• Question: Who is your favourite scientist of all time?

    Asked by u11mustafab to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 12 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by rumpelstiltskin.
    • Photo: Marcus Wilson

      Marcus Wilson answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      my favourite scientist is a little known guy called Peter Mitchell. He (almost single-handedly) how our cells make most of our energy and why we need oxygen.

      apart from all that he seemd like a bit of a character. He inherited a lot of money and got fed up with being ordered around, so decided to build his own workplace. For his holidays every year he flew himself, a couple of female friends and his rolls royce to far away lands and drink…. and then he won the nobel prize!

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      My all time favourite scientist is Richard Feynman. He was a quantum physicist who won the Nobel prize. One important thing he did was discover ways of making the complex maths much easier using special diagrams that are now named after him. He was also very eccentric, picked locks, cracked safes and played bongo drums! There are some great books about his life.

      The first time he gave a seminar (when he was a PhD student) there were four of the World’s most famous scientists sitting in the audience (including Albert Einstein), but once Feynman started talking about his work he forgot his nerves and was just excited about talking science. Every time I felt nervous about giving a seminar I think of this and it makes me feel better.

    • Photo: Joanna Giles

      Joanna Giles answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      I have loads of scientists who I really admire

      I really like (and have been lucky enough to meet!) Lord Professor Robert Winston. He does such an amazing job of communicating science and making it so understandable and interesting for everyone.

      I’m really fascinated by an experiment he started in the year 2000 called “Child of our time”. He is following a group of children born in the year 2000 to see how their personalities shape their futures. He shows his findings as TV documentaries that everyone can watch and get involved in:

      https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/personality/

    • Photo: Louise Walkin

      Louise Walkin answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      Gregor Mendel! He was a very influential scientist and first discovered heredity and also that half the genetic material came from one parent and the other half came from the other parent (in pea plants!).
      It’s quite strange to think there was a time when people didn’t know that, it seems so simple now, but it was a major discovery at the time! 🙂

    • Photo: Louise Stanley

      Louise Stanley answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      My favourite scientist is Rosalind Franklin as she was essential in the work leading up to discovering the structure of DNA but is unfortunately over looked by the two guys Watson and Crick as she died before the Nobel prize was awarded. She was also extremely unusual at that time as very few women were able to work in science. But we all really know how clever she was!

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