Dr. J

Dr. J had the gift of being simultaneously ferocious and warm. She gave delightfully good hugs, ones you could sink into. She prodded and pushed her students beyond what we could imagine doing.

She was deeply passionate, evidenced by her years of service with the American Chemical Society and National Chemistry Week. This year, we celebrated science without her.

Dr. J was an organic chemistry professor, sure. But she was also a friend, a mentor, and a pseudo-mom to so many of her students. She was fierce in class, but calm and inviting in her office. She expected the world from you, but understood when you needed space to breathe.

She was kind. So, so kind. And brilliant.

She had a cup of coffee perpetually glued to her hand, although her energy seemed boundless regardless of the time of day.

She is so hard to pin down to a few sentences.

She was plainly frank. As she pushed tirelessly through her cancer diagnosis, she spoke honestly about her health in a gentle way that only a mother can do.

Her eventual parting from this life was a long, painful reminder of what each of us is charged with – taking all that we are given in life and living fully, no matter our circumstances.

It’s hard to know just how many lives she touched. How many young scientists she inspired. How many students she comforted as they wailed in her office about the hardships of orgo. How many kids she empowered to pursue their dreams.

But at this year’s National Chemistry Week, the love for Dr. J was tangible as students and alumni attempted to carry on without her. Everyone tried with all their might to channel her excitement, her energy. For so many of us, we will never forget the first time we engaged someone with science, watching a spark of curiosity light up their face. After all, we learned from watching the very best.

Marie Maynard Daly: an Illuminating Chemist and a Path-Paving Activist

There was a time when simply being a woman created barriers to following a scientific curiosity. It was twice as challenging to be a woman of color interested in science.

But that didn’t matter to Marie Maynard Daly in 1947, when she became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. Her research about the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart shaped what we know about heart attacks.

She was born in 1921 in Queens, New York, to parents that fostered her love for science. Her father, Ivan, wanted to be a chemist, but was forced to drop out of his program at Cornell University because of economic hardships. Instead, he took up a career as a postal worker. Her mother, Helen, read endlessly to her from books about chemistry and biology.

Daly was educated at Hunter College High School, an all-female school that nurtured her love for science. In 1942, she graduated magna cum laude from Queen’s College with a bachelors degree in chemistry.

Economic hardship was not unique to her father’s experience at school – Daly herself had to work extremely hard to support her studies. While she was pursuing a masters degree in chemistry at NYU, she worked as a laboratory assistant and chemistry tutor at Queens College.

She obtained funding from Columbia University so she could be a full-time student while studying for her doctorate. She researched alongside Mary L. Caldwell, an empowering female professor at Columbia who encouraged the careers of many young women as chemists. Caldwell is best known for her work with the digestive enzyme, amylase.

In 1947, after three years of intense effort, Daly graduated with her Ph.D. in chemistry and made history.

She spent the rest of her life researching, teaching, and greatly expanding our knowledge about the human body. She studied how sugars effect the arteries and the circulatory system’s wear and tear with age. She also studied how proteins are produced and organized in the cell.

But perhaps most importantly, she was an activist for young people of color that wanted to pursue science. She experienced firsthand the challenges in place for people of color to establish themselves in science. In 1988, she established a scholarship fund for African-American students at Queens College, in honor of her father.

 

Nettie Stevens: The Birthday Girl

Nettie Stevens – a woman who changed the field of genetics. She was one of the first female scientists to make a name for herself in the biological sciences. She’s the reason we know that sex is inherited as a chromosomal factor. And she almost didn’t get the credit for it.

On July 7th of 2016, I opened my Google browser to find a Google Doodle commemorating what would have been Nettie’s 155th birthday. Googling her name, I found a number of articles written about her by mainstream outlets like Vox and Popular Science, celebrating her birthday and quickly detailing her accomplishments.

And it got me thinking – why do we need an excuse to write about women like Stevens?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy whenever there is opportunity to celebrate women in science. Any moment to educate young girls about the women that fundamentally changed science is a win. But I wish the conversation would move past “let’s honor these women because its their birthdays” to “let’s honor these women because of all they’ve contributed to science.” End of sentence, no need to qualify it.

