Lost Women of Science
Lost Women of ScienceLost Women of Science
For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. In this series, we illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season we focus on a different scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and worked. We also bring these stories to the present, painting a full picture of how her work endures.
Copyright 2021 Lost Women of Science
For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. In this series, we illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season we focus on a different scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and worked. We also bring these stories to the present, painting a full picture of how her work endures.
Copyright 2021 Lost Women of Science
Dr. Dorothy Andersen’s role in groundbreaking research into cystic fibrosis fails to get the recognition it deserves because of the Matilda Effect.
Dr. Frances Kelsey, the new medical reviewer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration receives a dubious application for drug approval.
The Doctor Who Said No To Thalidomide: Frances Oldham Kelsey
Dr. Helen Edwards was a particle physicist who led the design and construction of the Tevatron, a machine built to probe deeper into the atom than anyone had gone before.
Dr. Jess Wade explains the importance of recognizing female scientists on Wikipedia, and why she’s created more than 2,000 Wikipedia articles to do just that.
Nancy Hopkins, tape measure in hand, took her employer MIT to task for discriminating against female scientists. The ripple effects were felt around the world.
From arson to homicides to forgeries and even the death of chickens, Mary Louisa Willard helped police around the world solve crimes.
Female scientists played a vital role in establishing the field of ecological restoration, but their stories were lost. Laura Martin rediscovers their groundbreaking work.
Dr. Dorothy Andersen’s work paved the way for new treatments of cystic fibrosis that have turned a deadly disease into a treatable condition.
Hunting for a lost portrait of Dr. Dorothy Andersen highlights how the “dude walls” found at so many institutions shape our understanding of the past.
Episode 1: The Question Mark. Dr. Dorothy Andersen makes a startling discovery.
When poet Jessy Randall saw that so many female scientists weren’t getting their due, she got mad. And then she decided to write poems for as many as she could.
In the 1970s, a young psychologist challenged a popular theory of how we acquire language, launching a fierce debate that continues to this day.
Melba Phillips co-authored a paper with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1935 that proved important in the development of nuclear physics. Later, she became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons.
Nearly 100 years ago, a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin told us what stars are made of and turned the world on its head. No one believed her at first. Later, she was proven right.
Annie Maunder was an astronomer who expanded our understanding of the sun at the turn of the 20th century. Her passion was photographing eclipses.
Two sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology but their stories were erased – accidentally and by design – from the history of early American science. Catherine McNeur tells us how she rediscovered them.
Ursula Bellugi became fixated on the question of how we learn language. Her research on sign language in particular had a major impact on our understanding of how language skills and biology are interconnected.
Days after Oppenheimer won big at the Oscars, we look at the life and scientific contributions of nuclear physicist Kay Way, who worked on the Manhattan Project but ended up rallying fellow scientists to oppose the use of nuclear weapons.
In 1910, an Anglo-Irish women named Lilian Bland built a plane, with little to no encouragement from her family or aviation enthusiasts. Shortly after the plane took off, she quit flying, moving on to her next challenge.
Black nurses worked through unsanitary conditions and racial prejudice to help patients through the debilitating disease TB before a cure was found—with their help
Sara Little Turnbull used material science to invent and design products for the modern world.
Ruby Payne-Scott helped unlock a new way of seeing the universe, but to keep her job, Ruby had to keep a big secret.
Sallie Pero Mead made major discoveries about how electromagnetic waves propagate, which allowed objects to be detected at a distance.
A blindness epidemic among premature babies, and a brilliant biologist whose story hits close to home here at Lost Women of Science.
Canadian Radiation Oncologist Vera Peters pioneered the use of lumpectomies and postoperative radiation to treat breast cancer patients.
Annie Montague Alexander went on paleontology expeditions most women could only dream of in the early 1900s.
Emma Unson Rotor worked on the proximity fuze, a groundbreaking piece of World War II weapons technology that the U.S. War Department called “second only to the atomic bomb.”
Anthropologist Margaret Mead journeyed to American Samoa in 1925 to explore adolescent development. Fame and controversy followed the publication of her book Coming of Age in Samoa.
A master of logic battled her peers, her university and her own grandmother to get what was hers.
What are the rules of engagement when writing the stories of female scientists? We talk with the women who came up with the Finkbeiner Test, a checklist to keep sexism out of the narrative.
Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor Mária Telkes, who was nicknamed The Sun Queen, created a solar oven and one of the first solar-heated houses in 1948.
In 1856, Eunice Foote showed that CO2 traps the heat of the sun, beating the so-called “father of the greenhouse effect” by at least three years. Why was she forgotten?
While the Civil War raged, Rebecca Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn an MD and to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approach
A 1960s home economist runs a radical experiment in her preschool laboratory
It's a global pandemic. The year is not 2020 but 1918, and Harriet Jane Lawrence is developing a vaccine against the deadliest influenza outbreak the world has ever seen.
How Elizebeth Smith Friedman went from scouring Shakespeare for secret codes to taking down Nazi spy rings
How eight pages hidden in an archive led to the the discovery of the remarkable life of one of the first female zoologist
Meet Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, daughter of abolitionists and one of the first African American female doctors trained after the Civil War.
Lillian Gilbreth was an expert on workplace efficiency. But when her husband and business partner died and their clients deserted her, she switched course and used her skills to revolutionize the home.
