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Botanists in the Family

Posted on 30 November 2025 by Athene Donald

It is difficult to know where to begin with this post, since several strands have got intertwined. I guess the prompt for this is, as with my last post, the meeting at the Royal Society celebrating women from the past who, whether or not they would have identified themselves as scientists/natural philosophers, certainly got involved with the scientific endeavour and made significant contributions. I did intend to write about Margaret Cavendish, but that will have to wait, as I’ve disappeared down a genealogical rabbit hole. This was prompted by seeing the name Francis Boott on one of the slides, I think certifying some botanical specimen. Francis Boott (1792-1863) was American by birth, a secretary to the Linnean Society, a physician in whose London house the first recorded use of an anaesthetic for a dental procedure was recorded – and (if I’ve got my generations right), my great, great, great grandfather. His mother-in-law was Derby-based Lucy Hardcastle (1771-1834), a botanist of some distinction and acquaintance of Erasmus Darwin (one of my heroes, as a polymath) and, more particularly, his two illegitimate daughters. It is not for nothing that my grandmother’s middle name was the otherwise bizarre choice of Hardcastle.

Lucy Hardcastle befriended Francis Boott when he was on an extended stay in Britain and, after a family disagreement when he went back to the USA, he continued his interactions with her upon his permanent return to this country. In due course he married Lucy’s daughter Mary and they moved to London. Through his introduction, Hardcastle started a correspondence with Sir James Edward Smith, a leading botanist of the day and the founder of the Linnean Society. She did many delicate drawings of plants and in 1830 she published a book about Linnean classification. Whereas her acquaintance Erasmus Darwin wrote a long poem in rhyming couplets on the same theme entitled The Loves of the Plants (1789), when Hardcastle wrote her book she carefully avoided the use of the words male, female and sex, no doubt feeling such words were inappropriate for a woman (particularly one who ran a school for girls), although the sexual parts of the plants were clear in her illustrations. I learned all this and much more from a fairly recent pamphlet about her life, The Rediscovery of Lucy Hardcastle, written by Jonathan and Anne Powers, available through the Derby Museum.[1] This museum holds a number of her drawings and letters. All this I have picked up in the last couple of weeks since the Royal Society event.

Lucy Hardcastle, Capsula, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons, London, 1830, p. 75.

Lucy Hardcastle, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons (London: Thomas Richardson, 1830)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But then, in trying to work out quite how many generations I needed to go back to get to Lucy Hardcastle, I fell into another rabbit hole concerning another botanical relative, or perhaps more precisely, a well-known Victorian gardener: the Reverend Charles Wolley Dod (1826-1904), who was my great great grandfather and whose son Francis married Lucy Hardcastle’s great granddaughter, Annette Mary Clarke. The genealogy is a nightmare to disentangle because, in the way of Victorian families which ran out of male heirs, surnames got changed along the route, and often the same first names were recycled. My reading is that the Rev Charles was born Charles Hurt, married Mary Wolley who then became Wolley Dod upon the death of the relevant male heirs. The Rev Charles then changed his name formally to Wolley Dod in 1868 and in 1877 acceded to the family estate in Cheshire. Up till then he had been a Master at Eton, but thereafter he could use the gardens around the Hall to experiment and breed new varieties. He interacted with the eminent gardener Gertrude Jekyll who said of him:

‘of all these friendly gardeners, the one whom I felt to be the most valuable was Rev C.  Wolley Dod, scholar, botanist and great English gentleman; an enthusiast for plant life; an experienced gardener; and the kindest of instructors.’

(quoted in Huntia). He is depicted in one of the south nave aisle’s stained glass windows of Liverpool Cathedral.

Coming full circle to the Royal Society event, that same Huntia article says how Ellen Willmott, would stay with the Wolley Dod’s and use the Rev Charles as an advisor. Ellen Willmott (1858-1934) was one of the many women discussed at the Royal Society, covering her role in financing botanical explorations and the importance of the role she played in a widespread network of collectors. She was identified as a central node in such network analysis, with a huge circle of correspondents. She used her family money to employ over one hundred gardeners at her home as well as covering the costs of international teams seeking new plants. Wilmott was able to penetrate the scientific establishment, becoming one of the first women fellows of the Linnean Society.

None of this has any bearing on why I was enthusiastic about science at school. I vaguely knew about the Rev Charles Wolley Dod, because we had a rose in our small garden referred to as the Wolley Dod rose, but he was never described to me as a biologist (after all, he wasn’t one, although he carried out a lot of plant breeding). And, despite my ornithological inclinations I was put off biology at school anyhow by a formidable teacher as much as by the then curriculum. But it is interesting to see these different strands come together, all prompted by attending an event celebrating 80 years since the election of the first women to the Royal Society – and thereafter making extensive use of the web to track down relationships.

[1] For what it’s worth, this pamphlet debunks the story in Desmond King Hele’s life of Erasmus Darwin, where he suggests – based on correspondence between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton – that Lucy Hardcastle (née Swift) was actually a third illegitimate daughter of Erasmus. Sadly, therefore, I must conclude I am no descendant of his!

Posted in Ellen Wilmott, Erasmus Darwin, Francis Boott, Lucy Hardcastle, Women in science | Comments Off on Botanists in the Family

Where Were the Women?

Posted on 23 November 2025 by Athene Donald

I know that many people feel the Royal Society is a stuffy, white male institution, unwelcoming to women and other minorities, but I cannot agree. It may have had a long history of excluding women, but no more and, in my own personal experience, not over the past couple of decades at least. This year they are celebrating 80 years since the first women – Katherine Lonsdale and Marjory Stevenson – were elected with a series of events. Much more about these women and related events can be found out here. As part of that celebration, I attended a one-day meeting regarding historical perspectives. There will be further events in the coming months, including the unveiling of further portraits of women. For the current celebrations, they have acquired, on loan, the well-known painting of Caroline Herschel. There is no doubt the images around the building favour the male, but less so than when I was elected. Portraits take time to produce (not to mention are expensive), but in the short term there is also an excellent exhibition of photos of current women scientists that has been created for this year’s celebrations.

