Author
Delighted to see that, as a result of her appearance on the BBC World Service programme ‘Unstoppable’ last week, physicist Florence Bell who pioneered X-ray studies of DNA in 1938 is now catching up with more famous DNA scientist, Rosalind Franklin, thanks to a mention in the latest edition of UK TV and radio listings magazine ‘Radio Times’! Only a Royal Mint commemorative coin, a Mars Rover and a hit West End play to go now…
In the course of researching my book ‘The Man in the Monkeynut Coat’, I’d been interested to discover that physicist Florence Bell who, despite having shown for the first time in 1938 that X-rays could be used to reveal the structure of DNA, was described under the heading ‘Occupation’ on her death certificate as ‘housewife.’ But I’ve just found that when Bell emigrated to the USA in 1943, she was also described not as a scientist, but as a ‘housewife’ on her US Naturalisation records. Talk about hiding your light under a bushel (not that I’m trying for one minute to say that housework doesn’t qualify as hard and worthy graft – it does!)
Anyway, I was delighted to be interviewed about Bell’s life and work for the programme ‘Discovery’ on the BBC World Service this week – and hope that in doing so, I’ve done my bit to lift that bushel and bring Florence Bell out from beneath it!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5rmm
My ears pricked up during an excellent school performance of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ last night on hearing that one of the lines mentions George Washington Carver (1864-1943) who was born into slavery but rose to become one of the most eminent agricultural scientists in the USA. I’m now just kicking myself that I didn’t know about his namecheck in the man-eating plant-based musical when I wrote about him in the paperback version of my book ‘The Man in the Monkeynut Coat’…
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