Long before he was swinging lightsabres and dispensing nuggets of pseudo-Buddhist wisdom as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sir Alec Guiness played the idealistic young textile scientist Sydney Stratton in the 1951 Ealing comedy ‘The Man in the White Suit’ whose discovery of a new type of textile fibre promises to revolutionise the world. But I’ve always wondered whether, thanks to real life textile scientist William Astbury and his ‘monkeynut coat’, this classic film may well have been a case of art mirroring life…
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He Got Knocked Down…But He Got Up Again…
It’s a pity that physicist William Astbury was as good a comedian as he was a scientist. For had his jokes been just a bit funnier, he might well have found himself sharing a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. In this new podcast for BBC History magazine, I explore just how this might have happened. And, after opening with James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the now famous double-helix, made 70 years ago this year, and concluding with a namecheck for Leeds band ‘Chumbawamba’, this might well be a first for the academic discipline of History of Science…
‘We Need to Talk About Mendel…’
So, from Roman skeletons in Garforth, it’s back to history of science. Open any GCSE biology textbook today & you’ll see 19th century abbot Gregor Mendel hailed as the founding father of genetics. But what was he really up to with those pea plants? And does it really matter anyway? Let my colleague Prof. Greg Radick author of the forthcoming book ‘Disputed Inheritance: The Battle Over Mendel and the Future of Biology’, convince you that it really does & why getting Mendel & his peas wrong with an oversimplified story can have major – and harmful social consequences…
Garforth skeletons – more ‘Time Team’ than ‘Happy Valley’…
When I first heard earlier this week that around 60 skeletons had been found in Leeds suburb of Garforth where I grew up, I thought it sounded like the plot of another ‘Happy Valley’/ ‘Better’ gritty piece of Northern Noir crime drama.
It turns out instead to have been the discovery of a late Roman/ Early Anglo Saxon cemetery that could quite possibly shed valuable new light into understanding what happened in Britain as the Western Roman Empire collapsed and the Roman legions legged it home.
So, no need to call for Catherine Cawood or DI Lou Slack then- although if the latter found 60 skeletons in a field, she’d most likely just take a back hander from sinister crime boss played (wonderfully by Andrew Buchan) and turn a blind eye (no spoilers there – it’s there right from the start!)