There is so much that makes Stevens a remarkable person – she was well-educated, as she saved up her money to return to school at 35 years old. In 1896, she attended the school that would later be known as Stanford University, where she graduated with a Masters in biology. She eventually got her doctorate in 1903 from Bryn Mawr College.

She was a champion of the basic sciences. She worked for years studying the role of chromosomes in heredity. She had an assistantship at Carnegie Institute when she published her findings in 1905.

Studying the mealworm, she found males made reproductive cells with two types of chromosomes, whereas female had only one type of chromosome. The two types of chromosomes the male mealworms had were different in size. She didn’t call them X or Y chromosomes – that language came much later. She concluded that this was proof that sex is inherited as a chromosomal factor.

Her findings weren’t accepted by the scientific community. It wasn’t until her findings were later published independently by Edward Wilson of Columbia University that scientists began to take Stevens’ results seriously.

Stevens was brilliant, hardworking, and her work has directly impacted every biologist and geneticist that followed her. We can celebrate her work simply because it was fundamental to science, not just because she turned 155.

 

Frances Arnold wins the Millennium Technology Prize, Katherine Johnson’s Story is Told on the Big Screen

Two big wins for women in science this week: Frances Arnold, a Caltech biochemical engineer, became the very first woman to win the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize. And the New York Times told us about an upcoming movie based on the lives of the women that pioneered NASA’s space program. Whoa, what a week!

Arnold won the award for her work in directed evolution of proteins – she basically created the field of study. She thinks a lot about how we can replace toxic chemicals in manufacturing processes with enzymes to help protect the environment. And, as a side note, she was the first woman to be elected to all three branches of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Needless to say, she’s a force to be reckoned with.

In other exciting news, a recent New York Time’s article featured the forth-coming film “Hidden Figures”, staring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer. The movie recounts the story of African-American women like Katherine Johnson, who were the backbone of NASA’s space program in the 60s.

The film is based off the book “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly, which will be published in the fall. The author grew up knowing Katherine Johnson, but had no idea of Johnson’s impact on NASA’s operations.

“‘I thought, Oh my God, what is this we’re hearing here?’ Ms. Shetterly said, recalling the moment a few years back when her father, a retired research scientist, casually mentioned Ms. Johnson’s life work. Her next thought: why haven’t we heard about it before?” – New York Times

I couldn’t agree more, Ms. Shetterly. And I’m so grateful that the women of NASA will finally have their story told on the big screen. May their stories inspire people, young girls especially, around the world for generations to come.

Eugenie Clark: The Fearless “Shark Lady”

To get an idea of who marine biologist Eugenie Clark was, you need to know the following: she continued to deep-sea dive into her nineties, even after being diagnosed with non-smoking-related lung cancer. She once rode a 50-foot whale fish, the largest fish in the sea, and called it one of her most exciting journeys. And she once taught the former Crown Prince Akihito of Japan how to snorkel.

Clark was an adventurer who met every challenge that faced her.

Clark was born in New York City in 1922 to an American father and a Japanese mother. Her father died when she was just 2 years old and her mother remarried a Japanese restaurant owner.

Beyond her ocean-centered Japanese culture, Clark’s career in zoology was largely influenced by her experiences at the New York Aquarium. She would watch the large fish and imagine herself swimming alongside them – a dream that would become a reality later in her life. Her childhood home housed a 15-gallon tank with fish, toads, snakes and even a small alligator.

She was destined for the water. She learned to swim when she was two. Photographer David Doubilet who traveled with her for the articles she wrote for National Geographic once said, “Even when I was a younger man and she was older, I couldn’t keep up with her. She moved with a kind of liquid speed underwater.”

She was an oceanographer and an ichthyologist (one who studies fish), with a degree in zoology. She was a prominent marine biologist who spent her career using deep-sea diving as a tool for scientific research, a technique that was not widely used at the time. She discovered new fish species and spent a lot of her time fighting for coastal environmental protection. But what she is largely remembered for is embodied by her famous nickname: the Shark Lady.

She discovered that an excretion from a flatfish in the Red Sea worked as an effective shark repellent, the first of its kind. She also dispelled the widely held belief that sharks have to keep moving to breathe when she came upon “sleeping sharks” in undersea caverns along Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

She fought hard to change the public’s perception of sharks. She appeared in many television series, wrote three books, 80 scientific treatises, and lectured at countless universities in America and abroad. She once commented in a 1982 PBS documentary called “The Sharks” that people have more to fear from car accidents than they do from sharks.

