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How much do we know about the great female scientists of the past?

As part of researching a new children's book Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University's Department of Zoology has been finding out. OxSciBlog asked her about her new project and the unsung heroines of science...

OxSciBlog: Why choose to write a children's book on female scientists?
Sunetra Gupta: It was really my colleague Martin Maiden's idea. I was trying to think of a suitable project to promote women in science (as part of my application for the Rosalind Franklin Award) and Martin came up with this project. I instantly approached Ted Dewan to see if he was interested in illustrating it, and to my great good fortune he agreed.

Ted is an incredibly versatile  illustrator and author of children's fiction and non-fiction as well as science books for adults. He also has a fantastic sense of humour: his website mentions that "at age 15 he won his first drawing competition at the local Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store. The prize was a pink card entitling him to 31 free ice cream cones" - two of these apparently remain unredeemed…

One of the reasons the project appealed to me was because I had, myself, been inspired at a young age by reading a biography of Marie Curie - and yet, I realised I had never had the opportunity to find out about any other women scientists. There is definitely a niche here waiting to be filled. Also, at a completely selfish level, I was eager to remedy my own serious gaps in knowledge about their lives and their science.

OSB: Which scientists did you most enjoy finding out about?
SG: So far, I have only read about two people in sufficient depth - Rosalind Franklin and Anna Thynne. Rosalind Franklin is an obvious choice and I have very much enjoyed Brenda Maddox's biography, as well the very interesting defence of her by Anne Sayre in response to James Watson's portrayal of her as 'Rosie', the grumpy research assistant.

I might never have come across Anna Thynne but for a lovely little book by Rebecca Stott which I had been sent some time ago when it had been submitted for a prize I was judging. She was a very remarkable woman - wife of the sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey (while Buckland was Dean), mother of many, and can be credited with establishing the first marine aquarium in her living room. This is all in the early 19th century - by the 1850s aquaria were all the craze.

Another woman I felt ashamed not to have known much about is the 18th century astronomer Caroline Herschel; I have been reading about her in Richard Holmes's fantastic new book 'The Age of Wonder' and cannot wait to lay my hands on her diaries.

OSB: What has been the most challenging aspect of your research?
SG: Finding the time to do it. My commitments as an academic are quite extensive, and I am also very far behind on delivering a book on science and literature that I was funded to write by the Arts Council in 2007. There is also the tug of wanting to carry on with my new novel, and to spend time with my two daughters.

Researching the book has been pure pleasure, and writing my fragments (we are currently adopting a scrap-book format) has also been a lot of fun. Ted has been producing some amazing illustrations - he is absolute dream to work with. We've had some crucial decisions to make regarding layout and content - these have probably been the hardest bits so far.

OSB: What do you hope young readers will take away from the book?
SG: Some acquaintance with the lives of these women would probably be as much as I expect, but I'm naturally hoping that they (girls and boys alike) might find some inspiration here. Many of these women had to struggle, to adapt, to compromise, to suffer, and they always carried on. Even if they are not attracted to a scientific career, knowing the stories of these women scientists can have a transforming effect on young minds.

OSB: How has the book changed how you think about the female scientists of the past?
SG: It is embarrassing how little I knew about these women beyond the vague notion that they were brave and had to endure much. Whereas I had a much larger acquaintance with the lives of women writers, thanks to books such as Gilbert & Gubar's 'The Madwoman in the Attic' and, of course, all the biographies that are so readily available, not to mention the films about them.

I hear that a film is being made on Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron and possibly the first computer programmer) with Zooey Deschanel in her role, so perhaps women scientists will finally be in the public eye.

Again, I will say that the main benefit here is to learn about inspiring personalities - not everyone who enjoys 'Becoming Jane' is destined to become a writer, not everyone who falls in love with Zooey Deschanel as Ada Lovelace in ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ will become a scientist, but something will have been added to each person by learning about their lives and passions.

Professor Sunetra Gupta is based at Oxford's Department of Zoology.

Ecologists and scientists will gather in Wytham Woods today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI].

Wytham was made an SSSI in 1950 and for the last 60 years has hosted an enormous variety of long-running ecological studies of mammal, bird and insect populations by Oxford University researchers including such important figures as Charles Elton, EB Ford, and Sir Richard Southwood.

The history of ecological science at Wytham is celebrated in a new OUP book, Wytham Woods: Oxford’s Ecological Laboratory, which is co-edited by Peter Savill of the Department of Plant Sciences and includes contributions from a large number of Oxford University researchers.

The book will be launched at today’s special meeting of the British Ecological Society [BES] at Wytham Village Hall and showcases the amazing variety of research from studies of the diet and lifestyle of foxes and badgers, to charting the impact of climate change on the nesting behaviour of birds such as great tits, and assessing how invertebrates, from spiders and earthworms to moths and caterpillars, interact with plants and provide food for other animals.

An Oxford-led review published last week in the Cochrane Library  - that gold-standard source for the best evidence-based medical care - showed how empowering people at risk of blood clots to determine their own dose of anti-clotting drugs leads to a large drop in adverse events and deaths.

Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine [CEBM] at the University of Oxford and colleagues found a 50 per cent drop in the number of blood clots and a 36 per cent reduction in deaths among those patients who were able to monitor their own anti-clotting therapy.

