大象传媒

On All Things Considered this week there鈥檚 another chance to hear a programme first broadcast in January 2016 in which Roy Jenkins guest is the astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the late twentieth century.聽聽 Her work as a 24-year-old postgraduate student led to the identification of the spinning neutron stars known as pulsars, and is reckoned to have changed the way we see the universe.

It led to the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics - perversely not to her, but to her two male supervisors at the University of Cambridge.聽 Little wonder that she has been a prominent advocate for women in science.

She has herself been a trailblazer in this, with a dazzling string of prestigious academic and public appointments.聽 She has been president of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics, and is currently president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.聽 She has more than 20 honorary degrees, lectures around the world, played a key role in the work of the Open University, and is currently visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford. And last autumn she received the Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award.

She is also a very active and deeply committed member of the Society of Friends, the Quakers.聽