In the aftermath of the discovery of nuclear fission, letters exchanged between Lise Meitner and the chemist Otto Hahn reveal how she struggled with the betrayal of Hahn, her long-time scientific collaborator, who failed not only to credit her for her work but also to condemn the Nazi atrocities.
New translations of Meitner’s letters show that antisemitism before and after World War II robbed Meitner of the 1944 Nobel Prize that went to her long-time collaborator chemist Otto Hahn.
As part of our Lost Women of the Manhattan Project special series, we pay tribute to physicists Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, whose ten-year research project ensured a place in history for the female scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on the atomic bomb.
Kay Way was a nuclear physicist who was an expert in radioactive decay. After working on the atomic bomb she became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons.
Lilli Hornig is the only female scientist mentioned by name in the film Oppenheimer. Here's the story of the real Lilli Hornig.
Naomi Livesay supervised the mechanical computing operation at Los Alamos and worked on computations that formed the mathematical basis for implosion simulations. Despite her crucial role on the project, she has rarely been mentioned as more than a footnote. Until now.
Aggie Lee, a young indigenous woman from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, began working on the Manhattan Project in 1945. Her job: to monitor scientists' blood for excessive radiation exposure. Yet she didn't know that she was contributing to the building of the atomic bomb. Years later, she blamed the radiation for a series of cancer deaths in her family.
Just 23 years old and armed with a Ph.D., Leona Woods joined Enrico Fermi as he led a team working to produce the world's first successful nuclear chain reaction.
Thousands of scientists worked on the Manhattan project, the top secret push to develop an atomic bomb that would end World War II. Hundreds of those scientists were women.
700 years ago, a girl braved all for science. Alessandra Giliani was the first female anatomist of the western world. The only way she could work was disguised as a man.
Nearly 100 years ago, a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne turned the world's understanding of what stars are made of on its head. No one believed her at first. Later, she was proven right.
Nyswanderweg, a tiny street in Hamburg, Germany, is easy to miss. Yet it’s the only street in the world named after the American methadone pioneer, Marie Nyswander. How did that happen?
In many ways, Marie Nyswander got what she wanted after discovering the miracles of methadone, but how well has that worked out?
Just a reminder that we're scheduled to come back next week with our final episode—and an update.
Marie thinks she’s finally found a treatment for heroin addiction that will work as a long-term solution, but not everyone agrees—including some of the people she’s trying to help.
The doctor embarks on the most important experiment of her career.
A young psychoanalyst specializing in sexual issues starts getting calls for help – about something else entirely.
A young doctor looking for adventure abroad is posted to rural Kentucky, where she learns about addiction for the first time—and starts ruffling feathers.
The Doctor and the Fix: How Marie Nyswander changed the landscape of addiction
Flora Wambaugh Patterson, a widowed mother of two, played a crucial role in keeping fungal blights from U.S. shores.
A blindness epidemic among premature babies, and a brilliant biologist whose story hits close to home here at Lost Women of Science.
Our brand new mini-series – 30-minute episodes, each devoted to the story of one overlooked female scientists.
A special guest episode from Portraits
There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test.
A special guest episode from Our Mothers Ourselves
YY taught at Tennessee State University for 55 years. We look at her legacy as an engineer, an educator and a mom. And we investigate how HBCUs are training the next generation of Black scientists.
What did YY actually do as a mechanical engineer? We dive into her work at NASA, and the history of the American space program.
When YY started college at Howard University, there were three things she swore she’d never do: marry a tall man, become a teacher, and work for the government. But love and life had other plans.
With her knack for fixing household appliances in early childhood, YY was practically born an engineer. And fortunately, she had a family that nurtured her atypical interest—even when the segregated South made pursuing it almost impossible.
She’s the first, the first, the first…
Meet our cohost this season, Carol Sutton Lewis
When we first started researching Klára Dán von Neumann, we thought she was “the computer scientist you should thank for your smartphone's weather app.” It turns out, that’s not true.
A new home, a new husband, and a new project.
Klári von Neumann enters the Netherworld of computer simulations and postwar Los Alamos.
The ENIAC, an early electronic computer, gets a makeover.
Klári von Neumann arrives in Princeton just as war breaks out in Europe.
Before she entered a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons, who was Klára von Neumann?
Don’t know who Klára Dán von Neumann was? You’re not alone.
We investigate the curious, charged circumstances surrounding the resignation of the director of pediatrics at Columbia University's Babies Hospital, and one pathologist at the center of it all: Dorothy Andersen.
Dr. Andersen’s legacy creates hope for those living with cystic fibrosis today.
A missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization—and who gets to be remembered.
The traces Dr. Andersen left behind provide glimpses into her life.
While performing an autopsy on the body of a young child, Dr. Dorothy Andersen made a startling discovery.
The medical detective work of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, a pathologist and pediatrician, led to our current understanding of Cystic Fibrosis. But who was she?
Lost Women of Science digs deep to uncover stories of scientists that have long been overlooked.
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 2 The Matilda Effect
May 16, 202444min 20sec
Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story. Pediatric critical care physician Dr. John Scott Baird, who published a biography of Dorothy Andersen in 2021, suggests we take a second look at the conventional wisdom surrounding the evolution of cystic fibrosis research in the 1950s. And in this updated episode, we interview science historian Margaret Rossiter, who coined the term “Matilda Effect” to describe how credit for work done by female scientists too often goes to their male colleagues. We examine how this affected Dorothy Andersen and her groundbreaking research into cystic fibrosis.