Graphic Science: Seven Journeys of Discovery

Overlooked, sidelined, excluded, discredited: key figures in scientific discovery come and take their bow in an alternative Nobel prize gallery in a colourful novel by Darryl Cunningham. Antoine Lavoisier: the father of French chemistry who gave oxygen its name, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who found himself on the wrong side of a revolution and paid the price with his life. Mary Anning: a poor, working-class woman who made her living fossil-hunting along the beach cliffs of southern England. Anning found herself excluded from the scientific community because of her gender and social class. Wealthy, male, experts took credit for her discoveries. George Washington Carver: born a slave, Carver become one of the most prominent botanists of his time, as well as a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver devised over 100 products using one major ingredient – the peanut – including dyes, plastics and gasoline. Alfred Wegener: a German meteorologist, balloonist, and arctic explorer, his theory of continental drift was derided by other scientists and was only accepted into mainstream thinking after his death. He died in Greenland on an expedition, his body lost in the ice and snow. Nikola Tesla: a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A competitor of Edison, Tesla died in poverty despite his intellectual brilliance. Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics while Bell Burnell was excluded. Fred Hoyle: an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis – the process whereby most of the elements on the Periodic Table are created. He was also noted for the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to prevailing theories. This eccentric approach contributed to him to being overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee for his stellar nucleosynthesis work. Any one of these figures could have been awarded a Nobel prize. Not every scientific discoverer was lauded in their time, for reasons of gender, race, or lack of wealth, or (in the case of Lavoisier) being too wealthy: in the 21st century, there are many more reparations and reputations to be made.

About the Author :
Darryl Cunningham is the cartoonist/writer of Psychiatric Tales (Blank Slate 2010), Science Tales (Myriad Editions 2013), Supercrash: How to Hijack the Global Economy (Myriad Editions 2014) and Graphic Science (Myriad Editions 2017). All factual based books that explore subjects as diverse as mental health, science, economics and politics. He has given talks at the London School of Economics and the City of Arts and Lights, Valencia. In 2015 he was one of 30 world-renowned photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers and musicians who were invited to contribute to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Art of Saving a Life project, to promote vaccination in the developing world. In 2018 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts from Leeds Arts University. Darryl’s forthcoming title, Billionaires, will be published by Myriad in November 2019.

Review :
Delivers an insight into science your standard physics textbook never would.- Disclaimer, Darryl Cunningham returns to educate and entertain us in equal measure…Not only is Darryl detailing these scientists’ seven individual journeys of discovery, but he’s also providing us all with seven journeys of discovery of our own to engage upon.- Jonathan Rigby, Page 45 `Comicbook of the month’