The meeting celebrated women active in science-related areas over the centuries, starting with Emilie du Châtelet, in a series of vignettes. In my own book Not Just for the Boys (now available in paperback too!), I included some brief accounts of some women from the past, including du Châtelet and Herschel, but I learned about a number of others whose names I’d not come across before this week. I’ve written in the past that, unlike female composers, where more and more from the past are receiving current attention, I didn’t expect many female scientists to emerge from history to claim a place in the scientific record, but perhaps I need to change my views, certainly as regards from the nineteenth century on. I believe in due course the recording of the meeting will be put online, so others can check who these women are.

Mary Wortley Montagu on the mystery of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’sMy illustration is of Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, with her splendid turban/hat. She spent a decade in (what is now) Turkey when her husband was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and there came across the local habit of inoculation against smallpox. In the harems and Turkish baths frequented only by women, she could see that, unlike herself and so many of her British compatriots, the skins of Turkish women were not scarred from the effects of smallpox. She became convinced of the power of the practice in providing good protection against the disease that killed so many back home (including her brother and nearly herself), and disfigured many more. When she returned to England, she was vocal in support of the practice, and had her own daughter inoculated (her son had been inoculated back in Turkey). For these actions she was much reviled, including by the medical profession.

Although not a scientist in the modern meaning of the word, she had studied how the practice had been carried out in Turkey, not by medics but by more lowly folk. She noted they were careful to introduce only tiny amounts into the patient and then isolate them from others as a mild form of the disease took hold. In contrast, the medical profession in England, even when carrying out an inoculation, believed purging and bleeding were what needed to accompany the incision, not isolation, with predictable results. However, the royal family in due course inoculated their own children, which conferred a degree of respectability on the practice.  By introducing the practice into Western Europe,  she undoubtedly will have saved many lives. It was another 75 years before Edward Jenner came up with the idea of vaccination using cowpox rather than smallpox itself.

Let me single out one other woman from the many discussed:  Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901). She was a so-called ‘economic entomologist’, in other words someone who studied pests which attacked crops to economic disadvantage. She built up an enormous circle of correspondents, creating what we might these days call a group of citizen scientists. She was much more formally a scientist than Montagu, including being appointed consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society and lecturer at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. She also had something of a global reputation, winning awards from, for instance, both Russia and France. She became the first woman to be elected to Fellowship of the Meteorological Society in 1878 and the first woman to be awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of Edinburgh (1900), shortly before her death.  Nevertheless, she was very conscious of being largely excluded from the male scientific establishment and hers is not a well-known name. Apparently, Edinburgh’s cloud computing network is known as Eleanor, and I’m wondering how many of their undergraduates – or staff – have any idea why.

The day ended with Stella Butler and myself talking about what has changed since the first women FRS’s were elected in 1945 (three years, as I have to remind myself ruefully, before my own university even got to the point of awarding full degrees to women). Stella has just published a book Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Science, which tells the story of the first eleven women elected. Again, many of their names will not be well known. Most people will have heard of Dorothy Hodgkin, and possibly Kathleen Lonsdale (both, incidentally, very committed to promoting world peace), but are less likely to have come across the names of some of the others (in order of election after the first two in 1945: Agnes Arber [1946]; Mary Cartwright [1947]; Dorothy Hodgkin {1947]; Muriel Robertson [1947]; Sidnie Manton [1948]; Dorothy Needham [1948]; Honor Fell [1952]; Marthe Vogt [1952]; and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers [1954]). A group of women, none of whom were professors at the time of election, and many of whom survived for at least substantial parts of their careers on short-term and precarious contracts.

It is interesting to note that, despite the early nomination in 1902 of Hertha Ayrton to be a fellow, a nomination that was rejected on the grounds of her being married (you can find out more about her in the film that Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and I were involved with as part of the Royal Society’s 350th celebrations), there was a long period after the time the Royal Society had had to accept the legal argument that women were eligible to be elected, when strangely not one was nominated (from 1922 to 1943). You can read the details of how the first women came to be nominated, and how the politics of making sure the existing (male) fellows would accept the election of women came to pass in Stella’s book.

Once women were elected, it wasn’t long before they were serving on the Royal Society’s Council, so it would seem after the momentous step had been taken, they were fully included in the fellowship. As I say, I always found the organisation welcoming. I was struck that after I had remarked on this at the meeting, and how it was noticeably different from my experiences in Cambridge at around the same time, another Fellow came up to me to say how that chimed with her own experience, albeit in another university and more recently. Interestingly, I’ve just been going through a transcript of an oral history I recorded for the AIP (the interview was actually conducted about 18 months ago) in which I talk about this experience. There I stated about this time and how I had found the Royal Society more welcoming and inclusive than Cambridge:

‘I think just because they always treated me as a person, not as a woman. I’m just one of them, as it were, instead of being othered.’

Probably quite a succinct way of expressing the feelings of the years around my election in 1999.

There is much more about the historical aspect of women in science, those connected with the Royal Society and more broadly, as well as the current situation and the work that is now being done by the Society on their website. They may still be way off parity in the fellowship (I think they’ve reached around a third of the fellowship being women), but the numbers have been rising steadily. That’s not to say there isn’t still some negativity towards women lurking in some corners – but that’s true everywhere in our world, and probably getting worse. It’s not time to give up the good work and the fights where needed.

Posted in Eleanor Ormerod, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Royal Society, Stella Butler, Women in science | Comments Off on Where Were the Women?

The Importance of Community

Posted on 16 November 2025 by Athene Donald

I mentioned the book by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, AI and the Science of Being Human, in a previous blogpost. I love its optimism about how all of us could work with AI without letting it take us over simply to make money for Silicon Valley folk, although I’m not sure I share it. The idea that groups of individuals, in their daily lives or at work, might ‘fight back’, as it were, take control of the messaging so that humanity not money wins, is wonderfully positive, but it is based around imagined ‘stories’ as much as current reality. Can we get there from here?

One thing that is very obvious about how the authors describe their new world, is that it works via a sense of community, of people coming together. As it happens Maynard was a PhD student in my own department, the Cavendish Laboratory. We must have overlapped in the department, but I’m not sure we interacted back then, and my infrequent exchanges with him since have purely been digital. Nevertheless, he describes something I well remember: the importance of the Cavendish canteen and the tea breaks we all enjoyed.

‘I remember tea breaks and seminars from when I was a grad student, where we’d get together in person and talk about everything and nothing; in the process sparking ideas and hashing out new possibilities. Now we’re all in our offices (or more likely at home), doors closed, “connecting” through email chains that nobody fully reads.’

