L'Oréal: Women in Science

KATHLEEN LONSDALE 1903 – 1971: KATHLEEN LONSDALE 1903 – 1971

At a glance:
crystallographer, first woman to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society

Irish by birth, Lonsdale’s family moved to England when she was 5. She had to move to a boy’s school to study maths and science and entered Bedford College for Women to study maths when only 16. At University College London, she became a pioneer in the use of X rays to study crystals. she married fellow chemist Thomas Lonsdale and moved to Leeds when he got a job there. She had 3 children and was ready to give up research but her husband said that he hadn’t married her to get a free housekeeper. Whilst at Leeds, Lonsdale showed that the benzene ring, essential in the study of organic chemistry, was flat. The Lonsdales were Quakers and during the Second World War, she refused to register for civil defence duties. She was summoned, refused to pay a fine and subsequently imprisoned in Holloway gaol for a month. In 1945, she and Marjory Stephenson, became the first women to be elected Fellows of the Royal Society.
ADA, COUNTESS LOVELACE 1815 -1852: ADA, COUNTESS LOVELACE 1815 -1852

At a glance:
Bryon’s daughter and teenage predictor of the computer age

Ada was the product of a disastrous marriage between her mother Isabelle and the poet Lord Byron. Isabelle fled Byron with Ada when she was only 4 weeks old, resolving that Ada would be brought up to have nothing whatsoever to do with poets or poetry. She was tutored in maths and music and her mentors included Mary Somerville (qv). At 17, she met Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of maths at Cambridge and inventor of the difference engine, a calculating machine. At the time he was working on an analytical engine. In 1842, an Italian mathematician published a memoir in French on Babbage’s analytical machine, a forerunner of computers, which Ada translated. Her copious additional notes make it clear that she understood its promise better than Babbage. She died a horrible death from cancer at 36 and was forgotten until relatively recently, when her contribution to computing was acknowledged. A computer language is named after her and a portrait of Ada was once the security watermark for Microsoft products.
ANNE MCLAREN 1927 -2007: ANNE MCLAREN 1927 -2007

At a glance:
distinguished geneticist who made a notable contribution of the science and ethics of fertility treatment

An exceptional scientist, Anne McLaren made fundamental advances in genetics which paved the way for the development of in vitro fertilisation. She also played an important role in discussions on the fraught ethical issues that surrounded IVF in its early days. She was the daughter of a wealthy family of industrialists and read Zoology at Oxford, studying the genetics of rabbits. As a researcher in London she worked with mice, studying the effects of super ovulation on fertility. Working with John Biggers, she produced the first litter of mice grown from eggs that had developed in tissue culture and then been transferred to a surrogate mother, paving the way for embryo transfer in human IVF. She worked at the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh for 15 years, before returning to London as Director of the MRC Mammalian Development Unit, developing projects on reproductive immunology, contraception and chimeras. Later at the Gurdon Institute she continued research on stem cells. She became the first female officer of the Royal Society in 331 years, when she was appointed as their Foreign Secretary and travelled widely, becoming a role model for women in science. She and her former husband, Donald Michie were killed in a car crash.
BARBARA McCLINTOCK 1902 – 1992: BARBARA McCLINTOCK 1902 – 1992

At a glance:
the discoverer of ‘jumping genes’

Barbara McClintock was an American cytogeneticist who worked with maize plants and made fundamental discoveries about genetics, in particular that genes are not fixed but can ‘jump’ (be transposed) from one chromosome to another. Today this knowledge is part and parcel of GCSE biology. It explains for instance how resistance to antibiotics can be transferred between entirely different sorts of bacteria and is fundamental in understanding how evolution occurs. But her findings on gene regulation and transposition were greeted with such scepticism that in the 1950s, she made a decision to stop publishing them. Their significance went unrecognised for decades. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 when she was 81, for research carried out in her early forties. It is often said that recognition was denied to her because she was a woman but in truth her discovery was so radical that it was difficult for others to believe it.
LISE MEITNER 1878-1968: LISE MEITNER 1878-1968

At a glance:
Physicist who described nuclear fission

Born in Vienna, Meitner was invited to work with physicist Otto Hahn in Berlin but was refused access to his laboratory because she was a woman. She was forced to occupy a broom cupboard instead. In 1934, Hahn and she began experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons with puzzling results. Only later, when working with her nephew Otto Frisch did she realise that what they had actually done was split the uranium nucleus. She was forced to leave Germany by the Nazis in 1938 and fled to Sweden, barely escaping with her life. Meitner recognized there could be a chain reaction causing a huge explosion. In 1939, she and Frisch published a paper describing the process they called nuclear fission. Edward Teller and others who realised its potential as a weapon, persuaded Einstein to write and warn President Roosevelt. This led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project but Meitner refused an offer to work on it at Los Alamos, saying "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" In possibly the most egregious example of a scientist being overlooked for a Nobel, it was Hahn who received the prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, not Meitner
MARIA MITCHELL 1818 – 1889: MARIA MITCHELL 1818 – 1889

