Massive Science - Science Heroes

Meet Valerie Thomas, the inventor and scientist who launched the longest-running satellite program imaging Earth’s surface

Hanusia Higgins — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 22:13:00 EST

Valerie Thomas retired from NASA in 1995 after three decades of work, and she left with a legacy as a trailblazing scientist and creative inventor. More than 20 years later, her contributions and her dedication to teaching and uplifting underrepresented youth in her field are still making an impact.

Thomas was born in Maryland in February of 1943. Despite an early interest in mechanics that she shared with her father, Thomas was not encouraged to pursue her passion for science and math. When an eight-year-old Thomas brought home a library book called The Boy's First Book On Electronics, she hoped her father would help her work on the projects like he tinkered with TV sets, but he did not. Regardless, she went on to attend Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, a historically Black university, as one of two women majoring in physics in her class.

Valerie Thomas next to a stack of early Landsat Computer Compatible Tapes in 1979

NASA on Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

After graduating with honors from Morgan State, Thomas accepted a job as a data analyst at NASA in 1964. There, she was introduced to the world of computing, a natural extension of her interests in physics and math. “When I started work at NASA, I had not seen a computer except in science fiction movies,” Thomas said in a 2019 interview. “Since my job involved writing computer programs, I decided to learn as much as possible about computers.”

In her first role at NASA, Thomas worked on translating data captured by Orbiting Geophysical Observatory satellites, including information about gamma and ultraviolet radiation, into formats that scientists could understand and use.

A greater challenge came in 1970, when Thomas began working on the Landsat program (originally called the Earth Resources Technology Satellite), managed jointly by NASA and the United States Geological Survey. Landsat satellites capture multispectral images of Earth from orbit, meaning they gather data along various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This provides visual, infrared, thermal, and other information about the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Landsat was the first program to make multispectral imaging of Earth widely available to scientists, who use the data for applications from tracking water use to predicting crop yields.

Thomas managed development of the image processing software that translated the raw data transmitted from the satellites into formats usable for all kinds of applications. She also worked with the digital tapes that contained early Landsat data, called Computer Compatible Tapes. She saw a need to bridge the gap in understanding between the complex digital data on the tapes and the knowledge levels of scientists who were trying to use it. Thomas became the go-to person to consult about Landsat data, and eventually consolidated her knowledge into a document that became indispensable for scientists using the data.

Thomas took on a greater role in one specific application of Landsat, the Large Inventory Crop Area Experiment (LACIE). This ambitious program demonstrated that Landsat data could be used to predict global crop yields, and the study was completed in only five months. Thomas managed a team of about 50 people in the LACIE program, overseeing the research, development, hardware, and software needed to identify wheat fields across the world using Landsat images.

Landsat has now provided continuous data about Earth’s surface and atmosphere for nearly half a century since the first satellite was launched in 1972, making it an incredible resource. Especially as the rate of global climate change has accelerated, an objective and relatively high-resolution record of deforestation, urbanization, glacial melting, and other processes is invaluable. The most recent satellite in use, Landsat 8, launched in 2013, and its successor Landsat 9 is set to launch this month.

Thomas was also an inventor. In 1976, she saw a demonstration involving a lightbulb that led to her own lightbulb moment. The exhibit demonstrated an illusion in which the lightbulb appeared to glow even after it had been unscrewed from a lamp, using a concave mirror reflecting a second, hidden lightbulb to achieve this effect. “That caught my attention. I went up close to touch the light bulb. When I tried to touch it, my finger went right through what appeared to be a bulb,” Thomas said in an interview earlier this year. She went to the library, where she read that the illusion relied on optics principles she had learned about in her physics education. Excited by the possible implications of such technology for NASA and beyond, Thomas got to work developing her own invention and applied for a patent for an "illusion transmitter" in 1978.

The illusion transmitter itself is deceptively simple. It consists of two concave, or inwardly curved, mirrors, which can be located in separate places, each observed by an image processor such as a video camera. An object is placed in front of one mirror, and the reflection of the object in the curved mirror is captured by the first camera. On the receiving end, the partner camera projects the received image onto its own mirror. The image reflected in a concave mirror reaches each eye at a different angle. The observer’s brain combines the two images, creating an optical illusion that the object appears three-dimensionally in front of the mirror. Although other methods of transmitting three-dimensional illusions existed at the time, Thomas’ invention was unique in its simplicity.

Valerie Thomas speaks at 2003 event at Elizabeth City State University

NIA, Elizabeth City State University

Thomas’s patent for the illusion transmitter was granted in 1980. Only a small fraction of United States patents belong to Black inventors, and even fewer are held by Black women. The illusion transmitter is used by NASA today, and Thomas has imagined further applications in video, television, and even surgical imaging.

During the rest of her three-decade career at NASA, Thomas continued to manage projects such as the Space Physics Analysis Network, which increased connectivity between computer systems and became an integral part of the early internet. She rose through the ranks to become associate chief of the Space Science Data Operations Office. For her important work developing NASA technologies and facilitating connections between scientists around the world, NASA awarded Thomas the Goddard Space Flight Center Merit Award and the Equal Opportunity Medal.

But science is not her only passion — Thomas also cares a great deal about educating and inspiring young scientists, especially girls, women, and Black students like herself. She became involved with professional and educational organizations for minority and female scientists, including the National Technical Association, Science Mathematics Aerospace Research and Technology, Inc., and Women in Science and Engineering. In her final years at NASA, Thomas was integral to developing the Minority University-Space Interdisciplinary Network, enabling students at minority-serving institutions to connect and work with NASA scientists. Today, she is the president of her regional chapter of Shades of Blue, an organization promoting students’ interests in aviation and aerospace careers.

Thomas describes herself as a “lifetime learner,” and during her time at NASA she went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees. She is not only a learner but a lifelong teacher, too: Thomas now works as a substitute teacher at a high school in the Baltimore area, and her students Google her many accomplishments. Thomas’ contributions to NASA programs, her dedication to facilitating connection and sharing information among researchers, and her continued outreach work have impacted and inspired scientists, students, and people around the world.

Hanusia Higgins studies

Forest Ecology and Invasive Species

at
University of Vermont
.

Remembering Ben Barres, the trailblazing trans neuroscientist and mentor, on his birthday

Burcin Ikiz — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 10:32:52 EST

Today is the birthday of the legendary neuroscientist, Ben Barres, who passed away four years ago from pancreatic cancer. If he were alive today, he would have been 67 years old.

While many of his fellow neurobiologists focused their research efforts on nerve cells, he studied glia — the non-neuronal cells that were believed to only have a passive, supporting role in the nervous system. Barres and his lab changed this notion by discovering that glial cells are in fact necessary to make neurons functional and can even destroy them under disease conditions. Barres’s groundbreaking work put glia on the map of neuroscience and helped us understand the brain better.

Barres was born in West Orange, New Jersey, on September 13, 1954. From birth, he was assigned as female and named Barbara A. Barres, even though he later learned that he was intersex and transitioned. From a young age, Barres excelled in science and mathematics. He obtained a bachelor of science in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a medical degree from Dartmouth Medical School. It was during his residency in neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine that he decided to resign from medicine and pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School instead. He then became a faculty member in neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, where he stayed throughout the rest of his career.

As a professor, Barres was considered an incredible mentor who loved and supported his students, postdocs, and colleagues fiercely. He considered his colleagues his family and his trainees his children. According to Shane Liddlelow, an assistant professor of neuroscience at New York University, who was a postdoc in Barres lab from 2012 until 2018, one of the things Barres would have been the proudest of if he were alive today is “how his trainees have continued to make exciting discoveries and seeing some of his earliest discoveries leading to exciting new disease therapies.”

Barres speaking at the 2017 iBiology meeting

Screenshot via YouTube

But Barres was more than a trailblazing scientist and an exceptional mentor. He was a tireless advocate for diversity and inclusion in science. He believed that science could only move forward if everyone had a voice in it. “[Barres] was a constant and unreserved supporter of women, immigrants, people of color, members of the LGBTQI+, and any member of any underrepresented or poorly-treated group of scientists,” says Liddlelow, “his approach was to treat each other equally and lift up those who needed additional support.”

I felt that support even the first time I met Barres at the Society for Neuroscience meeting — the biggest annual neuroscience conference in the world with more than 30,000 attendees — in 2007. I was a 23-year-old first-year grad student and Barres was one of the keynote speakers at the event. Keynotes are highly regarded talks watched by almost all the attendees, where the speaker discusses their latest scientific achievements. Barres could have easily filled his precious time on the stage talking about his pioneering work on glia. Instead, he spent the majority of his speech talking about how hard it was to be a woman scientist and how the systemic biases and barriers hindered them from succeeding in their careers. “I can tell you all that from my personal experience,” he had said as he shared a photo of himself as a woman in a dress next to one after his transition.

As the first openly transgender scientist in the National Academy of Sciences, Barres — who transitioned from Barbara to Ben at the age of 43 — had plenty of first-hand experience with gender discrimination. And he talked openly about it. “People who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect,” he wrote in his famous opinion piece in Nature titled “Does Gender Matter?” “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

A slide from a seminar Barres gave in 2016 about the barriers women scientists face in their careers

Courtesy of Elizabeth Sypek

Similarly, in a seminar he gave in 2016, Barres shared a slide that said: “The Many Barriers Talented Women Still Face,” which included women scientists' struggles with lack of support for child care, prejudices against them being less competent, and sexual harassment. “Preach,” wrote Elizabeth Sypek, a postdoctoral scientist at John Hopkins University, who attended the seminar as a grad student at Stanford. By speaking about these barriers, he pushed the science community to know better and to do better.

The keynote talk he gave at the conference changed my view of the scientific community entirely. As a newbie to the science world, I had naively thought that I would be seen as an equal in my field but realized that I might face prejudice and sexism instead - which I did on many occasions. His speech not only made me aware of the challenges I might deal with in my career as a woman minority scientist but also encouraged me to support those around me and who came after me. I became one of the many he has supported through his advocacy for gender equality in science.

Barres, who loved Harry Potter, was taken to a movie theater by his lab in 2016 to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"

Courtesy of Shane Liddlelow

His impact, however, was beyond women scientists. By coming out as a trans man both in his personal and professional life, he paved the way for more trans, non-binary, and intersex people in science to choose to be out in their workplaces. ”It gave me hope that I could become a scientist and not have to hide who I was forever, and still keep my job and friends and colleagues,” says Claudia Astorino, a PhD student in anthropology at the City University of New York, who received the Professional Development Fellowship for Trans, Intersex, and Non-Binary People in STEM (formerly known as the Ben Barres Fellowship) in 2021. “I was told from a young age that I could basically never disclose that I am intersex without huge, negative ramifications in my personal and social life. Reading Ben Barres's [Nature] comment, I saw that maybe it would be possible after all, to someday be out and be myself and it could be okay.”

Speaking near the end of his life, Barres said: “I lived life on my terms: I wanted to switch genders, and I did. I wanted to be a scientist, and I was. I wanted to study glia, and I did that too. I stood up for what I believed in and I like to think I made an impact, or at least opened the door for the impact to occur. I have zero regrets and I’m ready to die. I’ve truly had a great life.”

And what a great gift his life has been and still is to all of us.

Burcin Ikiz studies
Neuroscience
.

Meet Nancy Grace Roman, the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope

Briley Lewis — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 22:45:36 EST

Today we take for granted that part of NASA’s job is to do astronomy, like with the legendary Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. But that wasn’t always the case — and we have astronomer Nancy Grace Roman to thank for shaping the space agency that it is today.

Roman, known now as the “mother of Hubble”, was born in Tennessee in 1925 and grew up as the quintessential kid with their head tilted up at at the stars. Her mother took her on walks to observe nature, showing her constellations at night, while her scientist father answered her curious questions. Of course, her favorite thing to draw as a kid was the Moon.

But, like many women at the time, her budding interest in STEM was discouraged. Her high school guidance counselor advised her to take more Latin instead of advanced math classes, since it was more “ladylike” to do so. When she finally made it to Swarthmore College, Roman had a rough start, recounting how, “the Dean of Women interviewed each freshman girl. If she failed to convince her not to major in science or engineering, the Dean had nothing more to do with her for the next four years.” With a series of poor physics professors, she was left to figure out a lot of the content on her own. Her first bit of backhanded encouragement, though, came from one of these professors, who said, “I usually try to discourage girls from going into physics, but I think maybe you might make it.”

Roman did, in fact, make it. She earned her PhD in 1949 from University of Chicago, working at the nearby Yerkes Observatory. Despite a lackluster thesis advisor, she stayed on after graduation to work as an assistant professor and continue her research on the properties of stars at Yerkes. Some of her research from this time forms the foundations of our current knowledge about stars and how our galaxy formed. She found that many of the common types of stars around us are different ages and observed the compositions of stars at the center of our Milky Way, giving the first clues about galaxy formation. Roman measured spectra of a whole catalog of stars, traveling to many observatories: Mount Wilson in Pasadena, Lick near San Jose and McDonald in Texas. For several years, she spent one-third of each year at McDonald, observing on every clear night (something an astronomer nowadays could only dream of).

Nancy Grace Roman

NASA

Yet, her job at Yerkes was unfulfilling, mostly due to the unequal treatment of female scientists. Her pay was less than two-thirds of what the men earned, a fact unsatisfyingly explained by an administrator who said, “We don’t discriminate against women — we can just get them for less.” She knew she had no chance of getting tenure due to discrimination, and her relationship with her PhD advisor remained rocky. Even people outside academia showed their discomfort with her role: “One reporter when told I was an astronomer replied, 'You can't be. You don't have a beard.' Another reporter, from a small paper in a neighboring town, was noticeably uncomfortable talking with a woman.”

Roman knew she needed to leave academic science, but she didn’t want to abandon astronomy altogether, leading her to a civil service job at the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) in Washington, D.C. In 1958, shortly after she began working at NRL, NASA was founded — and a substantial portion of NRL was transferred to NASA to form the Goddard Space Flight Center, which today still works on many of NASA’s big astronomy missions. Roman was asked to set up a program in space astronomy, an opportunity that she described as, “the chance to start with a clean slate to map out a program that I thought would influence astronomy for fifty years...more than I could resist.” In 1959, she officially joined NASA as the first Head of Observational Astronomy.

The environment in the early days of the agency was electric: "Everyone was gung ho,” she recalled. “There was no bureaucracy...Once, I wanted to do something unusual. I no longer remember what it was, but I called someone in the grants office to find out if I could do it. The reply was memorable: ‘Don't ask me what you can do. Tell me what you want to do. It is up to me to find a way.’” While famously NASA was working on human spaceflight and Moon landings, Roman turned her attention to developing the first space observatories.

At the time, people hadn’t yet figured out how to accurately point a telescope on a satellite, but they knew there would be serious benefits to getting out of Earth’s pesky atmosphere, since there are some wavelengths you can’t see from the ground because they’re absorbed before they reach us. Soon promoted to Chief of Astronomy, she oversaw the first orbiting observatory: a project known as the Orbiting Solar Observatories (OSO). After the success of those missions, her team soon followed up with the Orbiting Astronomical Observatories (OAO), the first space observatory looking at distant stars.

Nancy Grace Roman (third from the left) standing next to President John F. Kennedy and other recipients of 1962 Federal Woman’s Award

Via Wikimedia

These projects, shepherded by Roman, were the predecessors of modern space telescopes like Hubble, Kepler, Spitzer, and more. And the OAO projects did some remarkable science, too — they observed over 1,200 objects in ultraviolet light for the first time, found that comets have huge halos of hydrogen, and more.

But the OSO and OAO telescopes only observed in ultraviolet light — what about a regular, visible light telescope in space? Astronomer Lyman Spitzer had written a paper describing the science that could be done with a small four-meter space telescope, starting the conversation around space observatories.

Roman was convinced of the value of such a space observatory and lobbied to fund the project, despite significant pushback. Roman said, “At one point, Senator William Proxmire, noted for ridiculing government funding that he considered frivolous, asked NASA why the American taxpayer should support an expensive telescope. I did a back-of-envelope calculation and determined that for the cost of one night at the movies, every American would have fifteen years of exciting discoveries.” Her calculations convinced him.

In 1971, Roman assembled a group to design the systems that would become the basis of the Hubble Space Telescope, laying the foundations for this monumental mission. Before her retirement, she helped create the Space Telescope Science Institute, an institution dedicated to managing space telescopes and their data (beginning with Hubble).

Nancy Grace Roman (center) with astronomer Vera Rubin (second from left)

Via Wikimedia

The Hubble Space Telescope went on to be one of the most important, revolutionary changes in astronomy. A telescope above Earth’s atmosphere was able to take images of things we’d never seen before: far away galaxies, detailed photos of stars being born, planets around other stars. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope taught us that each galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, that galaxies merge in cosmic spectacles, and that our universe is getting bigger at an ever increasing rate. Although she retired in 1979, far before Hubble’s launch in 1990, her role in creating the first orbiting astronomical observatories — Hubble’s predecessors that proved science could be done in orbit — earned her the nickname “the mother of Hubble.”

Roman earned many honors for her foundational contributions to astronomy and years of civil service with NASA: the Federal Women’s Award, multiple honorary doctorates, NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement award, and even an asteroid named after her. She called her likeness in LEGO form by far the most fun honor she had received, even personally signing hundreds of boxes.

Nancy Grace Roman passed away in 2018, but her legacy lives on. In 2020, the NASA telescope formerly known as WFIRST (the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope) was named in her honor, now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It has a mirror the same size as Hubble’s and two new instruments to go along with it: a wide field camera with 100 times the field of view Hubble had, and a coronagraph to search for planets around other stars. It’ll hopefully reveal new insights about dark energy, exoplanets, and more. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, “It is because of Nancy Grace Roman’s leadership and vision that NASA became a pioneer in astrophysics and launched Hubble, the world’s most powerful and productive space telescope. I can think of no better name for WFIRST, which will be the successor to NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes.”