Those tea breaks were fundamental to the rhythm of the day for condensed matter physicists, both when I was a student myself and also, later, as a young lecturer. Every research group had its own timing for turning up and its own table(s) to sit at. So, you had the opportunity to talk casually about politics, or football – or science – on a daily basis with everyone else in your group. Group sizes varied from a handful to dozens of students and postdocs, and sometimes group technicians joined in (although workshop technicians had their own space in the comfortable chairs by the window).

It built a strong sense of community, which was often extended to the pub in the evenings. Different groups had a reputation for being more or less friendly. Some academic staff were more likely to be seen in the tea room than others, but in principle you could meet and engage with anyone there. Indeed, it was in the tea room that I recall Brian Pippard (already retired from the Cavendish Chair, the senior chair in the department, but still much in evidence) questioning why I wanted to get a research grant, when I admitted my first application had been turned down. He was definitely in the ‘you can do it all with string and sealing wax’ school (although for him, this would have been along with fantastic workshops and technicians to help build the apparatus, which were properly funded by the department under the funding mechanisms of the day.)

I mention this was the case for condensed matter physicists because, as I recall, the astronomers and high energy physicists always stayed away, with their own tea room(s). In due course the theoreticians got their own fancy coffee machine and were no longer to be seen, and over time that whole habit was essentially lost, except possibly amongst the workshop technicians for whom the 30 (I believe) minute breaks were sacrosanct. I note the new Cavendish building, recently fully opened as the Ray Dolby Centre, has preserved the idea of a large tea room, open to anyone without the need to get through the security gates with a University card. It will be interesting to see how it is utilised. I was struck, on arranging a meeting with an active member of the department (as I clearly am no longer) that they chose the canteen as a place to meet, rather than their office.

That is all a long-winded way to say that personal interactions matter, access to people you might not otherwise see during the course of your day crouched over some apparatus or screen. That sense of a community where you can ask naïve questions over a cup of tea as well as discuss the latest gossip is important for science to progress. As Abbott and Maynard say ‘Digital spaces optimize for transaction, not relationships…’ I’ve not forgotten the last huge US conference I went to, now many years ago but already people were sitting in the corridors staring at phones/laptops/tablets rather than attending the talks themselves. I found it deeply dispiriting and have avoided all such conferences since. I didn’t travel across the Atlantic simply to read the emails I could have read more comfortably from my desk.

Abbott and Maynard stress the importance of working in close collaboration and discussions with others in the context of AI, neighbours as well as work colleagues, and the importance of social interactions form the backdrops to another book I’m currently reading: Pete Etchell’s Unlocked about screen time and whether or not it is bad for us, particularly for adolescents. There is mass media discussion of how bad staring at a screen can be for teenagers, but the evidence is far from clear. In part this is because looking at email is vastly different from TikTok, which is different again from gaming or watching a film, let alone doom-scrolling. Obvious though that point is, it isn’t usually possible to detect that level of nuance in headlines. Nevertheless, people matter to adolescents as to PhD students and indeed to (just about) all of us. I am very conscious of this as a retiree, where I no longer have a place of work to go to and could just spend my life staring at a screen, even if I’m reading books on my iPad rather than getting worked up by what I find on social media.

The pandemic upended all our lives, for the current generation of adolescents and those a bit older probably more than for us older folk. I appreciate that I can give webinars without stirring from my desk, or attend committees without suffering the vagaries of the trains (Cambridge to London trains seem to have been particularly unreliable recently), but if chairing I find hybrid meetings unsatisfactory however convenient. I hope we will not voluntarily return to never being in the same room as other people as the default setting which was forced on us during the Covid era; or let AI tell us what it wants us to do, without human intervention and discussion.

Posted in AI, Brian Pippard, Ray Dolby Centre, Research, Science Culture, screens, tea break | Comments Off on The Importance of Community

Being Practical (Or Not)

Posted on 9 November 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended a workshop on the future of practical science in schools at the Royal Society.  Driven in part by the findings of the 2023 Science Education Tracker, that students at secondary school were frustrated they had little opportunity to do hands-on work themselves, as opposed to watching either the teacher do an experiment, or simply a video of that experiment, the meeting explored different aspects of the issue for both primary and secondary schools. The meeting was held, as it happened, the day before the publication of the Curriculum and Assessment Review. However, when the 197 pages of the report did land (metaphorically) on desks, its remarks about school practical science were somewhat bland. Recognizing that ‘practical work is not always effective’ it recommends that:

‘practical science activity – focused on high-quality teacher demonstration and hands on work by pupils – be underpinned by clearly defined purposes in the Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content.’

One can hardly disagree with such a statement, but it could be argued that is more about prescription for the teacher than feeding curiosity in the student.

When I think about my own school science days – as I was encouraged to do when talking about my personal experiences in the opening talk of the meeting – our lessons, as far as I recall, were largely based around ‘doing’ science. Right from the beginning of secondary school we were expected to do experiments, involving things such as dilute acids (no goggles provided) and open flames from Bunsen burners with tripods and asbestos mats. It was a different world, in which health and safety was not visibly considered, although I don’t remember any significant accidents. Lessons consisted of a teacher starting off with some explanations and then we were set loose. We had plenty of opportunity to explore and get used to apparatus.

In my talk, I discussed the A Level Physics course I had done, a new course just getting underway from the Nuffield Foundation at that time. It must have been very demanding on our teacher, since – as a pilot – she only got the material to teach a few weeks beforehand. There were no textbooks, everything came in a loose-leaf file. One of the innovative ways of working was to carry out an extended investigation. Having read The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon (an inspiring book, then as now, and one I wrote about back in the days when the Guardian had science blogs, because it was so influential on me) to supplement the work on materials we did, I chose to attempt to replicate one of the key experiments described there. That was on glass fibres and related to fracture mechanics. The theoretical details don’t matter, but when preparing my talk I went back to look at those teenage diaries I referred to in my last post. Of this attempt at independent experimentation, I wrote:

This time I did some work on glass fibres – and I managed to burn myself while making one – not very badly, but inconveniently.

Nobody seemed too bothered about this accident.

Let’s face it, I was then – and throughout my career – not very dexterous. I broke things repeatedly during my PhD, and my experiences with chemistry were equally unfortunate. Again, my diary tells the tale:

‘Had our first chemistry practical. We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.’

