make the step, and after two years I didn’t really want to go back. I was very happy. I thought the job, and still think the job, is really important – to do both the research, but also the service aspect. So, that fitted in very well with what I had done before.
FLG: Did you enjoy being in charge?
Janet: I find it quite stressful. I don’t do it sort of naturally in such a big arena. But I loved doing the sort of strategic parts and thinking about how the labs were going to develop, and what we needed to do, and how we might interact with different things and where we ought to develop and provide services for. I very much enjoyed that part of it. I also enjoyed working with the team of people that were there – it took some getting used to, but I think in the end it worked out extremely well. I was very lucky because I felt as if I was always on the crest of this wave. So, first of all it was computing when I was a PhD student – nobody in the institute apart from me was able to use this computer practically. Biology and computing were two separate things. There was theoretical biology, but in general there were very few people in the institute who thought about data or thought about computational things.
Then with the structures and them all pouring out and needing to be looked at, it was like looking at a whole new world – a molecular world. But it was a whole new world when these protein structures were determined. And then with all the other technology, with new data (transcriptome data or the genetic data), I sort of felt a little bit like a surfer, and I’ve always been on the top of this wave, and at some stage of course it will come back down! But it doesn’t seem to be doing that at all, the field has been fantastic to be part of from the very beginning, and to watch it grow and get more and more important…and it will continue to do that, I am absolutely convinced, especially in the medical field.
FLG: You are currently still working at EMBL-EBI as a senior scientist – what are your team currently exploring?
Janet: The lab has got three parts to it. Two of them are very firmly based in the protein structure world. One area is trying to understand enzymes and how they work and that’s still very reductionary. It is trying to go back to what we know about enzymes, to gather the data and to create tools to handle these enzyme reactions so that we can design enzymes tailored to what we as human beings or the planet needs. The second area is looking at human variants and trying to understand how genetic variation leads to different people. I mean it’s totally fascinating actually.
Then the third area, which is somewhat separate, but I’ve been working on this since I moved to EBI (so 20 years now), is on ageing. It is totally and utterly different and it sort of feels a little bit like at the beginning of the protein structure explosion. Now of course, there are many labs working on ageing and increasingly so (for good reasons because clearly there’s a crisis that everybody is getting older, and we all want to live longer and healthier lives). So, trying to understand how genetics influences probability of getting a disease or how it’s linked to your age, or why certain diseases have an earlier onset than other diseases – it is fascinating. And it rarely involves protein structure data I have to say, it involves all the other sort of data, so I’ve learned a lot about the other sorts of data in looking at ageing. The protein is important but it’s late onset – it is the degeneration of proteins that causes the neurodegenerative diseases. But that’s not the bit we have been working on.
FLG: Those areas of research are very widespread. Do you feel you are broadening your skills and learning about new areas?
Janet: One learns every day. But the things you are good at don’t change, unfortunately. So, the ageing field is somewhat philosophical – certainly in the past it has been with rather little data. Whereas the protein structure world, when I joined, was just when we were getting all of this very precise and actually incredibly accurate data. And these worlds are just totally different in the way that they do things. So, that’s been an interesting experience certainly.
FLG: Do you feel like you like biology a little bit more now?!
Janet: Well, I have always loved biology – I love the natural world, just like I love looking at the stars – it’s part of human experience. And I have been able to spend my life looking at the molecular basis of biology, which of course is kind of the same – we are all living things. It never ceases to amaze me how DNA is in all living things on earth, and proteins are there and you can see how these things have evolved. So, learning about evolution (as a physicist one doesn’t really talk about evolution) and of course in biology that famous quote: “Nothing makes sense accept in the light of evolution”. And it took me 20 or 30 years to really realise how important evolution was. You learn things as you go and I mean it’s a fantastic job being a scientist – it changes, you learn more all the time.
FLG: Last year, Deep Mind’s AlphaFold 2 algorithm made a pioneering step in determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino acid sequence. What is the significance of this breakthrough?
Janet: I think it will have a big impact going forward because now there is the potential to predict the structures for all human proteins or in fact all proteins on earth. Not only do they predict them, but they know how accurate their predictions are. So, some proteins they can complete quite accurately, whereas those with large, disordered regions they can’t predict so accurately. That means that, in principle, one can generate the whole of the human proteome (or at least 70% of it or something). To me it’s just the beginning. I mean it’s fantastic, I’m so pleased that this has happened. Because it’s based on all the work of all the protein structure crystallographers and EM specialists over the last 50 years and the fact that these new algorithms can take that data and learn from them properly. I mean, in a way, it’s what I’ve been trying to do for many years.
