Last weekend, The Herald and Herald on Sunday published a list of 50 Scots who helped shape the world. Over two days, we counted down the people who have really left their mark on their country, and the world.

However, we knew it would be an impossible task to cover everyone and so asked you, our readers, to send in suggestions of people we might have missed.

Here are three ideas we received this week ... do you agree?

William Murdoch

I would respectfully wish to draw attention to, in my humble opinion, one major omission – William Murdoch.

He was born on August 21, 1754, in Lugar, near Cumnock in Ayrshire. He was the third of seven children and the first son to survive beyond infancy. His father was a millwright and young William soon learned to help out with the family business.

However, his yearning for education lay well outside the rural community in which he grew up. In August 1777, at the age of 23, he walked, yes walked, to Birmingham to seek employment with the then fledgling company set up by James Watt and Matthew Boulton, steam engineers.

Much has been documented concerning the massive impact created by James Watt in the production of steam propulsion but little is known of Murdoch’s contribution. Initially being a little envious of the talent displayed by Murdoch, it was only later in the design stage that Watt credited him with his important input.

However, William Murdoch will be best remembered for his own invention: coal gas lighting. Starting with producing enough gas to light his own home, then the factory where he worked, his invention blossomed throughout towns and cities all over this country and beyond. Much more could be written about this remarkable Scot and his contribution to the economic and progressive development of this country but I will leave it there.

Jim Stables

Bishopton

Susan Wighton

One person I would like to suggest including is a nurse called Susan Wighton. She worked in refugee camps in Lebanon in the early eighties in unspeakable conditions. She was in her early twenties, and when she returned she was voted Evening Times Scotswoman of the Year.

I hadn’t heard anything of her since then, until I read the biography of Marie Colvin, where Susan’s work in the refugee camps in the 1980s was mentioned. She has obviously continued her nursing career, under the radar, not finding it necessary to post on Twitter, Facebook, etc – just quietly doing good.

I have never forgotten her.

Margaret Forbes

Kilmacolm

Jane Haining

May I suggest that Jane Haining from Dunscore should be among the 50. She worked as a Church of Scotland missionary in its mission school in Budapest in the 1930s and 1940s and was responsible for saving the lives of many Jews during the Holocaust.

She refused to abandon her work and was eventually arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in 1944.

In 1997, she was named Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel.

Her response to difficult and dreadful times reminds us that “there is always something we can do”.

Christopher Thornhill