“When you see a shark underwater you should say, ‘How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment.” – Eugenie Clark

She embraced the unknown challenges that the deep sea presents. Her book details encounters with 500-pound clams, giant squid, and man-eating barracudas. But she always pushed forward.

In the 1950s, she took a job as a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. She was told that as a woman, she would not be allowed to go on overnight trips or even to the Galapagos with her fellow male researchers.

Once, a scientist at Columbia University told her, “If you do finish (your postdoctoral studies), you will probably get married, have a bunch of kids, and never do anything in science after we have invested our time and money in you.”

Boy, was he wrong.

Eugenie Clark died at the age of 92, in February of 2015 after an illustrious career as a legendary figure in marine biology and as the revered “Shark Lady”.

 

 

 

 

Katherine Johnson: Born to Break Barriers

On August 26th, 1920, women were granted the right to vote in the United States. On that very same day, Katherine Johnson was celebrating her 2nd birthday. Knowing what she went on to achieve in her life, it’s not a surprise that she was born on the day now referred to as Women’s Equality Day.

Katherine Johnson is a mathematician, best known for her remarkable 30 year career with NASA. But to understand how an African American woman came to work with NASA in the mid to late 1900s, we have to go back to the 1930s and 1940s.

Source: NASA

 

Before space flight was a reality, the government was busy studying aeronautics – testing and improving planes. This work was mathematically very intense, churning out large sets of data on a regular basis. To deal with the overwhelming amount of data, the government decided to create a “computing pool”. And they hired all white women to do the job.

At the time, if you were a woman and had a degree in science or math, you were destined to teach for the rest of your career. It didn’t matter what you were interested in – you were pushed into the world of education. So the government recognized that they could open up the job of “computer” to this pool of talented mathematicians.

That’s right: their job title was “computer”. They computed all day and one who computes  is a computer. (Keep in mind this was before electronic computers were abundant)

Until 1943, the women who were hired as computers were entirely white. But the demand for computers was so high that they eventually hired African American women. The government was also facing pressure from civil rights groups to diversify. So the very first group of segregated women mathematicians began at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.

The women did a variety of jobs, whether it was recording data from instruments measuring effects of model planes in wind tunnels or using theoretical mathematics to build more efficient planes.

Katherine Johnson quickly garnered national attention, calculating the trajectory for Alan Shepard (the first American in space) in 1961.  When John Glenn became the first astranaut to orbit Earth in 1962, he used a computer to calculate his trajectory. But he asked Katherine Johnson to verify the calculations before he felt comfortable going.

Katherine Johnson was a pioneer, along with her fellow “computers”. She received a number of awards in recognition of her important calculations. But perhaps most importantly, at age 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This is the nation’s highest civilian award and it was given to her by President Barack Obama on November 24th, 2015.

She was a woman who defied every obstacle placed in front of her. She knew she had a talent for math and worked to ensure the safety of countless space missions. And she left an unforgettable impression on the history of space flight.

Happy Black History Month, readers! May Katherine Johnson’s story inspire you. Want to read more? Check out these great stories about her life:

“Katherine Johnson: The Girl who Loved to Count”

“Katherine Johnson: A Lifetime of STEM”

“Katherine Johnson – National Visionary”

 

 

In Defense of Storytelling

This blog is a collection of stories about women who all too often are unrecognized. We have forgotten to include them in the history of science. And if we’ve included them at all, we’ve done so with a whisper.

Perhaps the most common response I get to this blog is – “But why do we need to tell these stories?” In other words, aren’t the stories of male scientists enough? Why can’t young men and women look up to the likes of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein? This is an entirely valid question. And of course, men and women can idolize and emulate the lives of famous male scientists.

The real question is – what is a role model? Does a role model have to look like you or be like you in order to aspire to be like them?

The answer is both yes and no.

There are role models for all different facets of life – parenting role models, relationship role models, etc. But the one that is relevant in this discussion is an organizational or career role model.