It’s interesting, the people who are really involved and do this are real specialists in deep learning and how to apply it. So, what they’ve done is created a pipeline that is new and different and clearly very powerful in its ability to predict. So, the geneticists, the genome people, they all think genome wide – it is almost in their DNA actually – they just think about the whole genome. At the protein structure level, that’s not been possible because we still only have experimental structures for relatively few complete human proteins. We can model many more but having really good models I think will change this. So, using this structural data for the obvious things, such as drug design, for protein-protein interactions, for looking at host-pathogen interactions, for looking at COVID-spike versus receptor interactions, all of these things require knowledge about that 3-dimensional structure. So, we can really move into understanding biology in three dimensions. Up to now, it has been dominated by these linear sequences, which of course are fantastic to have and it’s just amazing, but they only work when they fold up. The whole of biology in a cell is a very 3-dimensional thing, so trying to capture that going forward I think will be really important. But just in terms of the machine learning, I think for the protein world it is to do with the future, the next step if you like, is to understand the interactions with the small molecule ligands – the interactions with other proteins and how organisms interact together and that becomes much more tractable.
FLG: What challenges do you think still remain? What needs to still be done?
Janet: As I said, doing powerful drug design based on structural data. Structural data is now usually used when you’re trying to design a new drug. But doing it overall I think it will be important. But mainly these protein-protein interactions. As human beings, we only have 20,000 proteins, which is really nothing. Before we knew the human genome, people were postulating 100,000 proteins, etc. But we only have these 20,000 genes. The complexity of human life, in fact all life, emerges by the interactions of these proteins, and so very clearly the next step is to look at those interactions and look at them in situ. There’s a big move in experimental structure determination to do it in situ (to do it in cell), to try and determine the structures in the cell. But more importantly, by looking at which proteins are interacting with which proteins, we understand a lot about development, much more than we used to, but there’s still many things that we don’t understand. Then, being able to predict the progress of disease, to diagnose disease, to understand the molecular basis of many diseases – this will all come to play I think over the next 10-20 years.
FLG: The amount of data being produced is increasing – how are we going to deal with the increased demand for computer power?
Janet: Obviously the emergence of cloud computing makes it easier so that everybody doesn’t have to store all this data and it can be shared more easily. I think the second point though, which is quite important, and it’s really at the heart of EBI and what happens when you curate data, is making data valuable. If you do data dumps, often that data is not so valuable. But if it is curated and looked after and annotated, then it becomes much more informative. Bioinformatics, I believe, has transformed biological research. I think now we need to transform medical research and that’s why there is a lot of effort to capture the medical data more accurately and to annotate it more accurately and to share the data when appropriate for research. And those are all big challenges in the medical arena. I mean obviously the main challenge is the privacy issues and the ethical issues, and those have to be faced head on and sorted out in a way so that people are confident. Most people would like to share their data if it’s going to help somebody else, but they don’t want to be recognised. So, they need to be anonymous. So how we do that robustly I think is extremely important.
In the biodiversity field and the whole preservation of species, I think the new molecular technologies are going to really change the way that we do that counting in effect. So, in biodiversity, people have gone out and counted species – it’ll eventually be done by DNA sequencing because it’s much more reliable and it’s much faster. I’m actually a trustee for the Natural History Museum in London. At EBI, we have incredible amounts of molecular data and at the Natural History Museum they have incredible amounts of organism data, you know species samples (bugs and fish and all the things we see at the museum). At the Natural History Museum, they have over 18 million samples most of which are not yet digitised – only a small fraction of those are digitised. Making those digitised and doing the same across all the Natural History Museums in the world so that we can really have an inventory of the biodiversity of life, is something that’s really exciting. And that will need the ability to store the data but also the other things – to annotate it, to curate and to make it available so that new ways of handling climate change (which obviously impacts on biodiversity) are found.
FLG: Your contributions to the field have been acknowledged with various awards and accolades – what has been your proudest moment?
Janet: I don’t think there is just one thing, there are many things over the years. I mean I’m most proud of my students and postdocs. They go on and do great things, and it’s really good to watch. I don’t know what I’m most proud of – I guess it’s always the thing I’m just working on now!
FLG: How did you feel finding out you were becoming a Dame and how did you feel on the day?
Janet: I wasn’t at home. I was babysitting for my granddaughter, but she was at school at that point. And I got an email because they had sent a letter to the office which they had opened. So, my PA called me and said, ‘We have just opened this letter and you’d be pleased to know you’re going to be made a Dame.’ I got off the phone and I burst into tears because my mother had died three months earlier, so I was so disappointed that she didn’t know about that. But the day itself was glorious. It was actually in Windsor. It was really nice, and it was a great occasion and then we went out afterwards with the family and had lunch and it was very nice indeed. So, it’s a strange thing, it’s not something that I personally ever aspired to, it never occurred to me actually that that would happen.
FLG: Are there any notable people throughout your career that you felt inspired you or encouraged you?
