Bøger af Georgina Ferry

Women have fought their way to the top in fields that have been male dominated for years. Yet, they still face challenges. 50 Women in Technology sheds light on the work of forgotten pioneers who defied expectations and includes 25 exclusive interviews with women at the forefront today.

The eccentric story of one of the most bizarre marriages in the history of British business: the invention of the world's first office computer and the Lyons Teashop.The Lyons teashops were one of the great British institutions, providing a cup of tea and a penny bun through the depression and the war, though to the 1970s. Yet Lyons also has a more surprising claim to history.In the 1930s John Simmons, a young maths graduate in charge of the clerks' offices, had a dream: to build a machine that would automate the millions of tedious transactions and process them in as little time as possible. Simmons' quest for the first office computer - the Lyons Electronic Office - would take 20 years and involve some of the most brilliant young minds in Britain.Interwoven with the story of creating LEO is the story of early computing, from the Difference Engine of Charles Babbage to the codecracking computers at Bletchley Park and the instantly obsolescent ENIAC in the US. It is also the story of post war British computer business: why did it lose the initiative? Why did the US succeed while British design was often superior?

On 17 March 1967, the 26-year-old David Sainsbury wrote out a cheque for ¿5 and established the trust which would become the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Gatsby's purpose was ambitious: to make the world a better place by taking on some of the social, economic and scientific challenges that face humanity. In recent years, Gatsby has spent around ¿50m annually on charitable activities, and by its 50th anniversary in 2017 it will have spent over ¿1bn on programmes that range from reducing poverty in Africa to raising the standard of technical education, investigating how plants fight disease, and finding out how the brain works. But despite Gatsby's wide reach and the level of its donations, it has always functioned discreetly and out of the public eye. Georgina Ferry's in-depth account reveals its achievements and invites us to question how the super-rich - and even the moderately affluent - might spend their money more wisely and for the common good.

Max Perutz himself explored the protein haemoglobin and his work, which won him a shared Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today's astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease. Max Perutz's story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life;

And as a pragmatist he reveals his hopes and concerns as to how the information unlocked by the Human Genome Project will affect people's lives in the future. The Common Thread is at once a compelling history of this most exciting of scientific breakthroughs and also an impassioned call for ethical responsibility in scientific research.