On 17 March 1967, the 26-year-old David Sainsbury wrote out a cheque for £5 and established the trust which would become the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Gatsby's purpose was ambitious: to make the world a better place by taking on some of the social, economic and scientific challenges that face humanity. In recent years, Gatsby has spent around £50m annually on charitable activities, and by its 50th anniversary in 2017 it will have spent over £1bn on programmes that range from reducing poverty in Africa to raising the standard of technical education, investigating how plants fight disease, and finding out how the brain works. But despite Gatsby's wide reach and the level of its donations, it has always functioned discreetly and out of the public eye. Georgina Ferry's in-depth account reveals its achievements and invites us to question how the super-rich - and even the moderately affluent - might spend their money more wisely and for the common good.
*Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Marsh Biography Award* The definitive biography of chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the only British woman to win a Nobel prize in the sciences to date. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994) was passionate in her quest to understand the molecules of the living body. She won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964 for her work on penicillin and Vitamin B12, and her study of insulin made her a pioneer in protein crystallography. Fully engaged with the political and social currents of her time, Hodgkin experienced radical change in women's education, the globalisation of science, relationships between East and West, and international initiatives for peace. Georgina Ferry's definitive biography of Britain's first female Nobel prizewinning scientist was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Marsh Biography Award. This revised and updated edition includes a new preface from the author.
Few scientists have thought more deeply about the nature of their calling and its impact on humanity than Max Perutz (1914–2002). Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, lapsed Catholic by religion, he came to Cambridge in 1936 to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. There he began to explore the structures of the molecules that hold the secret of life. In 1940, he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien, only to be brought back and set to work on a bizarre top secret war project. In 1947, he founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA: under his leadership it grew to become the world–famous Laboratory for Molecular Biology. Max himself explored the protein hemoglobin and his work, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today's astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease. Max Perutz's story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life. It has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of extraordinary characters. Max was demanding, passionate and driven but also humorous, compassionate and loving. Small in stature, he became a fearless mountain climber; drawing on his own experience as a refugee, he argued fearlessly for human rights; he could be ruthless but had a talent for friendship. An articulate and engaging advocate of science, he found new problems to engage his imagination until weeks before he died aged 88. About the author: Georgina Ferry is a former staff editor on New Scientist,and contributor to BBC Radio 4's Science Now.Her books include the acclaimed biography Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life(1998); The Common Thread(2002, with Sir John Sulston); and A Computer Called LEO(2003). She lives in Oxford.
Following discussions on scientific biography carried out over the past few decades, this book proposes a kaleidoscopic survey of the uses of biography as a tool to understand science and its context. It offers food for thought on the role played by the gender of the biographer and the biographee in the process of writing. To provide orientation in such a challenging field, some of the authors have accepted to write about their own professional experience while reflecting on the case studies they have been working on. Focusing on (auto)biography may help us to build bridges between different approaches to men and women's lives in science. The authors belong to a variety of academic and professional fields, including the history of science, anthropology, literary studies, and science journalism. The period covered spans from 1732, when Laura Bassi was the first woman to get a tenured professorship of physics, to 2009, when Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider were the first women's team to have won a Nobel Prize in science.
The eccentric story of one of the most bizarre marriages in the history of British business: the invention of the world's first office computer and the Lyons Teashop.
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