Women: Representation and Empowerment

Lord Patel Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baroness, Lady Mone, on their brilliant speeches. They are obviously women of ability and talent, and are great communicators. I look forward to hearing them more.

On the last occasion I spoke in this debate, I started by saying that I was going to tell a story of HeLa cells, which are cancer cells. After I had gone along this line for about two minutes, I was getting looks of amazement. Clearly the noble Baronesses in particular were feeling that I had lost the plot. I intend to continue in the same vein today, for I begin by telling the story of photograph 51. Photograph 51 is an X-ray diffraction image of DNA, which contributed to the discovery of DNA and the now-famous double helix model created by Watson and Crick, and for which Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962. I can see the same look coming on noble Lords’ faces now, so I had better come clean.

In her introduction, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, mentioned the contributions that women make to social, economic, cultural and political life at the highest level. I add to that the contribution that women make to science. This will be the century of science. We will see more discoveries in all fields of science, which will contribute to our wealth and well-being. Photograph 51 was taken by Rosalind Franklin, a chemist who graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, and who gained a PhD in 1945. In 1951 she used X-ray crystallography to develop the molecular structure of DNA as a research associate at King’s College London, under the supervision of Maurice Wilkins, who was considered rather a disagreeable man. Two years later she would leave King’s College, because of her disagreements, to work at Birkbeck College, where she did research on viruses, including tobacco mosaic viruses. One of her team members was Aaron Klug, who was later awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on viruses in 1982.

Rosalind Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer—still a very nasty disease. Controversy has always surrounded not only her contribution to the discovery of DNA, but why she was not awarded a Nobel Prize together with Watson, Crick and Wilkins. She may also have got a second Nobel Prize—and hence joined the only woman, Marie Curie, to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes—jointly with Sir Aaron Klug, but she did not live long enough and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Surprisingly, she also worked with Ronald Norrish, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967. Apparently, that relationship was not happy either.

In the United Kingdom, only four women since 1901 have been awarded Nobel Prizes. Two, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, were awarded the Peace Prize for initiating peace in Northern Ireland in 1976. A Nobel Prize was awarded in 2007 to Doris Lessing at the age of 88 years and 58 days—the oldest person to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Her novels are very commonly known, in particular The Grass is Singing. She wrote 50 other novels. She was followed by MI5 and MI6 because of her communist leanings. She fought for equality and against apartheid, which she had seen in Southern Rhodesia, as it then was. Her Nobel oration, entitled On Not Winning the Nobel Prize, was later produced in a limited-edition manuscript to support children with HIV and AIDS.

The fourth Nobel Prize awarded to a woman in the United Kingdom, and the only one in science so far, was awarded in 1964 to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, known commonly as Dorothy Hodgkin. At the age of 10 she was interested in chemistry and crystals. She gained first-class honours—then only the third woman to do so—at Somerville College, Oxford. Using crystallography and X-ray crystallography she discovered the structure of vitamin B12, insulin and penicillin. Crippled from the early age of 24, she worked and researched all her years in a wheelchair. In 1965 she was only the second woman to be awarded the Order of Merit, the first being Florence Nightingale.

The fact that very few women in science are recognised at the highest level has to be a concern, for we have some of the most brilliant women scientists. Even today, the first woman president, appointed last year, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which I am a fellow—a society that was founded in 1783—is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She read physics in Glasgow and got her PhD at Cambridge. At a young age she was interested in astronomy. As a postgraduate student, she contributed to and operated an 81.5 megahertz radio telescope. In 1969, analysing miles of printouts of data from radio telescopes, she noted a few unusual signals. She later determined that these signals emerged from super-dense, rapidly spinning collapsed stars, now known as pulsars. Her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and Martin Ryle were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1974, but Jocelyn Burnell was not, despite the fact that she was the second author on the paper.

Of course it is not good if top women scientists do not get the recognition they deserve, but things are changing. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, has yet to have a woman president, but last year it elected 11 women as part of the 58 new fellows. In 2015, 35% of the new fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences were women. For the economic success and welfare of our country, we need people to study STEM subjects. Only 12.8% of the STEM workforce are women, despite the fact that women get top grades at school. Unfortunately, most of them go into medicine, but they might choose other subjects and enter other professions if they are given the chance to do so. Only 17% of STEM professors are women. We need to promote having more women studying STEM subjects and a greater recognition of women in science. The pledge on parity should apply equally to women in science.