Dr. Donald Gibson of Fairfield University in Conneticut has spent his career studying organizational role models and has contributed greatly to the literature. He defines a role model as the following:

“A cognitive construction based on the attributes of people in social roles an individual perceives to be similar to himself or herself to some extent and desires to increase perceived similarity by emulating those attributes.”

So what does that mean?

Here’s what I take from all that – a role model is someone who you believe you share something in common with and so you use that similarity as the driving force to get where they are.

In other words, it’s important to have role models that you can identify with. It’s important for women to look at the scientists that have come before them and see their gender represented.

It’s important to notice that the word “similar” is used, but not defined. So when he says “similar” he could be talking about any range of things – gender, ethnicity, experience, etc. So of course – women can identify with the stories of male scientists and men can identify with the stories of women.

But, we shouldn’t neglect the stories of women. We should tell these stories and let people decide for themselves. When a young girl asks her teachers about the scientists of generations past, she should get to hear about Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. Kids deserve to know that the history of science was shaped by more than just men.

And perhaps this comes down to a notion that is at the very heart of feminism: telling the story of one group (women) doesn’t invalidate the story of another group (men). By defending the history of female scientists, we are not ignoring or invalidating the stories of male scientists. Rather, we enrich the history of science when we choose to be inclusive.

 

 

Mary Somerville: Scientist, Writer, Rebel

There was a time when women were taught to read but not to write. They were encouraged to absorb the ideas and thoughts of men (who could write and therefore produced all the content), but women couldn’t leave their own written legacy behind.

Then there were women like Mary Somerville, who despite all the cultural forces against her, pursued the life of an intellectual. And she succeeded.

Born in 1780 to a traditional and economically fortunate family in the UK, Mary was excluded from formal education. Instead, she was pushed towards the skills that women needed to be wives. But Mary wasn’t interested.

She relied upon herself for her education. She learned to read, write, and even began studying algebra as a young girl when she accidentally stumbled upon the mysterious symbol-based language of mathematics. This is where her love for math began.

Portrait bust of Mary Somerville at the Royal Society

She married her first husband in 1804, but he died just three years later. Suddenly, she found herself in a very unique position for a woman of her time: because she was widowed, she was financially free to pursue her studies.

She mastered the astronomy of James Ferguson and became a dedicated student of Newton’s Principia. She wrote to William Wallace, a Scottish mathematician who advised Somerville to start a small library of books about math.

In 1812, she remarried a man who was very supportive of her intellectual path. He was the only person in her life who encouraged her, as her entire family thought it was inappropriate for a woman to pursue math and science in such a dedicated manner.

Her experiments with magnetism kicked off in 1825 and a year later she published her paper entitled “The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum”. She was the second woman, after Caroline Herschel, to present her work to the Royal Society.

Her career as a scientific writer hit a high point in 1827. Lord Brougham, who worked for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, communicated to Somerville through her husband (which was the proper way to speak with her at the time). He asked her to create a rendition of Laplace’s Mecanique Celeste and Newton’s Principia that could be understood by the general public. Hesitant and unsure if she was qualified to do so, she pressed onward.

“The Mechanism of the Heavens” was her final product and it was an enormous success. A portrait bust was commissioned by the Royal Society and placed in the Great Hall to be admired for centuries to come.

But she wasn’t finished. She published four more books, crafting an admirable career as a science writer. Alongside Caroline Herschel, she became one of the first women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society.

She suffered in her final years – she was frail and had to endure as she lost every member of her family. But her mind kept her alive. She never stopped solving problems. She died at age 92, but not before writing an autobiography. In a time where women were rarely taught to write, this was her final rebellion.

Rosalind Franklin: The Story You May Have Heard

When asked to name a prominent female scientist, most people will struggle for a moment and then spew out a name like “Curie” or “Franklin”. Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin are perhaps the two more famous women in scientific history, but some people can’t even come up with their names.

Rosalind Franklin’s story is one of blatant sexism. It is an unending controversy that asks the question that science still hasn’t completely figured out – how do we give people the credit they deserve and how do our own biases affect the professional careers of others?

Franklin always knew she wanted to be a scientist. In fact, she attended one of the only all-girls school in London that taught physics and chemistry. She was a natural from the start. She proceeded to study at Newnham College from 1938-1941. And finally, in 1945 she earned her doctorate degree in physical chemistry from Cambridge University.

