We have all heard of figures such as Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, and Marie Curie, but there are many other remarkable women in science, technology, and engineering who also deserve recognition. Therefore, this article has compiled a list of 22 women in the history of science who deserve to be remembered for their contributions..
Rosalind Franklin –The scientist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Perhaps the most famous among these women scientists is Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958). Franklin was a British chemist who conducted research that helped reveal the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). However, her role in this groundbreaking discovery was not fully recognized until after her death.
In fact, although Rosalind Franklin obtained the first image of DNA strands using X-ray crystallography and was in the process of writing several papers clarifying the structural properties of DNA, her unpublished findings were shared with others.
In 1953, American biologist James D. Watson and British physicist Francis Crick gained worldwide recognition for discovering the three-dimensional double-helix structure of DNA in their paper “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”, published in issue 171 of Nature. Although the paper acknowledged that the research was developed from Franklin’s unpublished general knowledge and findings, it ultimately led Watson and Crick to receive the Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind Franklin continued working on DNA-related projects during the final five years of her life. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 38.
In his 1968 book, The Double Helix , Watson described how the two became friends while working together. He also acknowledged that he would never have won the Nobel Prize or published the famous paper without Rosalind Franklin.
More in: http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/rosalind-franklin-a-crucial-contribution-6538012
Janet Taylor –A pioneer in navigation and nautical astronomy.
Janet Taylor (1804–1870) was born Jane Ann Ionn, was a British astronomer and navigation expert. Throughout her active and highly successful life, she published numerous works on astronomy and navigation, established an academy to teach these subjects, and operated a shop specializing in the distribution, manufacture, and repair of nautical instruments. Her academy was highly regarded and recommended by the East India Company, Trinity House, and the Admiralty. In recognition of her contributions, she was awarded medals by the Kings of Prussia and the Netherlands, and her method for calculating latitude from altitude was described as “ingenious.”
Taylor was one of the very few women working as a maker of scientific instruments in London during the 19th century.
Her “Mariner’s Calculator,” patented in 1834, was rejected by the Admiralty. However, in 1860, she was granted a Civil List pension “for her benevolent labours among sailors in London.”
More in: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-78973-2_5
Dorothy Hodgkin – The scientist who discovered the structure of insulin.
Dorothy Hodgkin was born in 1910 as the eldest of four daughters, and in 1920 her family settled in Suffolk. She attended a state secondary school where only boys were allowed to study chemistry, but she challenged the system in order to enroll in the subject.
Eventually, she was admitted to University of Oxford, where she was recognized as an outstanding student and earned first-class honors in chemistry in 1932. She completed her PhD at University of Cambridge in 1936 and went on to conduct research mapping the structure of cholesterol and examining the structure of penicillin, which was essential for producing a synthetic version of it.
Her work led to numerous industrial collaborations, and from the 1950s onward, she focused on researching the structure of insulin, developing the first model of the insulin molecule.
In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.” She was only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, after Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, and the fifth woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.
She remains the only British woman to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in any of the three scientific fields recognized by the organization. In 1965, Dorothy Hodgkin became the second woman, after Florence Nightingale, to be appointed to the Order of Merit by the British monarch.
Katherine Johnson – NASA’s “human computer.”
Katherine Johnson (maiden name Coleman; August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020), also known as Katherine Goble, Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations in orbital mechanics, while working for NASA, were critical to the success of the first crewed spaceflights and subsequent missions of the United States. Throughout her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, she became known for her remarkable ability to perform complex calculations by hand and for helping pioneer the use of computers to carry out these calculations. The space agency recognized “her historical role as one of the first African American women to work as a scientist at NASA.”
Katherine Johnson’s work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for missions in the Project Mercury, including the flights of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. She also calculated navigational trajectories for the Lunar Module and Command Module in the Apollo program during missions to the Moon. Her calculations were also vital contributions to the Space Shuttle program, She also contributed to plans for a human mission to Mars. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2019, Katherine Johnson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Actress Taraji P. Henson portrayed her as the lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures (Những con người thầm lặng).
More in: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-was-katherine-johnson-k4
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan – A botanist and commander in the Women’s Royal Air Force.
At different stages of her life, Gwynne-Vaughan took on remarkably contrasting roles. Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, during World War I she led the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in France. However, she spent most of her career as an academic, becoming well known for her research on fungal genetics. In all three roles, she felt out of place and was aware that she was often regarded as eccentric; she became a victim of the widespread belief of the time that a woman could either be “normal” or be a brilliant scientist, but not both.
Born into a distinguished family, Gwynne-Vaughan endured formal tea parties until she was nearly 21 years old, when she finally she persuaded her family to she allow her to attend King's College London. Forbidden from studying the “unladylike” subject of zoology, she graduated in botany and soon earned a scholarship to the all-women’s Royal Holloway, University of London just outside London. In this close-knit academic community, she distanced herself from her female colleagues by dressing attractively and using the social skills she had acquired to charm visiting male professors. Moving to the University of Nottingham and eventually to Birkbeck, University of London, . she became known as distant, highly driven, and determined to advance her career—acting, in other words, in a way that was seen as “how a man would behave” in pursuit of success.