At a glance:
Pioneer American astronomer

Maria Mitchell’s family were Quakers, which meant that intellectual equality between the sexes was valued so Maria benefited from education similar to her nine brothers. She was offered the job as first librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum, after which she was largely self taught. She was an enthusiast ‘We ask for all the knowledge around us and the more we get, the more we desire’. She discovered ‘Miss Mitchell’s comet’ using a telescope, which gave her worldwide fame and a prize from the King of Denmark. She became the first professional woman astronomer and the first woman member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She became professor of astronomy at Vassar College. When she learned that her salary was considerably less than that of her younger male colleagues she made such a fuss that she got the salary increase she demanded. She was a suffragette and traveled in Europe with Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and his family.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 1820-1910: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 1820-1910

At a glance:
Lady with the lamp and a noted statistician pioneering visual presentations of statistics and was the first female memer of the Royal Statistical Society

Named after the city of her birth, Florence Nightingale committed herself to nursing from her teens. She was a campaigner for health improvements in workhouse infirmaries and is most famous for her work during the Crimean War, believing that more deaths occurred because of the poor living conditions of the troops than from battle. From an early age, she was a skilled mathematician with a special interest in statistics. Statistical analysis was key to her advocacy, and she pioneered the use of visual presentations to simplify traditional statistical reports for important stakeholders such as politicians and army chiefs. She used ‘coxcombs’, compilations of pie charts to illustrate, for instance, seasonal mortality. She was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and left money in her will for a Chair of Applied Statistics at Oxford University.
BEATRIX POTTER 1866 -1943: BEATRIX POTTER 1866 -1943

At a glance:
author of Peter Rabbit and respected mycologist

Beatrix Potter was typical of her time in that she was expected to keep house when she left school, rather than pursue further education. She was always interested in fauna and flora but was rejected as a student at the Royal Botanical Gardens because she was a woman. However she continued to make observations and drawings, particularly of fungi, being one of the first to suggest that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. She recorded her microscopical observations in exquisite paintings and had a considerable reputation and respect as a mycologist (one who studies fungi). An uncle attempted to present her work on the germination of spores to the Linnaen Society who turned it down because she was a woman. The Royal Society also turned down her work. She occupied her time instead with writing stories about animals.
EMILY ROEBLING 1844-1903: EMILY ROEBLING 1844-1903

At a glance:
silent engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge

Born into an upper class American family, Emily Warren defied convention, taking maths and science subjects at school. Emily married Washington Roebling, an engineer whose father John, also an engineer, was designer of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the greatest engineering project of its day. After Roebling Senior died suddenly of tetanus, his son took charge. But then he too was struck down with decompression sickness acquired during the works. Fearing that he wouldn’t live to finish the project, she learnt the technical issues, including strength of materials, stress analysis, cable construction and calculation of caternary curves. She went to the site every day to give her husband’s instructions and answer worker’s queries. Many suspected that hers was the intelligence behind the project, as indeed it had become. That this was the work of a woman was thought both preposterous and potentially dangerous. But in 1883, when the bridge opened, it was Emily who rode across the bridge with the President. She continued to lead an extraordinary life, taking a law degree when she was 56.
NANCY ROTHWELL 1957 -: NANCY ROTHWELL 1957 -

At a glance:
British neuroscientist working on brain injury

Nancy Rothwell wanted to be an artist and dropped biology at 14. She managed to gain entry to read physiology at a college in London, her choice of university having been driven entirely by how close it was to great shops. And she then became completely hooked on science. She began her research career investigating the role of energy balance in obesity. It earned her a coveted Royal Society Research Fellowship in 1984. She returned back to her native Manchester in 1987 but switched research direction. She began work investigating the causes and possible prevention of brain damage from stroke. This work stemmed from a control experiment that was supposed to prove the opposite of what turned out to be the case – a moment Nancy says stands out as one of the most exciting in her life. Her subsequent research suggests that modification of cytokines, mediators of immune response in response to infection or injury, may be of benefit in a wide range of neurological conditions such as stroke and head injury. Rothwell is passionate about public engagement and has frequently spoken out in defence of animal experimentation.
MARY SOMERVILLE 1780 – 1872: MARY SOMERVILLE 1780 – 1872