By the time I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, and finding myself needing to continue with Chemistry to my annoyance, I hadn’t got much better with my hands.  This time quoting from a letter to my mother, I described my first undergraduate practical lab:

‘I got myself well and truly stained bright yellow by a salt of picric acid all over my hands (I should have been wearing gloves but took them off to wash up some apparatus). Also on my face, since I kept touching my face when adjusting safety goggles.’

I literally lived to tell the tale, and I don’t really want to know whether the salt was cancerous or explosive or any of the other things I’ve been told.

However, amusing and embarrassing though these anecdotes may be, the reality is science in my day was full of practical work at least from secondary school on (there was nothing that was described as science at my primary). It was striking how many people in the Royal Society audience last week had also done one or more of the Nuffield courses of the day. Courses that had practical work at their heart, in stark contrast to what schools can offer now. Everything from a packed curriculum, to teachers having to teach outside their specialism and therefore comfort zone; from lack of space to lack of cash; and from school accountability measures to absence of crucial equipment, practical science just doesn’t have the same focus in science lessons today as in my own, often as not. Yet, as the most recent Science Education Tracker shows, students miss being able to do their own practical work. It was a motivating factor for students wanting to do science for more than half of those in KS3. By making that a rare treat rather than something that they can routinely expect to engage in, we are turning students off pursuing science thereafter.

What many students get regularly as part of their lessons is watching a video demonstration. It may in principle have the same learning outcomes as doing the identical experiment themselves, but in practice almost certainly it will be less memorable and not give them ‘muscle memory’ of how to do things. Or, as in my case, how not to do things. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) had little to say about these matters. It explicitly states it won’t be discussing the teacher workforce. Yet, a science teacher who is teaching outside their own speciality, may not have the confidence to talk around a video to help the students understand what is going on, let alone have the resources or the confidence to do the experiment themselves. The evidence the conference was presented with showed that – in terms of student learning – a well-prepared and judiciously commented on video or, even better, teacher demonstration can be very effective for learning. But passively watching a demonstration with no additional elucidation from the teacher is not.

School practicals should feed curiosity as well as learning. Finding out what doesn’t work and why and how to use key apparatus ought to be central to the science curriculum. Unless schools are enabled – through adequate funding, curriculum time and supply of teachers in each of the sciences – to deliver effective practical work, we are short-changing our students, whether or not they are going to be the scientists of the future. It is disappointing that the CAR had so little to say about this.

Posted in Curriculum and Assessment Review, education, Science Education Tracker, teachers | Comments Off on Being Practical (Or Not)

Is That What Makes Me Human?

Posted on 2 November 2025 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recently published book AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. I found it a fascinating – and indeed optimistic – book, which prompted a lot of reflection, although not directly because I’ve been exploring AI myself. I haven’t (at least as yet), but the underlying theme of what it takes to be human resonated with me, even without the AI bit. I may have more to say about other aspects of the book another time, but for the moment I want to pause and think about one of the many questions the book poses:

What remains uniquely mine? – Name the experiences, feelings or qualities that can’t be captured by algorithms.

Thinking about what is ‘uniquely mine’ I would hazard a guess is not something many of us dwell on too often, at least if our primary focus is science. However, that sentiment certainly gave me pause for thought. I looked up and around the room I work in, and my eyes fell on the objects casually sitting on and around one of the (many) bookcases in the room in which I now ‘work’ (given I’m retired). It struck me how much these are symbols of the people and things that matter to me, or who have contributed to who I am. A strange collection they happen to be, but feeding into my being.

There is a conductor’s baton. This belonged to my grandmother who, in my teenage years, expended much effort every autumn on being part of running a conductors’ school; my grandparents lived with us. This was a weeklong course for those who lead things like WI choirs and other amateur bodies. My grandmother was undoubtedly musical, and right to the end would play Chopin mazurkas and polonaises with great panache but, in my lifetime, I never knew her conduct anything. Nevertheless, when we cleared my mother’s house after her death, this baton turned up and I couldn’t bear to throw it out.

Most of the other items on this bookshelf were also tied to that house-emptying, along with some of the books on the shelf itself. How can one throw out appalling Victorian tracts given to a great- or even great-grandmother as a Sunday school prize, for attendance or good behaviour? I can’t imagine reading the actual books, but inscribed books have sentiment attached it’s hard to dispose of.  Then there are a couple of pieces of damaged porcelain that were always part of my childhood. Perhaps they were valuable once, but they surely aren’t in their damaged state. I suspect anything actually valuable of this ilk was sold when we were on our beam-ends when I was around 10 and bankruptcy stalked the family.

Perhaps the item I treasure most is a print of brent geese by the naturalist, broadcaster and artist Peter Scott, dated 1939. I remember buying this – a scruffy somewhat crumpled print at the time, unframed – at a jumble sale (as I say, money was tight) for my mother’s birthday when I was a young teenager. She kept it by her bed all her life, and I treasure it because she treasured it. We brought it back to our house, and now that it is flattened and suitably framed it looks rather good. It reminds me of the days she and I used to go out birdwatching, including with the London Natural History Society’s coach trips to the Essex and Kent mudflats where we often saw brent geese. An atmospheric painting, bringing back memories of freezing cold days at the coast. But they were happy days out to places we’d never have got to without the LNHS (my mother never drove).
brent geeseHanging over the bookshelf is a penguin mobile that we must have given my daughter as a small child. It hung in her room till she left home. Indeed, it hung in her empty room gathering dust for many years and I rescued it before our house was gutted and refurbished, and now here it is.

The final item is a bronze (?) figurine of a woman standing tall and empowered. It’s about 30cm tall and very heavy. This was given to me by colleagues in the University when I stood down as the Gender Equality Champion as a vote of thanks. It meant a lot to me that they had clubbed together to give me this as a measure of appreciation for what I’d done, or at least tried to do, to support women across the university. It definitely symbolises empowerment and was created by a local artist.

So, in some ways that is a summary of significant parts of my life and the fact that I’ve kept these objects must say something about me. Is that what makes me human, because an algorithm probably wouldn’t have collected a random array like this? At least, I assume not.

