Yeah right, but I'm talking peer reviewed proper science, not oh but I know of an example that defies the trend.
Ok you asked for this
Watson and Crick
And the theft of Rosalind Franklins research
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_FranklinIn 1976 with the ink still drying on my A level certificate I rocked up at University College Cardiff with a slightly disappointing result in one of my A levels and got a second chance. A year later with a score of 99% in first year Biochemistry 98% in Chemistry and a mere 75% odd in Zoology (as I said at the interview in front of the Professors of Biochemistry and Organic Chemistry to be allowed proceed to year 2, ‘I wanted to show you your faith in me last year was warranted, and to do that properly, something else had to give, and I knew I only needed 60% to pass the year) I was on my way
As a postgraduate researcher I worked with, and taught medical student practical classes for, Doctor Gillian Powell whose team at Cardiff were renowned for developing an isolated whole organ perfusion system. They removed the hearts and lungs from rats and kept them alive in isolation in culture vessels so they could study all sorts including the actions of nerve toxins. God knows how many of our armed forces stood to benefit from their work on surviving chemical weapons attacks had it come to that in the days when Eric Honiker was the problem Putin is today
Powell became the Professor of Biochemistry when Ken Dodgson succumbed to the disease his research gave him, and sadly Powell was to follow into a coffin a very few short years later for the same reason. The work they were doing had nasty consequences, I am in fact the last man standing from their research group all of whom died of one or other pretty aggressive cancers and I’ve got three hospital appointments next week whose outcomes I do not relish so maybe the reaper has got round to me, who knows.
BUT I digress
Professor Powell was of a generation where women in science were abused in many ways. Like my aunt Sheila Green a multi millionaire from her establishment with her husband of a pharmaceutical and biochemical manufacturing company near Amersham back in the fifties, Powell had the experience of her alma mater trying to wreck her career before it started by denying her admission to her graduation ceremony so as to deny her the award of her degree and the career paths it opened.
In my aunts case she transferred away from Oxbridge to Bristol to finish her first degree in Pharmacy knowing Oxbridge would pull that stunt. That move led her to a practical class working with a chap called George Green snd as they say the rest is history.
But back to Franklin
Powell was studying in the same university where Franklin was a research X Ray Crystallographer.
Watson and Crick were at that time barking up the totally bogus tree that there were THREE, not two, DNA strands in the human DNA helix. One day they were standing in Maurice Wilkins’ lab where Franklin worked and Wilkins showed Crick and Watson her work.
He instantly realised she was on tbe right track and he was utterly wrong, stole her work, published it as his own and took the glory
Powell was standing at the next bench in the lab when this took place
As a researcher in the field myself, Powell told us this account of how women were treated in our field in the past. She made us promise never to forget and to make sure the truth never died and it is with some considerable honour I now take upon myself the duty of the former student of medical science to their former teacher and mentor as required in the Hippocratic oath and relate to you the facts of how women were really treated by bigoted shitheads such as you appear to enjoy following in the footsteps of.
The measures taken by Oxbridge came to naught. Seeing the skullduggery underfoot the General Medical Council and the equivalent trade bodies for Dentistry, Opthalmology and Pharmacy successfully had British law changed so that no longer was it the role of a University to certify a students fitness to practice, that task fell instead to the said trade bodies whose role in this persists to this day. The first university don who tried to conceal from the new General Medical Council the true status of a female graduate of the medical degree course found themselves in the dock at no less a court than the old Bailey where they went down for FRAUD.
Gillian Powell told me she took the day off from her then career at I believe it was Imperial College London to attend the public gallery to hear the sentence and was forcibly removed by the usher for cheering.
After that, the lot of women in science improved.
If you read the account of Franklin you might see (and in my view unfairly) the accusation that the establishment had one last swipe at her, for when Crick and Watson took the Nobel Prize for her work they claimed as theirs, she was excluded from that to
The truth sadly is Franklin had by that time died of ovarian cancer (the reaper having started to collect his dues early, perhaps) and it is a requirement that a prize winner be alive at the time of the award.
This applies to this day. When the committee recognised Patrick Steptoe for his work on IVF and the birth of Louise Brown he had himself passed beyond the veil and the award was actually given to his senior assistant.
Those of us who have worn the lab coat know how the system works and accept why the real hero of the hour is not recognised. It would be good if the public were told but hey ho.
I think Powells words back then had a definite impact on me.
Years later I was standing on a firing range at Warminster where a new helicopter gunship sight was about to be trialled
Some prick with a bucket load of stars on his uniform made a cheap remark about the likelihood this would not hit a barn door having been designed by a woman
Perhaps I over reacted. But I could not help myself. Turning to this piece of shit I said ‘that woman works for me. She came to our team from a joint NASA/JPL/ESA facility. Her main job there, and her finest achievement, was to design the elements that keep an interstellar robotic spacecraft’s radio aligned on an either thousand mile wide ball of rock from tens of millions of miles away
I have here ten pounds (reaching into jacket pocket) that says her gunsight software is capable of blowing your balls clean off at fifteen hundred yards and leave you with enough of your dick still in your hands to piss with.
Nobody took my bet, and it is fair to say I was never invited back to another live fire exercise, but the test proved my faith in the ability of the women I am proud to have had work for me and I really do think I’d have made the late Professor Gillian Powell Ph.D D.Sc F.I.Biol proud of me for my stance.
