To: Bank of England

Nomination of a scientist to appear on the new £50 note

I wish to recommend that a picture of Professor Elsie Widdowson, University of Cambridge scientist, who died in 2000, be placed on the new £50 note. Prof. Widdowson was my tutor at Cambridge.

Why is this important?

Here is a brief history of Prof. Widdowson:

Elsie Widdowson grew up during the First World War in London. She studied Chemistry at Imperial College London and took the BSc examination after two years. As a graduate she worked with Helen Archbold (later Helen Porter, FRS) who steered her into one of the most remarkable scientific careers of the century. She took doctorates at Imperial College and at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and in 1993 a Companion of Honour.
Widdowson specialised in the scientific analysis of food, nutrition and the relationship between diet before and after birth and its effects on development. She entered into a 60-year partnership with Professor RA McCance in 1933. Their joint recognition that contemporary nutritional tables were substantially wrong cemented a highly creative partnership, which revolutionised the way the world assessed nutritional values, how it investigated problems of dietary deficiencies and how mammalian development was perceived.
Famously, Widdowson became involved in nutritional problems faced in Britain during the Second World War, particularly experimenting with minimal diets. Over long periods of self-deprivation McCane and Widdowson showed that health could be maintained on a diet so small that others believed starvation would be inevitable. She was also consulted on the careful dietary policy needed to remedy the effects of gross starvation suffered by Nazi concentration camp victims and later investigated the effects of different types of bread on the recovery rates of malnourished children in the general population of Germany.
Widdowson spent most of her working life in Cambridge, at the Medical Research Council Unit of Experimental (later Investigative) Medicine and at the Dunn Nutrition Unit.

UK

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