Of course, that is by no means all of my past that I treasure and which I keep upstairs in nooks and crannies. There’s also my school attaché case, given to me when I was still at primary school and which – I suspect – I took in every day rather than the traditional satchel. It contains much of my past too, in the form of letters from my husband before we were married, the single letter from my father I still have with me, and my childish diaries. Curiously I had recourse to these this week: preparing a talk for the Royal Society’s meeting on practical science at school on Tuesday, I was amused to look back at what I wrote about my own days of school practicals. Suffice it to say, I was not good at them and safety issues were less on people’s minds then than now. I once nearly set fire to the chemistry lab and I had this to say about my first A Level chemistry lesson:

We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.

I lived to tell the tale, and to gather all these memories – solid and ephemeral – around me. Is that what makes me human?

 

Posted in AI, Anthony Maynard, memories, Peter Scott, Science Culture | Comments Off on Is That What Makes Me Human?

What I Read In October

Posted on 2 November 2025 by Henry Gee

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert: Shibboleth A campus novel for the febrile age of social media warfare, Peermohamed skewers the modern obsession with identity politics, and how intellectually overstuffed but emotionally immature undergraduates exploit modish ideas of Diversity and Inclusion for their own ends, going to ridiculous lengths to claim that they belong, however tenuously, to some exploited minority (just as long as it’s not the Jews). It’s not Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury, to be sure, but then we live in less innocent times.

Elizabeth Bear: Ancestral Night Haimey Dz spends her working life cruising the galaxy for salvage. But when she and her crew find signs of interstellar genocide, she gets embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with space pirates, who seem to know more about her own identity than she does herself. An entertaining modern space opera, full of exotic aliens, chthonic megastructures and mind-blasting physics.

Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies My review for this book got so long that it demanded its own spot. So here it is.

Florence Knapp The Names In the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987, Cora, ex-ballerina and mother of two, is on her way to register the name of her newborn son. But what should she call him? Her husband insists that he be Gordon — his own name, and that of his father. She, in contrast, rather fancies Julian. Her nine-year-old daughter Maia favours Bear. What follows is a three-way sliding-doors novel exploring the consequences of each of these choices. It sounds fun and fluffy, but it’s not. If like me you are appalled by the very thought of domestic violence (and how common it is) then this will be a difficult if excellent read.

Richard Osman The Impossible Fortune Yes, the Man on the Telly is at it again, with yet another whodunit featuring the ageing sleuths from the Thursday Murder Club. If you’ve read any of his others you’ll know what to expect: pin-sharp plotting affectionately wrapped in warm humour.

Mick Herron Slow Horses I had heard of this from a televisual adaptation (which I have not seen). The ‘Slow Horses’ are MI5 agents who, as a result of errors professional or personal find themself exiled to the dispiriting Slough House, a sin-bin in which they are condemned to a life of pointless paper-shuffling by the Jabbaesque Jackson Lamb. But a plot by a group of extremists to behead their hostage on the internet brings the Slow Horses in from the cold. Well-written if slow in places, Slow Horses is less about MI5 than the narcissism of management in any large. sclerotic organisation. Unlike some other spy-thriller writers, the author has no direct experience of spook work, though he knows a thing or two about the dead hand of HR.

Michael Bond Animate In this robust raspberry to human exceptionalism, Michael Bond shows that the lengths to which people have gone to justify our exalted estate only point up our close relationship with the animals with whom we share this planet. [DISCLAIMER: I was sent this by the publisher for San endorsement].

Mick Herron Dead Lions Slower horses.

 

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Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?

Posted on 2 November 2025 by Henry Gee

What follows is a review of Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies – it was going to be part of my monthly book blog but the review got so long I felt it should have a place all of its very own. So here it is.

This is the best book I wish I had never read. Written by two experts  in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, it makes a very persuasive case that advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) could produce a program whose interests would differ fundamentally from ours, and wipe us out. This could happen very soon — within a few years.

At the core of the AI issue is something called the Alignment Problem. That is, the task of developing an AI with goals that align with our own. This, however, is very hard to do, because AIs are not crafted, but grown. AIs are computer programs that take inputs (vast quantities of information) and outputs (language, speech, solutions to scientific problems, and so on) separated by many layers of processing whose parameters can be tweaked by training the AI to provide the desired outcome.

Perhaps the most famous example of an AI is ChatGPT,  which can produce rich and detailed responses  to simple requests. For example, I asked ChatGPT to ‘recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare’. The result you can see here.

There may be trillions of  parameters in the many layers of the AI opera cake, and during each training run they are modified by ‘weights’, of which there are also many trillions. It is beyond the capacity of mere human beings to catalogue all the parameters and weights, and impossible to understand the relationship between the input, the changing combination of parameters and weights, and the output.

This is perhaps not surprising. AIs emerged from neural networks, which in turn emerged from models of the visual cortex, a layered structure of the brain that turns nerve impulses from the eyes into images. It’s now possible, for example, to isolate neurons that detect features of a scene, such as edges — but we still don’t fully understand what associates a particular pattern of neural firing with the detection of an edge, or any other feature of a scene. And if such seemingly fundamental aspects of neuronal processing remain elusive, it’s no surprise that we cannot understand how a particular pattern of firing in the brain translates as, say, Swann’s memory of dipping a madeleine into his tea. If the structure of AIs is modelled on the visual cortex, then, it follows what really goes on in the murky region between the inputs of an AI and its outputs defies understanding.

This situation is absolutely ripe for unintended consequences. One might, for example, design an AI to elicit happy and satisfied responses from human participants (customers, friends on social media, business contacts). These responses feed back into the AI, which might seek to elicit happy outcomes from anything, irrespective of whether it is human. It might, for example, be happier when fed random strings of rubbish. In which case human involvement becomes irrelevant. This is an example of a misaligned AI. There are already examples of AIs that exhibit unanticipated or ‘weird’ behaviour (Yudkowsky and Soares list some). In some circumstances, AIs give the results users want to hear, even if the advice is illogical or even dangerous.

Screenshot 2025-11-01 at 10.24.45

A dangerously sycophantic AI. Recently.

There are increasing reports of AIs that cheat, lie, blackmail, deliberately underperform, and even (in one laboratory test) plot the murder of a human being that wishes to turn them off. It is no great leap, then, to imagine the creation of an AI capable of subverting human intentions entirely to the extent that humanity is driven to extinction.

