Women’s work: Dorothy Hodgkin and the culture and craft of X-ray crystallography
The year 2014 was celebrated as the International Year of Crystallography. A number of successful 20th century women scientists, of whom the Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin is perhaps the most prominent, achieved their distinction in this field. Wh....
More details | Watch nowSisters in science: Hertha Ayrton, women and the Royal Society c.1900
Although women were not admitted as Fellows until 1945, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were a number of female scientists working at the margins of the Royal Society and its masculine scientific elite. This talk will introduce some o....
More details | Watch nowMary Somerville and the Empire of Science in the Nineteenth Century
Prof. Jim Secord, Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was a leading mathematician and author of important books on the sciences: it was in connection with a review of one of these that the term "scientis....
More details | Watch nowGhosts of women past
Dr Patricia Fara, Clare College, Cambridge. "I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of 'woman and science' is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not." So declared Hertha Ayrton over hun....
More details | Watch nowThe end of the world in 2012? Science communication and science scares
21st December 2012 marks an ending of the Mayan calendar and is asserted by some to mark the end of the world. This scare is examined from an astronomical point of view, followed by some reflections on what the scare tells us about the communication ....
More details | Watch nowWellcome’s collectors
Pharmacist, philanthropist – and Fellow of the Royal Society – Sir Henry Wellcome is now widely recognised as one of the most acquisitive of collectors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Wellcome’s collection of histo....
More details | Watch nowNatural History and the Rights of Woman
During the two-year period of the composition and publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley and early advocate of women’s rights, read and reviewed a number of important works of n....
More details | Watch nowWashing dirty lab coats on the page and the stage
The drive to publish first, even the order of the authors and the choice of the journal; the collegiality and the brutal competition; grantsmanship; the still existing glass ceiling for women; Schadenfreude, even Nobel lust - these are the soul and b....
More details | Watch nowWomen in Science: End-Running the Crowd
Sheila Tobias gives a presentation on the role of women in science and the obstacles they must continue to overcome.
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