At a glance:
the first popular science writer

It was the death of her first husband that allowed Mary Somerville the financial and emotional independence to study, whch was rare in the 18th century for a woman. Her second marriage to William Somerville bought her into contact with many scientists of the day, including Herschel. Even though she had six children she nevertheless began scientific investigations in 1825, presenting her findings to the Royal Society. However she realised she could reach a larger audience by simple explanation and began a popular science book, The Mechanism of the Heavens. Like many women however she suffered from imposter syndrome. Thinking that she didn’t have the qualifications to write it, she swore those involved to secrecy, reasoning that if it was no good, it could be destroyed without anyone knowing. In fact it was a huge success and Somerville with her lucid prose became the first popular science writer. The term scientist was first coined by William Whewell in a review of a book by Somerville. Her last scientific book, Molecular and Microscopic Science’ was published when she was 89.
ROSALYN YALOW 1921 –: ROSALYN YALOW 1921 –

At a glance:
American medical physicist who won a Nobel prize for her work developing the radioimmunoassay technique

Rosalyn Yalow was born in New York. Believing that a woman would never get financial support for a College course, she got a job as a secretary to a biochemist, graduating from Hunter College in 1941. During the war scholarships were offered to women as so many men were off fighting, enabling her to take tuition free courses in physics. She began working at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital after gaining her PhD and has remained there ever since. She collaborated with Solomon Berson to develop radioimmunoassay, a technique which uses radioisotopes to measure those substances in the blood only present in the tiniest quantities, such as hormones, vitamins and enzymes which had previously been too small to detect. The technique revolutionised the treatment and understanding of many conditions including diabetes, thyroid disease and fertility problems. The radioimmunoassay was critical to medical advance and had huge commercial potential. However Berson and Yalow refused to patent the method.
CAROLINE HERSCHEL 1750-1848: CAROLINE HERSCHEL 1750 1848

At a glance:
18th century discoverer of comets

Caroline Herschel was born in Germany but moved to England to join her brother William when she was 22. William was initially an organist and she was a fine singer. But he became interested in astronomy and devised ever bigger telescopes, accepting the job of King’s Astronomer to George III in 1782. Caroline was his indispensable assistant, performing the complex calculations necessary to his observations. When William married, she made observations of her own, discovering eight comets. She cross indexed John Flamsteed’s catalogue of stars, which was full of errors, showing the errata and adding a further 560 stars which he had not included and also produced a catalogue of nebulae. She was given the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society in 1823 and in 1835 became with Mary Somerville, the first woman to be awarded honorary membership of the Royal Society. She died in Germany in full possession of all her faculties, aged 98.
DOROTHY HODGKIN 1910-1994: DOROTHY HODGKIN 1910-1994

At a glance:
British crystallographer, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1964

‘Oxford Housewife wins Nobel’ was the headline run by the Daily Mail when Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964. The ‘housewife’ was in fact one of the most outstanding scientists of the 20th Century. She analysed the molecular structure of complex chemicals including antibiotics (penicillin and cephalosporin C), cholesterol, vitamins (D and B12 used to treat anaemia) and hormones. The technique she used involves passing X rays through crystals which produces diffraction patterns on film from which the 3D structures can be deduced. It requires intuition, creativity and endless patience. Penicillin contains 39 atoms, insulin contains thousands and it took 34 years to determine its structure. Hodgkin was remarkable in many ways – she was a committed socialist who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and also overcame crippling rheumatoid arthritis which afflicted her from a young age. She became only the second woman after Florence Nightingale to have received the Award of Merit. She received the Nobel Prize in 1964 for her work on insulin, but any of her discoveries was worthy of a Nobel.
GRACE HOPPER 1906-1992: GRACE HOPPER 1906-1992

At a glance:
pioneer American computer scientist and Rear Admiral

The fabulous Grace Hopper was born in New York and at first taught maths at Vassar College. But she came from a family with military traditions and in 1943, resigned from Vassar to join the Navy under the WAVES (women accepted for voluntary emergency service) programme. She joined a research team at the Ordnance Computation Project. Her main contribution to computing was to create the first standardised computer language COBOL which is still in use, together with the invention of the compiler, the intermediate progam that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She also invented the term ‘debug’. A moth had stopped a machine working. As Hopper struggled to extract it, a supervisor asked what she was doing. ‘Debugging Sir’. After the war she worked for a company that eventually became the Univac division of Sperry-Rand but continued to serve with the Naval Reserve. In 1967, she returned to active duty and at her retirement with the rand of Admiral in 1986 aged 80, she was the oldest serving officer in the US Navy.
LINDA BUCK 1947 -: LINDA BUCK 1947 -

