All hail the scientists! ????‍?

Where would we be without scientists?! Huge respect to them all. Can’t thank and praise them enough.

I’m all for praising scientists and international cooperation , however scientists have also brought us - weapons including nuclear weapons and plastics that not biodegradable and other things that we could argue have not enhanced the planet, indeed led to death and destruction. Not ALL discoveries have been put to good use I’m afraid .

Yes I'm another who somewhat took scientists for granted. I've a concept of them beavering away in laboratories and just tweaking away at stuff rather than the bit of spectacular work they've achieved recently with Covid. I certainly hope they're all revelling in this current eureka moment they're experiencing. Admirable and wonderful. They have my relief and gratitude and I choose to ignore negative comment at the moment.

I too took them for granted until recently and never thought about how they beaver away quietly to improve our lives. We have so much to thank them for.

If you choose to ignore negative comment, then I’m guessing you also choose to ignore the realities of man made climate change, species destruction and degradation of oceans with plastics, weapons of mass destruction and other consequences of human greed. I’m not against giving due praise and I am thrilled that international cooperation has led to so many medical advances, but perhaps we should also hope that many negative “advances” are banned .

Is that Einstein second from the right?

Yes, River walk, it is the great Albert Einstein in the first photo. I was born on the day he died!
I and OH both worked for large pharmaceutical companies in research and feel proud of all the achievements, particularly the current vaccine situation. Long live scientists!

Riverwalk

Is that Einstein second from the right?

Yes it is - this photo is from the first Solvay Conference. I first saw the photo when I stayed in Brussels at the hotel where the conference was held. I was utterly blown away by the talent gathered together - I kept thinking Einstein and Curie together in the same room - wow.

I hope this thread stays as a celebration of the role of scientists who are so often the unsung heroes. We tend as a society to place higher value on the arts ( in the widest sense of the word). This issue was highlighted by C P Snow in the late 50s / early 60s as The Two Cultures which stated that compared with some other societies, the UK valued knowledge of and education in the arts far more highly than of and in science.

I think it’s still broadly true and we’d all be better for at least a basic understanding of what might be called the scientific method and of research/ statistics etc. I’ve posted before on the poor standard of science reporting and journalism in main stream media in this country. It’s a bit of a vicious circle - if we were better educated ( in the widest sense) scientifically, we’d appreciate our scientists more and if we appreciated them more, we’d probably be better educated in theses issues.

Meanwhile, lovely idea for a thread

NellG

All hail Max Theiler, the first scientist to develop a vaccine that was effective against a virus, in this case Yellow Fever back in the 1930s. A South African man, post grad educated in London, then working through Harvard who finally won a Nobel prize for his work. He laid the foundations which allowed the present day vaccines to be developed so quickly.

Maybe not quite the first Nell. Lady Mary Wortley Montague had her son vaccinated against small pox in 1718, with the men in the medical establishment of the day objecting, or course!
Everyone's heard of Jenner et al, but the achievements of women in history seems to get wiped out. Plus ça change ?

Beverley I hadn’t heard of her and found it really interesting reading up about her. I hadn’t realised that the ideas around inoculating against smallpox went back so far - Jenner rather benefitted from others didn’t he? At least she inoculated her own child, Jenner just used his gardener’s son for practice?. There’s a lot of women who have had their thunder stolen or been generally cheated of or downplayed in scientific achievements. Ada Lovelace for example ( she’s in the children’s book I mentioned) and probably in more recent times the most egregious example was Rosalind Franklin. There’s been a definite improvement as far as that is concerned.

The ideas for inoculation go back thousands of years to China, Asia and Africa. Lady Montague got the idea from Turkey. The British Museum have a very interesting article on the subject. Jenner perfected vaccination and Smallpox was finally eradicated worldwide in 1979.

25Avalon

The ideas for inoculation go back thousands of years to China, Asia and Africa. Lady Montague got the idea from Turkey. The British Museum have a very interesting article on the subject. Jenner perfected vaccination and Smallpox was finally eradicated worldwide in 1979.

You bring in a really interesting point here - as well as the contribution of women scientists being downplayed over the years, it’s true that the scientific contribution of non -Western societies has been downplayed/ignored. And as you say, we’re talking hundreds and even thousands of years in some instances.

Another under-recognised scientist is Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She worked in almost makeshift conditions in her lab in Oxford and had to fight for every penny to fund her research.

From Wikipedia: “Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin as previously surmised by Edward Abraham and Ernst Boris Chain; and the structure of vitamin B12, for which in 1964 she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hodgkin also elucidated the structure of insulin in 1969 after 35 years of work.”

I agree with you so strongly about The Two Cultures suzie. The original lecture by C P Snow is still available on youtube, I think. In this country some people think nothing of proudly saying oh, I'm not very good at maths when faced with the simplest bit of arithmetic but nobody would dream of saying oh I'm not very good at this reading business

I've mentioned her on another thread but Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a scientist I admire. She built a radio telescope as part of her PhD work and went on to discover pulsars. She is a great advocate for women and girls in physics. In 2018 she won a scientific prize worth £2.3mn and donated it all to the Institute of Physics to support "women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers".

I met her once. I was a bit star-struck!