Nancy Grace Roman views the still under construction James Webb Space Telescope in 2017

Via Wikimedia

Although she made history as one of the first female NASA executives, her legacy truly centers around her scientific work — how she was at the forefront of astronomy, with a new vision of what could be for the future. David DeVorkin, senior curator of the National Air and Space Museum, remarked that, “she had that very, very large egalitarian view of how to make space astronomy part of astronomy, and I think that is a very important legacy.”

Ahead of her time — as a woman a scientist before that role was widely accepted, as an observational astronomer before the digital age — Nancy Grace Roman shaped the field of astronomy, enabling decades of scientific discovery not only with Hubble, but with all space telescopes, forever changing our understanding of our place in the universe.

Briley Lewis studies
Astronomy and Astrophysics
at
University of California, Los Angeles
.

Meet Melba Roy Mouton, the Space Race mathematician and keeper of orbiting satellites

Kristen Vogt Veggeberg — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 23:14:00 EST

There is something to be said about an individual who not only shaped science as we know it, but was also able to impart knowledge as a teacher. With science comes teaching, but often science comes alone. Melba Roy Mouton, who was born in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1929 to parents Rhodie and Edna Chloe, and graduated from Manassas Regional High School before attending college.

Roy Mouton's specialty was math. She held both a bachelor's and a master’s in the subject from Howard University, where she also participated in Future Teachers of America as an undergraduate student. She graduated during the precarious time between World War II and the Space Race with Soviet Russia. Roy Mouton’s career was not theoretical in practice, but rather applied — she first focused on statistics within government work, and used her skills there. She employed her multiple degrees in math for both the Army Map Service and the Census Bureau, which focused on the plotting of future neighborhoods and other places of population expansion, an incredibly important job during the famous 'baby boom' of the post-World War II era in the United States of America.

Her work analyzing statistics of populations showed an aptitude for interpreting data in a format easy for other scientists and engineers to understand. Roy Mouton moved to NASA, where she began analyzing and following new objects sent into space. Her initial focus was Echo 1, one of the first satellites used to orbit Earth in order to help communications across the globe. In addition to transmitting communications through both reflecting ground based transmissions and creating a two-way system for parties to contact each other, Echo 1 also served as a concrete example of why the space program — then in its infancy — needed to be funded and expanded to include more celestial objects, including the hiring of more computers and the eventual flying of astronauts into space.

Her initial focus was Echo 1, one of the first satellites used to orbit Earth in order to help communications across the globe.

NASA

Roy Mouton's responsibility for tracking the Echo 1 was not an easy task, and it required the mastery of multiple tracking formats in order to recover data in regards to charting the movement of the object. These tracking formats were as diverse as optical (using images from telescopes and screens), digital primary/secondary tracking (following transmittable data from the NASA Minitrack) and radar, which pinged different locations from across the globe and the atmosphere.

Perhaps due to her ability to interpret different formats of data (thanks to her time at the Maps department of the Census Bureau) or her ability to predict the movement of satellites, Roy Mouton's skills attracted the notice of her superiors, who gave her additional projects to work on as computers roles adapted to different forms of communication. Namely, her abilities made her a prime candidate to work with programming languages, such as APL, one of the first languages used in code, a new technology necessary when working with complex mechanics, space launches, and plotting orbits.

...had Roy Mouton not been able to analyze and track their movements, many of the technologies that we take for granted would not be possible

She got promoted. Her new role as Assistant Chief of Research Programs at NASA's Trajectory and Geodynamics Division meant that she was responsible for overseeing all of the human "computers," individuals creating and interpreting complex (and sometimes long winded) calculations in order to make sure projections and communications were done correctly. Some of these computers you may recognize, such as Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan — main characters in the movie, Hidden Figures.

Though depicted in the film, Roy Mouton’s story may be familiar. Like many other women of color working at NASA in the 1960s, her math skills were used to track celestial objects, an important role that was crucial in not only figuring out where satellites and shuttles were heading, but in tracking and setting the course as well. Satellites have continued to play a role in communications and directions ever since, and had Roy Mouton not been able to analyze and track their movements, many of the technologies that we take for granted (such as the tablet or phone that you're reading this article on!) would not be possible.

Important as her job in analyzing data and tracking objects were, like many other women and people of color working behind the scenes at NASA, Roy Mouton did not receive the same amount of glory as other scientists and astronauts during this time in American history, but her skills in programming would lead her down another road.

The Space Race was not only instrumental in spurring advancements in flight and space travel, but also in communication through the design of programming languages. At this time, some of the first programming languages were being developed to better program the technology that was necessary to keep propelling the American Space Program. Although other languages and mathematical coding had been designed and used for communication within technology, none had the application that this new language, designed by Kenneth Iverson, did. Called simply, "A Programming Language" (APL), this ancestor of modern coding was designed for statisticians to program computers and other pieces of technology to follow different tasks, rather then simply serve as a series of data transferred across different, more complex machines then before. This was a necessary step in allowing multiple shuttles, computers, and other matters of technology to be deployed, and for a statistician used to large amounts of data and multiple projects at once, Roy Mouton was able to learn and apply the language quickly.

Though she was working within analysis and programming for the American government right after she finished her education, Roy Mouton had another skill set up her sleeve. If you've ever had to learn a new coding language for a specific goal, you're familiar with how difficult it can be. Because of her specialty with APL, Roy Mouton was asked to lead classes on coding, just as she had managed and trained the human computers at NASA. This paired well with her interest in teaching, which called back to her time at Howard University.

Soon, she was helping create seminars on APL programming, at a time when coding was not only being taught to further academic science and technology, but also in the business world, where computers were starting, in the 1970s, to find themselves in more and more American offices. Data in all manners was being used to better project outcomes and predict the future, and Roy Mouton was not only literate in this language, but thanks to her experience in both NASA and the Census, was an expert.

Roy Mouton retired from NASA in 1973, living in Silver Spring, Maryland. She passed away in 1990, at the age of 61, from brain cancer.

Roy Mouton advanced discoveries in science, but also in technology as we know it. Her contributions to computer science education might have a can't be overstated, with the advancing number of enrollments in coding boot camps have been focused on adult learners looking to gain skills outside of the classroom. But her contributions to the ability to predict movement of celestial objects should not be understated. To quote astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, "what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy."

Kristen Vogt Veggeberg studies
Science Education
at
University of Illinois at Chicago
.

Meet Evelyn Boyd Granville, the mathematician who mass produced computers and shot Apollo into space

Brittany Kenyon-Flatt — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 22:51:15 EST

In 1949, the newly minted Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville became only the second Black woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, but she didn’t realize her achievement until her sister pointed it out to her.

After completing her PhD, Granville worked on a litany of landmark mathematical and astronomical projects. She worked on the first mass-produced computer in the world at IBM; on Project Vanguard, which aimed to launch the first artificial satellite into orbit; Project Mercury, which intended to send the first humans into space; and Project Apollo, which attempted to land the first humans on the moon.

Like the “Hidden Figures”, Granville was a Black woman working in astronomy and math during the American civil rights era. The difference between Granville and others was that, in her mind, she wanted to be a mathematician and so she was, regardless of societal boundaries. She wrote that she was aware of segregation while growing up in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, but “our parents and teachers preached over and over again that education is the vehicle to a productive life, and through diligent study and application we could succeed at whatever we attempted to do.” When asked whether there was a stigma because she was a girl, she replied: “No, no, we never had that stigma placed on us. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do mathematics because, well, I could do mathematics.”

Granville spent her career taking opportunities that interested her, regardless of what her gender or skin color dictated she could or couldn’t do, saying “if a door opened, I went in.” In 1941, she was admitted to Smith College, where she received a Phi Delta Kappa (the national sorority for Black teachers) scholarship. She majored in math and originally intended to teach, though contemplated switching her primary studies to astronomy. Later, Granville wrote that had she known the US would launch its space program, signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, she likely would have switched majors.

“It never occurred to me to be the first,” she said. "I just wanted to do math."

She graduated from Smith in 1945 and was awarded a scholarship to begin her PhD. Both the University of Michigan and Yale University offered her admission, though she ultimately chose Yale due to their financial aid offer. Ironically, had she chosen Michigan, she would have been in a cohort with Marjorie Lee Browne, the third Black woman to earn a PhD in math. After Browne it would be 11 years until another Black woman earned a math PhD.

While at Yale, Granville studied functional analysis, a branch of mathematics focusing on the relationships between objects, writing a dissertation titled, “On Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain." The Laguerre Series are polynomials (combinations of variables which only use operations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication) typically used in quantum mechanics, the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles. The Laguerre Series is often used as a solution for the Schrodinger equation, which explains how electrons move in space.

Granville's deep understanding of the Laguerre Series, functional analysis, and quantum mechanics likely aided her work on outer space projects. In 2021, these branches of math are still used by mathematicians and astronomers, but also by anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, geneticists, physicists, psychologists, and other scientists. Biologists and geneticists, for example, use a version of functional analysis to describe gene function and interaction, while psychologists use functional analysis to establish the relationships between stimuli and response.

The IBM 650, the first mass produced computer ever, being used at Texas A&M, mid-20th century

Via Wikimedia

After earning her PhD, Granville worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the New York Institute of Mathematics before moving to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee for an associate professorship. She was then recruited by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., to work with engineers to develop missile fuses. Eventually, Granville was hired by IBM, where she wrote programs for the IBM 650, an early digital computer that was the first mass-produced computer in the world. IBM had recently secured a contract with NASA, opening a door for Granville into astronomy work. She joined Project Vanguard, whose primary goal was to launch the first artificial satellite (the size of a grapefruit, according to Granville) into orbit, and Project Mercury, which aimed to send the first humans into space.

Granville moved to California in 1961 following her marriage to the Reverend Gamaliele Mansfield Collins, transferring to the Space Technology Laboratory in Los Angeles where she worked on space computing and developing programs for satellites and spacecraft. She commented that because this was during the Cold War, “it was a time when no matter what color you were, if you could do the job, you were hired.”

Eventually, Granville transferred to North American Aviation with the opportunity to work on celestial mechanics, orbital computations, and support engineers attempting to land on the moon for Project Apollo. Of that project, she said, “it was quite something. We actually went to space. We went to the moon.”

The grapefruit-sized satellite launched by Project Vanguard

NASA

After her work on Project Apollo, Granville held teaching and science communication jobs and retired three different times — unsurprising given her strong work ethic and drive. First, she taught math at California State University Los Angeles, and then computer literacy to middle schoolers in Texas following her second marriage to Ed Granville, a job she ultimately “bombed out” of and retired from. She then joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas in Tyler, eventually retiring for a second time in 1997, and then worked for Dow Chemical talking to middle schoolers about math until her third and final retirement in 1999.

Granville is most widely known because she was only the second Black woman to receive a PhD in mathematics, and did so during the height of the American civil rights era when race relations were high — she was even denied entrance to the 1951 Mathematics Association of America since it was held at a whites-only hotel.

Although Granville never proposed a new mathematical theorem or published in prestigious journals, she did something arguably more extraordinary: she found a path to have the career that she wanted, and imparted what she learned along the way to others following in her footsteps. During her career, Granville mentored other Black women mathematicians like Drs. Vivienne Malone Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer. “It never occurred to me to be the first,” she said, “I just wanted to do math.”

Brittany Kenyon-Flatt studies
Biological Anthropology
at
North Carolina State University
.

Meet Gerty Cori, the Nobel-winning biochemist who uncovered how the body stores and consumes sugars

Maggie Chen — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:03:35 EST

In 1947, Gerty Cori traveled to Sweden with her husband, Carl, to jointly accept the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. It was an undoubtedly exciting moment. The Coris had received the Prize for their successful test tube synthesis of glycogen. From their discoveries, scientists now knew exactly how glycogen was processed in the body to create glucose – a once mysterious metabolic process that had confounded researchers for decades.

Gerty Cori became the third woman, and the first American woman, to win a Nobel Prize in science. The summer before the prize ceremony, however, Gerty had developed myelosclerosis – an incurable and ultimately fatal disease. To Gerty, however, the diagnosis only served as further fuel for the scientific questions still lingering in her mind.

And so, after the ceremony, she returned to the laboratory, eager to resume her experiments. Gerty was intensely curious about how glycogen, when mutated, caused disease. This group of rare diseases, called glycogen storage diseases, manifested through an enlarged liver, weak muscles, and growth obstruction. What was the crux of the problem that caused the body’s symptoms?

Gerty Theresa Cori (then Radnitz) was born in Prague in 1896. The daughter of a sugar refinery chemist, Gerty was a precocious child with a clear interest in the sciences. She entered medical school at the German University of Prague in 1914, where she met another young scientist – Carl Cori, who was smitten by her intelligence, charm, sense of humor, and love of the outdoors. In 1920, Gerty received her medical doctorate, married Carl, and published their first joint research paper together. As a postdoctoral researcher, Gerty began her research career by studying pediatric diseases at the Karolinen Children’s Hospital in Vienna.

The Coris working in the lab

Silvia semeraro via Wikimedia Commons.

According to the Coris’ biography, Gerty’s identity as a person of Jewish heritage precluded her from receiving any university teaching positions in Europe. To better support her, and to escape the general conditions of life in Europe, the Coris decided to immigrate to the United States in 1922.

Gerty began her research career as an assistant pathologist at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, New York, where she was eventually promoted to assistant biochemist. The Coris found increasing opposition to their collaborative relationship due to institutional nepotism policies at the time – ultimately, however, the two weathered the storm and continued their professional collaboration. During these early years, Gerty found great interest in studying the effects of X-rays on skin and body organs, which some have speculated had severe detrimental effects on her health later in life.

According to family lore, Gerty’s father was diabetic. He had said to his daughter, “Find me a cure!” – sparking Gerty’s lifelong commitment to sugar metabolism

According to family lore, Gerty’s father was diabetic. He had said to his daughter, “Find me a cure!” – sparking Gerty’s lifelong commitment to sugar metabolism. At Buffalo, the Coris researched what exactly in the body regulated blood glucose. By studying rats, they determined that the hormone insulin increased the conversion of glucose to muscle glycogen but decreased conversion to liver glycogen. On the contrary, the hormone epinephrine decreased muscle glycogen and increased liver glycogen. Based on the known assumption that muscle glycogen did not add glucose to the blood, the Coris postulated that another intermediate would be necessary to complete the cyclic conversion of muscle to liver glycogen. They discovered that lactate was the missing puzzle piece in the “cycle of carbohydrates” – later to be known as the Cori Cycle.

The famous Cori Cycle describing how glycogen is processed in the body

Cori and Cori, 1928

In 1931, the Coris moved to the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where they continued their work on carbohydrate metabolism. Within five years, the Coris had identified glucose-1-phosphate (later deemed the Cori ester) – the intermediate that represented the product of the first step from the conversion of glycogen to glucose.

This compound served as a jumping off point for Gerty’s burgeoning interest in how enzymes work, or enzymology. Step by step, the chemical process by which glycogen was synthesized, appeared. First came the enzyme phosphoglucomutase, which converted glucose-1-phosphate to glucose-6-phosphate (another intermediate). Then came the seminal discovery of phosphorylase, crystallized by Gerty and her graduate student Arda Green, which catalyzed glucose-1-phosphate formation from glycogen. Green would go on to co-discover the neurotransmitter serotonin, and how fireflies glow.

Aiming to synthesize glycogen, the Coris reversed the phosphorylase reaction, adding a little glycogen to push the equilibrium in the right direction. Excitingly, a starch-like macromolecule appeared – debunking the belief that cells were required to synthesize these very large molecules. It was the first time that any macromolecule had been synthesized in a test tube. This discovery, coupled with the others, launched the Coris to Sweden for the Nobel Prize. More importantly, the newfound capability to study macromolecules in a test tube formed the foundation for Gerty’s work with glycogen structure and glycogen storage diseases.

Gerty “needed only one exciting experimental finding to jump into a problem with unbounded energy"

Immediately after returning from Sweden, Gerty began to turn her attention to glycogen structure and function. Glycogen appears as a branching macromolecule with various combinations of carbon linkages – like a starchy tree. Certain linkages connected the linear portions of the molecule, while another linkage type connected the branching portions. How, then, could glycogen be broken apart?

Along with her graduate student, Joseph Larner, Gerty hypothesized that an enzyme, later called debranching enzyme, could break the branch point linkages in glycogen. If the hypothesis was correct, the only product from the breakdown of glycogen by this enzyme should be glucose.

Lo and behold, when the experiment was conducted, free glucose appeared as the only product. As Joseph remembered, Gerty ran up the hallway in excitement, screaming, “It’s free glucose, it’s free glucose!”

The discovery of the debranching enzyme combined with Gerty’s increased knowledge of glycogen’s structure formed the basis for her studies on glycogen storage diseases, a group of conditions with no known cure even today. Then known as a singular disease, these conditions affected around 1 in 100,000 births. They also manifested first as a pediatric disease – marking Gerty’s return to the beginnings of her medical career, all those years ago.

Gerty Cori and her husband Carl Cori were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1947 for their work on how the human body metabolizes sugar

Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons

Gerty had a hunch that the disease was somehow due to a defect in glycogen-related enzymes. Her guess was that the missing enzyme was glucose-6-phosphatase – the enzyme that broke down glucose-6-phosphate. Joseph, her graduate student, on the other hand, believed that the missing enzyme was the debranching enzyme.

