Science Matters

Female scientists you should know about

Boyce Rensberger

(9/2023) Ordinarily, I am quite proud of the scientific enterprise. It is a genuine quest for accurate knowledge about how the world works, from the subatomic realm to the conscious brain to the cosmos, past, present, and future. But—shocker!—science is practiced by human beings, and some of them do not always separate their work from their prejudices.

One of the worst manifestations of this is the way male scientists have viewed female scientists. It is a problem today, and it was a gross injustice in years past.

I know a bit about this because I had a hand in bringing the work of Dr. Nancy Hopkins at MIT to public attention. She was a prominent molecular biologist who identified many genes that control embryonic development. In the 1990s she organized a small group of women on the faculty to study how much pay and how much lab space women were given at MIT compared with what men had. They found that female faculty members were treated way worse than men with equivalent credentials and experience— especially receiving lower pay and less lab space. She presented the hard numbers to MIT’s then-president, Charles Vest, and he, an engineer by trade and a respecter of hard data, agreed. He set in motion a series of reforms.

When Hopkins told me about that, I saw a good story that the rest of the world should know. I tipped off reporters at the The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Their stories and her willingness to speak out triggered a serious movement in academia.

So, in the space I have here, let me make a small contribution to the visibility of some of the most important women in science anywhere who, sadly, remain largely unknown. Most of us have heard of Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson and maybe even Ada Lovelace, who in the 1880s developed the idea for a computing machine and how to program it.

But here are a few more whom you should know. There are many more, but these are at the top of my list.

Cecelia Payne (1900-1979) discovered what the universe is made of. Based on her observations of stars and galaxies, she asserted in the early 20th century that the known universe was made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. That contradicted the leading theory of the day, which held that the Earth’s composition was typical of all the universe. We know today that Payne was right. Only 1 percent of normal matter consists of heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, silicon and all the other elements that we know and love. Earth is, of course, made mostly of such heavier elements, but planets amount to only a tiny fraction of what exists in the universe.

Payne was born in Britain and went to Cambridge University, but the school refused to give her a degree because she was a woman. So, she moved to the U.S. and earned a doctorate from Radcliffe College, then the women-only branch of Harvard. The editor of a prestigious astrophysics journal, a man of course, said Payne wrote "the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy."

Payne was, eventually, the first woman promoted to a full professorship at Harvard. She continued research on the nature of stars, including our sun. She died in 1979, never having received a major award.

Eunice Foote (1819-1888) discovered what we know today as the greenhouse effect, and she did it in the 1850s. She filled glass cylinders with various gases and measured temperature changes as sunlight shined through them. She found that the greatest warming effect came from water vapor and carbon dioxide. She speculated that if those gases increased in the atmosphere, they could affect the climate. Today both gases are known to be the main drivers of global warming.

Foote was an amateur scientist or what today we call an independent scientist, working in her home laboratory. Still, her scientific papers on this and other discoveries were published in serious academic journals and read at major scientific meetings, read by male scientists. In later years, men performed similar experiments and one of them, John Tyndall, gets most of the credit today for what Foote discovered and published.

Foote and her husband were also inventors. Among other things, she patented a thermostatically controlled cooking stove and a paper-making machine.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) developed the world’s first method of producing nuclear fission, the phenomenon responsible for nuclear energy and, of course, atomic bombs. Born in Austria, she studied physics at the University of Vienna and, when the Nazis took over Austria, moved to Sweden. Meitner went on to develop a theoretical understanding of how nuclear fission works. When others, notably Otto Hahn, used her method of splitting the uranium atom, it proved successful. When the Nobel Prize was awarded for this, it went to Hahn and another man. Meitner was not even mentioned.

In later years, this omission would be seen as one of the Nobel committee’s greatest mistakes.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was another woman denied a Nobel. She was a British chemist and expert in a technique called x-ray crystallography. Her analysis of her x-ray results showed that the structure of DNA was a helix. That evidence tipped off the famous team of James Watson and Francis Crick who published the well-known "double helix." The men got the Nobels.

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and a rear admiral in the Navy. She did pioneering work to develop computer programming languages and invented the first compiler, an essential type of software that converts programming language that a trained human can write and read into machine language that the computer can follow. She also created the widely used programming language COBOL.

There are more women I could mention. Perhaps in a future column I will tell you about them.

Boyce Rensberger retired to New Midway after more than 40 years as a science writer and editor, mostly for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Write him at boycerensberger@gmail.com.