To be fair I have hardly ever seen a £50 note in my life but news that the former PM Margaret Thatcher is on a long list of people to be the face of the £50 note for her work in science, may ruffle quite a few feathers. I am unsure what exactly she did for science to be honest.
Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford and worked as a research scientist for food company J Lyons before becoming the UK’s first female Prime Minister.
The selection process has received a total of 174,112 nominations.
Matthew Boulton and James Watt are the faces on the current £50 note.
The favourites, ahead of Thatcher, are…
Professor Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist and cosmologist
Ada Lovelace, first computer programmer
Rosalind Franklin, who inspired the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA
Frederick Sanger, biochemist
Dorothy Hodgkin, chemist
Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science