Gerty had saved a cabinet of patient glycogen samples, sent by physicians interested in learning more about glycogen storage diseases. It was decided that they would stain the samples using iodine to determine the structure of glycogen in this disease. Iodine stained normal glycogen to a brownish color, while staining starches to a blueish-purple color.

The stain showed a blueish-purple color – indicating that the glycogen demonstrated greater morphological similarity to starch. This represented a watershed moment in biochemistry; the stain indicated that glycogen storage disease contained glycogen with structural differences, which showed that this was a molecular disease. At the time, this marked glycogen storage disease as only the second known molecular disease.

Gerty unknowingly established the first set of experiments that directly linked enzyme dysfunction with disease

As Gerty continued to study the disease in greater detail, she began to identify different forms of the disease. Her findings were summarized in a 1952 Harvey lecture, one of the most prestigious lecture series for biomedical science. Rather than the one-size-fits-all definition that it had originally been given, Gerty identified four main disease forms: the first, due to a lack of glucose-6-phosphatase in the liver (consistent with her original hypothesis), the second, due to a lack of de-branching enzyme (consistent with Joseph’s hypothesis), the third, due to a lack of another branching enzyme, and the fourth, with unknown enzymology that led to more generalized organ disease.

From her enzyme kinetic studies on glycogen storage diseases, Gerty unknowingly established the first set of experiments that directly linked enzyme dysfunction with disease. Before, it had just been assumed that enzymes could cause disease, but never proven. Her final paper, published the same year of her death in 1957, was a review on glycogen storage disease.

National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia Commons

During the final years of her life, Gerty refused to give up laboratory work. Instead, she requested a small cot be added to the laboratory, upon which she would rest when tired. She also held a party, according to graduate student Mildred Cohn, “to squelch the rumor that I [Gerty] was dead.” Finally, Carl was put in charge of monitoring her blood hemoglobins, eventually carrying her around when she could not stand – the final act in a marriage partnership that changed the face of biochemistry.

From Joseph’s recollections, Gerty “needed only one exciting experimental finding to jump into a problem with unbounded energy.” Her spontaneity, particularly in thinking of new ideas, manifested in the breadth of research discoveries she accomplished. Gerty was undeniably brilliant, with a legacy lasting far beyond her scientific accomplishments. Her graduate students, many of them women, went on to pursue their own careers in enzymology and metabolism.

Maggie Chen studies
Developmental Biology and Regenerative Biology
at
Harvard University
.

Meet Kathleen Lonsdale, the physicist and prison reformer who cracked benzene's code

Josseline Ramos-Figueroa — Thu, 20 May 2021 23:16:06 EST

"I had never heard of Kathleen Lonsdale until today," a professor wrote to me in a recent email. Though I'm a chemist, I hadn't either.

A physicist by training, Kathleen Lonsdale is most famous for revealing the shape of the benzene ring — a molecular scaffold with unusual chemical properties that was considered a mystery to chemists for many years. She was the first to uncover the benzene ring's dimensions and atomic structure. Lonsdale, who was recently commemorated by English Heritage with a London Blue Plaque on the 50th anniversary of her death, also played a fundamental role in establishing X-ray crystallography — technology discovered in the 20th century that allowed scientists to "see" atoms and their spatial arrangement within a molecule. The technique was later critical in the structural studies of a vast number of molecules.

Lonsdale was brilliant, hardworking, and adaptable. Born on January 28, 1903, in Newbridge, Ireland, Lonsdale was the youngest of ten children. Her love for math and physics started during her late school years. She attended the County High School for boys, because the girls’ school didn't teach these subjects. She was so excited to go to university that she declined scholarship funding in her last year of high school to instead start interviews for university. She was accepted at Bedford College for Women at sixteen. She graduated when she was only nineteen, with the highest marks listed in ten years.

Look at your formulae notes
Look at Kathleen Lonsdale's formulae notes

Give up on science for the day#NationalHandwritingDay pic.twitter.com/1Ttd5jnL1U
— Royal Institution (@Ri_Science) January 23, 2019

Despite this achievement, Lonsdale thought she would have limited job prospects in science. "One of my colleagues applied for 150 posts before he got one, even though he had a good higher degree," she wrote for a book chapter celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of X-ray diffraction. She was surprised when William H. Bragg, Physics Novel Laureate in 1915 and a professor at the University College London, offered her a paid position with his research group to do her master's degree. "It was a luxury and I jumped at it," Lonsdale recalled in the same publication.

Lonsdale continued to earn scholarships and grants, which allowed her to graduate with a masters in physics from the University College London by 1924, and eventually a doctorate in science at the Davy Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution by 1929. Lonsdale's doctorate topic on the study of ethane derivatives was included in a famous handwritten book of structure factor formulae, published in 1936. She remained working at the Royal Institution as a researcher until she was appointed as a professor of Chemistry and head of the department of Crystallography in University College London.

Lonsdale's reputation swiftly grew, including among her colleagues in Bragg's research group, like John D. Bernal, a physicist who later worked on X-ray crystallography applied to molecules of life. "Kathleen, despite her unobtrusive ways, had such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place; her opinions were sought for and her judgment was always respected," he wrote, supporting Lonsdale's nomination to be one of the first two women admitted to the Royal Society.

Kathleen Lonsdale, elected as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

Smithsonian Institute via Wikimedia

While Lonsdale's scientific work could have been interrupted by her marriage and the birth of her three children, she adapted, crediting the support of her husband, Thomas Lonsdale, who was also a researcher in engineering. Because he was a good husband and father, "I could quite well keep on my 'Arbeit' [German word for 'job'], as we called it to distinguish it from the domestic chores. It was great fun," Lonsdale noted. She also received an extra grant to hire a domestic helper. "While he experimented, I did crystallographic calculations," wrote Lonsdale, likely referring to her work on hexamethylbenzene.

She soon revealed the three-dimensional arrangement of the benzene ring, putting an end to a long-standing mystery that chemists had for over sixty years.

Before the 1920s, organic chemists had built substantial knowledge about the chemistry of carbon, mainly through meticulous experiments involving numerous chemical reactions and logical deductions. The progress to determine the spatial distribution of atoms of even one molecule was incredibly slow, requiring the work of large teams of chemists over a dozen years or more.

It wasn't until 1923 that X-ray crystallography began to be used to determine the three-dimensional aspect of organic molecules — molecules composed of carbon atoms, to which other elements, like hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, are attached. The first structure determinations of an organic molecule were that of hexamethylenetetramine in 1923, and of several hydrocarbon chains in 1927. But despite these efforts, the method was impractical. Certain features in a crystal sample could make the diffraction data easier to process through mathematical calculations than others.

Lonsdale quickly saw the need for a tool that could ease the mathematical analysis of crystallographic data, and worked together with her then-labmate, William T. Astbury, to create crystallography tables in 1924. "The usefulness of the Astbury-Yardley Tables, which the Royal Society had to reprint — a very rare event...perhaps lay in the fact that they were intended for immediate practical use," Lonsdale reminisced later.

In 1927, Lonsdale moved to Leeds, where both Lonsdale and her husband had obtained jobs and research positions. While Thomas Lonsdale was completing his doctorate degree, Lonsdale obtained a scholarship from Bedford College so she could carry out research in the physics laboratory at Leeds University. It was there that Christopher K. Ingold, then a professor of Chemistry at Leeds, offered Lonsdale large crystals of hexamethylbenzene, a benzene derivative, which he had prepared.

A series of interpretations of benzene's structure. On the far right is the modern, correct structure

Via Wikimedia

At the time, nobody had been able to prove what the shape of the benzene ring was, and the study of benzene-like derivatives was highly important. While benzene was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1825, more than one hundred years before Lonsdale’s work, a century later, scientists still knew only a few things about benzene and its derivatives: they all shared the same six-carbon ring core, had incredible stability, and baffling reactivity. One of the most memorable and perhaps wild hypotheses on the shape of the benzene ring was made by the chemist August Kekulé from a dream in 1865. In it, he saw atoms dancing in a fizzy image, transforming into an ouroboros — a snake biting its tail. He interpreted this to mean that the carbon atoms had to be bonded like in a ring forming a hexagonal shape.

The simplest aromatic compound was benzene, but it was a liquid, and not suitable for X-ray crystallography. However, because all benzene derivatives contained the same core of six carbon atoms, any benzene derivative could be used to find its dimensions. The derivative hexamethylbenzene, given to Lonsdale, could readily form crystals, so it was perfect for the study.

A little more than 100 years after the discovery of benzene, in 1928, Lonsdale began experimenting on Ingold's sample. She decided to approach the problem anew. "It is better not to have to make an a priori assumption in any structure determination," she wrote in a detailed description. Lonsdale assembled her own X-ray laboratory equipment from scratch, buying and assembling different pieces, and used the apparatus to obtain hexamethylbenzene diffraction patterns.

A pamphlet written by Kathleen Lonsdale called "Prison for Women," an account of her time imprisoned

Via Wikimedia

While the analysis was cumbersome, as more than thirty parameters were required in the calculations, Lonsdale was successful: She demonstrated that the benzene ring could not be anything but a flat hexagon, and provided accurate distances for all carbon-carbon bonds in the molecule. "...[It was] my most fundamental and satisfying piece of research," Lonsdale wrote in a chapter published by the International Union of Crystallography. She published a short summary of her findings in Nature on November 24, 1928.

It was a remarkable achievement at a time where all calculations had to be done by hand. But she didn't stop there. Lonsdale next studied the structure of hexachlorobenzene, another benzene derivative, using an additional mathematical analysis known as the Fourier series. This work was well received by Ingold, who said, "The calculations must have been dreadful, but one paper like this brings more certainty into organic chemistry than generations of activity by us professionals."

When she returned to the Royal Institution in London after her time in Leeds, she found no X-ray instruments available to continue her research. Nevertheless, Lonsdale had already become interested in other research areas that did not require X-rays and tracked down a large electromagnet. Her last work on benzene-like compounds — also known as aromatic compounds — involved the determination of their magnetic properties.

A plaque dedicated to Lonsdale, in Newbridge

Via Wikimedia

Lonsdale was able to use these magnetic parameters to determine the electronic details of aromatic compounds. This established the proof of molecular orbitals — an important concept that allowed the understanding of chemical bonds. However, another prominent scientist, Chemistry Nobel Laurate Linus Pauling, had been working in parallel on the same topic and published his work shortly before Lonsdale.

But Lonsdale also cared about her community. She had strong opinions about scientific knowledge exchange between nations. She became an active advocate for world peace. And when elected a fellow of the Royal Society, she was a vocal advocate for women in science. She had served time in prison for refusing service during World War II, and became an advocate for prison reform, writing an account of her time imprisoned.

There is no doubt Lonsdale significantly contributed to the chemical and physical sciences when little computer power existed. "Kathleen Lonsdale had a profound influence on the development of X-ray crystallography and related fields in chemistry and physics. Very few have made so many important advances in so many different directions," wrote John M. Robertson, a chemist, crystallographer, and Lonsdale's colleague.

Later in life, she continued her work at the Royal Institution, examining synthetic and natural diamonds, kidney stones, developing a technique known as divergent beam X-ray photography, and studying solid-state reactions. Chemistry Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, who discovered the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12 using X-ray crystallography, said Lonsdale "appeared to own the whole of crystallography in her time."

Josseline Ramos-Figueroa studies
Chemical Biology
at
University of Saskatchewan
.

Meet Sophie Germain, the amateur mathematician who worked on number theory's toughest problem

Rebecca Lea Morris — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 22:17:47 EST

Born in Paris in 1776, Sophie Germain's teenage years were spent witnessing the French revolution. Her father, a silk-merchant, had a library and Germain tried to distract herself from the volatile political and social situation by reading some of his books. One of those books was the story of Archimedes, who was so captivated by the mathematics he was working on that he did not notice the invading Roman soldier who swiftly killed him. Looking for an intellectual escape, how could Germain not be curious about the subject that distracted a man to death?

Unfortunately for Germain, mathematics was not regarded as a suitable subject for women in her time so she studied in secret, at night. When her parents discovered her night time study habit, they took away her fire, light, and even her clothes in an attempt to get her to stop studying and stay in bed. When even this failed, they relented. That did not mean she could study mathematics freely, however. Classes at the École centrale des travaux publics, later known as the École Polytechnique, were only available to men, but 18 year old Germain was able to obtain lecture notes for some of the classes. She then assumed the name of a male student, Monsieur LeBlanc, and wrote to one of the professors, Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Lagrange was impressed with Monsieur LeBlanc’s abilities and remained supportive when he found out LeBlanc was actually a woman.

Sophie Germain at 14 years of age.

Wikimedia Commons.

Later, in 1804, Germain used the pseudonym Monsieur LeBlanc to write to another top mathematician: Carl Friedrich Gauss. Like Lagrange, Gauss was impressed with LeBlanc's abilities and they corresponded for a number of years. Germain eventually revealed her true identity to Gauss after Napoleon's 1806 invasion of Gauss's hometown. Once she learned of the invasion, Germain worried Gauss would meet the same fate as Archimedes and asked her friend General Pernety to protect him. Fortunately Gauss was safe, but when a French officer checked on him, explaining that a Parisian woman named Sophie Germain was concerned for his safety, he was confused as he did not know who she was. When this was reported back to Germain, she wrote to Gauss explaining the situation, revealing her true identity in the process. Fortunately, Gauss reacted positively to the news that LeBlanc was really Germain, telling her that women who overcome society’s prejudices to do mathematics have “the most noble courage, extraordinary talent, and superior genius."

Despite Germain's brilliance, the continual obstacles she faced due to her gender made it impossible for her to become a professional mathematician

During their correspondence, Germain and Gauss discussed their shared interest in number theory. Number theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with whole numbers and especially prime numbers. One of the most intriguing claims in number theory at the time was Fermat's Last Theorem: the equation xⁿ+ yⁿ = zⁿ , called the Fermat equation, has no positive whole number solutions for any whole number n>2 (so, for instance, 3² + 4² = 5² works great, but no such equation exists for any exponent greater than two). It got its name from amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat claiming he had a proof of it in around 1630, though he died without writing it down (and given what we know now it is very unlikely his "proof" was correct). Although Fermat’s Last Theorem is relatively simple to state, it wasn't proven for another two centuries after Germain and Gauss, in 1995 by Andrew Wiles with help from Richard Taylor.

National Library of France via Wikimedia Commons

Germain wrote to Gauss about Fermat’s Last Theorem on multiple occasions. In fact, she described some of her early attempts to prove it in her very first letter to him in 1804. In 1809, however, the French Academy of Sciences announced a prize competition to mathematically explain the behavior of vibrating surfaces, causing Germain to switch her focus to applied mathematics. She worked on this topic for a number of years and in 1816 was awarded the gold medal, making her the first woman to win a prize from the French Academy of Sciences. That same year, the Academy announced a new prize competition to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem and Germain began working on it again.

By the time the competition was announced, mathematicians had made some limited progress towards proving Fermat's Last Theorem. They could prove that it held for exponents n=3 and n=4, i.e. they could show that there were no positive whole number solutions to the equations x³ + y³ = z³ and x⁴ + y⁴ = z⁴. They also knew that proving Fermat’s Last Theorem for all prime numbers greater than 2, i.e. showing that x^p + y^p = z^p has no solutions for p>2, was enough to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem in its entirety. To make further progress, however, they had to go beyond proving the result for specific exponents like 3 and 4. Germain did exactly this by proving, as mathematician and Germain biographer Dora Musielak describes it, "the first general result about arbitrary exponents for FLT [Fermat's Last Theorem]." This result is now known as Sophie Germain’s Theorem.

Stamp of Sophie Germain issued by France in 2016

Sophie Germain's Theorem is quite technical, so let's focus on a simpler special case. First, there are Sophie Germain primes. A prime p is called a Sophie Germain prime if 2p+1 is also prime. So, for example, 3 is a Sophie Germain prime since 2 times 3 plus 1 is 7, which is also prime. 7, however, is not a Sophie Germain prime as 2 times 7 plus 1 is 15, which is not prime. As well as appearing in her work on Fermat's Last Theorem, Sophie Germain primes have important applications in cryptography, the mathematical study of codes and code-breaking.

"In the end, Sophie Germain developed her own algorithms and a unique approach to prove Fermat's theorem, distinctively different from Euler’s and Fermat's"

The special case of Germain's Theorem says that for any Sophie Germain prime p>2, the equation x^p + y^p = z^p has no solutions when x times y times z is not divisible by p. This rules out a class of potential solutions to the Fermat equation when the exponent is a Sophie Germain prime. Germain also used the full version of her Theorem to show that for any prime p (not just Sophie Germain primes) greater than 2 and less than 100, the equation x^p + y^p = z^p has no solutions when x*y*z is not divisible by p.

Until around 2008, historians of mathematics thought that, while impressive and significant, Germain’s Theorem was her only contribution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Then Andrea Del Centina and Reinhard Laubenbacher and David Pengelley examined her unpublished papers and discovered that Germain’s Theorem was just one piece of a much larger and sophisticated plan she had developed to prove all of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Her general idea was to show that any solutions to the equation x^p + y^p = z^p must have infinitely many prime divisors. This would mean that there cannot be any solutions, because any number divisible by infinitely many primes must itself be infinite. Unfortunately, her plan could not be made to work, as she herself came to recognize. Nonetheless, it was still fruitful. In her pursuit of it, Germain developed new methods and proved new results that were later rediscovered by others.

Despite Germain's brilliance, the continual obstacles she faced due to her gender made it impossible for her to become a professional mathematician. She thus remained an amateur throughout her life, never obtaining a position at a university. Her mathematical work, however, was sophisticated and exemplified her boldness and creativity, just like her earlier efforts to overcome barriers to gain a mathematical education.

