• Question: What Famous Scientist/Inventor inspires you the most and why??

    Asked by bumblybee to Amelia, Jim, Liz, Prateek, Richard on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Lizzard O'Day

      Lizzard O'Day answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      O so many. Two huge heros of mine are Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun- they discovered a class of small-non-coding RNAs called microRNAs that I work on and they will surely win the Nobel Prize one day. Their work completely changed the way we think about gene regulation. But their work went against what a lot of people believed so they had to really fight to prove what they found was true- I admire that dedication. At the same time, they are two of the nicest, funnest guys you will ever meet. I like people that are fun, nice, and not afraid to stand up for what they believe!

    • Photo: Jim Caryl

      Jim Caryl answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      I’ve always cited three scientists as being greatly inspirational:

      David Attenborough – for his rich portrayal of the natural world
      Carl Sagan – for making the universe understandable for everyone
      Richard Feynman – for helping me understand the fun of finding things out, the joy of problem-solving and logic and always offering interesting perspectives to look at understanding the world around us.

      Alas, the last two of these great men are dead, but we still have all their written work and I highly recommend their books to anyone. David Attenborough is fortunately still with us, and long may he go on writing and producing documentaries 😉

    • Photo: Amelia Markey

      Amelia Markey answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I find Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough quite inspirational because they can explain really complicated ideas in a really simple and interesting way.

      I’m also pretty inspired by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. These are 2 scientists at manchester who won the nobel prize last year for graphene. Apparently they put some cellotape on a piece of graphite and pulled off a single layer of this, just to see what they got, then they found out it had loads of interesting properties.

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