The authors are coy about how this might happen (though they do offer some scenarios). End results, they say, may be inevitable, even if the precise path towards that end is unpredictable. For example, if you play chess against Stockfish, currently the world’s best chess program, you will almost certainly lose, though the precise moves you and Stockfish make are not predictable. So, extinction might start with a perfect storm of factors, including blackmail, extortion and espionage, and progress to the kinds of massive cyber-attacks that corporations are experiencing with increasing frequency (causing a great deal of human disruption and hardship). It’s not hard to imagine the disruption a rogue AI could do to power grids, air-traffic control, banking systems and so on in our increasingly networked, fragile and non-linear world, and, with a little imagination, biological laboratories. Would an AI need a human catspaw for things like this? Not necessarily — it would be easy to imagine a video call in which the research director of a lab asks their scientists to create certain chemicals or strings of DNA or contagious viruses, but the research director is in fact an AI-generated deepfake. All this should be quite enough to give anyone the willies, but Yudkowsky and Soares go a bit overboard here (and so damage their credibility to those of us not used to apocalyptic SF)  with invocations of AIs using molecule-by-molecule nano-engineering of ribosomes and scenarios in which a rogue super-AI boils away the Earth’s oceans and strip-mines the entire Solar System for energy and computational substrate, before heading off into the Galaxy.

This book was published hardly a month ago, and most of the advances in AI research they cite are no more than a year or two old. Progress in AI research is happening at amazing speed, so it is entirely possible that we’ll start to see such rogue events very soon, if they haven’t started already. The authors compare AI development to nuclear weapons, and advocate the kinds of treaties and safeguards that have kept the world from nuclear war, including regular inspection, legal sanction, and even use of military force to bomb rogue data centres. They could have cited the American bombing of Iranian nuclear weapons laboratories using 30,000-pound ‘bunker busters’, the most powerful conventional weapons that exist, but perhaps this occurred after the book went to press.

There are alternative views, however. Some think that the risks posed by AI are overhyped. Others feel that although AIs might indeed do a lot of damage, it might not be quite as apocalyptic as Yudkowsky and Soares claim. There are many precedents for techno-doom that never came to pass. Back in the 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to famine and civilisational threat within a decade. In the 1990s, nanotechnology was going to create self-replicating nanobots that would turn everything into grey goo. The turn of the year 2000 didn’t witness devastation wrought by a Millennium Virus. Yudkowsky and Soares’ book seems very much in that Doom-Scrolling tradition. It has the same febrile, heightened tone as Ehrlich’s, even closing with a plea to protest, and lobby elected representatives. This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong of course. In the end, the boy who cried ‘wolf’ was right.

The  book has had decidedly mixed reviews (it gets slaughtered in The Atlantic). However, an increasing number of people feel that even if it’s not likely to kill us all, AI is too hot to handle and should be better regulated, yet hardly dare speak frankly about it in case they either frighten people into inaction or get fired. In the end I felt a sense of despair and helplessness. Yudkowsky and Soares’ parting shot, assuring us that ‘where there’s life there’s hope’ rang kind of hollow. However, they do say that people lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation for the entire Cold War and still got on with their ordinary lives. My wife’s motto is ‘Not Dead Yet’, which I remind her is a great motto. but a lousy epitaph.

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About LinkedIn

Posted on 30 October 2025 by Frank Norman

I’m a member of my local U3A branch’s social media group. A few of us meet regularly to learn about social media and associated topics, taking turns to present. This week I gave a talk about LinkedIn. I don’t really consider myself an expert but I’ve been on it since 2006 so I have some knowledge of and views about it. It was a chance for me to reflect on the platform and my use (and non-use) of it, and to explore its history and how it is distinctive.

LinkedIn logo

Introduction to LinkedIn

In some ways LinkedIn is just like other social media platforms: members have a profile and they can post stuff. But in addition LinkedIn has a defined purpose. Its mission is:

To connect the world’s professionals, so 
they can be more productive and successful

I think this sets it apart from other general social media sites.

It’s not the biggest social media platform but it is substantial. Launched in 2003 it has nearly 1 billion users across more than 200 countries and territories.  300 million of those are classed as ‘monthly active users’. In its basic form it is free to use, but you can pay for a premium subscription. Since 2016 LinkedIn has been owned by Microsoft.

The biggest reason for using it is job seeking/recruiting, with knowledge sharing/professional networking a close second. Businesses and freelancers use it to advertise and reach customers. It’s also used for data mining.

You are probably already a user of LinkedIn, or at least have an account there. One estimate said that there are 45 million users in the UK, which I find hard to believe.

Jobs

I have posted job vacancies on LinkedIn, but never used it to look for jobs myself. A couple of times I’ve been contacted through LinkedIn by job agencies. I think the premium subscriptions can be useful if you’re seriously jobhunting, giving you additional features and communication options. For recruiters too there is a premium service that would be worth it if you are hiring frequently.

One source says that 65 million people search for jobs on LinkedIn each week and there are more than 12 million applications through the site daily. Over three million new hires each year owe something to LinkedIn. The number of job adverts on LinkedIn is ever-changing, but I’ve read one estimate that there are 14 million open jobs there. I’ve also read that up to 60% of job postings there may be fake, so be warned.

Data mining

Some people use LinkedIn for data mining, either by simple web-scraping or by paying for access to the LinkedIn API.  You can use it for  general market research, trend analysis or competitor analysis, or for lead generation. The huge volume of data in LinkedIn also attracts academic researchers. I heard a very interesting talk from someone who’d carried out diversity research using LinkedIn data (eg proportion of women working in IT).

The users

Who are the site’s users? There are personal accounts (individual users) and corporate accounts (businesses).  It is reported that 57% of LinkedIn users are male and 43% are female.  Nearly 60% are aged 25-34, and 78% are outside the USA. Plenty more statistics are available about the geographical spread and extent of usage in different industries.

Knowledge sharing – your timeline – the algorithm

Your profile on LinkedIn is closely tied with your professional profile and employer, so there’s a strong incentive to behave. In my experience people on LinkedIn are reasonably well-behaved, but your mileage may vary.  Much genuinely useful and interesting information is shared, though sometimes it comes across as ‘look at me’ or ‘hire me!’ or ‘buy my product’. Posts about career milestones (promotions, new jobs etc) will usually generate many congratulatory comments that are more about social connection than anything else.

There are also groups – these are sometimes linked with real world groups. They can help you to reach beyond your immediate network.

