• Question: who is your favourite famous scientist and why?

    Asked by Beth to David, Sian, Christie, Dan, Dawn on 14 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by 299thaf27, Caitlin, Watfordftw, squimmy.
    • Photo: David Robertson

      David Robertson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      I think my favourite is James Clerk Maxwell.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell
      He was as brilliant as Newton and Einstein, but doesn’t have the popular recognition that he deserves. His formulation of electromagnetics was one of the great unifications in the theories of physics, equivalent to Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Also he was Scottish and lived close to where I grew up.

    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Rosalind Franklin. She was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer and she was critical in the discovery of the structure of DNA. This discovery is usually attributed to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins (who jointly won the Nobel Prize), but actually, they would not have been able to identify the structure as quickly without her contribution.

      While she was working at King’s College London (where I work now), there were research groups racing to find out what the structure of DNA was. These groups had conflicting ideas about DNA structure. Rosalind Franklin was extremely thorough and precise in her work, eventually managing to take the clearest X-ray image of DNA at the time, which led to the confirmation that DNA is a double-stranded helix. This image is known as Photograph 51, and there’s actually a brilliant play about Rosalind Franklin and her work named after it. (Nicole Kidman played Rosalind Franklin!)

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      My favourite is someone more recent – Sir David Attenborough, or as I like to call him the “Godfather of Natural History”! He has transformed nature documentaries and really brought the natural world to us. I’ve learnt so much about animals in general, their behaviours, plants and their behaviours and its fascinating! He doesn’t have a PhD, and isn’t a “researcher” in the traditional sense, but he’s found a way to make nature seem interesting to people who would never have been interested in it before.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      I think it is Prof Sir Roger Jowell. You probably don’t realize that you know him but if you watched the election coverage on BBC 5 or more years ago he was probably the one that did the analysis.

      He is my favorite because he was such a wonderful man. I had the pleasure of working with him – he was the chair of our Social Science Research Committee while I was the secretary. He was always really charming and had the amazing characteristic of looking like he was not listening and then making a really profound contribution to the discussion. It was certainly an honor and pleasure to work with him.

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