At a glance:
American Nobel prize winner honoured for her work on smell in 2004

Linda Buck didn’t decide on science as a career until she was nearly 30. Seattle born, she originally took psychology thinking that she wanted to be a psychotherapist. She drifted from one thing to another for several years after graduating but then she took a class in immunology and was instantly hooked. Only at this stage did she know that she wanted to be a biologist. She worked in Texas before joining Richard Axel at Columbia University. In the mid eighties she read a paper on smell and was intrigued. How could humans recognise and remember 10,000 or more different smells when some were virtually identical chemically? It was the beginning of work to find out how the human olfactory (smell) system work. It revealed that each odour receptor in the nose makes just one of a thousand possible receptors. A smell may activate many, to a greater or lesser degree, so that each smell generates its own unique scent fingerprint. Now at Harvard, Buck works on pheromones and anti-ageing.
ANNIE JUMP CANNON 1863–1941: ANNIE JUMP CANNON 1863 – 1941

At a glance:
US astronomer – and Fine Girl - who catalogued the stars

As a child growing up in Delaware, Annie Cannon contracted scarlet fever. It left her almost completely deaf. She obtained a degree in physics but there was little for women could do thereafter and she became bored. After the death of her mother and by now 30, she wrote to her former tutor at Wellesley College in the hope of a job. She worked there as a junior physics teacher, gaining skills in spectroscopic measurements. In 1894 she was hired by the director of the Harvard Observatory, Edward Pickering to complete the Draper Catalogue, which mapped all the stars in the sky, classifying them by their spectra. It was a project fraught with problems as how to classify stars proved very difficult. Annie Jump Cannon devised a system still used today. Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me was the mnemonic she devised for spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K. Her Draper catalogues were immensely valued and she discovered over 300 stars herself. But it wasn’t until 1938, two years before retirements that she was able to obtain a regular Harvard appointment as William C Bond Astronomer.
RACHEL CARSON 1907–1964: RACHEL CARSON 1907 – 1964

At a glance:
a scientist turned influential environmental campaigner

Rachel Carson was bought up in a farm in Pennsylvania. Initially she studied English but swapped to biology, completing an MA in zoology at Johns Hopkins. She worked at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory before taking a job as a staff aquatic biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She was a gifted writer and ended up as their Chief Editor. An early book on oceans ‘The Sea was around us’ was a bestseller and she resigned her job in 1952 to concentrate on writing. She is best known for ‘Silent Spring’ published in 1952 after four years of careful research. Because of her job, she had unprecedented access to government scientists and papers. It documents the dangers of pesticides and herbicides and in particular the long lasting presence of toxic chemicals in water and mother’s milk. The book was the subject of constant assault from the chemicals industry from the start but John F Kennedy read it and ordered a presidential advisory committee which issued a report in 1963 backing Carson. Silent Spring was enormously influential; it is credited with the setting up of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, the banning of DDT and in kick starting the environmentalist movement.
GERTY CORI 1896–1957: GERTY CORI 1896 – 1957

At a glance:
Nobel prize winning American who discovered how energy is stored in the body

Shamefully Gerty Cori was only made a full professor a year before she won the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine in 1947, a prize she shared jointly with her husband Carl. The couple, originally from the Czech Republic, worked at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York where their main research focus was energy metabolism in the body. They published some 50 papers jointly, describing the movement of energy in the body from muscle to the liver and back to muscle again, giving their name to the process – the Cori cycle. Gerty also published 11 articles as a single author. When they left Roswell in 1930, several universities offered Carl a job, but none would hire Gerty. She was told that she would ruin his career if she continued to attempt to work with him. In 1931, he was given a chair at Washington University who grudgingly offered Gerty a lowly research assistant’s post, finally giving her a chair fifteen years later in 1946.
MARIE CURIE 1867-1934: MARIE CURIE 1867-1934

At a glance:
universally famous scientist who won two Nobel prizes for her work on radioactivity

Marie Curie was born in Poland but enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1891, graduating first in her class for physics. She then took a maths degree. She began research and met her husband Pierre whom she married in 1895. She believed there to be an unknown radioactive element and together they worked to isolate it from pitchblende, a uranium ore, discovering first polonium and later radium. Her 1903 dissertation became the first doctorate in science awarded to a woman in Europe. The Curies, together with Henri Becquerel were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. Pierre was killed in an accident in 1906. Marie was denied election to the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, the same year that she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, but this time for Chemistry. Thereafter she refused to have her name resubmitted. She was a global celebrity but scandal erupted when news of her affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin emerged in the press, prompting angry mobs outside her home and deeply unpleasant newspaper coverage. During World War I Curie and her daughter Irene, fitted ambulances with portable X ray equipment, driving vehicles to the front line. She was dogged by constant ill health induced by exposure to radioactivity. Her notebooks are still too radioactive to be handled without specialist equipment.
Mary Anning 1799 -1847: Mary Anning 1799 -1847

