• Question: Who is your favourite scientist and why ?

    Asked by anon-196554 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 1 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      My favourite scientist is Dorothy Hodgkin. 1) She was a chemist who helped improve how we use X-rays to work out the 3D shapes of molecules and 2) for the huge amount of work she did in helping us understand the shapes of really important molecules like steroids, insulin, penicillin and vitamin B12.

    • Photo: Eleanor Senior

      Eleanor Senior answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      I find it hard to choose between Alan Turing or Charles Darwin. Turing, gave us some of the ideas behind modern computing which is pretty cool and Darwin came up with the ideas of inheritance and how you get traits passed down from your parents which has helped found modern genetics.

    • Photo: Paddy Sudhakar

      Paddy Sudhakar answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      We had a visiting student who gave this answer when she was asked “What makes a good Scientist ?” – she replied saying “A good scientist is one who understands the effects of the science he / she carries out”. To me any scientist who is aware of this and does good science would be among my favourite scientists.

      But if I were to choose one, it would Dr. Vandana Shiva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva) who graduate with her PhD in quantum physics and is also a keen supporter of farmers, biodiversity and earth democracy.

    • Photo: Lee Steinberg

      Lee Steinberg answered on 2 Mar 2019:

      My favourite scientist is Paul Dirac. He did a lot of the early work in quantum mechanics, looking at the fundamentals of chemistry. He also once walked into a class he was teaching, and said ‘The laws of nature should have mathematical beauty’, which is something that really stuck with me. He was quite an interesting guy, working during a total change in how we thought of physics. If you want to learn about him, a good place to start is a book called ‘The Strangest Man’.

    • Photo: Jennifer Harris

      Jennifer Harris answered on 3 Mar 2019: last edited 3 Mar 2019 12:32 pm

      My favourite scientists are the researcherers James Allison and Tasuku Honjo who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their ground-breaking work on manipulating the immune system to combat cancer. The work they did in the 90s opened-up a new era for medical research and made us think about other cells in the body as well as the cancer cells. This lay the foundation for the work that I did for my PhD, so it feels very close-to-home and I find it fascinating! The immune system is amazingly complex and slightly different for different people and we now know how important it is for some many diseases. We just need to figure out how to better target and manipulate it!

      Read here for more info: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/summary/

    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      As a synthetic chemist it is hard to look past E. J. Corey. His contributions to synthetic chemistry during the 20th Century advanced the chemists understanding so much that most of his work underpins a lot of the chemistry we do today.

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