Musielak suggested in an email interview that the obstacles Germain faced may have even shaped her approach to Fermat's Last Theorem: "Maybe because she was an amateur mathematician, determined to arrive at a proof, working alone with all odds against her, Germain had to think differently. In the end, Sophie Germain developed her own algorithms and a unique approach to prove Fermat's theorem, distinctively different from Euler’s and Fermat's."

Rebecca Lea Morris studies
Mathematics
.

Women scientists are bearing the brunt of COVID-19's impacts

Kristen Vogt Veggeberg — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:25:45 EST

During the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, it should behoove all of us to remember the difficult climb of a career in STEM.

This is especially so in academia, and especially so for academics in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am no stranger to this: I finished my doctoral program at University of Illinois at Chicago in December 2019, a few months before the pandemic shuttered the world in March 2020. And I am lucky — I have been working my position as a director of a STEM program for a large nonprofit for years now, and my job is secure. I’m doubly lucky, as I also have a small child at home, but her tiny preschool is open (with a mask mandate), allowing my husband and me to avoid the concerns that millions of working-age women have right now: eight hours of guaranteed childcare a day. I daresay I'm triply lucky, as my career is in informal science education, and if my three-year-old comes along for a day, there's a good chance it's because I will be in the woods, at a festival, or at another place where a small child and her working mother will be welcome.

This triple home-run of parenting luck doesn't exist for the vast majority of my female colleagues in academia and laboratory science. They are juggling childcare, writing, and work, usually all from the same space within their homes.

For many of my friends who were seeking jobs right after graduation, or a transition into a new career, this has been a devastating year. This is especially true for women, who are often the caretakers in their house, whether it is a small child, elderly relatives, or even their siblings. Society expects them to bear the emotional labor of caretaking. It's not wholesome; it's insidious by nature. For many professional and academic women reading this, who is more likely to have to remember such functions as birthdays in the lab, ordering lunch during a crunch time, or organizing social events?

It is not a secret that women face harassment and barriers within STEM: I faced it as a first-year doctoral student, from my female advisor, no less. The harassment of women in STEM and academia came to an especially ugly head in 2020, with the breaking stories of BethAnn McLaughlin’s nasty treatment of her fellow STEM advocates, many of whom were women and/or early-career scientists. When paired with the high amounts of unemployment in academia, the ongoing harassment and barriers, and the societal expectations of women as caregivers before all other roles, the horizon of hope for women and girls within STEM seems to stay within the dark, rather than offer any beacons of hope.

As the COVID-19 pandemic reaches almost a year within the United States, it is clear that those who have suffered the most are working mothers, as well as beginning academics. For those who are in the middle of this unfortunate Venn diagram, the recently graduated scholars who happen to be mothers, this misfortune is especially telling. Many of the science careers outside of academic research — such as museums, informal science institutions, and government positions — have also been cut, if not completely eliminated. Sadly, there are few exceptions and alternatives at this time.

Will this generation of women in STEM ever recover from the setback? I do not have the answer. I do know that for those of us who graduated during the Great Recession, a decade ago, most of us will never make up the lost years of pay and experience that our slightly older, or slightly younger, peers have enjoyed. This, I fear, will be the same story for many women and girls within STEM during this harrowing time in our history.

Kristen Vogt Veggeberg studies
Science Education
at
University of Illinois at Chicago
.

Meet Jane Colden, the 18th century botanist snubbed by Linnaeus

Brittany Kenyon-Flatt — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 22:51:28 EST

Had she not been a woman, Jane Colden would likely be one of the most famous early American botanists. But, because of her gender, she faced numerous barriers, including a lack of formal schooling and being given the cold shoulder by the foremost expert of her time. Nevertheless, Colden continued drawing and studying plants around her home in the Hudson Valley in the new New York colony, eventually discovering two entirely new species, in part thanks to her father, Dr. Cadwallader Colden.

Dr. Colden was a scientist, medical doctor, and the lieutenant governor of the New York colony. Because of this role, he was given an estate in modern-day Newburgh, New York, to work on classifying the region’s plants. In 1743, Dr. Colden published Plantae Coldenghamae, which described the plants on his land, with the help of his daughter, Jane, aged 19.

Though Jane was interested in botany, it was difficult for women to be taxonomic botanists in the 18th century, since many women were not allowed to attend school, nor learn Latin, the official language of taxonomy. But, the history of science shows us that if women were scientists, they tended to be botanists, likely due to the medicinal properties in plants which were important for women caretakers. For example, Hatshepsut, Queen of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, organized the Punt expedition partly to search for new medicinal plants. In the 18th century, Queen Charlotte of Great Britain and Ireland (later, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) promoted gardening as women’s work through her time spent at Kew Gardens.

In spite of her discoveries, Colden was never recognized for her scientific work

For Colden, Queen Charlotte’s influence, along with her father’s teaching and Carl Linnaeus' recently published Systema Naturae — a revolutionary book which explained how to scientifically classify plants and animals — meant that she could be a botanist. Her father was aging and expressed frustration with his task of categorizing plants, and so recruited his daughter's help. She was happy to be included in her father’s botany projects, and she began communicating with other botanists like Alexander Garden, John Bartram, John Ellis, and Peter Collinson. During this time, botanists were often in communication with each other, sending illustrations and descriptions of plants back and forth when they found something exciting.

A page from Colden's manuscript

Michigan State University Libraries

Colden likely began studying and drawing plants in the late 1730s. She wrote a manuscript, comprised of over 340 ink drawings of leaves, and crafted detailed descriptions, which usually included local medicinal uses. For example, she wrote “Asclepias tuberosa [Ed: commonly, the butterfly weed] is an excellent cure for the colick. This was learn’d from a Canadian Indian…and confirmed by Dr. Pater of New England…Pedicularis canadensis is called by the country people Betony [now, called wood betony]. They make tea of the leaves and use it for fever."

While studying plants around her family's estate one afternoon in 1753, Colden discovered a small, pink-flowered plant in the woods and determined that it had never been scientifically described. She sent this new plant to Garden, who agreed that it was unknown to Western science (it is likely that Indigenous peoples like the Lenape — who lived in this region before it was colonized — already knew about these plants). Colden wrote to Linnaeus, as the authority on new discoveries at the time. She said she had found a new species and proposed the name “Gardenia,” after her colleague Garden. Linnaeus disagreed with Colden’s assessment, and assigned the plant to the already known Hypercium genus (commonly called St. John’s wort).

St. John's wort

Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich), CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Over time, scientists found that Colden’s original assessment was correct — this small, pink-flowered plant was a new species, which was then named Triadenum (or, Marsh St. John’s wort). But, by this point, her role in its discovery had been long forgotten. In fact, contemporary scientists are still discussing the morphology and taxonomy of these two species. So, Colden was right when she said that the North American plant was not reported on in European books, given that plant does not live in Europe. Since Linnaeus did not take Colden's suggestion for the plant, she lost the honor of naming a new discovery for a colleague — Peter Ellis named a different plant in Garden’s honor: Gardenia jasminodies, the cape jasmine or gardenia.

Triadenum, commonly known as marsh St. John's wort, the flowers that Jane discovered

Ken-ichi Ueda

In 1756, Colden made another new discovery, this time a white-flowered plant which, again, she could not identify in Linnaeus’s books. She wrote about her findings in a letter to John Ellis, who proposed it as a new species to Linnaeus on Colden's behalf. She called this new plant “Fibraurea," though when Ellis wrote to Linnaeus, he said, “This young lady merits your esteem, and does honor your system…suppose you should call this Coldenella, or any other name that may distinguish her among your genera.” Linnaeus refused and named the plant “Helleborus” which was later renamed Coptis groenlandica (commonly called threeleaf goldthread).

Since “Fibraurea/Helleborus” was not named for Colden, Collinson wrote to Linnaeus asking again for a plant to be named after her. But, Linnaeus again ignored this request. It was common at the time for plants to be named after their describer, and as there were many new plants being written about at the time, there was no shortage of things that needed a name. Linnaeus was very much a man of his time, however. In developing his classification system, he believed that the most natural system for grouping plants would center on the reproductive parts, as he thought God intended. So, it is unsurprising that Linnaeus did not want to formally recognize Colden, since she was a woman.

Because Linnaeus, and others, did not acknowledge her, Colden’s work was effectively ignored. In addition to her discoveries, she developed a new method of using a rolling press with printer’s ink to take a leaf impression — a system that made recording leaves much more accurate than drawing them. While Colden thought she described two new species, others have argued that there were probably more than two. Dutch botanist John Frederik Gronovius wrote that he found at least three additional new species in her manuscript, and that she wrote on unique characteristics in even more plants which had not been written about elsewhere.

In spite of her discoveries, Colden was never recognized for her scientific work; the genus Coldenia (a flowering plant genus) was named for her father. While science historians recognize Colden’s work, there have been no notable revisions to botanical history, like revising a species’ history and naming her as its describer, and there is still no genus named for her.

Creeping tick trefoil (Coldenia procumbens), a member of the genus named after Colden's father

Rison Thumboor from Thrissur, India, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Aside from some mentions in academic texts about women in science, Colden’s legacy as one of the first women botanists has been largely forgotten. Sadly, once she married in 1759, her botany work stopped, and she died in childbirth in 1766, just prior to her 42nd birthday.

Brittany Kenyon-Flatt studies
Biological Anthropology
at
North Carolina State University
.

Meet Virginia Apgar, the unlikely anesthesiologist who saved newborn babies

Shannon Casey — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 23:36:56 EST

The newborn’s skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing. A few years earlier, the doctors would have documented the baby as stillborn, not believing there was anything they could do to help. If this were the mid-1950s though, a recent development in the field of obstetrics would have given them hope – the Apgar score. The newborn’s 1-minute Apgar score indicated that the newborn was in poor condition, but they treated him with oxygen. Sure enough, his 5-minute Apgar score showed improvement. Maybe he had a chance after all.

Virginia Apgar's invention helps saves newborns.

Virginia Apgar was born on June 7, 1909 in Westfield, New Jersey. Although her father’s day job was that of an insurance executive, on the side he was an amateur inventor and astronomer. As a child, Virginia Apgar learned to play the violin and later joined her high school orchestra. Around this time, she set her sights on medicine. At Mount Holyoke College, she pursued a degree in zoology and was lauded as an exceptional student.

After graduating in 1929, Apgar began her medical training at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Women were drastically underrepresented in the field at the time; there were only eight other women in her class of 90 people. After completing her MD in 1933, she became one of the first female surgical residents at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. However, her mentor, surgeon Allen Whipple, was concerned that since she was a woman, she would have a hard time attracting patients. As a result of this feedback, Apgar pivoted to anesthesiology, a relatively new specialty established in the mid-1940s. This was a much less prestigious career path, but since anesthesia was mostly handled by nurses at the time, gender discrimination wouldn't present as much of a hurdle.

Virginia Apgar examining a newborn

Via Library of Congress

As an anesthesiologist, Apgar had never even delivered a baby and was therefore an unlikely candidate for revolutionizing the field of obstetrics. However, part of her job entailed providing anesthesia for deliveries, so she had plenty of exposure to newborns. In the 1950s, reducing infant mortality (the death of an infant before their first birthday) was a daunting problem: an astonishing one in 30 newborns died at birth.

At that time, if a newborn didn’t seem to be thriving – if, for example, the baby’s skin was too blue or they were deemed too small – the baby would be left to die and documented as a stillborn. Of course, it wasn’t that anyone wanted these babies to die, but doctors simply believed that they were too sick to survive. Apgar believed that if such babies received better care, many of them would live.

Since Apgar was a “lowly” anesthesiologist, she wasn’t in a position to directly challenge how obstetricians did their work. Moreover, she was a woman in a man’s world. Nevertheless, she devised the "Apgar score" – a way to observe and document the condition of every newborn. It was a simple, indirect approach that had powerful results in terms of helping to dramatically decrease the infant mortality rate.

A chart for calculating a newborn's Apgar score

Via Wikimedia

The Apgar score is an acronym with each letter standing for a component of the score: Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, and Respiration. In other words, the score evaluates a newborn’s movement, heart rate, irritability, color, and breathing. In each category, a newborn receives 0, 1, or 2 points. In the “Pulse” category, for example, the newborn’s pulse may either be absent (0 points), below 100 beats per minutes (1 point), or over 100 beats per minute (2 points). The total score ranges from 0-10, with a low score indicating a newborn in poor condition, and a high score indicating a newborn in excellent condition.

The Apgar score enables healthcare providers to systematically observe and document the condition of every newborn – starting one minute after the baby is born and again five minutes after birth. Implementing the Apgar score introduced a spirit of competition because the doctors inherently wanted the newborns they delivered to have better scores. It became readily apparent that a baby with a low score initially could improve remarkably and have an excellent score five minutes after birth.

Moreover, Apgar worked with colleagues such as pediatrician L. Stanley James and anesthesiologist Duncan Holaday to establish the physiological basis for the Apgar score’s profound effect on reducing infant mortality. By analyzing neonatal blood chemistry, such as the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the newborn's blood, Apgar and others were better able to correlate a newborn’s Apgar scores to the effects of labor, delivery, and maternal anesthesia practices. Today in the US, thanks in large part to Apgar’s contribution to the field of obstetrics, only about three out of five hundred newborns don’t live to see their first birthday.

Today the Apgar score remains the standard of care, although some have wondered whether or not it is still pertinent in the context of modern medicine. However, despite suggestions that the Apgar score may be antiquated, this study from 2013 concluded that the Apgar score “has continuing value for predicting neonatal and post-neonatal adverse outcomes.”

Apgar, a musician as well, examining a violin "fashioned from an old telephone shelf"

Via Library of Congress

In the process of attending over 17,000 births, Apgar had seen many newborns with birth defects, and she went on to become a leader in the emerging field of teratology – the study of birth defects. In 1958, she took a sabbatical from clinical practice and pursued a master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. Subsequently, she became the director of a division at what is now the March of Dimes. In this role, Apgar worked to increase research in the field of teratology in order to help prevent and ameliorate birth defects to the greatest extent possible. Her medical training coupled with incredible determination and perseverance enabled her to leave an inspiring legacy in the field of medicine.

Apgar never retired, but she developed progressive liver disease and died on August 7, 1974. In addition to receiving numerous awards during her lifetime, her contributions have also been recognized far and wide posthumously. In 1994, her portrait was included in the commemorative U.S. postage stamp series of “Great Americans.” The following year, Apgar was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Shannon Casey studies
Biology and Medicine
.

Meet Merit-Ptah, the ancient Egyptian doctor who didn't exist

Cassie Freund — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 22:00:00 EST

Legend has it that the first woman doctor in recorded history lived in ancient Egypt nearly 5000 years ago, around 2700 BCE. But sometimes legends are merely legends for a reason: the doctor in question, Merit-Ptah, probably did not exist. She's still our science hero.

Ancient Egypt held women in high esteem. Many of the Egyptian deities were goddesses, including Hathor (goddess of love and fertility), Ma'at (goddess of truth and order), and Nut (goddess of the sky). The goddess Sekhmet, depicted with a human body but the head of a lion, was the patron of doctors and healers. Women had equal rights to men. They could own land and businesses, wear whatever they wanted, divorce their husbands, and hold powerful social positions. Merit-Ptah, rumored to be the first recorded woman physician in history, was thought to be the chief doctor of the royal court around 2700 BC. Her picture was even on one of the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.

Or, was it?

Late in 2019, microbiologist and medical historian Jakub Kwiecinski published an article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences debunking the myth of Merit-Ptah. "Almost like a detective, I had to trace back her story, following every lead, to discover how it all began and who invented Merit-Ptah," he said in a press release.

Matteo Farinella

Merit-Ptah as we conceive of her today seems to have been born from a real healer named Pesehet, whose tomb is dated to the 25th - 22nd centuries BCE. Kwiecinski believes that another medical historian, Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, accidentally conflated Pesehet and an unnamed woman mentioned on her son's tomb as a chief physician. The son was a high priest during Egypt's fifth dynasty around 2700 BC.

From there, the legend of Merit-Ptah blossomed. Hurd-Mead's historical work was published in the early 1930s. World War II caused huge changes in women's roles in society, and Kwiecinski notes that Merit-Ptah again appeared in an article on women in medicine in 1940. Then in the 1960s and early 1970s, women successfully pushed back against discrimination in medical school admissions. The story of Merit-Ptah was revived and repeated in several books and articles over the next few decades and her status as a feminist academic icon was cemented.

Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, who accidentally invented Merit-Ptah

National Library of Medicine

"It was associated with an extremely emotional, partisan – but also deeply personal – issue of equal rights," noted Kweicinski in the press release. "Altogether this created a perfect storm that propelled the story of Merit-Ptah into being told over and over again."

Merit-Ptah's life was a myth. But her popularity reflects the very real hunger of women to be seen as equals in science and medicine. And although Merit-Ptah's story started, and initially proliferated, in white and Eurocentric circles, Kwiecinski notes that she also featured in Afrocentric black history, where she shined as "an example of the scientific genius of the black Africans."

In a way, it doesn't matter that the exact person we consider to be Merit-Ptah never existed. She still stands as a figurehead and an inspiration for women – doctors, nurses, healers, scientists – around the world. As Kwiecinski says: "She is a very real symbol of the 20th century feministic struggle to write women back into the history books, and to open medicine and STEM to women."

Cassie Freund studies
Ecology
at
Wake Forest University
.

Deborah Jin engineered new quantum states of matter — twice

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:02:43 EST

“She probably would have gotten the Nobel.” University of Chicago physicist Kathryn J. Levin doesn’t hesitate when asked about fellow physicist Deborah S. Jin, affectionately known as Debbie.