At a glance:
The greatest fossilist the world has ever known

Mary Anning was said to ‘understand more of the science of paleontology than anyone else in this kingdom’ but she was a woman, moreover one of low social class, in a man’s kingdom. She lived and died in Lyme Regis, on the South coast of England. It’s cliffs are rich in fossils from seas of the Jurassic period. The Anning family lived in dire poverty, occasionally selling fossils to gentlemen collectors. A professional collector, Thomas Birch raised money to help them and Mary with her keen eye and accomplished skills as an anatomist soon established herself as a respected fossil hunter. She found the first pleisiosaur, which remains the type specimen for all others and made many other great discoveries including a pterodactyl and several ichthyosaurs. Her discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction, Her enormous contribution to paleontology was forgotten on her death, partly because it troubled the educated to think that someone uneducated like Mary could have such great intellectual skills
HERTHA AYRTON 1854-1923: HERTHA AYRTON 1854-1923

At a glance:
pioneering engineer and suffragette who saved many lives

Born in Portsmouth, she studied maths at Cambridge but being a woman was not eligible for a degree, merely a certificate so had to study in London to obtain her BSc. She invented a draftsman’s device for dividing a line into equal parts and for reducing and enlarging figures. Later she married physicist William Ayrton and assisted him in his experiments on electricity. She herself worked on arc lamps - her improvements to searchlight technology were used in aircraft detection during both wars. She also invented a fan for dispersing poison gases used in the trenches. Ayrton was the first woman to become a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. She was the first to read a paper in person (on the formation of sand ripples) to the Royal Society yet she was refused their Fellowship because she was a married woman. A great friend of Marie Curie, she provided an anonymous haven for her to recuperate from illness. Both women were constantly (and astonishingly) accused of riding on their husband’s coat tails. ‘An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’ wrote Ayrton. She and her daughter were notable suffragettes.
JOCELYN BELL BURNELL 1943–: JOCELYN BELL BURNELL 1943 –

At a glance:
astrophysicist who discovered radiopulsars

Bell Burnell was born in Belfast near the Armargh Observatory where she spent much time as a child. After a physics degree, she went to Cambridge. It was in 1967, when she was a research student aged 24, that she discovered the first pulsar. With her supervisor, Anthony Hewish and others she had spent the first two years at Cambridge building a radiotelescope designed to record rapid variations in signal from within the Crab Nebula. She noticed one signal which was a rapid set of pulses every 1.337 sec. Temporarily dubbed LGM 1 (as in Little Green Men), Bell Burnell soon discovered three others leading to the realisation that they were being emitted by a special kind of star – a rotating neutron star called a pulsar . Bell Burnell’s name was second on the paper that was subquently published but it was Hewish and others who received the Nobel Prize not Bell Burnell. She has always made light of this controversial decision saying that ‘students don’t win Nobel prizes’ and ‘an award to me would have debased the prize’. Her subsequent career in which she worked on infrared and optical astronomy has been a distinguished one and she has been a notable force in encouraging women into science. Her Quaker faith has been an important part of her life.
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL 1821–1910: ELIZABETH BLACKWELL 1821 – 1910

At a glance:
first woman to graduate from medical school

Elizabeth Blackwell was born into a religiously and socially radical family. British by birth, she moved to the US when she was 12 where her mother opened a school. She became obsessed with the idea of becoming a woman doctor to meet the needs of women but no medical school would admit her. Finally Geneva Medical College New York agreed but she was kept from medical demonstrations and was an outcast in the town. Nevertheless, she graduated top of her class in 1849, the first woman doctor of medicine. She returned to England, working at St Bartholomew’s Hospital London and becoming friends with Florence Nightingale. In 1851, she went back to New York. Hospitals wanted nothing to do with her, so she set up a surgery for women in her own home. During a year long lecture tour of England in 1885, she became the first woman to have her name on the British medical register. Her lectures inspired other women to take up medicine and her later work during the American Civil War, selecting and training nurses, inspired the creation of the US Sanitary Commission. In 1875 she was appointed Professor of Gynaecology at the hospital founded by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and died in Sussex in 1910.
ANN DOWLING: ANN DOWLING

