Edited by: Vidushi Rijuta UG 2019
There has been a recent and steady increase in the number of women in STEM. However, that wasn’t always the case. Take any list of famous scientists and you’ll find it dominated by men. One could argue that women may not have shone in the sciences. But that would be factually incorrect, as it has been observed time and again how women scientists have had their work stolen, plagiarised, or downright dismissed in the past. So, here’s a small list of amazing women scientists you may not have heard about, sure to inspire any STEM field major!
Janaki Ammal
Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist who conducted research in cytogenetics and phytogeography. Despite not being encouraged by her family to study science (they wanted her to do fine arts), she chose to do Botany from Queen Mary’s College, Madras. Even though she was not an American citizen, she was arguably the first woman to obtain a PhD in Botany in the United States, and remains one of the few Asian women to be conferred a D.Sc (Doctor of Science; a “higher doctorate” degree) from the University of Michigan. She was awarded a Padma Shri by the government of India in 1977, and the Janaki Ammal National Award for Taxonomy is named after her. I have a soft spot for her as she and I are from the same state, Kerala!
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian Nobel Laureate, honoured for her work in neurobiology. Like most women of her time, she too was discouraged from attending college as her father believed it would deter wedding proposals. Her academic career in the anatomy department of University of Turin was cut short with Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race. The subsequent introduction of laws barred Jews from academic and professional careers. When Germany invaded Italy, her family fled to Florence under false identities and survived the Holocaust. She continued her career after the war, and in 1952, she did her most important work: isolating nerve growth factor (NGF) from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells. At the time of her death in 2012, she was the oldest living Nobel Laureate. She never married or had any children; in a 2006 interview she said “I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense… My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely.” Now there’s a classy perspective to life.
Ada Lovelace
You may or may not have heard of her as the first computer programmer. Yes, that’s right, the first ever programmer was a woman! She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. Her father, poet Lord Byron was deeply disappointed when his child turned out to be a girl, as he expected it to be a “glorious boy”. Despite often being ill as a child, she continued her education and was privately tutored in Mathematics and Science by William Frend, William King and Mary Somerville. Lovelace became close friends with Somerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage, the father of computers, in 1833. Unfortunately, she died at the young age of 36 due to uterine cancer.
Vera Rubin
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves. This phenomenon became known as the galaxy rotation problem, and was evidence of the existence of dark matter. She ignored advice from her high school teachers to quit the sciences and was the sole undergraduate in Astronomy in her college at the time. She attempted to enrol for her graduate studies in Princeton but was barred because she was a woman (Princeton did not accept women for as astronomy graduates for another 27 years). She ploughed through sexism for almost her entire academic career and was once even denied from meeting an advisor because women were not allowed to enter that part of the university! Rubin’s calculations showed that galaxies must contain at least five to ten times as much dark matter as ordinary matter. Rubin’s results were confirmed over subsequent decades, and became the first persuasive results supporting the theory of dark matter. Rubin was featured in an animated segment of the 13th and final episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. An area on Mars, Vera Rubin Ridge, is named after her and Asteroid 5726 Rubin was named in her honour. As an aspiring astrophysicist, she is someone I look up to a lot.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium metalinto uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gasesous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics, and earned Wu the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include “the First Lady of Physics”, “the Chinese Madame Curie”, and the “Queen of Nuclear Research”. She did her undergraduate education in China, and as advised by her supervisor, left for the University of Michigan for her PhD (This was the last time Wu ever saw her parents). However, her plans changed once she reached America and found that women were not allowed to use the front entrance of the university. Instead, she enrolled in the University of California, Berkley. She married physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan in 1942. In 1964, she spoke out against gender discrimination at a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I wonder,” she asked her audience, “whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment.” When men referred to her as Professor Yuan, she immediately corrected them and told them that she was Professor Wu.