The communist regime did not care for single-parent families, so Ľubica Lacinová's family was always short on cash. She grew up with her grandmother and her sisters in the town of Skalica, western Slovakia.
Nevertheless, she received a good education at a high school in Bratislava, which at that time was freer than other schools. She also experienced life in Philadelphia, USA, and blossomed into a successful Slovak scientist in the end.
Ľubica Lacinová, a researcher at the Centre of Biological Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, recalls communist times, her activism and the Velvet Revolution in this week's episode of Spectacular Slovakia.