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100 years ago today, Canadian clinician Dr Fred Banting received the phone call of which every scientist must secretly dream. But on hearing that he’d just won the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin – a milestone in medicine that would save countless lives (my own included), his reaction was not what you might have expected.
He was furious. Utterly livid, in fact… find out why at https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/2521/the-controversy-of-insulin-and-its-nobel-prize-100-years-on
Delighted to give a global shout during a recent podcast recorded for the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, to Leeds Phil and Lit for having unveiled a plaque in 2019 to commemorate the Nobel Prize winning development of partition chromatography in 1940s Headingley, Leeds for analysis of wool, and which later allowed Columbia scientist Erwin Chargaff, molecular biology’s very own veritable Victor Meldrew, to gain first hint at how DNA carries genetic info!
So – when teaching genetics and trying to understand genes, why do the forgotten water fleas of little known late 19thC biologist WFR Weldon matter as much as the more famous Gregor Mendel and his peas? Just heard my colleague Greg Radick talking about this at Ilkley Literature Festival last week – and why it matters to us all that we get the right picture in our heads when it comes to genes – was so impressed that I’m coming back for second helpings when he talks on this subject to Leeds Phil and Lit Society on 25th Oct – available to join on Zoom without having to leave the comfort of your own home! https://www.leedsphilandlit.org.uk/shop/disputed-inheritance-the-battle-over-mendel-and-the-future-of-biology/