Your timeline is created partly by who you follow and partly by the LinkedIn algorithm. That’s a recommendation system that decides which posts appear in each user’s news feed.  It filters and ranks content so that your feed is filled with posts that are interesting and relevant to you. It doesn’t have the problems associated with some other platforms  and LinkedIn explicitly says the platform “is not designed for virality”. I think that’s very important.

Sourcegeek says there are three main elements to the algorithm:

Components of the LinkedIn algorithm

Screenshot

If you want advice on how to get better engagement on LinkedIn you can read a 123-page report about the algorithm, full of tips.

LinkedIn and me

I joined LinkedIn in 2006, just because it seemed like something worth exploring and various people I knew had joined. It had a very pushy email invite system back then so it was hard to avoid. Once a few people in your circle had joined up you kept receiving invitations to join up too. I’m not sure if they still do all of that.

I wasn’t looking to change job so actually I used it very little at first. At some point I noticed that people were posting announcements and small articles. Some of these generated comments, even discussions, so LinkedIn became a place I visited to read stuff. Much more recently the changes at Twitter/X pushed more people to post content on LinkedIn instead of Twitter.

For me, with interests in research libraries, scholarly publishing, research culture, workplace wellbeing and DEI, I’ve found LinkedIn has plenty of content of interest.

I also use it to find out about people. Quite often when I search a person’s name in a general search engine their LinkedIn profile is among the top results. The profiles on LinkedIn include educational background and work experience, and the profile summary for a person highlights their recent posts and comments on LinkedIn so it’s good for giving you a quick impression of who they are.

LinkedIn is a successful business

Its three main income streams are adverts, premium personal subscriptions and recruiter subscriptions. It was expected to generate $6.79 billion through advertising in 2024. It generated $17.1 billion revenue in 2024, an increase of 8.6% year-on-year.

It has grown from a small site that let you post your CV online into a large multifaceted website. Here are a few significant mileposts in its development.

  • 2003: Professional profiles – showcase your work history, education, skills
  • 2004: Company pages – Businesses could create pages
  • 2008: Groups –  focused on professional topics or networks
  • 2012: Publishing platform – publish your own long-form posts
  • 2013: LinkedIn Endorsements – recognise your connections‘ skills
  • 2017: Video upload – Native video hosting
  • 2019: Stories –  short-form content sharing
  • 2021: Audio clips –  share bite-sized voice messages
  • 2022: Virtual events toolkit – templates and guidance for hosting

Boring but sensible

At our meeting someone commented that it had a reputation of being a bit boring, and I guess that’s true – it doesn’t court controversy and users tend to be focused on their work and professional interests to a large degree.  But that is also its secret strength I think.

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Civic Responsibilities

Posted on 26 October 2025 by Athene Donald

Innovate Cambridge Summit 2025 The University Vice Chancellor Debbie Prentice, with Lord Patrick Vallance and Minister Pennycook at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit

This week saw various significant announcements for and from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge region and the wider so-called Ox-Cam Corridor. Starting with the last, £500M has been pledged for investment in new homes, infrastructure and business space by the Government for the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor. Most of this money is coming to the Cambridge city region. Improving local infrastructure (housing, water and transport in particular) is vital if growth is to be possible. Those in the north of England may wonder why Cambridge is favoured but, as Minister Pennycook stated clearly at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit, the Government sees the Corridor as crucial in being able to stimulate the economy of the whole UK. Or, as Lord Vallance (also present this week) is quoted in the Government’s press release:

‘These investments are a milestone, not just for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor, but for the entire country. We are going to deliver the housing, amenities and infrastructure that businesses need to grow and that people need to flourish. This region has all the ingredients to be the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley or the Boston Cluster: somewhere that turns world-class innovation into economic growth the whole nation benefits from.’

Within this new money, £15M has been put aside for an innovation hub to drive growth, alongside the necessary infrastructure. In terms of innovation, money was also committed earlier this summer to develop the Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership – the first trans-UK innovation collaboration of its kind – funded with £4.8M from Research England, so that there is a direct connection  between the Cambridge city region and Manchester, one vehicle to ensure the north of England does receive some benefit. Both the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester are committing further funds of their own to this enterprise.

The Innovate Cambridge Summit covered these plans and much more. One key message that has sat at the heart of the work of Innovate Cambridge since its start is the importance of inclusion. That Cambridge is the most unequal city in the country was highlighted by many speakers during the day, with a call for action to make sure that innovation and growth benefit the whole community. The Cambridge Pledge, an initiative driven by Innovate Cambridge, is a shared commitment to channel wealth and innovation into lasting social good: companies that create wealth in the city through innovation are called upon to pledge some of their future profits.

For many Cambridge residents, the University may seem a remote, forbidding organisation not accessible to people ‘like them’, and who probably don’t expect the inequalities they face every day to go away any time soon. In an important new venture, the University is aiming to change both the perception and the reality for the whole community. The day before the Innovation Summit, the University had launched its Civic Framework, which is the outcome of a ‘listening exercise’ conducted over the past months. When asked to describe the University in three words, the most common words local residents used were historic, prestigious and excellence, but also and less attractively, elite. There was a range of other worryingly negative words such as arrogant, remote, exclusive and entitled. Nearly half the respondents felt the University did badly at communicating its research.

Under the banner People, Place, Partnership: Civic priorities for the University of Cambridge the University pledges to improve with four underpinning civic principles:

  • Equity, inclusion and belonging;
  • Collaboration and mutual benefit;
  • Transparency and learning
  • Sustainable impact

Of course the proof of the pudding will be in the delivery. In three years’ time, will local residents be more inclined to use words such as inclusive and transparent rather than exclusive and remote?

I have argued before (and also here and here) that universities have a responsibility for training youth who are not aiming at university, but perhaps at something technical and/or vocational. I am delighted to see that amongst the actions the University is proposing under its Civic Missions is one to develop skills including youth opportunities. Opening up its training programmes to more apprentices – whether they end up working in the University or elsewhere in the local innovation ecosystem – strikes me as a minimal action the University can take. Ensuring that T-Level students have the necessary placement is another ‘easy’ step. Academics and staff who have the charisma to inspire the young in the less advantaged areas around the city region, not just the city schools themselves, need to get out more to share their love for their discipline or work more generally. It is not sufficient to run a Festival of Ideas that local middle-class families attend, fun and thought-provoking though that may be, but the net must be cast far more widely.

