Women finally to join the men on frieze honouring most renowned scientists
Nightingale, Curie and Ball will be the first females on university’s 90-year-old facade
THE facade of one of Britain’s most revered scientific institutions is to be altered to make way for the names of three female scientists to set right a “historic injustice” against women.
The names of Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie and Alice Ball will be chiselled into a 90-year-old frieze at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London.
The listed facade has until now only included the names of male scientists, including Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, and Edward Jenner, the English physician who discovered the smallpox vaccine.
Campaigners have long complained about the “airbrushing” of prominent women from history and recently managed to get Jane Austen, the author, featured on the new £10 note.
The alterations to the frieze are designed to help correct the imbalance.
“It’s a statement and it’s about the future as much as it’s about the past,” said Prof Peter Piot, the university’s director. “This restores a historic injustice, to a certain degree.”
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, added: “It is very important to mark the outstanding contributions of women in science as it may inspire the next generation of female scientists.
“For too long the achievements of female scientists were overlooked including Rosalind Franklin [one of the pioneers of modern genetics]. This is beginning to change and I look forward to more celebrations of women in this field.”
Special planning permission was granted in May and the three surnames will be added next month to mark the institution’s 120th anniversary. The women were selected by university staff who were invited to nominate female “pioneers” of tropical medicine who were contemporaries of men already on the frieze.
“We wanted to respect the historic nature of this building, which was inaugurated in 1929,” said Prof Piot. “So there are no living women.”
Nightingale is recognised as the founder of modern nursing and also contributed to advances in the use of statistics in hospital medicine.
Ball, an African-American chemist, developed an injection to treat leprosy, and will be the first black scientist to be included.
Curie, the physicist and chemist, was the first female Nobel Prize winner, the first person and only woman to win a prize twice, and the only person to win it in different scientific fields.
The three women’s names will be displayed above the surnames of Sir John Pingle, Thomas Sydenham and James Lind, which sit over an entrance to the university on Gower Street.