so we asked several women scientists who their fictional uh science inspiration is
and this could be a character from a book a tv show or a movie
um that inspired them to learn more about science and even potentially to pursue a career in science
when i was a kid i used to love to read i mean i still do but when i was a kid i read
all the time and one of my favorite books was a ring of endless light by Madeleine L'Engle
and the main character her father was a marine biologist and a lot of his colleagues then were
marine biologists and i think it was through that character and that the fictional community
of marine biologists that i started to get into marine biology at all so i think those
those sets of characters are probably some of my first early science inspirations my fictional
science hero would have to be the incredible the fantastic educator ms frizzle from the magic
school bus because she encouraged her students to get messy and that is what being a field biologist
is all about this frizzle showing her kids all the cool things about the world and about nature
and earth was awesome there are several ways to find out the answer to that and i choose this one
she's lost it so i would say for sure by far miss frizzle was my uh
fictional science hero my fictional science hero growing up was uh dr dana scully from the x-files
she was very logical and skeptical but at the same time surprisingly open-minded to all the crazy
things that happened on the x-files and i thought that that was a pretty good representation of
what a scientist should be and if i were a scientist that's the kind of scientist i'd want to
be as well why dana scali i really liked her kind of badass attitude and also her way of solving
problems from a very scientific and skeptical point of view that said i also have a bit of
mulder in me just because i was on mother's side in terms of believing in extraterrestrial beings
and it's probably one of the reasons why i wanted to do astrophysics in the first place
and yeah there was a really really inspirational show for for me i have always been inspired
by fictional characters who love knowledge and love learning which i think is sort of a kind of
scientist so people like miss frizzle and matilda were always characters that i loved as a child
but i think the one who actually probably
most turned me to the sciences that i am is a character named cassie from the animorphs
series which is a series of books where kids could touch animals and then turn into them
and they sort of had this understanding of animals they were fighting space aliens also
um but cassie was the one whose parents were vets and was sort of more thoughtful and more
scientific and i just loved learning about animals through learning about another person
um this was a hard question for me i don't really remember a lot about me
growing up growing up and i'm thinking about scientists or science too much
but i do remember there was a tv show like a cartoon called a capitan planet and the planeteers
and i really liked that that show captain planet was fighting against pollution i always loved
nature so i think that's what i i like about that show and yeah well maybe captain planet
was my fictional science hero so sadly i didn't have a lot of fictional science heroes as a kid
but if i really dig deep i would say that i loved indiana jones
and he was an archaeologist so it wasn't in the natural sciences which I ended up studying um like
biology and ecology but I just loved you know this idea of going out into the world and studying old
cultures and exploring and traveling so if I had to pick one Indiana jones would be my fictional
science hero this is so um easy it is dr alan grant from Jurassic park the book and the movie
um and why is because he is about that life like he lives for his science he loves his work
um he's deep into the theory of his work you know digging up the dinosaur bones and thinking about
what the bones and things mean and what you can infer about how dinosaurs lived but when it comes
down to it he can take all that theoretical knowledge and apply it so people don't die
you