Sunetra Gupta, Rosalind Franklin

London, July 22: Children fresh from marvelling at the solar eclipse have been promised an illuminating treat to widen their horizons and correct an imbalance: an illustrated book about women scientists.

Sunetra Gupta, the Calcutta-born Oxford University scientist and novelist chosen last week for the Royal Society award that recognises the achievement of women in science, will use part of the prize money to put together the book.

“An important part of this award is to do something to promote women in science. The project I will be undertaking is an illustrated book for children in the 9-11 age group about women scientists. It will be historical,” Sunetra told The Telegraph after the Rosalind Franklin Award announcement.

Franklin (1920-1958) was “an English scientist who was actually key to unravelling the structure of DNA”. It subsequently emerged that although James Watson and Francis Crick came to be regarded as heroes for unravelling the double helix of the DNA, the two men borrowed heavily from Franklin’s research on what would become the science of genetics without, at the time, revealing this vital piece of information.

This is an omission that upsets Sunetra even though Franklin is now revered as an “icon” by the Royal Society. “She was not honoured in the way she ought to have been. She was totally ignored in that race (to unlock the secrets of the DNA). She had concerns about how women are treated in science which are still prevalent today, how anyone’s contribution, women’s or men’s, can be diminished in ways that are outside their control.”

She wants to convey the excitement of science to impressionable young minds. Her own daughters, Isolde Urmila Natasha and Olivia Nisha Maud, are aged 12 and 10, respectively.

Sunetra paid an emotional tribute to her late father, Dhruba Gupta. “My father died five years ago but he is very important to me. It is very hard to start to talk about everything he brought me but I cannot imagine that I would have been me without my father,” said Sunetra, who is writing a book on the connection between science and literature.

Sunetra, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University’s department of zoology, has also written five novels.

Her father, a university Reader in art and film criticism whose teaching jobs took him and his family to Ethiopia and Zambia, lived to read four of his daughter’s novels — Memories of Rain, The Glassblower’s Breath, Moonlight into Marzipan and A Sin of Colour — but died in 2004 long before the publication in February this year of the fifth, So Good in Black.

Sunetra, who was born in Calcutta on March 15, 1965, and lived in the city from 1976-84, settled in Oxford after graduating from Princeton in 1987 and doing her PhD from Imperial College in 1992.

Her husband, professor Adrian Hill, is chairman of the Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine at Oxford University.

Sunetra’s award was instituted in 2003 by the Royal Society, “the independent scientific academy of the UK and the Commonwealth dedicated to promoting excellence in science”.

The Franklin Award carries prize money of £30,000 (Rs 8 lakh), a medal and a requirement that the recipient give a lecture within six months. In Sunetra’s case, this will be entitled, ‘Surviving pandemics: a pathogen’s perspective’.

Sunetra explained that the award is “essentially established for women in science — (but) it is not open just to women. The idea is that that a portion of the money should be spent on the research but also a portion on promoting women in science.”

Sunetra, an expert on pathogens, is not impressed with the British media’s coverage of the current swine flu epidemic.

She calls it “a vastly overblown response to a natural event which is again a pathogen exploiting an opportunity to spread. It is going to cause disease but it is no more virulent than any other flu. There is a huge hype and panic about this one. It’s ridiculous.”

Sunetra’s mother, Minati Sengupta, a former schoolteacher, still lives in Golf Green in Calcutta. “I still don’t feel it is somewhere I have left,” she said of her relationship with her city of birth. “I really don’t.”

When her father was alive, he would write to Sunetra pretending the letters were from the family pet. “We had a rabbit in Calcutta, Andropov. My father became very attached to Andropov once I had left. He would write me letters from Andropov in French — Andropov was an unusual rabbit.”

Another legacy from her father is her love of Tagore, “my acquaintance with Bengali culture and also international culture. It is the values I have. It’s so deeply derived from what my father gave me.”

Sunetra used the present tense. “He is an extraordinary person.”