People of Science with Brian Cox - Uta Frith on Alice Lee
Transcript
- Uta: People of Science. Take one.
- Gosh, what fun.
- Brian: Professor Uta Frith, could you tell us a bit about your research?
- Uta: I am a Psychologist, or perhaps what I should say, a Cognitive Neuroscientist.
- All my life I've been interested in how the brain produces the mind
- and how the mind the mind changes over a lifetime.
- Brian: It's the hardest question in science that isn't it? How the brain produces the mind?
- Uta: I believe so, I believe that it's really still a very, very new science
- barely more than a hundred years old.
- We're really at the threshold of something that's a new age
- of a new kind of science.
- Brian: If we go back right to the start, because you've chosen Alice Lee.
- Uta: Alice Lee is not a typical hero, nobody celebrated her.
- I accidentally found out about her and she is as good a scientist
- as any of the others who worked at the time.
- She was involved in measuring the volume of the skull
- in order to find out something about what's inside.
- Brian: I suppose from a modern perspective
- it's almost the first thing a modern scientist would think of: I'll start making some measurements.
- So why is that a radical move?
- Uta: It was at that time a question
- how come that we have the important men of science?
- Are they really superior because they have bigger brains?
- Are they really superior because they have bigger brains? That was a reasonable hypothesis to have. That was a reasonable hypothesis to have.
- She decided that this is an assumption which we can test
- and that's when she had this really ingenious idea to take head measurements
- of a group of people who were in fact anatomists meeting at a conference in Dublin.
- And she found that there was a group with big heads and a group with small heads
- and the very smallest of them all was in fact
- the most distinguished of the anatomists, everybody agreed.
- Brian: It's quite bold isn't it walking into a conference and measuring the head sizes
- and essentially challenging these great men of science
- to say, well your assumptions do not match the data.
- Uta: Well, I think she had a lot of support,
- especially from her supervisor Karl Pearson.
- But she remained a low paid assistant all her life.
- Still, she did get a publication in the Philosophical Transactions.
- And this paper is called 'Data for the Problem of Evolution in Man - A First Study of the Correlation of the Human Skull'
- By Alice Lee, with some assistance from Karl Pearson.
- And we find a letter from Pearson.
- "She objected to my presenting the paper as purely hers
- and I had to compromise the matter as indicated in the title."
- Brian: Oh I see, so he said publish it just as Alice Lee.
- Uta: Yes and she insisted. "Still I want the paper treated as hers."
- Brian: That's great of Pearson, I suppose, isn't it.
- Uta: It is really nice. It is really nice.
- Brian: So Alice Lee for you is a sort of, today you'd describe her as a very good working scientist.
- She'd be a Fellow of the Royal Society probably today,
- but not this kind of Einstein or a Newton.
- Uta: She's absolutely not. No, most scientists
- most great scientists are not Newton or Einstein.
- They do something that is important in answering a critical question at the time.
- Alice Lee did that and she was acknowledged.
- She did get the credit, which I'm very glad for.
The pioneering developmental psychologist Uta Frith discusses Alice Lee, whose work in craniology challenged the idea that women were intellectually inferior because they have smaller brain sizes.
Explore our Google Arts and Culture collection on Alice Lee's life -
With special thanks to the UCL Galton Collection.
See our collected archive papers of Alice Lee's work -
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