At a glance:
outstanding mechanical engineer working with planes

As far as the public are concerned, Ann Dowling, who is professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, works on boys stuff – aeroplanes, submarines and oil exploration. As far as engineers are concerned she is a leading authority on developments that are enabling the control of unstable combustion systems in both aeronautics and power generation. She was the first to understand the mechanics of the jet engine instability known as reheat buzz. The two underlying themes of her work are the interaction of sound with unsteady flow and the control of aeroaccoustic instabilities. Her work on ‘silent running’ in submarines helped resolve problems faced by engineers interpreting the results of seismic tests used in oil exploration. She has held visiting posts at MIT and at Caltech and is the UK lead of the Silent Aircraft Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge and MIT who have recently released the conceptual design of an ultra-low noise and fuel efficient aircraft, SAX40. She is currently working with Rolls Royce on the gas turbines used in power stations.
GERTRUDE ELION 1918-1999: GERTRUDE ELION 1918 - 1999

At a glance:
American pharmacologist responsible for some of the world’s most important medicines

Gertude Elion was born in New York. She had no interest in science as a child, although she did have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. When she was 15, her grandfather died a painful lingering death from stomach cancer. ‘I decided that nobody should have to suffer that much’. So she took chemistry as a degree but when she graduated, no positions were available in research laboratories for women. She worked as a lab assistant and a high school teacher to earn enough to let her take a part time PhD, but then gave it up to take a job as assistant to George Hitchings at the Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company. She never did get a PhD although she was to get a string of honorary doctorates later in her life. Her innovative research, both with Hitchings and alone, producing a string of new drugs. Mercaptopurine, the first drug for leukaemia, the first immuno-suppressive agent, the malaria drug Daraprim and, paving the way for AZT and other anti-HIV drugs, acyclovir for viral herpes. She became the first woman to be inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame
DIAN FOSSEY 1932-85: DIAN FOSSEY 1932-85

At a glance:
great apes expert murdered because of her work with gorillas

Dian Fossey pursued a career as an occupational therapist, although she wanted to be a scientist. However, she didn’t have the necessary skills with physics or chemistry. She went on to became director of an occupational therapy department in Kentucky until she met Dr Louis Leakey who was giving a lecture in Louisville. in 1966, through him, she began long term research on mountain gorillas, first in Zaire and then in Rwanda. She strongly supported active conservation through anti poaching patrols and preservation of natural habitat. She is portrayed as eccentric and difficult, features that in male scientists are thought endearing but which in women are regarded as evidence of mental instability. She was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin in 1985, felled by a blow from a poacher’s weapon to the head that she kept on display as a souvenir. The perpetrator has never been found but there is speculation that it was either poachers in a revenge killing or an effort to prevent her disrupting profitable plans for tourism.
ROSALIND FRANKLIN 1920-1958: ROSALIND FRANKLIN 1920 - 1958

At a glance:
outstanding X ray crystallographer who made an important contribution to the understanding of the structure of DNA

Franklin was educated at St Paul’s Girls School and then at Cambridge graduating in chemistry during the war years. She first worked for an organisation researching coal before spending several years in Paris, on the same subject. In 1951 she began work at King’s College London where she was directed to X ray diffraction of DNA, the molecule of inheritance. Watson and Crick indirectly obtained a pre-publication version of Franklin’s diffraction data giving them insights into DNA’s structure. They published their famous paper in Nature in 1953 with a small footnote to Franklin’s data. Franklin went on to work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus at Birkbeck College. She died from ovarian cancer at the age of 38, four years before the award of the Nobel Prize to Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962. Franklin was not mentioned in their Nobel prize acceptance speeches. Watson provided a coarse caricature of her in his subsequent book ‘The Double Helix’ which was then countered vociferously by Sir Aaron Klug. Although Franklin’s contribution to this key discovery has been recognised in many ways since her death, there remains a lingering sense that she has been unfairly treated and deserved better.
SOPHIE GERMAIN 1776-1831: SOPHIE GERMAIN 1776-1831

At a glance:
Great mathematician forced to assume the identity of a man

The Ecole Polytechnique, an academy of excellence for scientists and mathematicians, opened in Paris in 1794 but it was reserved exclusively for men. Sophie got hold of lecture notes, took the identity of a former student, M le Blanc and wrote answers to the problems printed for him. When her teacher demanded to meet this brilliant student she was unmasked. Taking the name of Le Blanc, she corresponded with the most famous mathematician of the age, the German, Carl Gauss. She made a profoundly important contribution to one of math’s then unsolved conundrums, Fermat’s Last Theorem. This would have forever been wrongly attributed to the mysterious Le Blanc, had it not been for Napoleon’s invasion of Prussia. Fearing for Gauss’ safety, she contacted a family friend who was one of Napoleon’s commanders. When he told Gauss he owed his life to Mademoiselle Germain, he said he did not know her. The Institut de France set a prize competition, asking for a mathematical theory that would explain the elasticity of metal plates. Sophie was the only entrant, but her work did not win the award. Her third attempt in 1819 won her one kilogram of gold although she boycotted the award ceremony. Her work was built on by others but is the basis of all modern building construction. When the Eiffel Tower was built, the names of 72 ‘savants’ were inscribed on plaques around the base. Sophie’s name was not among them, even though the Tower could not have been constructed without her elasticity work. Her death certificate listed her not as scientist but as ‘rentiere’ (a woman of no profession).
MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER 1906-1977: MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER 1906 - 1977