In 1919, after a brief period leading the Women’s Royal Air Force, Gwynne-Vaughan returned to her pre-war academic career as a head of department at Birkbeck, University of London. She ran her laboratory efficiently, attracting distinguished botanists to give her students access to leading experts in the field as well as first-class laboratory facilities. Although she received several academic honors and national distinctions, Gwynne-Vaughan was gradually excluded from university committees.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin – An astronomer who revealed the structure of the stars.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a woman of many firsts: the first person to receive a PhD from Radcliffe College, the first woman to become a professor at Harvard University, and the first to discover the composition of stars.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin began life on May 10, 1900, in the town of Wendover, about 40 miles northwest of London. From an early age, she displayed an insatiable curiosity. Before she could read, she was already able to look up and point out Charles’s Wain (also known as the Big Dipper) and the Belt of Orion.
Her mind was restless and highly imaginative. After a summer storm, she noticed that the ground in her family’s English garden was rippling like the surface of a beautiful pond. Cycling out to take a closer look, she discovered that the rain had churned up the soil, revealing a writhing sea of black slugs. She wept at the thought that the world could produce something so disturbingly chaotic.
Although she was expelled from high school at the age of 17, she was later admitted to St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London. After a year of intense study—covering equations of motion, thermodynamics, and Newtonian astronomy—she was admitted to University of Cambridge.
When she enrolled in 1919, she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, one of the two women’s colleges. She initially followed the prevailing convention of the time: men studied mathematics, while women studied botany.
However, everything changed on the night of December 2, when Arthur Eddington, head of the Cambridge Observatory, gave a lecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, describing his recent solar eclipse expedition that had confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was one of four women in the audience. She was finished with botany; she switched her major to physics, taking in as much astronomy as she could alongside it.
After graduating, with no prospects for an astronomy job in Britain, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin received a scholarship at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. She immediately began applying her Cavendish Laboratory training to her work. By looking down through a jeweller’s glass, she could do what astronomers had tried for centuries by looking up through telescopes: determine what stars are made of. This marked the birth of astrophysics.
And that was where the trouble began. She determined that hydrogen was far more abundant in the Universe than the established astronomical community had believed. Like a milion times over, no one believed that a newly graduated female student could have made such a fundamental discovery.
The head of astronomy at the time, the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who led the Princeton Observatory, wrote to Cecilia that her findings were “clearly impossible.” As a result, in her book The Atmospheres of Stars , she concluded that her own results were “almost certainly not real.” (Many years later, Henry Norris Russell admitted she had been right, but he buried the conclusion at the end of his paper.)
Against all odds, she persevered. She was the first woman to receive a PhD from Radcliffe College; the first woman to receive the “lifetime of distinguished service” award from the American Astronomical Society; and, after Lowell finally retired, the first—and also the last—person to hold that position.
The New York Times , on June 21, 1956: “Today Harvard University announced the appointment of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as Professor of Astronomy. She is the first woman to achieve full professorship at Harvard through promotion from the rank of senior lecturer.” Donovan Moore
More in: https://www.sciencefocus.com/author/donovanmoore/
Barbara McClintock – Awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering “jumping genes” (transposable elements).
We live in an era where the human genome has been mapped and tools like CRISPR have been developed to edit the building blocks of life, but all of this was made possible thanks to the lifelong dedication and research of Barbara McClintock in genetics. She devoted her entire career to studying maize, and in the 1930s developed a staining technique that allowed her to identify, examine, and describe its individual chromosomes.
Corn (maize) may seem like an unusual research choice, but for a geneticist it was a goldmine of information, as each plant could produce kernels of different colors, each with its own genetic pattern. Through her research, she was able to identify the existence of “jumping genes,” known as transposable elements—segments of DNA that can move within the genome.
Her work was not immediately recognized, and “jumping genes” were dismissed by much of the scientific community at the time as “junk DNA.” However, Barbara McClintock persisted and suggested that, in fact, they could control which genes in a cell are switched on—crucial for the formation of different cell types; without them, we would simply be an undifferentiated mass of matter.
It was not until 1983, when Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, that the scientific community began to recognize not only the importance of these “jumping genes,” but also how they shape the genome itself—some estimates suggest they make up as much as 40% of the human genome.
McClintock was also the first to propose the idea of epigenetic inheritance, biểu sinh in which genes change their activity in response to external factors, nearly 40 years before it became a formally studied field.
More in: https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/barbara-mcclintock
Source: compiled and collected (synthesized from multiple sources).
(To be continued)