Warfarin (Coumadin) is used in a number of conditions where there is a risk of dangerous blood clots, such as deep-vein thrombosis, abnormal heart rhythms, pulmonary embolism, and in patients with mechanical heart valves. In those at increased risk of stroke, warfarin reduces the likelihood of a stroke but also its severity.

The number of people taking anti-clotting drugs is on the up as they are increasingly used for more diseases and the population ages. But it is important to get the dose absolutely right, as while the drugs can prevent clots they can also go too far and cause major bleeds.

Typically, people have to have blood samples taken at a GP surgery or specialist clinic to determine the correct warfarin dose. Once the right dose has been established initially, patients still need to have blood tests on average around once a month.

But a simple device – like those used by diabetics to monitor their blood sugar level – can be used by people on the anti-clotting drug warfarin to help them determine the correct dose. Patients using the device can then either adjust their own medication using pre-determined guidelines (self-management) or they can call a clinic to be told the appropriate dose adjustment (self-monitoring).

Carl Heneghan and colleagues assembled all the best evidence there is to compare outcomes for patients using these different ways of monitoring warfarin levels. They combined data from 18 trials involving a total of almost 5,000 patients. In a podcast on the website of the Cochrane Collaboration, Carl Heneghan says the conclusion was clear: ‘Compared to standard monitoring, patients who self-monitor or self-manage can improve the quality of their oral anticoagulation therapy.’

However, it is worth pointing out that self-monitoring or self-management of warfarin wasn’t possible for up to half of patients for a variety of reasons. These included inability to complete the necessary training, simple refusal by the patient, or exclusion by their GP.

So there is a need for doctors to be able to identify those patients that would benefit. Still, most would agree that giving patients power over their own treatment where possible is a good thing.

‘Self monitoring has impact beyond just the reduction in adverse events,’ says Carl Heneghan. ‘Issues like freedom to travel and time off work for blood tests are important factors for individuals in determining whether to self-test.’

Another Cochrane review published at the same time may also offer significant relief for a different set of patients. As reported in The Times, Sheena Derry of the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics at Oxford University and colleagues found that migraine sufferers might get pain relief by taking slightly more aspirin than the recommended dose.

David Rose reports that: ‘Taking up to three tablets – up to 1,000mg – in one go could leave one in four (25 per cent) sufferers pain-free within two hours.’ More than half of patients experienced some relief from their debilitating headaches at this dose. Adults are normally advised to take no more than two aspirin tablets in one go.

The researchers also found that aspirin also helped to prevent nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light commonly caused by migraines – but sachet formulations combining another anti-sickness drug, metoclopramide, worked best at this.

As part of efforts to understand the impact of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano an Oxford team have been using LIDAR to search for airborne ash over southern England.

LIDAR sends pulses of coherent light up into the sky and measures scattered and reflected light from any particles or debris floating in the air. From timing the 'echoes' it can determine not only the presence of material but also measure its height and thickness.

Last week Adam Povey, of Oxford University's Department of Physics, was scrambled to STFC's Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire to use a system, jointly operated by both Oxford University and Hovemere Ltd, to see if any sign could be detected of the ash cloud passing over southern England.

By last Friday his measurements could detect a thin layer of material at around 3km altitude (c10,000 feet up), part of which slowly descended over the following couple of hours before merging with echoes from other debris at the top of a convection layer (the Planetary Boundary Layer) around 3,000 feet up. Below that height, the air is full of all sorts of other debris, including human-generated pollution, so is difficult to untangle from the volcanic ash.

Since then Adam, part of Don Grainger's group at Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, and the team have continued to monitor the cloud and are publishing updates of the latest information and images online.

Andy Sayer, another member of the Oxford team, told me: 'From the satellites we're getting the 'big picture' of what's happened over Europe over the course of the past week or so, although because of the way the satellites sample the revisit time for any one location can be a couple of days.'

'From this we can estimate the light extinguished by the ash, and learn about the size of the particles, as well as measuring the amount of sulphur dioxide released during the eruption and where that's going.

'The lidar, on the other hand, is giving us a continuous profile of any ash at one site (Chilbolton) and we can see how distinct any layers are and how they're mixing with the rest of the atmosphere.'

Tomorrow at 2pm Susan Cheyne will be updating listeners to Radio Oxford on the progress of her conservation work in Borneo.

Susan, of Oxford University's WildCRU, is leading research into the agile gibbon and wild cat species for the OuTrop project.

We've blogged about her work before, including the amazing images and sounds of gibbons swinging through the trees and how camera traps set up in the forest have snapped photos of elusive species, such as the clouded leopard.

Above are a selection of the latest photos from her work: this year, the 8th they have been studying orangutans and the 7th agile gibbons, has seen the birth of 2 orangutans and 3 gibbons in the groups studied.

The project is hoping to make a real difference, not just to the forest apes but to the overall ecology of the rainforest: Susan has already raised over £7,000 to provide equipment to help combat forest fires and this year the team have started the first ever long-term regeneration project to re-forest the degraded peatland.

They are also offering a new training programme for the project's Indonesian staff to help pass on the skills needed to continue and expand the scientific and conservation work.

On Thursday she'll be explaining more about her research, and how members of the public can help, at an event at Science Oxford.

Dr Susan Cheyne is a member of the WildCRU, part of Oxford University's Department of Zoology.