Looking back on a century full of science
Dr Paddy Bassett has done a lot in her life.
As an agricultural scientist, she was the first woman to graduate from Massey’s agricultural college and conducted cuttingedge research at one of the world’s top universities. But what she’s most proud of is learning to build a haystack.
Speaking from her room at Kilbirnie’s Rita Angus Retirement Village, Bassett remembered a life stretching over a century.
Dr Paddy Bassett – aka Elsie Gertrude Thorpe – was born on July 15, 1918, in Timaru. She went to Craighead Diocesan School, a boarding school, at age 11 and was there for six years, filling up on Latin lessons. It wasn’t until she went to university that she discovered physics and biology.
When it came to picking a degree, agricultural science called to her – Bassett grew up in a farming community and two of her older siblings were farmers, teaching her how to milk and build haystacks.
Bassett credited her father for sending her towards the sciences, saying he was very forward-thinking for the time.
Unfortunately, in the 1930s, other institutes were not. Lincoln Agricultural College – Bassett’s initial choice for a university education – didn’t accept women. She turned to Massey Agricultural College instead and became its first female student in the late 1930s.
‘‘I was the first woman there but I didn’t know at the time. It was no great deal.’’
After graduating with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science in 1941, she was finally accepted into Lincoln, where she looked into the relationship between cattle pituitary glands and ovarian dysfunction for her Masters thesis.
While there, she met her husband, Colin Bassett. ‘‘By that time, I was in a little building on the grounds and Colin saw me coming out of the door and decided that was what he wanted.’’
Marriage quickly followed – but no children – and Bassett moved to Hamilton, to pick up her research again at the Ruakura Research Centre.
Her work drew the attention of scholars at the University of Cambridge and in 1954 she was invited to study for her PhD.
She came back to New Zealand two years later, spending time in Dunedin before moving to Nelson to take up an honorary research fellowship.
She started collaborating with researchers at the University of Otago’s Wellington Medical School and stopped working only in her 90s, having published more than 20 research papers. ‘‘I didn’t set out to be a scientist, it just happened.’’