She doesn’t have to try hard to make her case: during her short career, Jin was honored by one award after another. She invented new experimental techniques that led her to engineer new quantum states of matter twice, and her experiments were inspirational to many other physicists. Some of her work directly influenced theorists working on complex problems such as that of perfect electrical conductivity. She was a quiet yet strong and unforgettable presence wherever she went and a dedicated mentor that sought to lead by example.

Jin was born in California in 1968 and grew up in Florida where her father worked as a physics professor. Her mother and brother also studied physics. Her husband, physicist John Bohn, later wrote that she grew up “in a home with physics in the air.” She fully leaned into it and her undergraduate work at Princeton University earned a prize for experimental physics.

Deborah Jin in one of the lobbies of the JILA facility on the CU-Boulder campus

Glenn Asakawa (University of Colorado) via Wikimedia Commons.

She received her PhD from the University of Chicago where she studied materials that perfectly conduct electricity (called superconductors). There, Jin learned about particles called fermions that later defined a large part of her career. In 1996, she moved to JILA, a research institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. In Colorado, Debbie shifted her focus to the sub-field of atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics.

AMO physicists study atoms, molecules and light and they devise ways to control them. Often, they work with ultracold systems — close to absolute zero (-273° C) — which obey quantum mechanics. The toolbox of AMO physicists mostly contains lasers and magnets. Interactions between laser light and atoms result in electric forces whereas interactions between atoms and magnets give rise to magnetic forces. Physicists use these forces to make atoms ultracold, as close to absolute zero as a trillionth of a degree, and then keep them stuck in place so their properties can be measured.

The JILA research team that Jin joined, led by Eric Cornell, had collaborated on engineering the first ever Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), work that earned a Nobel prize in 2001. A BEC is a quantum state of matter that forms when particles classified as bosons are made extremely cold. At extremely low temperatures, they all assume the same, lowest energy state and behave as a single chunk of quantum matter rather than thousands of separate particles.

In the late 1990s, ultracold bosons and BECs were the big sensation at JILA. As a postdoctoral researcher, Jin worked with ultracold bosons for the first time in her career and had to learn a whole new set of experimental techniques to do so. She undertook “total retraining,” according to Levin. Jin learned quickly and soon made important contributions to AMO studies.

A vacuum chamber apparatus that captures cloud of ultracold atoms in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), which form a few micrometers below the glass pieces within the chamber.

E. Cornell group (JILA) via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1997, she was permanently hired at JILA and started her own research group. “She was starting in a field where the doors had been widely open,” Levin notes, and she decided to open them even further. Jin set out to make fermions ultracold.

Every particle in the universe is either a boson or a fermion, depending on its spin. Two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state so they cannot all “fall” into their lowest energy state at once. In other words, coaxing them into being very cold is very difficult. At the time, this was considered a huge experimental challenge. Creating an ultracold fermion gas would constitute an experimental breakthrough and Jin would be engineering a brand-new quantum state of matter. A year and a half later, Jin and her first graduate student succeeded in doing exactly that.

“I started making circuits on the floor of my office” her first graduate student, Brian DeMarco, recounts about their early days.

Despite becoming an AMO experimentalist only a few years earlier, the techniques Jin developed on this project were more successful than those competing research groups were using. She started from scratch, inheriting an empty room instead of a full lab. “I started making circuits on the floor of my office” her first graduate student, Brian DeMarco, recounts about their early days.

They also built their science from scratch, innovating everything from how to produce atoms they wanted to cool to new measurement techniques. Jin was not intimidated by this challenge. Her determination paid off: the 1999 Science paper where she and DeMarco reported the success of this experiment has thousands of citations and contemporary AMO physicists now routinely engineer and study ultracold fermion gases in their labs.

Equipment for obtaining and researching ultracold atoms, located at the National Laboratory of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.

Ciacho5 on Wikimedia Commons

In 2001, Jin and her research team experimentally pushed fermions to form pairs that then behaved like bosons. Their experimental achievement advanced theories about fermions and superconductivity. One famous mechanism of superconductivity, recognized by the 1972 Nobel prize, requires that electrons, which are a type of fermion, pair up. However, details of this pairing process are not understood for all superconductors. Jin’s experiment offered theorists a new setting for figuring out how fermions can act as bosons and how that can result in special properties like superconductivity.

Openness to collaborative work was a part of the research culture at JILA and Jin championed this approach to doing science.

Levin, who has spent years studying odd superconductors, recalls Jin’s work inspiring her to start collaborating with AMO researchers herself. Other physicists started to turn to ultracold atomic systems to emulate models they could previously, due to their complexity, only study by solving equations or using supercomputers.

In 2008, Jin and JILA colleague Jun Ye helped launch the study of ultracold quantum chemistry by making diatomic polar molecules ultracold instead of atoms, effectively engineering another new kind of quantum matter. Once they are ultracold, chemical reactions between molecules follow the rules of quantum mechanics, but cooling molecules to extremely low temperatures is more complicated than cooling atoms. There are many more ways for molecules to get energetically excited and consequently warm up.

Jin died of cancer in 2016. She was only 47 but her legacy is tremendous. Today, engineering an ultracold fermion gas is a skill AMO physics graduate students often learn early on in their doctoral training. Years after his first taste of ultracold fermions, DeMarco is mentoring his own students in studying them in new, complex configurations. Levin also continues to collaborate with AMO experimentalists; such collaborations have become more common since the early 2000s. And many physicists continue to work with ultracold molecules. Many ripples are still spreading from the successes of Jin.

It is not a coincidence that Jin’s success has been part of the incentive for physicists to collaborate more with their theoretical or experimental colleagues as well as across different branches of physics. Openness to collaborative work was a part of the research culture at JILA and Jin championed this approach to doing science. As DeMarco recounts, she had also been known to be a kind and generous team leader.

Working in a male-dominated field (women comprise less than 20% of physics faculty in the United States), Jin cared a lot about the status of women in physics. She was committed to leading by example and being a mentor. This way of addressing the gender disparity in physics was best suited to her strengths. “When invited to events aimed at improving the participation of women, she’d always do it,” DeMarco recalls, “and she’d meet with young women scientists all the time.” She had particularly appreciated the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award she received in 2013.

[Jin] believed that “unless physics and nature say no,” clever and hard work could get her through all setbacks, DeMarco recalls.

Her determination and careful approach to doing science made Jin a great role model for all young scientists. She believed that “unless physics and nature say no,” clever and hard work could get her through all setbacks, DeMarco recalls. But this conviction did not make her quick to jump to conclusions. “I learned from her to be skeptical of your own work,” DeMarco underscores. Jin really wanted to explain her work clearly and did not claim any result she was not absolutely certain of.

Following her passing, Bohn wrote that Jin encouraged young physicists to be like a fermions and pursue their own interests and individuality. She herself was quite like a fermion too: she could not be forced to assume the same state as everyone else. She was always driven to do things her own way and did not fear setting precedent. A true science hero, she used that drive to advance the field she worked in and move its community forward.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan studies
Theoretical Physics
at
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
.

Meet Lynnae Quick, NASA's hunter of space cryomagma

Maryam Zaringhalam — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 01:24:45 EST

What lies beneath the surface of icy moons and distant planets? Global oceans of salty water? Cryomagma waiting to burst through the surface in geyser-like jets? Hints of extraterrestrial life?

Planetary geophysicist Lynnae Quick has dedicated her career to investigating the inner workings of planets and moons. Today, she is the Ocean Worlds Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Unlike her colleagues studying Earth, Quick can’t just jet off to investigate these faraway locales for her research. Instead, she combines satellite data, an understanding of Earthly geological processes, and the power of mathematics to imagine — and model — how other worlds might behave. Her research has taken her from volcanic plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to the surface of the crater-laden dwarf planet Ceres and possible ocean worlds outside the bounds of our solar system.

Mentors helped her find her way to icy moons

Quick grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina and found her way to the sciences through a high school biology course. She considered becoming a zoologist or a physician, until she learned about the death of stars and the creation of supermassive black holes in her physics class. Her teacher, John Brown, nurtured Quick’s curiosity for the cosmos and encouraged her to pursue a career in the space sciences.

Mentors like Brown played an instrumental role throughout Quick’s career. She pursued a degree in physics at North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black college or university (HBCU). She credits attending an HBCU with instilling confidence in herself and her potential as a Black woman in the sciences. “I was used to seeing bright African American students being taught by African American teachers,” she says. “That helped me become confident in a way that might not be the case for people who were always the only person of color everywhere they went.”

After graduating, Quick got a master’s in physics from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. There, her interests gravitated towards volcanic activity on planets and moons. She discovered the work of Brazilian planetary geologist Rosaly Lopes, who studied Jupiter’s moon Io (the most volcanically active body in our solar system with hundreds of volcanoes — some of which spew fountains of lava 250 miles high). “I contacted her and basically said: I think your work is really cool!” Quick said, “For me, it was easier to cold email her because I saw her as another woman of color who was inside the sciences.”

Chaos terrain on Europa

NASA/JPL

Lopes recommended Quick get in touch with her colleagues Louise Prockter in Washington, DC. Through that connection, Quick began working with Prockter at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL), where she studied chaos terrain — planetary surfaces marked by ridges, cracks, and plains that become intertwined and entangled in one another as a result of geologic activity — on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Poring over maps of Europa’s surface, Quick became fascinated with the inner workings of the icy moon and the geological processes that carved out these chaotic topographies. She later told NASA, “I felt there was a whole other alien world at my fingertips.”

“The mission chose me”

Quick followed her fascination with Europa to a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins University, where she continued working with Prockter and faculty advisor Bruce Marsh. Prockter reflects, “I have always been impressed by Lynnae’s clear-sighted vision of what she wants, and her willingness to take some significant leaps of faith in order to realize her goals.” There, she was drawn in by spectacular geyser-like plumes of water vapor erupting from cracks in the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. She began to wonder, “Why don’t we see these plumes erupting from Europa?” Both Europa and Enceladus have surfaces covered by ice. Both have a subsurface ocean. And Europa should have more water because of its larger size.

Europa’s larger size and higher gravity, however, could create smaller plumes that might be missed by a spacecraft camera. Set on plume spotting, Quick devised new modes of detection that would enable a camera to find Europa’s putative plumes. This work caught the attention of Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, a planetary scientist at APL, who wanted to develop a camera to outfit NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission. Set to launch in 2024, the mission would be the first detailed study of Europa. Turtle invited Quick to collaborate, and NASA ultimately selected them to lead the mission’s Europa Imaging System.

Geysers erupting on the surface of Enceladus, photographed by Cassini

NASA

“The mission chose me,” Quick recalls. “Serving on a mission where we're sending a spacecraft out to Europa is just out of this world for me — no pun intended!”

Paying it forward

The Europa Clipper mission was the first of many missions Quick has joined. Most recently, Quick joined the Dragonfly mission, which will venture to Saturn’s largest moon Titan. The spacecraft will explore the carbon-rich moon through a series of controlled flights,taking off and touching down to analyze the ocean world’s chemistry for hints of habitability and how life may have arisen here on Earth. She serves as the lead for Dragonfly’s Student and Early Career Investigators Program, which gives undergraduates from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to work on the mission. Quick is committed to fostering a more diverse workforce for the future to advance the field. “People who are minorities tend to think really outside of the box,” Quick notes. “I wonder how much of that creativity we are missing in our field because it is so homogeneous?”

Outside the box thinking is a necessity for scientists who are underrepresented in their fields — not only to advance their research, but also to imagine and carve out spaces for themselves to thrive. “We often have to make ways out of no way,” she adds. “We don’t always have the privileges that other groups have, but we still have to find ways to be successful.”

Lynnae Quick giving a presentation at University of Maryland-College Park

Courtesy of Lynnae Quick

Quick is only the fifth African American woman to receive her doctorate in planetary sciences. But she’s often asked to talk only about her journey as a woman in science, rather than her experiences as aBlack woman or woman of color in science. “We not only deal with sexism. We also have to deal with racism,” she notes. “We need to think of diversity on multiple axes.” Embracing and openly discussing all of her identities has made Quick a powerful mentor. One of her mentees, astrochemist and #BlackInAstro organizer Ashley Walker, reflects, “Lynnae has helped me in so many different ways. It's very comforting knowing that someone that looks like me will always be in my corner.”

Creative writing

Throughout her career, Quick has nurtured her own creativity — while also relieving stress — by embracing the arts and humanities. In college, she took creative writing classes, where she wrote historical romance stories that centered on Black characters. Writing allowed her to both hone her communication skills, while giving her a new outlet to exercise her mind. “You have to connect plot points and there has to be a conclusion to the story, in much the same way as we’re trying to connect dots in science all the time.” Constructing these fictional worlds also instilled a sense of confidence in her ability to hypothesize about the real worlds beyond our own. “To a certain extent, creative writing made me trust my own ideas and not think they were too crazy or wacky or strange to consider.”

She didn’t always want to be a scientist

Despite her success and deep dedication to planetary sciences, Quick was not always interested in science. As a geophysicist, she’s often asked to bring in photos of her playing with rocks as a child — a sign of her early passion for science. But she spent most of her childhood playing with Barbies. “We want to remember that not all kids who grow up to be scientists — and not all women who grow up to be scientists — follow the same path,” she says. “It takes all types.” In fourth or fifth grade, she recalls her frustration at an assignment to learn the names and the order of the planets in our solar system. She remembers complaining to her mom, “When am I ever going to need this in my life?” Now, she confesses, “I guess the joke was on me!”

Maryam Zaringhalam studies
Molecular Biology
.

Meet Lady Mary Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation to England

Dan Samorodnitsky — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 23:53:26 EST

Whose heart was beating faster: the five year old boy holding his arm out to be stuck with a smallpox-laced needle, or his mother, looking on, whose idea all this was?

The boy, Edward, wasn't getting a vaccination. He was living in Turkey with his mother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and father in 1718. Edward Jenner wouldn't inject his first patient with a cowpox vaccine until 1796. This was a variolation – the forerunner to vaccination. Instead of a being administered a dead virus, or a fragment of that virus, or a related but not illness-causing virus, variolation (sometimes called "inoculation" as well) gave a patient the genuine article. Edward got a shot of live smallpox (in one arm, he also got cut with a smallpox-laden scalpel on the other arm by the British embassy's doctor).

This practice had been documented since around the 16th or 17th century in places as far afield as China, Sudan, and Turkey, and was probably in use long before then. What was really happening inside the body wasn't known at the time. Today we know that instead of smallpox going in through the nasal passages, where it quickly multiples and overwhelms an immune system, entering through the bloodstream is a less than optimal method, from smallpox's point-of-view. Making the bacteria take the long way around to infection slows it down, and gives the immune system time to mount an adequate defense. Montagu learned about variolation while living in Turkey and was the first to bring the idea to England.

Montagu was born Mary Pierrepont on a date unknown. It was not recorded. Or, a lot of websites say it's May 15, 1689, but I couldn't find anything to corroborate that. Neither could Isobel Grundy, one of Montagu's biographers (Grundy said via email: "I'm sorry to say there is no more information on Lady Mary's birthday. From the baptism date of May 26 I've always hoped that she was born on the 23, my own birthday, but I was unable when writing her biography to come up with anything more precise. I can't imagine where May 15 comes from"). But, she was certainly baptized on May 26, 1689.

Matteo Farinella

Her family almost diverted her away from Turkey and her encounter with variolation. The Pierreponts were minor nobility and her father had chosen a husband for her: another minor noble named Clotworthy Skeffington, which I'd like to emphasize is a real name. Mary did not like him. In a letter she referred to marrying with love, with indifference, and with hate as Paradise, Limbo, and Hell. Skeffington was Hell. She said that she would "rather give my hand to the Flames than to him." Instead, she chose Edward Wortley Montagu, whom she'd known for years (she expected him to be Limbo but found the marriage a surprising Paradise).

In 1717, Lady Montagu accompanied her husband to Constantinople, where he had been appointed as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. There, she learned Arabic and boasted that she was the first foreigner to be friends with Turkish women.

On April 1, 1717, she wrote to a friend:

"I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins."

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with her son Edward, by Jean-Baptiste van Mour

Via Wikipedia

"I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it."

Lady Mary knew smallpox well. In 1715 she survived a brutal case herself, which left her with facial scarring. "She was the more interested [in variolation] because an attack of small-pox had somewhat dimmed her beauty," one book states. Her brother, William, also died of the disease.

Comments on Lady Montagu's appearance after her smallpox illness have been common. Even how people spoke about smallpox in those days was gendered. A man's brush with the disease risked the most important thing he carried: his life. A woman risked her most important possession too: her beauty. Grundy, Montagu's biographer, said via email: "All the written commentary on smallpox emphasizes danger of death more in the case of men and danger to appearance in the case of women. And it was perfectly reasonable for a woman to fear that at a time when your face was your fortune." Montagu addressed in verse the temporary empire of a woman's beauty:

'Ye meaner beauties, I permit ye shine;
'Go, triumph in the hearts that once were mine;
'But midst your triumphs with confusion know,
''Tis to my ruin all your arms ye owe.
'Would pitying Heav'n restore my wonted mien,
'Ye still might move unthought-of and unseen.
'But oh ! how vain, how wretched is the boast
'Of beauty faded, and of empire lost!
'What now is left but weeping, to deplore
'My beauty fled, and empire now no more!

Montagu's views on things outside of inoculation were not far-seeing. She wrote approvingly of the treatment of slaves in the Ottoman Empire: "I know you'll expect that I should say something particular of [the market] of the Slaves, and you will Imagine me half a Turk when I don't speak of it with the same horror that other Christians have done before me, but I cannot forbear applauding the Humanity of the Turks to those Creatures. They are never ill us'd and their Slavery is in my Opinion no worse than Servitude all over the world." She also wrote about a Turkish man who told her that Islam's prohibition against alcohol was meant only for the people but not the ruling class, who were wise enough to handle drinking.

