Recently, we celebrated International Day of Women and Girls in Science, and soon we will celebrate International Women’s Day, so I thought it fit to write about female scientists who are not recognised enough for their fascinating work and discoveries.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin performed work that was vital to the discovery of the structure of DNA. In 1953, Wilkins, who had been working with Franklin, showed Watson an X-ray photo, often referred to as ‘Photo 51’, which had been made by Franklin and a PhD student. Watson and Crick now needed the data about the X-ray, which Franklin had written in a brief informal report. This data eventually reached Watson and Crick, so they could now do the necessary calculations. Although the report was not confidential, they did not ask Franklin for permission to interpret her data. Franklin died four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins for their work on DNA structure, so few people realise how important she was to this discovery.
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner performed extensive work on nuclear physics and radioactivity. She helped discover the radioactive element Protactinium, and she was one of the scientists who discovered nuclear fission. Her collaborator, Otto Hahn, was later awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner faced anti-Semitism and sexism, which contributed greatly to her exclusion from the Nobel. She had almost fifty nominations, yet won none.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars while still a graduate student in Radio Astronomy at Cambridge. This was described as the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century. Her PhD supervisor was later awarded a Nobel Prize for this discovery; Bell Burnell was excluded from it. In later years, she said that ‘the fact that [she] was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted [her] standing in terms of receiving a Nobel Prize’.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that the Sun and other stars are composed almost entirely of Hydrogen and Helium. The leading astronomer of the day dismissed her hypothesis and encouraged her not to present her findings. Four years later, he published his own paper with the same conclusions. For most of history, he was given credit for this discovery. Despite her monumental contributions, she never received the Nobel Prize.
Emmy Noether
Noether was a mathematician who made enormous contributions to rings, fields, and algebras. In fact, Noether’s theorem has been called one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proven in guiding the development of modern Physics. She had to work without pay for seven years after completing her dissertation, as women were excluded from academic positions at the time. Later in her career, she had to lecture under a male colleague’s name as the faculty at her university objected to a female lecturer.
Sofia B, Year 12
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