• Question: who do you most admire?

    Asked by rosieapple to Ailsa, Evan, James, Kath, Ryan on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Kath O'Reilly

      Kath O'Reilly answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I think I most admire David Attenborough. He’s had such a long succesful career. We know him from all the nature docs he’s done, but he was also director of BBC2, and pushed through some amazing developments in filming. and he’s so nice 🙂

    • Photo: Ryan Ladd

      Ryan Ladd answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I have a lot of admiration for a group of people called Engineers Without Borders. They go to developing countries and help to build really important things for the communities that most need them – electricity, water, hospitals, schools etc.

    • Photo: Evan Keane

      Evan Keane answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I admire many people, who do so many different things. I will tell you about which scientist I admire the most.

      It has to be Galileo. He was an Italian scientist and he has been dead for more than 350 years but he made VERY important discoveries. As well as that he was a very brave man. He built his own telescopes from scratch (that is amazing isn’t it?) and he was first to observe Jupiter and notice 4 moons which went around it. He observed it over many nights and realised that the moons orbitted Jupiter and he could time how long it took. This was a huge discovery! At this time people thought that everything, all planets, the moon, and the Sun, all orbited the Earth and that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe. They were so wrong! When he noticed that moons could orbit Jupiter that meant that not everything had to go around the Earth! Eureka! And then he realised that the ideas of a guy called Copernicus were right – Copernicus had said that all the planets went around the Sun, and he was right!

      Now, you can see why he was a great scientist, but why was he brave? Well, I didn’t mention it but as well as everyone believing all things orbited the Earth, it was actually a crime to say that everything orbited the Sun!! And the Catholic church would torture you and keep you in jail for the rest of your life if you said it!! Even though it is true. This is why Galileo was brave. He knew it was true and he would not lie when the church tried to “persuade” him to change his mind. Of course he was under arrest for the rest of his life as a result – but he stuck to his principles!

      Galileo died in 1642, and of course since then everybody has realised he was correct and that the planets orbit the Sun. We’ve even been to the moon since then! Strangely the Catholic church only apologised for its treatment of Galileo in 1992! Now that is a long time to wait for an apology – but better late than never 🙂

      So a great scientist who discovered many things (there is a huge list of other things he did that I would not have space to even mention!) and a man who stood up to persecution. I admire Galileo.

      @Ryan By the way I know some people in Engineers Without Borders (small world). Yes, they do some good work.

    • Photo: Ailsa Powell

      Ailsa Powell answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I have to agree with Evan that I have a massive amount of admiration for Galileo, the work he did in the time and environment he was in and the strength of his convictions to stick to his discoveries when he was under immense pressure, is just amazing.

      So not all of the scientists I would find inspiring are in my field – I have a very broad range of interests 🙂 – but Dorothy Hodgkin was in my field and she is the only British woman to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in any science field.

      I use a technique called protein X-ray crystallography to find out the locations of all the atoms in the proteins I am interested. If it wasn’t for Dorothy Hodgkin and her contemporaries (Max Perutz and John Kendrew) developing the science of X-ray crystallography, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do today. Dorothy Hodgkin got her Nobel prize for solving the structures of small biological molecules in 1964, she then went on to solve the structure of insulin.

      So I find what she discovered very useful and as she also did all her work in Oxford University and if she were still alive and working today I would be working in the same lab as her! 🙂

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