Inoculation was a huge leap forward for mainstream smallpox treatment in Britain, which had not been particularly scientific to that point (one contemporary doctor's treatment schedule included keeping the windows open and administering "twelve bottles of small beer every twenty-four hours"). But it took seeing to believe. That Edward, Lady Mary's son who was inoculated in Constantinople, never became ill wasn't enough. In 1721 another epidemic was cutting through the country. Lady Mary, who had been proselytizing to the royal family in favor of inoculation, insisted that Charles Maitland, the embassy doctor who helped inoculate Edward, inoculate Lady Mary's daughter, also named Mary. Maitland had medical professionals on hand to witness the inoculation (for the protection of his career), which was successful. One of the witnesses, James Keith, whose other children had died of smallpox, afterward had his sole surviving son inoculated as well.

From there, the idea of variolation took hold in Britain. Princess Anne, eldest daughter of the Prince of Wales became ill with smallpox, and discussions began about inoculating the Prince's younger daughters. Before royals could be inoculated, the treatment was tested on six prisoners at Newgate prison (some of whom were awaiting execution for such crimes as stealing a bolt of silk). The prisoners all survived, and were given a pardon and release for volunteering.

Alexander Pope declared his love to Lady Mary, who responded with laughter, by William Firth

Via Wikipedia

There are so many more interesting details I couldn't fit here. I could write a 10-piece series on Lady Montagu. She led an unbelievably full life. She was a frequent and vocal critic of the allotted status of women in the 18th century. She wrote savage and clear-eyed poetry. Some of it was satirical: she wrote a poem to call Jonathan Swift both impotent and cheap, the kind of man who tries to get a refund from a sex worker. She was a longtime friend and contemporary of Alexander Pope. They had a falling out for reasons unclear, though it may have to do with Pope taking credit for a poem Montagu had written, or another occasion where Montagu broke into laughter after Pope proposed to her.

Dan Samorodnitsky studies
Senior Editor
.

Meet Hertha Ayrton, the mathematician who cleared WW1 trenches of poisonous gas

Joan Meiners — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:04:44 EST

Mathematician, inventor, and friend of Marie Curie, Hertha Ayrton was an outspoken advocate for women's rights in science and in the voting booth. Her Ayrton fan dispelled toxic fumes from WWI trenches, and her research on London's lamp functioning landed her the first Hughes Medal awarded to a woman. Although her inventions impressed her peers and saved the lives of soldiers, few of her colleagues supported her efforts for women's equality during her lifetime.

The daughter of a Polish watchmaker, Hertha was born in 1854 as Phoebe Sarah Marks. She had a natural gift for tinkering, which won her the family nickname “Beautiful Genius.” When she was just seven, her father died and left her mother in poverty with eight young children. Still, her mother recognized Hertha’s intellectual talents and so, when an opportunity arose for Hertha to go to London and live with her aunt who ran a school, her mother allowed her to go. She studied mathematics, Latin, French and music until, when she was 16, she was obliged to start working as a live-in governess to send money home to her family in Portsea.

A sphygmograph

It was during this time — at a women’s suffrage meeting — that Hertha met Madame Barbara Bodichon, a prominent educationalist, artist and the founder of the Girton College for women at Cambridge. Bodichon helped Hertha enter Girton to study mathematics. It was also around this time that she acquired the nickname "Hertha" from an Algernon Swinburne poem. While a student at the college, and with Bodichon’s help, Hertha filed patents for several inventions, including a line divider that could be used by artists and designers to divide lines in equal parts or scale up drawings, and a sphygmograph that could record a person's pulse. Hertha would file 26 different patents in her life, striving to carve out a record of women’s accomplishments that others could follow.

“More lives than a cat”

After finishing college, Hertha took a job teaching mathematics. She also enrolled in night classes at Finsbury Technical College and, the following year, married her electrical engineering professor, William Ayrton. He would become her collaborator and a champion of her scientific pursuits.

Portrait of Hertha Ayrton by her cousin Héléna Arsène Darmesteter

Via Wikimedia

William admired his wife’s talents, remarking to a friend that “you and I are able people, but Hertha is a genius.” In defiance of the conventions of the time and to some of his colleagues’ disapproval, William supported his wife’s scientific pursuits, even setting up a laboratory for her in the top floor of their house. Though the couple shared many intellectual interests, William was careful not to collaborate with Hertha on some of her projects to ensure that she was not robbed of the credit for her work.

Nevertheless, Hertha struggled throughout her life to receive recognition for her own achievements, once stating that “errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”

The electric arc

In 1893, Hertha took over a project from William investigating the cause of an irritating hissing noise coming from the electric arc, which powered lamps in London at the time. The lamps consisted of two carbon rods with a charge running between them that produced an arc of light in the space between the rods. Hertha was the first to figure out that this loud hissing was due to the oxidation of the carbon electrodes. If you simply enclosed the whole contraption in a bulb so that it was not exposed to open air, the hissing stopped.

An electric arc forms between these two wires when a current jumps between them, creating light that used to be used in lamps in London during Hertha Ayrton's time. She figured out how to reduce the hissing noise caused by oxidation of the carbon rods

Khimich Alex via Wikimedia

Hertha’s remarkable work on the electric arc won the attention and admiration of contemporary scientists. She was the first woman invited to give a paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1899 and became the first woman elected to membership of that Institution. She spoke about her findings at the International Congress of Women in London and at the Electrical Congress in Paris. Her appearances convinced the British Association for the Advancement of Science to include women on scientific committees.

But even with all this success, she still faced barriers. In 1901, her paper on the electric arc was presented to the Royal Society by a man standing in for her, since women were not allowed admission. In 1902, her name was put forth for admission to the Royal Society but was rejected by a majority of votes because, simply, they were “of the opinion that married women are not eligible as fellows of the Royal Society.”

This decision held even after, in 1906, Hertha became the first woman — and only the second woman to date — to be awarded the Hughes Medal for outstanding research in the field of energy.

A friendship forged in rejection

Being refused admission to a prestigious scientific society put Hertha in good company. During the same time period, Marie Curie was refused admission to the Academie des Sciences, even though she had already won a Nobel Prize in Physics and was about to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When Curie was nominated for membership in the Academie in Nature, Hertha wrote a letter to the members on Marie Curie’s behalf requesting “equality of treatment of intellectual work without regard to the sex of the workers.”

Bonded by rejection and by being physicists who were also widows of physicists (William Ayrton died in 1908), the two women formed a fast friendship and spent summers together with their children on the Hampshire coast. Hertha reportedly even got Marie Curie to join the women’s suffrage movement and sign the international petition to free British suffragists imprisoned and on hunger strike in 1912.

Making waves

These trips to the Hampshire coast inspired Hertha’s next major project, on ripple movements in sand and water. She became interested in the dynamics of the rippled appearances of sand on the beach. Her 1910 paper on the subject, “The Origin and Growth of Ripple-Mark,” was published by the Royal Society, though they still did not accept her as a member. The paper, while credited to her, is listed as having been “Communicated by the late Prof. W. E. Ayrton.” Even after death, men were given credit for women’s work.

A figure from Hertha Ayrton's published paper "The Origin and Growth of Ripple-Mark" shows how waves create ripples in the sand. She later used this research to design a handheld fan that would expel poisonous gas from war trenches

Via Wikimedia

Hertha later developed this line of work into her invention of the Ayrton fan, which used the principles of wave motion to expel poisonous gas from war trenches. The use of chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas as weapons was becoming common in warfare during the early days of WWI. Hertha’s fan was dismissed at first but, after proving useful, the war effort finally manufactured 104,000 Ayrton fans and distributed them to the men fighting in the trenches. Hertha spent the rest of her days building upon this wave theory to devise strategies of clearing noxious gasses out of mines and sewers.

The fight for women

At the same time that Hertha’s house served as an active laboratory, it was also “a centre for suffragist endeavor.” She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906 and participated in marches and demonstrations with her daughter, Barbara. She was attacked by a police officer while marching to Downing Street with suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. In 1913, Hertha took in women who had been on hunger strike in prison and nursed them back to health.

In 1914, Hertha doubled down on her support of the suffrage movement. She donated part of an inheritance from mentor Barbara Bodichon, 100 pounds, the equivalent of £11,625 in 2019, to form the United Suffragists, which included both men and women. Hertha became the vice president and her daughter, Barbara, the secretary of the organization.

Hertha’s support of women was not limited to the suffrage movement. In addition to supporting the scientific endeavors of her friend, Marie Curie, Hertha was also an outspoken voice for the rights of women in science. According to her 1923 obituary, “It was her opinion that women were naturally inventive and original, and that these qualities, joined to the capacity for patient work that is universally allowed to be theirs, especially fitted them for scientific work.” She fought for this principle every day of her life.

And as her obituary writer also noted, “she was a good woman, despite of her being tinged with the scientific afflatus.”

Joan Meiners studies
Ecology and Environmental Data Journalism
.

Meet Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who figured out what the universe is made of

Arianna Soldati — Sat, 09 May 2020 22:33:52 EST

"I spring quite literally from a pagan background."

There is only one person capable of introducing themselves that way in their own autobiography: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the most original scientists to ever live. She was the first to determine that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. In doing so, as a young graduate student, she bucked contemporary scientific theory. Prevented by sexism from being awarded her degree, and then a professorship, she eventually became the first woman to chair a department at Harvard University.

Cecilia Payne knew she wanted to be a scientist early on. As an eight year old, she recognized a bee orchid from her mother’s stories about the Italian Riviera. She later recalled that moment saying, “For the first time I knew the leaping of the heart, the sudden enlightenment, that were to become my passion.” The rush of excitement that comes when the final puzzle piece fits into place, of seeing theory confirmed by practice, is something many scientists can identify.

“I think my life as a scientist began at that moment”

Matteo Farinella

She attended a private school, run by Miss Elizabeth Edwards, and credited her time there with providing her a rich education. But even with the best teachers, school in early 1900s England wasn’t exactly a nursery for open-mindedness or the pursuit of knowledge. Left-handed students like Cecilia were forced to use their right hand, a process she found difficult and uncomfortable. As was the case with many schools at the time, religious trappings also meant that long hours were dedicated to hymn and prayer.

When it came time for college, Payne settled on astronomy after bouncing between botany and physics, and credited another teacher, the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, for putting her on the path of stars. In her first year at Cambridge, she attended a transformative lecture by Eddington about his expedition to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity by observing the stars near a solar eclipse.

She remembered the power of that lecture: “My world has been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” Payne published her first academic paper with Eddington as an undergraduate student, and even late in life considered him “the greatest man I have been privileged to know.”

...her work was “undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy"

Studying physics at Cambridge in 1920s was a lonely prospect for a woman. Payne sat alone, since she was not allowed to occupy the same rows of seats as her male classmates. Though Payne fulfilled all the requirements for a degree in 1923, women were only granted "certificates" at Cambridge until 1948.

Such restrictive, sexist polices stifled any hope of a research career in the UK, so Payne moved to the United States. At the time, there was no regular graduate astronomy program at Harvard Observatory. For Payne, the intellectual stimulation and comparative freedom at Harvard was intoxicating. She threw herself into her work, spending long days and nights at the Observatory.

The work paid off, and in 1925 Payne became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University, advised by with Harlow Shapley, the head of the Observatory. In her thesis, she inferred the cosmic abundance of the elements from stellar spectra, the range of radiation emitted by stars.

Her results showed that helium and especially hydrogen were by far the most common elements in stars, and hence in the universe. It was a view that contradicted the scientific consensus of the time, which was that the Sun, a star, and the Earth, a rocky planet, would provide similar spectra if measured at the same temperature.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Via Wikimedia

Astronomer Otto Struve, director of Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, gushed that her work was “undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy." A number of prominent astronomers of the day, including Henry Norris Russell, director of the Princeton University Observatory, dismissed her work as impossible. But even her staunchest critics relented after independent observations later proved that she was correct. Payne’s findings are now central to any introductory astronomy course, where students learn that the Milky Way Galaxy is composed of ~73% hydrogen, 25% helium, and 2% other elements.

After her PhD, Payne took on a slew of less prestigious, low-paid research jobs, as women were not permitted to enter the Harvard academy at the time. She met her husband, Sergei Gaposchkin, during a visit to the Astronomische Gesellschaft meeting in Gottingen in 1933. The marriage spanned four decades, producing three children and stacks of manuscripts and books about the cosmos. Eventually, in 1956, Payne-Gaposchkin became both the first female professor in her faculty, and the first woman to become department chair at Harvard.

"Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money"

In 1976, the American Astronomical Society awarded her their highest honor, the Henry Norris Russell Prize (named after the same Henry Norris that once criticized her PhD work), in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research. In her acceptance speech, Payne-Gaposchkin reflected on the thrill of discovery that she’d chased ever since she’d recognized that orchid as a little girl, saying “The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience.”

Payne-Gaposchkin died in Cambridge in 1979. Near the end of her life, she wrote “Young people, especially young women, often ask me for advice. Here it is, valeat quantum. Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.”

Arianna Soldati studies
Geology and Volcanology
at
Ludwig-Maximillians Universitat Munchen
.

Brittney G. Borowiec studies
Comparative Physiology
at
Wilfrid Laurier University
.

Can you help identify unnamed women scientists of the past?

Karen Kwon — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 23:14:47 EST

On March 12th, the Science History Institute, a non-profit located in Philadelphia, uploaded a photo on their Twitter account. Pulled from their digital collection, the black and white photo, most likely from the 1940s, depicts a man and five women wearing lab coats in what appears to be a chemistry lab. Of these six people, only the man has been identified, as Michael Somogyi, then professor of biochemistry at the Washington University and Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, now Barnes Jewish Hospital. The others were only labeled as “female laboratory assistants.”

March was International Women’s History Month. And 2020 also marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women in the US the right to vote, albeit only white women. To celebrate, the Institute decided to launch a crowdsourcing campaign to name women scientists whose identities are mystery. The initiative's leaders, Hillary S. Kativa, Chief Curator of Audiovisual & Digital Collections at the Othmer Library of Chemical History, and Rebecca Ortenberg, Social Media Editor of the Science History Institute, are hoping that people would look at the photo and provide leads on who the women scientists could be.

Do you find internet sleuthing and historical research calming? Here's a task for you: help us identifying the women in this photo! Our #OthmerLibrary records don’t tell us much about them, and we want to fix that. Read on to find out what we *do* know. ⬇️ #WomensHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/NSyAVwzMCl
— Science History Institute (@SciHistoryOrg) March 12, 2020

In recent years, there has been a surge of similar initiatives, like Wikipedia Edit-a-thons aimed at increasing the number of Wikipedia articles about women in science. However, the lack of detailed records of women scientists with correct attribution and identification has made this difficult. Even though women were present in scientific settings, they were often not credited for their work. And, because articles such as Wikipedia biographies need credible sources and demonstration of notability, obtaining historical documents and photos is crucial in highlighting women scientists who have been sidelined.

Kativa drew inspiration from a viral story from 2018, where crowdsourcing was used to find the identity of a woman in an old photo from a scientific conference. Candace Jean Andersen, an illustrator, posted a photo of the attendees at the 1971 International Conference on the Biology of Whales on her Twitter account. The caption she found named all 37 men in the photo, except for the lone woman. Andersen’s tweet asking for people’s help finding the identity of the woman instantly went viral. Through many strangers’ efforts, the woman in the photo was identified as Sheila Minor Huff, a museum technician working for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History at that time.

The caption she found named all 37 men in the photo, except for the lone woman

Crowdsourcing to discover the previously unknown facts of a person, an object, or an event in old photos is nothing new. Organizations as large as the Library of Congress and CERN have used crowdsourcing to find information on their archived photos and documents. The Newberry, an independent research library in Chicago, has been using crowdsourcing to transcribe documents in their Modern Manuscript Collection since December 2017. As of this writing, almost 65% of the 51,259 pages has been transcribed according to their project website.

Ortenberg said that the Institute’s collection has many photographs of women in labs, working for many different kinds of scientific roles. Often, they are “some of the most popular digital collection items,” Ortenberg said. She argues that the photos prove that “women have always, or for a very long time, been involved in different kinds of scientific processes and projects,” and “because they were often in more junior roles or supportive roles, [women] were not held up, identified, or highlighted.”

“The project provides an interesting opportunity to tell stories about who gets documented and whose materials are collected,” Kativa said. The photo for the project was archived along with the documents because of the male scientist — Michael Somogyi — in the photo. And because it was about him, not much attention was given to the women scientists in the photo. Kativa said that this is typical of the collection at Science History Institute. It’s not that women weren’t there. It's that they were hidden. So, she is interested in what unrevealed stories this project can find.

Mar Hicks, a professor and historian of computing and author of the book Programmed Inequality, agrees that women in science have largely been overlooked. “Women would often be photographed working in machine rooms and in laboratories, but when it came time to write up the results of that work, preserve archives about their contributions and research, or even caption the photographs, their identities were usually not seen as very important. So even though their presence and impact is obvious from photos, it cannot be directly tied to what they actually did in many cases,” Hicks said via email. “Their impact on science and technology has been enormous, but too often they are still seen as peripheral and second class instead of being seen as real scientists and workers. Correcting incomplete archives can help fix that.”

