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The Popperian Knight, Sir Hermann Bondi, sought to incorporate his mentor's ideals of creativity, imagination purity and scepticism into British teaching - whether in the sciences or the humanities. The aim, initially at least, was to broker an understanding between the scientific profession and government paymasters. But a golden opportunity would also present itself: owing largely to his Presidency of the Association of Science Education, Bondi was to contribute to the Royal Society's Public Understanding of Science initiative - a significant platform and boost in his quest to establish Popper's ideas as the common language through which science could be understood.

The fight over the new state science standards spilled over from the State Board of Education into the State Legislature in 2008 as bills requiring “academic freedom” were filed. Lengthy debates slowed the bills in both legislative chambers, but they progressed nonetheless. The two proposed versions were very different from one another, and the two chambers couldn't reconcile them. Senator Ronda Storms was her bill's leading figure in the Senate, and Rep. D. Alan Hays was her counterpart in the House. Out-of-state science-based organizations such as the Discovery Institute and the National Center for Science Education played roles in the battle as did conservative political writer and actor Ben Stein who visited Florida to promote his movie Expelled, with its anti-evolution theme.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the first children’s museum in the country, aimed its offerings at middle-class children who they saw as independent strivers. In discussing the types of science education available at their museum, the educators who ran the Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed how science education for boys in the early twentieth century was pitched at a higher level than the equivalent offerings for girls.

This chapter is devoted to the story of the Punjab Science Institute and Scientific Workshop, which Ruchi Ram Sahni set up along with Professor J.C. Oman of the Government College, Lahore. The aim of the Institute was to popularize scientific knowledge through the Punjab, initially through lectures illustrated with experiments and magic lantern slides, given both in English and the vernacular. The Institute’s lectures became so popular that Sahni and his colleagues were invited all over the Province, to small muffasil towns, to the native states of Kapurthala, Patiala, and Bhawalpur, as to the followers of a religious Sikh leader; for many years Sahni also lectured on scientific topics in Punjabi to an audience of shopkeepers in Lahore. In addition to his work of popularizing science, Sahni recounts his adventures in setting up of a Scientific Workshop which grew in time to produce such excellent instruments that colleagues at an Industrial Conference in Poona were convinced that they had not been produced in India, but had been made abroad and were being passed off as Indian. The narrative includes a discussion of Sahni’s acquaintance with M.G. Ranade, whom he came to know in Simla and then stayed with in Poona.

When I wrote my first book African American Women Chemists I neglected to state that it was a historical book. I researched to find the first African American woman who had studied chemistry in college and worked in the field. The woman that I found was Josephine Silane Yates who studied chemistry at the Rhode Island Normal School in order to become a science teacher. She was hired by the Lincoln Institute in 1881 and later was, I believe, the first African American woman to become a professor and head a department of science. But then again there might be women who traveled out of the country to study because of racial prejudice in this country. The book ended with some women like myself who were hired as chemists in the industry before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Therefore, I decided to write another book about the current African American women chemists who, as I say, are hiding in plain sight. To do this, I again researched women by using the web or by asking questions of people I met at American Chemical Society ACS or National Organization for the Professional Advances of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) meetings. I asked women to tell me their life stories and allow me to take their oral history, which I recorded and which were transcribed thanks to the people at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. Most of the stories of these women will be archived at the CHF in their oral history collection. The women who were chosen to be in this book are an amazing group of women. Most of them are in academia because it is easy to get in touch with professors since they publish their research on the web. Some have worked for the government in the national laboratories and a few have worked in industry. Some of these women grew up in the Jim Crow south where they went to segregated schools but were lucky because they were smart and had teachers and parents who wanted them to succeed despite everything they had to go through.