There is a flowering of women scientists. After generations have struggled to survive in a world where scientists have only seemed to come in one gender (of 319 science Nobel prizes, only 17 have been won by women), critical mass may have been reached.
Sally Davies is the chief medical officer, Dame Julia Slingo is the chief scientific officer at the Met Office, while Dame Carol Robinson is a Royal Society research professor as well as professor of chemistry at Oxford. Now Danielle George, who is not yet 40 and already professor of radio frequency engineering at Manchester, is to give the Faraday Christmas lectures, the series of talks to enthuse children about science introduced in 1825 by Michael Faraday himself.
Her series will be all about encouraging her audience to hack into everyday items – a light bulb, a mobile phone and a motor – to see how they work, and how they might be reprogrammed to work differently. Her aim is to encourage experiment and discourage fear of failure. Perhaps not the message anyone who has splashed out on an expensive bit of electronics for a child’s Christmas wants to hear, but irresistible all the same.
