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Congratulations to the happy couple who celebrated their wedding in truly stellar style recently at St. Michael’s Church, Headingley, Leeds. Just a shame they didn’t tie the knot today, what with it being May the Fourth…oh dear…thankfully I have no plans to give up the day job in favour of a career in stand up comedy. But in my defence, today is apparently ‘Star Wars Day’…
A letter in this weekend’s edition of ‘The Financial Times’ argues that hours spent as a teenager immersed in an obscure but highly enjoyable hobby can pay big career dividends later in life with invaluable and highly transferable professional skills…
Long before he was swinging lightsabres and dispensing nuggets of pseudo-Buddhist wisdom as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sir Alec Guiness played the idealistic young textile scientist Sydney Stratton in the 1951 Ealing comedy ‘The Man in the White Suit’ whose discovery of a new type of textile fibre promises to revolutionise the world. But I’ve always wondered whether, thanks to real life textile scientist William Astbury and his ‘monkeynut coat’, this classic film may well have been a case of art mirroring life…
It’s a pity that physicist William Astbury was as good a comedian as he was a scientist. For had his jokes been just a bit funnier, he might well have found himself sharing a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. In this new podcast for BBC History magazine, I explore just how this might have happened. And, after opening with James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the now famous double-helix, made 70 years ago this year, and concluding with a namecheck for Leeds band ‘Chumbawamba’, this might well be a first for the academic discipline of History of Science…