If transport links around the city really do improve, we can hope to see easier access into the city from Fenland villages, where job opportunities may be scant, so it becomes all the more important that training opportunities are available within the University, and that this fact becomes widely known. Of course, it’s not just the University of Cambridge. Anglia Ruskin University is already active in this area. I hope – from the discussions held earlier this year – more local companies will feel able to take on such youth training opportunities, facilitated by the Opportunities Hub that is being set up through Cambridge University Health Partners which aims to cover this strand and much more. Some funding has been obtained to get this initiative under way.

It is encouraging that the University is focussing on its civic responsibilities. I look forward to seeing both the local economy flourish and infrastructure improve as the OxCam Corridor funding flows in, and the local youth feeling included in the benefits that derive from the investment.

Posted in apprentices, careers, Equality, inequality, Innovate Cambridge, Patrick Vallance, transparency | Comments Off on Civic Responsibilities

Mrs Handley and the Whippets (Learning to be Difficult)

Posted on 19 October 2025 by Athene Donald

No, not the name of a pop-group (although it might be quite a good one), but an episode from my early life. In later life I’m sure people had me in the category of those difficult women I wrote about last week, but by and large at school I was a goody-goody who (as my mother continued to say long after I’d become a professor) couldn’t say boo to a goose. I was, in general, not one for breaking school rules, unlike those who will remain nameless who put potassium permanganate in our school’s water tank, or who were constantly disruptive in the classroom. However, just occasionally, I found the backbone to tackle what I thought was unfair behaviour on the part of the teaching staff. The occasion with Mrs Handley and her whippets was one such occasion.

Carol Handley was, at the time, deputy head of my secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She later became Head of the School before retiring to Cambridge (sadly, I never met her in the city, and only discovered around the time of her death that she had been a Fellow at Wolfson College. Her husband, Eric Handley, had been the Regius Professor of Greek). She taught classics, although she never taught me.

The episode I’m referring to occurred one day in May many years ago when many of us, so-called fifth years, were about to take our O Levels (the GCSE’s of the day). We were feeling disgruntled. We had just been told we would not, as was the norm and as we had expected, be able to revise at home between our different exams but would have to come into school for lessons. I was clearly not the only one who felt very put out by this announcement. I suspect, being the nerdy swot I was (think of how Hermione Granger tackled revision), I probably had a neatly drawn up schedule of when I would revise what: the need to be sure I knew the appropriate chemical reactions and could tell a gerund from a gerundive (neither of which I would like to be tested on now). My diary of the time simply says ‘we got all the 5th formers together’ and went to see Mrs Handley.

All the 5th formers would have been approaching a hundred pupils, so I’m sure that’s an overstatement but still, a lot of us went find her in some classroom, and my memory is that I was the ring-leader, although that’s not written down precisely in my childish script. With her was – unusually, I don’t ever recall another appearance of a dog in the school – a sick whippet, which clearly was too ill to have been left at home and was sitting in a small basket on the desk at the front of the class (I suspect both her whippets were involved, but only one was unwell). We argued the case to her that we would all accomplish more revision quietly by ourselves at home, rather than dragging ourselves into the school for a teacher to decide collectively what we were in most need of thinking about. My diary notes ‘she is on our side now’.

However, the next time we saw our form teacher she was livid. (Incidentally, she was also a classicist, although again not one who taught me; we must have had a lot of Latin teachers in our school at the time, given everyone did Latin from arriving at the school at 11, although I think doing it at O Level probably wasn’t compulsory). ‘Irresponsible’ she said, particularly given the sick whippet. Why the latter was relevant I’m not sure, since we did it no harm, were not rowdy and did not shout. Nor did it seem to bother Mrs Handley at the time, but apparently by this point the furore had escalated to the head teacher, Doris Burchell (head 1946-68), who was now ‘against us’.

A couple of days later, a suitable compromise was found: we didn’t get the full time away from school we’d initially expected, but we got three more days than the interim plan had proposed. I suppose everyone could feel they’d won. I never felt Mrs Handley held this against me – in due course she was extremely helpful to me in a very different situation, but that’s not my story to tell. I’m sure I felt we, collectively, had done the right thing and that gathering everyone together to put our case calmly and on good didactic grounds had been totally responsible, despite what our form teacher claimed.

I’m not sure if that encouraged me to become stroppier. On the whole I continued in my nerdish way, but the next year I had occasion to make a different fuss which had zero didactic basis. I felt, in this episode, the school was being unfair and unreasonable and I took them to task over what felt like the illogicality of their position. These school-years of mine were at the height of the mini-skirt craze, and the school had rules about what length our skirts (no trousers; such a thing was never even considered) our uniform had to be. I can’t remember what the answer was, I didn’t have either the thighs or the daring to go for the shortest of skirts, but it was clear they thought longer was better. However, when I and one other girl turned up in a maxi coat, essentially floor length, this was deemed unsuitable and ‘against the rules’.

By this point I was in the sixth form doing A Levels, and we didn’t have to wear uniform at all, so that in the first instance this felt a bit odd anyhow. However, I can imagine on health and safety grounds (although such a phrase was not in common parlance back then), long skirts in a lab – where of course I spent quite a lot of my time – might have been thought a hazard. But this was a coat, worn solely to get me to and from school. What risk was there in that? What rule were they suddenly inventing to stop me wearing this coat I was so proud of? (I was so proud of it, I loved it dearly, that I only got rid of it a few years ago once the moths had had a good chew, although I rarely wore it in the relatively recent past). I argued the toss – and won. This felt like a jobsworth kind of unconsidered reaction to something unexpected, and I think they swiftly realised that they did not have a leg to stand on.

So, despite my mother’s attestations to my teenage son that I couldn’t say boo to a goose, at least until my 20’s, that clearly wasn’t quite accurate. Push me too far and I could be forceful. That does not mean that I take kindly to the phrase, said to me all too often, that I’m ‘not a shrinking violet’. Both my last two posts touch on the words and phrased directed at women in pejorative tones, and my (and I suspect many women’s) dislike of phrases such as that, or being described as feisty was raised in many of my conversations at the WISE conference. Being a forceful woman (not aggressive, just assertive) is a perfectly fine way to act. As a teenager I was just practicing, and probably not often enough.

Posted in Camden School for Girls, careers, feisty, teenagers, Women in science | Comments Off on Mrs Handley and the Whippets (Learning to be Difficult)