Month: January 2019

As a young child, Dame Dr Jane Goodall was fascinated by the natural behaviour of animals and at age five hid in the family’s hen-house to watch the laying of eggs, unbeknown to her frantic parents! She was born in London in 1934 and would go on to become a world expert on the behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild. For her doctorate in 1960-5, she carried out a truly remarkable ethological study of a group of chimpanzees in Tanzania.

Working alone, she bravely and patiently continued to seek them out until they finally accepted her presence and allowed her unique access, never recorded before. She made discoveries which amazed ethologists in academia. She saw chimpanzees making and using tools; she witnessed them hunting and eating smaller monkeys; she noticed that the chimpanzees had different personalities; they would suddenly fly into rages and at other times they would be very touchy-feely, including two hours of mutual grooming each day. These observations re-wrote the textbooks.

She set up the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It has a wide-ranging mission, not only to protect the declining numbers of chimpanzees in Africa, but also to engage people, especially children, in conservation projects and animal welfare campaigns.

(Images LtoR: Delphine Bruyere at Commons Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0 & Peter Broster at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0)

Professor Sir John Vane, FRS, was born in Worcestershire in 1927 and from a young age showed a great interest in carrying out scientific experiments. His father built him a shed in the garden for this hobby, after a small explosion one day in the kitchen! He would go on to become a Nobel Prize winner in 1982 for his discoveries in the field of pharmacology.

He is best known for his work on aspirin. Aspirin tablets have been available for the public to buy since the early 20th century but until Professor Vane conducted his research, scientists did not know how aspirin worked on the molecular level. Once this was known, it led to the development of new treatments for heart disease, pain, inflammation and high blood pressure. He is also known for developing the ‘cascade superfusion bioassay’ technique for pharmacological analysis.

In 1990 he set up the William Harvey Research Institute in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and this is now the largest institute for pharmacology in the UK. Professor Vane died in 2004.

(Image: Concept Productions at pexels.com)

The first Briton in space was Yorkshire-born Dr. Helen Sharman (1963-) in 1991, who spent eight days in the Russian space station, Mir, in orbit above the Earth. The second Briton, Major Tim N. Peake (1972-) from Sussex spent 186 days in the International Space Station from December 2015 to June 2016. He had previously been in the British Army Air Corps and was a helicopter pilot before training at the European Space Agency.

He was able to set up or contribute to more than 250 experiments during his 3,000 orbits of the Earth. Most of these are long-term. Some, like his rocket seeds experiment, are aimed at getting schoolchildren interested and involved. Major Peake has been a leading figure in new school projects designed for the STEM subjects ~ science, technology, engineering and mathematics ~ in the hope that they will inspire British youngsters to take up careers in space technology in the future.

(Top image: NASA Johnson at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)