It’s not that women weren’t there. It's that they were hidden

Even though the initiative hasn't taken off like they were hoping for because of COVID-19 pandemic, Kativa said that just initiating the conversation about “why don’t we have the names of these women?” is a success. Although, Kativa already has the next photo for the initiative in mind, just in case if she and Ortenberg decide to do one more round of it: a photo of a woman at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory, from the Institute’s Travis P. Hignett Collection of Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory Photographs. This photo, taken in 1926, is the only one from its collection in which the subject’s first name isn’t revealed. The female scientist in the photo was only noted as Mrs. M.K. Murray.

For people at home, participating in a crowdsourcing project might be a great way to spend time during the pandemic, as Atlas Obscura suggests.

Still, Hicks generally finds the crowdsourcing initiatives tricky. “As a labor historian, I do not like to see people asked or encouraged to work for free because unpaid labor drags down everyone’s worth in the workplace, lowers the GDP, and contributes to the type of silencing that many crowdsourced history projects are, ironically, working to undo.”

“In this case, however, casting a wide net to try to find more information on these women is a critical first step,” Hicks said. “There will be people who see these photos who may be friends, relatives, or coworkers — or possibly even the women themselves. This provides researchers invaluable resources for trying to undo some of this historical silencing and correct our lopsided understanding of science and technology’s past, and its present impacts.”

Karen Kwon studies
Chemistry
.

Meet Betty Hay, the scientist who saw how cells grow and limbs regenerate

Luyi Cheng — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 17:38:24 EST

Limbs regenerate, embryos grow, and cancers invade.

In each of these processes, cells change dramatically. Betty Hay studied fascinating biological phenomena, relentlessly asking questions with her students and colleagues to understand how cells behaved. By the end of her life, she had made enormous research contributions in developmental biology, on top of committing herself to mentoring the next generation of scientists and advocating for more representation of women in science.

She made significant contributions towards understanding cell and developmental biology

Betty Hay began as an undergraduate at Smith College in 1944. She loved her first biology course and started working for Meryl Rose, a professor at Smith who studied limb regeneration in frogs. “I was self-motivated and very attracted to science,” she said in an interview in 2004, “Meryl at that time was working on regeneration and by the end of my first year at Smith I was also studying regeneration.”

“Nothing could’ve kept me from going into TEM"

Hay regarded Rose as a significant scientific mentor in her life and followed his advice to apply for medical school instead of graduate school. She ended up attending Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for her medical degree while continuing her research on limb regeneration over the summers with Rose at Woods Hole’s Marine Biological Laboratory. She stayed at Johns Hopkins after to teach Anatomy and became an Assistant Professor in 1956.

The year after, she moved her studies to Cornell University’s Medical College as an Assistant Professor to learn how to use the powerful microscopes located there. Her goal was to use transmission electron microscopy (TEM), a method of taking high-resolution images, to see how salamanders could regenerate an amputated limb. “Nothing could’ve kept me from going into TEM,” she said later.

With her student, Don Fischman, they concluded that upon amputation, cells with specialized roles, known as differentiated cells and thought to be unchangeable, were able to de-differentiate and become unspecialized stem cells again. These cells without an assigned role could then have the freedom to adopt whatever new roles they required to regenerate a perfectly new limb.

Already making leaps in figuring out an explanation for the process of limb regeneration, Hay turned her attention from salamanders to bird eyes when she moved to Harvard University. She studied the outermost layer of cells on the cornea, known as the cornea epithelium. With the help of a postdoctoral scholar in her lab, Jib Dobson, and a faculty colleague, Jean-Paul Revel, they isolated, grew, and took pictures of cornea epithelium cells and demonstrated the epithelial cells could produce collagen.

Collagen is the main type of protein that weaves together to form the extracellular matrix, a connective tissue (the “matrix”) found outside of cells (“extracellular”). The collagen in the extracellular matrix provide structure, acting as a foundation for connective tissues and organs such as skin, tendons, and ligaments. Other scientists in the field were skeptical of the conclusion. They thought that one dedicated cell produced collagen, and nothing else. They dismissed the idea that cells in the cornea could somehow do the same. Despite their doubt, Hay, along with postdoctoral scholar Steve Meier, continued their studies. In 1974, they further showed that not only could epithelial cells produce collagen and extracellular matrix in different organ systems, but that the matrix could also tell other cells what type of cell to become.

She was a committed educator and mentor

Kathy Svoboda and Marion Gordon, two colleagues of hers, wrote about Betty Hay and described her “not only as a superb cell and developmental biologist, but also as an educator and beloved mentor.”

Limb regeneration in salamanders

Russell et al BMC Biology 2017

She was dedicated to teaching and influenced the careers of many junior and early-career scientists. In addition to working with and training her students to produce successful research and results, others mentioned how she would take the time to introduce students in her department to more established and prominent scientists in the field of cell biology. These actions reflected her belief that every student was worthy of being heard and introduced.

She held influential positions and advocated for more representation of women in science

At the time of her graduation from Johns Hopkins in 1952, she was one of only four women in her graduating class of 74 people. Afterwards, she experienced frequent moves for her career, going from Baltimore, to New York, to Boston. Despite how difficult it felt moving alone and leaving her personal relationships behind every time, she felt it was necessary for her career. In her mind, she strongly believed her research always came first, fueled by her “intense desire to find answers, using the scientific approach.”

“I am very glad to see in my lifetime the emergence of significantly more career women in science"

She went on to serve as president for multiple professional societies, such as the American Association of Anatomists, the American Society for Cell Biology, and the Society for Developmental Biology, demonstrating her commitment to leadership and service. In two of these societies, she was the first woman to ever hold the position.

In 1975, she became the first female chair of what is now the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard University and held that position for 18 years. Even with these impressive milestones, she acknowledged one of her biggest obstacles to be achieving acceptance in the male professional world.

In 2004 and nearing retirement, Betty Hay would go on to say, “I am very glad to see in my lifetime the emergence of significantly more career women in science,” in an interview with editor-in-chief Fiona Watt for the Journal of Cell Science, “this so enriches the intellectual power being applied to the field of cell biology.”

Luyi Cheng studies
Molecular Biology and Structural Biology
at
Northwestern University
.

Meet Antonia Maury, astronomy's renegade who changed the way we classify stars

Dori Grijseels — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 07:45:12 EST

Antonia Maury was born March 21, 1866 into a true science family. Both her grandfather and her uncle were renowned scientists. She was helping her uncle, Henry Draper, in his laboratory as young as four years old. She was tasked with handing him the test tubes he needed for his chemistry experiment. By the time she went to Vassar College, she was primed to succeed in science.

Antonia Maury was one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, alongside other influential astronomers, such as Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne and Annie Jump Cannon. These women were hired by the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to classify the observations made by the male astronomers at Harvard College. This was the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in a reflection of how science-minded women were treated at the time, were also called "Pickering’s Harem."

Matteo Farinella

These brilliant women were hired as inexpensive labor, working for as little as 25 cents an hour. But Antonia Maury's accomplishments reflect the depth of talent these women had: She was a creative and independent scientist who made major contributions to astronomy, despite the challenges of working as – and sometimes, being treated as – a human computer.

Maury’s job was to work on a catalog of stars honoring her late uncle, the Henry Draper Memorial. Her uncle was a pioneer in astrophotography, and was the first person to photograph a nebula. He also took many photos of the moon, including the first photo taken through a telescope. Draper died in 1882 and his wife, Mary Anna Draper, donated money to the Harvard Observatory to create the catalog of stars in his honor.

Maury did not like the classification system that Pickering and Fleming developed....She decided to make her own

This included bright stars in the northern hemisphere, which Maury studied. The men in the observatory would point their telescopes at these stars and obtain stellar spectra (a measure of the light a star emits). Depending on what a star is made of, it won’t emit pure white light, which contains all the colors of the rainbow. Instead, only certain bands of color will show up on the spectrum. The colors that do and do not show up can tell astronomers something about the temperature and the size of the stars. For example, two lines in the yellow part of the spectrum, called D-lines, indicate a star contains sodium.

Maury did not like the classification system that Pickering and Fleming developed, which only included 12 types of stars. She decided to make her own. She reordered some of their classes, and added some of her own, resulting in a classification of 22 different types of stars, which were based on the combination of colored lines in the stellar spectra. The truly innovative part of her classification was the addition of lettered classes, a, b and c, indicating the brightness and width of the lines.

The astronomers known as the "Harvard computers," including Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, Willamina Fleming, and Antonia Maury

Harvard College Observatory on Wikimedia Commons

During her time at the Harvard College Observatory, Maury did not get along well with Pickering, the director of the observatory and her boss. He did not like that she created her own classification system, taking away time from her work on the Draper Memorial. Maury was described as an “independent renegade” by her colleague at the observatory Dorrit Hoffleit. Hoffleit surmised that she probably got away with this because of her family status, a perk the other women who worked with Pickering did not necessarily have.

Maury had an additional problem with Pickering: he would take credit for the women’s work, including hers. She discovered that Zeta Ursae Majoris, one of the stars in the Big Dipper actually consisted of two stars, called a double star. She found this through spectroscopy, the first time this method had been used to discover a double star. However, Pickering didn’t make her co-author on the paper describing this achievement, and only mentions her very briefly, saying: “a careful study of the results has been made by Miss. A. C. Maury, a niece of Dr. Draper.”

With the "Spectra of Bright Stars," she was the first woman ever to publish a star catalog

Maury left the observatory in 1891 for a teaching position in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following her disagreements with Pickering. But it wasn’t so easy to just leave. The Memorial Catalog for her uncle wasn’t finished yet. His widow and her aunt, Mary Anna Draper, was paying for the project and wanted Antonia to keep working on it. The two did not get along. Mary wanted Antonia to finish the work, but was happy to cut ties with her afterwards.

Antonia did return to finish the work at Harvard twice, in 1893 and 1895. Eventually her contribution to the catalog ‘Spectra of Bright Stars’ was published in 1897. On this work, Antonia was listed as an author and finally got her recognition. With it, she was also the first woman ever to publish a star catalog. By the time the catalog was published, she had already left the observatory and gone back to teaching. This would remain the case until 1918, when she returned to the Harvard Observatory as an adjunct professor.

Pickering died the next year, and Antonia got along much better with the new director. She published several works under her own name. During this time she studied Beta Lyrae, a star system in the Lyra constellation, and Upsilon Sagittarii, a star system in the Sagittarius constellation. Cecilia Payne, who worked with Maury, recalled: “She had a passion for understanding things. It was typical of her that she devoted years to the mysteries of Beta Lyrae and Upsilon Sagittarii, still incompletely solved.”

A diagram of the stellar spectra compared to the sun-spectrum, and others

Dodd, Mead and Company on Wikimedia Commons

Antonia Maury officially retired over 50 years after she started working at the Harvard Observatory, but continued her research –in addition to studying ornithology, natural history, and campaigning to save sequoia forests in the western US when they were threatened by timber companies – even after that. She passed away in 1952.

Antonia Maury published many influential papers during her time at the Observatory, such as her catalog on northern stars and her analysis of Beta Lyrae, and significantly impacted the field of astronomy with her work. Maury's enduring legacy is her classification system: Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung partially based his Hertzsprung–Russell Diagram, the main system to classify stars in modern times, on her c-characteristic. The official system of star classification adopted in 1922 by the International Astronomical Union used the letter c as well, to indicate narrow well-defined lines, a recognition of Antonia’s classification work. This system, with minor changes, is still in use today.

Dori Grijseels studies
Neuroscience
at
University of Sussex
.

Meet Alice Wilson, the Canadian geologist who did the work of five people

Arianna Soldati — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:32:04 EST

Alice Wilson was a lot of firsts.

She was the first female geologist to be hired by the Geological Survey of Canada, to be admitted to the Geological Society of America, and first to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She mapped over 14,000 square kilometers of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Lowlands, complete with information on the geology and fossils found in this region — and she did it alone, because the Geological Survey of Canada barred her from doing fieldwork with men.

Alice was born in 1881 in Cobourg, Ontario. Her father was a professor at Victoria University, so she was encouraged to be a scholar, but her family also greatly enjoyed the outdoors. Wilson spent her summers camping, canoeing, and collecting fossils with her family, and she developed an avid interest in paleontology. This experience provided her with skills and self-confidence that would later help her conduct geological field work.

Matteo Farinella

Wilson found her footing as a scientist in her first job as an assistant at the Museum of Mineralogy at the University of Toronto, and then, starting in 1909, as a clerk for the invertebrate paleontology section at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). She wanted to further her formal education but World War I, illness, and disagreeable GSC officials interfered with her plans. Wilson finally earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1929. Despite this, it took the GSC an additional seven years to promote her to the rank she deserved. But other professional societies recognized her expertise, and in 1936 she was also elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. She was the first woman to be selected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada just two years later.

"...while not heavily built, I am muscularly very strong, and from earliest childhood have been accustomed to an out-of-door life"

Professional recognition was not the only courtesy that GSC refused Wilson; she also had to fight for the right to do fieldwork. She was forbidden to work at remote field sites with her male colleagues, so she made the case that she could work alone into the St. Lawrence Valley, an area easily accessible from her home. She successfully argued that "while not heavily built, I am muscularly very strong, and from earliest childhood have been accustomed to an out-of-door life."

Original caption: "Alice Wilson instructing a field party."

Earth Sciences History

She explored the St. Lawrence area for the next 50 years. She covered more than 16,000 square kilometers despite her poor health and the limitations placed upon her. For example, the GSC provided all its male geologists with vehicles, but wouldn’t do the same for Alice: she had to walk or bike until she bought her own car. Nonetheless, Alice became the authority on the fossils and rocks of the St. Lawrence Valley, especially invertebrates from the Ordovician Period (444-485 million years ago). The GSC otherwise barred women from fieldwork until 1970.

Original caption: "Alice the geologist, slightly embarrassed to be posing for the photographer!"

Earth Sciences History

When she was allowed to work with other people, Wilson was an iconoclast in the field. She was famously opposed to smoking, hacking and coughing until whoever had lit their cigarette put it out. Whenever other male scientists started fighting over discoveries and things got heated, Wilson "never raised her eyes from her book, never spoke a harsh word herself."

The dedication to The Earth Beneath Our Feet, Wilson's children's book

Alice Wilson and C. E. Johnson

Alice was superannuated and forced by to retire at age 65, but she kept teaching at Carleton College (now called Carleton University) until her death. She said, “The earth touches every life. Everyone should receive some understanding of it.” She also wrote a famous children's book on geology called "The Earth Beneath our Feet," which you can read for yourself at the link. Every chapter starts with a poem, and short verse in the dedication states, "...it is not the hills but the sea that is everlasting" (an interesting thing to say since Marie Tharp wouldn't definitively prove plate tectonics until 1953, six years after the book's publication).

Wilson was such a force that five people had to be hired to replace her upon her retirement: "We never understood how she could do all she did in a day, first to the Survey, then a two-hour lecture with us, then back to the Survey, and then a field trip in the afternoon" said a colleague from Carleton.

A few months before her death, she told the Survey's director that she wouldn't need her office anymore. When told she could continue to have it, she said with finality, "No, my work is done."

Arianna Soldati studies
Geology and Volcanology
at
Ludwig-Maximillians Universitat Munchen
.

Cassie Freund studies
Ecology
at
Wake Forest University
.

Meet Rebecca Lancefield, the revolutionary microbiologist whose work paved the way for antibiotics

Ashley Juavinett — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 22:47:05 EST

Streptococcus is not the kind of bacteria that you mess around with. They’re notorious for causing illnesses as varied as strep throat, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and flesh-eating bacterial infections. Renowned 20th century microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield, however, loved Streptococci. So much so that she dedicated her 60-year scientific career to sorting them into different categories. It was her work with Streptococcus and other bacteria that ultimately helped pave the way for antibiotics and an understanding of how and where infections happen.

Lancefield was born in 1895 in Fort Wadsworth, a military installation on Staten Island, New York. Her father was an army officer, which led to a rather nomadic early life and schooling. However, her mother strongly believed in education for women, and educated Lancefield and her five sisters. This educational foundation led Lancefield to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She was originally a French and English major, but became deeply intrigued by her roommate’s work in zoology, and switched her field of study, graduating with a zoology degree in 1916.

Lancefield wanted to continue to graduate school after Wellesley, but couldn’t manage it financially. Her father had died while she was in college, and her mother needed money. So, Lancefield worked for a year as a teacher, and subsequently earned a scholarship that enabled her to work in a lab at Columbia University in Manhattan while earning her master’s degree. It was at Columbia where she first began working with bacteria.

Streptococcus seen under 70,000-fold magnification with an electron micrograph

Rockefeller University

Lancefield’s love for bacteria began with strains other than Streptococcus. As a master’s student, she researched Staphylococcus, the bacterial culprit behind staph infections, highly contagious infections that are often easily treatable but can be dangerous if they reach deeper tissues. After graduating in 1918, she joined the lab of molecular biologists Oswald Avery and Alphonse Dochez as a technician. Avery and Dochez had built their careers on pneumococcus (which causes pneumonia), and had just been tasked by the Surgeon General of the Army to investigate the cause of streptococcal infections in U.S. troops in Texas.

At the time, it was unknown whether it was just one or many strains of Streptococcus that could cause problematic infections. After collecting samples from the soldiers, Lancefield, Avery, and Dochez identified 125 different strains, most of which they were able to sort into four distinct groups. They published their results in a lengthy 34-page paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. It was quite uncommon for a technician to earn authorship on a paper at that time, but Lancefield had been an integral part of the team, and earned her spot.

With the work in Texas complete, Lancefield returned to Columbia as a research assistant while her husband, who was also a scientist, finished his PhD. They both accepted teaching positions at the University of Oregon and moved there for a year. In 1922, they returned to New York, where her husband joined the zoology faculty at Columbia, and Lancefield began her PhD in the university's immunology and bacteriology program.