At a glance:
US physicist who won a Nobel Prize for her work on the structure of the atomic nucleus

Maria Goeppert was born in Silesia and educated at Goettingen University in Germany, then the most exciting place to work for theoretical physicists. She was taught by three Nobel prize winners and her fellow students and lecturers included famous physicists Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg. But when she married American chemist Joe Mayer and they emigrated to America in 1930, she could not get a job at Johns Hopkins University where her husband worked and it was to be 1941 before she managed to get a part time job teaching science. She did other voluntary or unofficial jobs including working for Edward Teller at Los Alamos for instance. When Joe Mayer moved to the University of Chicago, strict rules against hiring wives meant no job once again. She was given a job a part time job as a theoretical physicist with the newly formed Argonne Laboratory. There she developed the nuclear shell model, showing how the atom was arranged, including a description of magic numbers in nuclei (those arrangements of protons and neutrons which confer most stability). She and Hans Jensen were jointly awarded the Nobel prize for this work.
JANE GOODALL 1934–: JANE GOODALL 1934 –

At a glance:
conservationist and world authority on chimpanzees

Jane Goodall obtained a PhD from Cambridge University in 1965 despite never having been to University. She initially worked as a secretary and as a film production secretary but then had an opportunity to work for anthropologist Louis Leakey in Africa. She studied the chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve on Lake Tanzania, discovering that they are omnivores and that they use tools. She became a passionate advocate of animal rights and has become the global leader of efforts to protect wild apes and their habitats. Her unconventional practices, such as giving names to the chimpanzees she studied, have brought criticism from some scientists, some of whom resent her high media profile.
ALICE HAMILTON 1869-1970: ALICE HAMILTON (1869-1970)

At a glance:
US doctor and social reformer who founded the science of occupational medicine.

Alice Hamilton’s work on ill health caused by workplace hazards such as lead and organic solvents was so influential that Harvard offered her the post of assistant professor of industrial medicine, fully three decades before they accepted women as medical students. But it was subject to three requirements. No use of the Faculty Club, no access to football tickets, no presence in University processions. Dr Hamilton’s enormous contribution was recognised with many honours later in her life including a listing in Men of Science in 1944 but Harvard never made her up to full professor. The FBI still considered sufficiently subversive at the age of 90, to insist on monitoring her peace campaigning.
HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA 370–415: HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA 370 – 415

At a glance:
first notable woman polymath murdered by those who envied her scholarship

A truly extraordinary woman who headed the school at Alexandria in Roman Egypt hailed as a valiant defender of science against religion. She discourage mysticism and encouraged logical mathematical thinking. ‘Reserve your right to think’ she said ‘for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all’. She wrote treatises on geometry, algebra and astronomy, including charts of celestial bodies. A gifted teacher of philosophy, students flocked to her from all over the Greek world, although she was a pagan. She invented several tools, including a device for distilling water. Renowned for her beauty and for her learning she paid for her talent with her life. She was stripped naked, dragged through the streets and killed by a Coptic Christian mob, who felt threatened by her scholarship and scientific knowledge.
IRENE JOLIOT-CURIE 1897-1956: IRENE JOLIOT-CURIE 1897 -1956

At a glance:
discovered artificial radioactivity, daughter of Pierre & Marie Curie, Nobel for Chemistry 1935

The daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, Irene helped run the field hospitals her mother had established during the First World War, exposing herself to large doses of radiation. She went to work at the Radium Institute in Paris and in 1926 married Frederic Joliot, a pupil of her mother’s. Jointly they discovered in 1935 that one element could be turned into another by bombardment with alpha particles, creating radioactive isotopes. Their discovery allowed radioactive materials which are used extensively in medicine to be created quickly, cheaply and plentifully. Joliot-Curie was accidentally exposed to polonium in 1946 and died of radiation induced leukaemia at the age of 58. She and her husband received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry jointly in 1935. Their work pioneered the research on radium nuclei that led to Lise Meitner(qv) and others to nuclear fission. The Joliot Curies were worried how this work might be used and in 1939,placed all their documents on nuclear fission in the vaults of the Academie des Sciences where it remained until 1949.
HEDY LAMARR 1913–2000: HEDY LAMARR 1913 – 2000