Janet: I think you always learn from all the people that you’re working with, who are kind of in charge at the time, and you learn that they are all different and all bring different ways of looking at what they’re telling you. So, my supervisors, the head of the lab in Oxford and the head of the lab at Birkbeck, have all been important. And obviously the people I have collaborated with. But also, my students and postdocs. I think I’ve learned more from them actually. I really don’t have in my mind anyone. I’ve never thought about role models – maybe that was why it never bothered me when there were more men than women – it had never occurred to me at that point. To me it’s the people that I interact with on a day-to-day basis that I enjoy, and you learn. Even people sometimes that you don’t really like very much, you still learn a lot from them, and I hope vice versa.
FLG: What are some of the major life lessons you have learnt throughout your career?
Janet: Do what you enjoy doing. Take the opportunities when they come. Make good friends and keep them. And work hard. Unfortunately, there’s no way around that last one! It is hard work, and in some ways, it kind of made it easier that I didn’t have these aspirations. I see some colleagues who get very upset because they don’t achieve this, or they don’t get recognised for this. And happily, I’ve not been in that situation, so everything has come as a delightful surprise when it’s happened. I guess maybe I’m stupid, I don’t know. But it’s just kind of made my progress easier because I never expected to get a job in science. I sort of thought ‘Well I’ll do this and then I’ll go and teach, and then I’ll do this’ and so on. Really, it’s been like a fairy-tale to me when I think about it.
FLG: If you could tell your younger self something, what would it be?
Janet: Don’t worry! It will work out! But of course, you don’t know that at the time. So, you know just try and do the work that you are doing and keep at it.
FLG: How do you think the field evolving in the coming years? What in the field are you particularly excited about?
Janet: Well, there’s so many things that are coming, and I think it is this transition. We have in biology been very reductionist, so that we’ve sort of been taking things apart and trying to understand them. That’s basically how my mind works anyway, so it suited me great. But going forward it’s now all going to be about putting things back together again to understand at this molecular level how life functions, how it evolves, how things work out and what happens when they go wrong. So, there’s so much still to do actually, it’s amazing. Despite all the work, there is still so many things to be discovered in the biological arena. It’s a wonderful area to work in. The whole thing about how the brain works is just fascinating and we still really don’t understand everything about the connections, etc. Also, for many diseases we might know this variant causes this disease, or it’s associated with it, but we don’t really understand how you go from the molecular to the organismal. So, it’s this idea of crossing scales – molecular, cellular, organ, organism – to try to build models that go up.
And of course, this will be approached in different ways. Some people come top down, and people who do organismal, like the Natural History Museum, can learn to come down in scales. And the molecular people have to learn to go up to deal with physiology and all those things. This isn’t news, this is what everybody thinks. But the molecular technologies can now be applied at scale so you can do the metagenomes – you can look at the ocean, you can look at the soil and see how it changes. So, all these molecular technologies are really going to overrun the medical and biodiversity fields and environmental fields because they are so powerful. But they generate lots of data that has got to be looked after!
FLG: Outside of your career, what do you like doing in your spare time?
Janet: I love reading. I mean it’s very boring actually – the usual things. I love reading very much. I have belonged to a book group for the last 40 years. We are currently reading The Stolen Bicycle by a very famous Taiwanese author (Wu Ming-Yi). It’s the story of various bicycles that he’s used and lost, and a life story at the same time. But I’m not that far through that at the moment and yes, I did struggle a bit with all the descriptions of the bicycles and thinking ‘I know why I didn’t go into bicycle manufacturing’. I love beautiful gardens, so I garden a little bit – very badly. I’m afraid I’m not very good at doing things on time and of course in the garden one has to be punctilious about when you plant things. It’s very nice to sit here, that’s the advantage of lockdown. I can look out on the garden and enjoy it. And meeting friends and talking. And of course, my family – it’s not very big, but for me it’s the most important thing.
FLG: If we were to turn your life and career into an autobiography or film – what would the title be?
Janet: Hmmm…I have not thought about this. I think probably something like ‘The joy of protein structures’ or something like that. Because they are so beautiful. I mean to me, they are just like flowers. I’ve got some daffodils on the table here and they are complex and they are beautiful and they are symmetrical and they are colourful. Proteins – well obviously they are not colourful in the same sort of way – but they are beautiful, they are symmetric, they are exquisitely designed to do the jobs that they need to do. And this is all happening through evolution – I mean it’s fantastic! Yeah, I think something like that!
FLG: That sounds great! Thank you so much for joining me today, it’s been really interesting talking to you. I mean you are an inspiration, throughout your whole career.
Janet: I just hope that other people get as much pleasure in what they do and have the researchers that I’ve been lucky enough to have. It’s been fantastic actually.
FLG: Thank you so much, it’s been great talking to you!
Janet: Alright then, thank you!