And in 1951, the controversy begins.

She returns to England as a research associate in a lab at King’s College. This lab was overseen by John Randall. He had another research associate named Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins couldn’t have been more different from Rosalind. He was shy and quiet, while she was direct and bold.

He returned from his vacation to find Franklin working in the lab alongside himself, and he believed her to be a technical assistant – someone to help him with his work. In reality, she was doing her own research. It is easy to see how Wilkins would make this assumption. At the time, King’s College had separate lunch tables for men and women. It wasn’t common for women to be peers with men in the laboratory. From then on, Wilkins and Rosalind had a very competitive, muddied relationship as scientific colleagues.

From 1951 – 1953, Rosalind produced incredible images of DNA using a technique called x-ray crystallography. She made advances with the technique, refining it and creating images that were unprecedented. It seemed as though she was on the brink of discovering the structure of DNA.

It is widely believed by science historians that at this time, Wilkins showed another scientist, James Watson, one of Franklin’s x-ray crystallography images of DNA. It is not a coincidence that shortly after, in 1953 Watson and his fellow scientist Francis Crick published the first model of the structure of DNA: the double-helix.

“Photograph 51” – the famous image shown to Watson and Crick. 

Watson and Crick did not credit Franklin in any of their publications. She left King’s College shortly after and began studying viruses instead. And in 1962, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA – this was four years after Franklin’s death.

In the modern world of science, Franklin is given some credit. When children learn about the structure of DNA in school her name is occasionally mentioned. But we too often shy away from the question of why she wasn’t given any credit at the time. Mostly because, the answer isn’t very comfortable.

Sure – in all fairness, she didn’t come up with the structure of DNA. But it is clear that her x-ray crystallography images were an enormous help to Watson and Crick. The image, now famously called “Photograph 51”, was the key piece of evidence that alerted Watson and Crick to the double-helix nature of the structure.

Franklin was not a technical assistant. She was a lead scientist, with PhD students working for her. She was a peer who was ignored because her colleagues didn’t like that she was a bold woman with the potential to change the world of science.

 

Curie & Meitner: Women of the Periodic Table

The periodic table of elements is often presented to students as the cornerstone of their introductory chemistry classes. It may initially appear to be a dull chart of discoveries. But behind each elemental name and symbol is a rich history, a story, a person, or perhaps a mythological creature.

So how do elements get their names? Well it turns out, there isn’t a simple answer to that question. Upon the discovery of a new element, the discoverer churns out some creativity and bestows upon the Interntional Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) a potential name and symbol for review. But how chemists come up with those names has ranged dramatically over the years.

Some elements get their name from Anglo-Saxon roots. The Greek word for sun, “helios”, was incorporated into the element name “helium”. Other elements like gold and iron get their symbols from their roots. The latin word for gold is “aurum”, hence the symbol Au.

Other things like characteristics of the element can be found in its name. For example, the noble gases xenon and krypton are named after the Greek words for “stranger” and “hidden” respectively.

Chemists aren’t all rationale and logic – sometimes, a little whimsy is needed. Some elements are named after mythological creatures or legend. Tantalum, atomic number 73, is named after a Greek antihero named Tantalus.

But what about the people whose names are immortalized on the periodic table? No discoverer has ever proposed their own name as a suggestion to the IUPAC. Instead, discoverers often suggest to name elements in honor of other scientists that have made monumental discoveries to their particular field. Perhaps most famously, Einstein is memorialized with einsteinium, atomic number 99. Enrico Fermi also found his way to the periodic table with fermium, atomic number 100. Interestingly, both elements were discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb set off in 1952.

There are others, including mendelevium. But how about the women?

There is curium, named after the famed Curie family. But the element was named in honor of both Pierre and Marie Curie. In fact, only one woman is individually recognized on the entire periodic table and that is Lise Meitner with the element meitnerium. (Check out my blog post about the incredible Lise Meitner)

Now in all fairness, there aren’t many elements named after people in general, man or woman. And if Einstein, Mendeleev, and Fermi are to be among colleagues, it is only right that they be joined by Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. And hopefully, as discoverers move on to new elements and women are recognized more equally in the scientific community, more names of women will adorn the periodic table.