At a glance:
film star and communications expert

Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, the mathematically gifted Lamarr learnt about military technology from her first husband who was an arms dealer. She became a film star following a meeting with Louis B Mayer in London, starring most famously in Samson and Delilah. At a Hollywood dinner party in 1941, the problem of Atlantic convoys coming under torpedo attack was raised. Lamarr and Antheil, an avant garde composer, devised a system intended to make it hard for enemies to detect radio guided torpedoes using frequency hopping, a way to rapidly change between a large number of frequencies. The pair filed a patent but it wasn’t implemented until after it had expired, during the US blockade of Cuba in 1962. Frequency hopping forms the basis for all modern spread spectrum communications technology such as WiFi and cordless phones. Had the pair not let the patent expire, their heirs would have been billionaires.
RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI 1909–: RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI 1909 –

At a glance:
Nobel prize winning Italian discoverer of nerve growth factor

Born into an intellectual Jewish family in Turin, Levi-Montalcini read medicine against her father’s wishes. Her twin sister became a famous Italian artist and her brother, a celebrated architect. She had just embarked on an academic career when Mussolini banned non Ayryan citizens from practising science and medicine. She built a secret lab in her bedroom. Later, when bombing forced many to leave, she rebuilt her lab in a dining room in the hills. She worked on the development of the nervous system which required fertilised eggs, then almost impossible to obtain. After the war, she was invited to Washington where she remained for the next 30 years. She noticed tumours made embryonic nerve cells proliferate enormously. She eventually isolated the factor that caused this – nerve growth factor – from salivary glands. This work paved the way for explosion of interest in growth factors and has been of great importance in understanding tissue regeneration and cancer growth. She and Stanley Cohen received the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1986. She is the oldest living laureate and a senator for life in the Italian Senate.
CHRISTIANE NUSSLEIN VOLHARD (1942 –: CHRISTIANE NUSSLEIN VOLHARD 1942 –

At a glance:
German developmental biologist, Nobel Prize for Medicine 1995

Currently Director of the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Biology, Dr Nusslein Volhard initially worked with tiny fruit flies, called Drosophila. She had the idea of exposing their eggs with chemicals and radiation (which causes genetic mutations) and then looking for strange looking larvae and flies as this would help identify which genes were responsible for forming body pattern. At the time, many of the mechanisms which made it possible for a single cell to develop into a multi-functional organism were not understood. Nusslein-Volhard found huge numbers of new genes creating the foundation for work on the development of all other creatures including humans. She also began the tradition of giving descriptive names to genes such as Sonic Hedgehog and Knirps (after the little pocket German umbrella. She won her Nobel prize in 1995 and used the prize money to set up a fund for women scientists which pays for childcare and, as importantly in her opinion, cleaners.
CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN 1900 – 1979: CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN 1900 – 1979

At a glance:
English astronomer who showed the sun is mainly composed of hydrogen

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was English by birth. She read natural sciences at Cambridge where her interest in astronomy was sparked. She won a Pickering Fellowship to study at the Harvard Observatory and moved to the US when she was 23. She was the first person, male or female, to be awarded a PhD in astronomy from Harvard with her dissertation being hailed as the most brilliant ever written in the field. She suggested that helium and especially hydrogen was the major constituent of the stars but was dissuaded from concluding it because her supervisor claimed it was impossible. Later she was proved right. She later studied stars of high luminosity. She married a Russian astronomer and they worked together developing data which was used to determine how stars evolved. She is regarded as a key figure in women’s science because her trail blazing brought women scientists into the mainstream.
ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON 1836 – 1917: ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON 1836 – 1917

At a glance:
first British doctor, pioneer physician and campaigner

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was born in Suffolk, one of ten children. In 1859, she heard a lecture by Elizabeth Blackwell (qv) on medicine as a profession for ladies and resolved to become a doctor. She overcame her father’s opposition and entered medical training as a surgical nurse. When she came first in all the exams, her fellow students had her banned from lectures. She was rejected by all British medical schools so studied for an apothecary licence. Although she got it, becoming the first woman qualified in Britain to do so, the Society of Apothecaries then changed the rules so no more women could be licensed. She opened a dispensary for women and child which subsequently became the only teaching hospital to offer courses for women. She learnt French in order to study medicine at the Sorbonne and qualified in 1870. In 1872, she founded the New Hospital for Women, later named after its founded, staffed entirely by women, appointing Elizabeth Blackwell as a professor. In 1873 she came a member of the British Medical Association and remained its only female member for the next 19 years, the BMA having voted like the Apothecaries, to exclude all further women. She was a campaigner for women’s rights, particularly for further education. She retired to Suffolk and was the first lady mayor of Aldeburgh.