Her name is Professor C. Bodin, and she’s responsible for breakthroughs that allow the swapping of body parts from one Lego person to another, allowing minifigs everywhere to experience various forms of locomotion.

She’s also the very first female minifigure whose profession is “scientist” that Lego has ever produced.

The Scientific American’s Maia Weinstock has the story of how she got her hands on one, and how this has kind of been a long time coming. It’s not that Lego has never made lady minifigs with a job in the STEM field, in fact the first female minifig was a doctor, but they’ve been few and far between. And every time they’ve made a minifig that was simply a “scientist,” it was always a guy. From SA:

One collectible [female] minifig is a surgeon, complete with mask, syringe, and X-ray slide. If you consider wild animal care a branch of science, then you can include the Zookeeper among LEGO’s [female] STEM professionals. Several generic female “scientists” were also released as part of the FIRST LEGO League, but they and their male partners were scientists in name only; their clothes had no markings, nor did they carry any scientific instruments.

Professor Bodin comes with two Erlenmeyer flasks, blind packaged along with her other minifig Series 11 counterparts. Weinstock’s article frames the step that her minifig represents expertly: in that it’s just as important to tell boys that girls can be anything they want to be as it is to tell girls that they can be anything they want to be. Producing a female scientist minifigure that isn’t part of the exclusively marketed towards girls Friends line expands the the idea of what a scientist looks or can be like for both genders.

You can read the rest of the article, including a good tip on how to identify which blind packaged pouch contains Professor Bodin, at the Scientific American.

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