Rebecca Lancefield and her husband Donald, 1928

Rockefeller University

Lancefield had hoped to work with bacteriologist H. Zinsser at Columbia, but he wouldn’t let her work in the lab because she was a woman. So, she did the bulk of her research with biologist Homer Swift at Rockefeller University. Studying for her PhD at Columbia and doing lab work at Rockefeller at the same time was often, quite literally, a balancing act, as she had to carry her test tubes between campuses. It’s an image I’m fond of: aspiring microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield, with a rack of Streptococci samples jostling on her lap, traveling back and forth between the west to east sides of Manhattan.

Lancefield’s doctoral work was foundational for our understanding of rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease. At the time, scientists thought that a specific group of Streptococci, the viridans, were responsible for rheumatic fever. Lancefield's doctoral work conclusively demonstrated that they were not the culprit.

Lancefield received her PhD from Columbia in 1925, and continued her work at Rockefeller, investigating Streptococci’s molecular machinery. By studying the reactions between different strains of Streptococci and different types of antibodies, Lancefield was able to determine the antigens that different types of Streptococci have, and therefore what kind of cells each strain could infect.

A modern electron micrograph of streptococcus bacteria.

NIH via Rockefeller University

The establishment of a Streptococci pecking order was necessary not only for basic science, but also for our ability to do epidemiological studies on diseases caused by these bacteria. Scientists originally believed that different strains of Streptococci caused different diseases, but Lancefield’s research showed that some strains could cause a variety of symptoms.

At Rockefeller, Lancefield was known as “Mrs. L.” She was meticulous and deeply dedicated to her science, so much so that she was reluctant to leave the bench to actually write up her findings, and was totally uninterested in administrative work.

She also made a killer eggnog, a recipe that still today is shared widely within scientific circles.

Lancefield was also a kind colleague and dedicated mentor. Marjorie McCarty, a scientist in the lab, once asked to leave at 3 pm because her son was sick. Lancefield responded flustered and embarrassed that someone would even need to ask to leave. According to Lancefield's close collaborator, Maclyn McCarty, "A visitor with an interest in streptococcal problems would leave with a thorough indoctrination and with most of his questions answered — as well as with a collection of cultures of reference streptococcal strains and samples of the relevant antisera [blood serum with antibodies]."

Lancefield worked in the lab into her 80s, often staying the night, and continuing to work the next day. She also made a killer eggnog, a recipe that still today is shared widely within scientific circles. After 86 years and countless contributions to our understanding of bacteria, Lancefield passed away in 1981. But her bacterial strains live on. You can visit the 6,000 or so strains that she collected over her lifetime at Rockefeller University — descendants of bacteria that spent many long rides on the lap of one of microbiology’s most dedicated and inspiring women.

Lancefield in the lab

Rockefeller University

Ashley Juavinett studies
Neuroscience
at
UC San Diego
.

Five facts about Pamela E. Harris, Mexican-American mathematician and educator of "leaders of character"

Gabriela Serrato Marks — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 23:07:14 EST

Pamela Harris works on the theor em of Zeckendorf. She explained it like this: if you have all the Fibonacci numbers (a special series of numbers, where, starting with 0 and 1, you add two in a row to make the third number) you can take any whole number, like 2020, and write it as a unique sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers (if you start from 1 and 2). To be honest, she lost me there. But there’s a lot more to Harris than her research, which is why she's a science hero to me: she's an accomplished educator and a fierce advocate for immigrants. Her family also came to the US from Mexico, just like my mom's family. I sat down with Harris, an assistant professor at Williams College, during the 2019 SACNAS National Diversity in STEM conference, to learn more about her life and career.

Her family laid the foundation for her success

Harris is Mexican-American: her family emigrated from Mexico twice, first to California, then to Wisconsin when Harris was 12 years old. Harris grew up undocumented in the US, always nervous about her immigration status. Although she loved school, she was unable to apply to a four-year university without a Social Security number. But her parents encouraged her to get as much education as possible, so she enrolled in her local community college. Harris earned two associate's degrees in just two and a half years, all with a 4.0 GPA. She later married a US citizen, which changed her immigration status. She was excited to continue her education, and went on to earn a bachelor's degree and a PhD in mathematics.

Harris, like most of us in academia, has been told (both implicitly and explicitly) that you can only be a “good scientist” if you can dedicate all your time to work – an idea she rejects in favor of prioritizing her family. That’s in part because Harris is a mother – her daughter, Akira, was still a baby when Harris was starting graduate school. “Being a mathematician and professor has made me a better mother, and vice versa,” she said. “There’s no separation between my personal life and my professional life. That line is extremely blurry.”

Being a mathematician and professor has made me a better mother, and vice versa

She loves teaching

When I asked her about her favorite part of her job, Harris beamed and said, “I love my research, but the part I love the most is really seeing my students thrive.” She doesn't just love teaching – she’s really good at it, too; she won a national teaching award for young faculty in 2019. She goes above and beyond for her students, and tries to make sure they feel part of a community at Williams – even having them over for dinner. “The students wrote heartfelt letters [for my teaching award nomination], and mentioned things that I don’t think of as part of my job that I just do,” she said. It’s clear that Harris has a positive impact on her students both in and out of the classroom.

In case you’re wondering, the part of her job that she enjoys less is administrative tasks that she doesn’t feel passionate about, or as she put it, “things not as close to my heart.”

People are sometimes surprised that she is a mathematician

Harris is sometimes expected to be an expert on Mexican history and culture, even though she grew up in the US. “I am not an individual to them. I represent an entire group of people,” she said. Even worse, white mathematicians have been “surprised” to see her at conferences because she “doesn’t seem like a math person.” When those not-so-micro-aggressions occur, Harris told me that she always wants to ask her colleagues why they think that, and educate them about why it’s a hurtful thing to say. But “it’s more taxing to help people grow than to self-protect,” so she can’t do it every time.

Harris and three students, all math majors at Williams

Shannon O'Brien

That's part of why she founded Lathisms, a project that features Latinx mathematicians during Hispanic Heritage Month. She and her co-founders want to showcase the contributions of mathematicians who look like her.

She said she loves going to diversity-focused conferences like SACNAS because she's surrounded by colleagues with a wide variety of backgrounds. “I don’t have to look around to see where I’m going to sit, and scour for someone who might be friendly and will strike up a conversation without being surprised that I’m there.”

She worked for the US Army

After earning her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Harris ended up teaching mathematics at the US Military Academy (West Point) for four years. In addition to teaching math, part of her job was to “train leaders of character” for the US Army. She felt like she was serving the US, which she really enjoyed. “It taught me to be a better person,” she said. “We were encouraged to have conversations about being good leaders, and I was empowered to call out students on their crap.”

My story is about community and the strength that gives me

She doesn’t like to be called an underdog

When Harris shares her family’s story, she’s had people say that she’s an underdog. People see her history of immigration and her Mexican-American background as a hurdle to “overcome.” But she doesn't feel like she overcame hardships just because she "made it" into academia. One of her frustrations is how little immigration policy has changed since she came to the US. “It’s 20 years later and people are in cages at the border. We haven’t overcome systemic racism just because I got through the academic system,” she said.

Her background isn’t a hurdle, she told me. Instead, “My story is about community and the strength that gives me.”

Gabriela Serrato Marks studies
Science Journalism
at
Massive Science
.

Elizabeth Rona, the wandering polonium woman, changed radiation science forever

Brittney G. Borowiec — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 23:07:00 EST

Elizabeth Rona’s work taught us fundamental details about atoms. Her preoccupation with the radioactivity of seawater and ocean sediments revealed the hands of a clock, stretching back eons. She did all this despite having to start over every few years, moving from place to place as she fled political upheaval and chased new research opportunities.

For the Ronas, radiation was a family affair – Elizabeth’s father Samuel helped bring radium therapy for cancer to Budapest. Initially, Rona wanted to be a physician like her father. However, while he was supportive of her interest in science, he dissuaded her from studying medicine, believing that the work would be too difficult for a woman. Rona “settled” for chemistry, geochemistry, and physics, receiving her PhD from the University of Budapest in 1912.

Following an 8 month stint in Germany under radiochemist Kasimir Fajans, Rona returned to Hungary during World War I to work with George von Hevesy, a chemist researching how isotopes, radioactive versions of elements, could be used to study chemical reactions.

Elizabeth Rona was an enemy to both sides – the communists...and the nationalists

Rona and von Hevesy tracked how radioactive tracers moved in different materials, and used that information to predict the size and behavior of atoms. Long after Rona left his lab, von Hevesy would be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on these tracers, recognizing their importance in studying metabolism and in diagnosing conditions like cancer and heart disease. The collaboration with von Hevesy established Rona as a key figure in the radioactivity community.

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I lead to political upheaval and violence as communists and nationalists fought for control. As a Jewish member of the academy, Elizabeth Rona was an enemy to both sides – the communists hated the notion of an ivory tower, and the nationalists were suspicious of Jews, who they associated with the communist leadership.

In 1921, radiochemist Otto Hahn offered her a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and she soon left for Berlin. Like Rona’s previous mentor, Otto Hahn would also receive a Nobel Prize long after she left the lab, this time for the discovery of nuclear fission, the reaction that fuels the atomic bomb. Hahn's female colleague in the fission research, Lise Meitner, was snubbed.

Rona’s new job was to isolate “ionium,” a mysterious substance that was suspected of being new element.

Rona’s new job was to isolate “ionium,” a mysterious substance that was suspected of being new element. Unlike those that had failed before her, Rona proved “ionium” was simply an isotope of thorium. Still, in the early days of nuclear chemistry, confirming the existence of thorium-230 was still a major contribution.

Though Rona had fled Hungary for Germany only a few years earlier, the latter was only marginally better off, gutted by war and struggling under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. With the situation in Hungary improving, Rona briefly returned to her homeland to work as an industrial chemist at a textile plant. She developed a method to turn flax into a burlap-like material, a practical reaction for a sputtering economy.

Rona then took a position at the Radium Institute in Vienna under its director, Stefan Meyer. She worked on several lines of research while there, but her most famous work focused on developing polonium as an alternative radioactive material to radium.

Radium was central to early studies of radioactivity. Scientists would expose individual atoms to its radiation and watch what happened next to understand questions of fundamental atomic physics. However, radium was rare and expensive, hampering scientific progress as labs jostled over limited supplies.

A Frisch grid chamber, a device for detecting emissions of different radiactive elements, designed by Rona.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities

Because of this limited access to radium, researchers were on the hunt for an alternative that could produce similar types of emissions to spur on chemical reactions. Polonium, a strongly radioactive metal that produced the same type of radiation as radium, fit the bill.

Meyer sent Rona to the Curie Institute in Paris, where she studied polonium purification with Irene Curie (later Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935). Having learned from the heir of the first family of radioactivity, Rona returned to the Radium Institute with a small disc of polonium (donated by Joliot-Curie) that she used to create lab specimens of polonium, enabling much of the Institute's subsequent research. Preparing polonium samples made Rona an asset to high profile labs, and she leveraged her skills to find new opportunities for collaboration.

Aside from polonium extraction, Rona’s other main area of interest was understanding the radioactivity in seawater. She made yearly trips to the Bornö Marine Research Station in Sweden, where she studied how radioactive elements behaved in marine environments.

The U.S. military needed polonium – and lots of it – to trigger the fission reaction of atomic bomb.

By the late 1930s, the situation in Europe was quickly deteriorating. Rona left her position at the Radium Institute and returned to Budapest to work in an industrial lab. She took on string of temporary positions in Sweden, Norway, and then Budapest again before fleeing to the United States on a visitor’s visa.

Once stateside, Rona secured a prestigious Carnegie Fellowship to continue her work on the radioactivity of seawater and sediments. Her 1942 study showed that the ratio of radium to uranium was lower in seawater and higher in river water. This work caught the attention of the Manhattan Project.

The U.S. military needed polonium – and lots of it – to trigger the fission reaction of atomic bomb. Rona gave the United States her methods for concentrating polonium, for free. The polonium was also used in series of experiments conducted by the U.S. government to understand the effects of radiation on the human body.

Rona herself lived an unusually long life for an early radioactivity researcher, outliving many of her colleagues

Rona herself lived an unusually long life for an early radioactivity researcher, outliving many of her colleagues who suffered from cancer and other ailments linked to the hazards of their work. In her 1978 book, How It Came About, Rona credited her careful lab practice – masks, gloves, and other protective gear – for shielding her from the worst effects of radiation.

Rona moved to the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago in 1947, and then joined the teaching staff at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, Tennessee, in 1950. She continued to study the radioactivity of seawater. Uranium, she found, was relatively constant in oceans across the world. Thorium, the element she’d unmasked decades earlier, sunk to the bottom. These were the hands of the radioactive clock.

Over thousands of years, uranium in the ocean slowly and predictably breaks down into thorium, which then settles in the seafloor. This process is so reliable that scientists can date ancient reefs and deep-sea sediment cores by how much thorium they contain. The modern practice of geochronology, buoyed by Rona’s illustrious career, has been fundamental in mapping historical sea levels and tectonic plate movement.

Rona retired from the Oak Ridge Institute in 1965, and then moved to the University of Miami, where she held a professorship in oceanography position for a decade before retiring again in 1976. She returned to Tennessee and finally settled down to publish her book.

Elizabeth Rona, the wandering polonium woman, was in demand wherever she went. Over the course of her six decades in research, she saw the evolution of the strange new science of radioactivity into an established field of study, capable of producing experimental tools and weapons of war. She died July 27th, 1981 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Brittney G. Borowiec studies
Comparative Physiology
at
Wilfrid Laurier University
.

Meet Annie Jump Cannon, who cataloged and ranked over 300,000 stars by their hotness

JoEllen McBride — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 21:59:00 EST

“In the house where I was born, there stood on the white marble mantel, a candelabra representing a gilded tree. At the base two children are about to waken a sleeping huntsman. Five outspreading branches support the candles, which are surrounded by glass prismatic pendants. I remember no earlier plaything than these prisms which were easily detachable. To hold one in my hands, to catch a sunbeam, and watch the brilliant prismatic colors dance over the wall was a delight to my youthful eyes. Even now I hold one of these pendants in my hands, and note that it is embossed with stars. Stars and prisms! How prophetic was this baby amusement of the profession which was destined to fill my life.” — Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon was born in 1863 in Delaware. Her father was a bank director and former state senator. Her mother taught her the constellations at an early age and encouraged her interest in astronomy.

Cannon studied physics at Wellesley College under Sarah Frances Whiting, a protégé of Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory. Whiting showed Cannon how to use a four inch telescope to observe the Great Comet of 1882. During college, a bout of scarlet fever took most of Cannon's hearing. She graduated from Wellesley in 1884 as valedictorian of her class and went back home to Dover to continue healing and study photography. Her skills allowed her to travel to Europe and eventually publish photos of Spain. After returning home, she tutored students in math and U.S. history, played organ at her church, and continued her photography.

The Great Comet of 1882, as seen from South Africa.

By Sir David Gill, South African Astronomical Observatory [Public Domain].

After 10 years of this and the loss of her beloved mother, Cannon was feeling unfulfilled and depressed. She reached out to Whiting, who was still at Wellesley, and procured an assistantship. Whiting prepared Cannon for advanced physics studies at Radcliffe College. There she was offered an unpaid internship at Harvard Observatory, still under Pickering's direction.

Teaching physics classes and completing astronomical observations gave Cannon a sense of purpose again. With her experience and academic background, Pickering made her the first female assistant to make astronomical observations at the observatory. Night after night she would record the slight fluctuations in brightness of stars by comparing them to nearby stars that were slightly brighter or fainter. She also compiled the observations of citizen scientists across the globe who made similar observations into a large series of tables that anyone could use called “A Provisional Catalogue of Variable Stars.”

Annie Jump Cannon at her desk at the Harvard College Observatory.

Smithsonian Institution Archives

Cannon is most known for classifying stellar spectra in a way that lead astronomers to understand why stars had different spectral patterns. Astronomers like Pickering used to observe one star’s spectrum at a time, passing the light through a prism in front of the telescope's eyepiece and drawing the rainbows they saw which were interrupted by dark, vertical lines from atoms within the star. With the invention of photographic plates — glass with a photosensitive liquid painted on — the spectrum could be recorded on a 1-inch square plate of glass but, now, in black and white. While this eliminated the task of drawing , Pickering found that installing the prism at the light gathering end of the telescope, instead of near the eye, sped up the process by creating an image that displayed the spectra for all the stars in the telescope's view on an 8”x10” photographic plate.

Matteo Farinella

Many of the Harvard Computers were tasked with classifying the thousands of spectra obtained using this method, but Cannon was by far the fastest. She would carefully place each photographic plate on a stand with a mirror at the base to catch sunlight that would illuminate the plate, revealing the hundreds of tiny horizontal bands of light where a star should be. The chemical makeup of each star is contained in the horizontal band of light that appeared on the photographic plates. The vertical dark lines that interrupted the stellar rainbow correspond to a specific element on the periodic table. Using a microscope, she would evaluate the patterns of dark vertical lines and call out a classification to an assistant who would record them. According to sources, Cannon could classify spectra in as little as three seconds — as quickly as her assistants could write them down.

Cannon’s system is still used today.

Cannon devised a system that combined elements of the classification systems created by two of her fellow computers, Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury. Fleming had devised a system with 15 separate classifications for the stars based on the strength of their hydrogen lines. Maury had a complex system of 22 separate classifications each with their own subdivisions and placed significance on the helium lines and their widths.

In Cannon’s system, she kept Fleming's lettered designations but reorganized them into just seven classifications. She, like Maury, gave precedence to the helium lines, so stars that had helium with missing electrons were first. The next set of stars had helium with all their electrons in tact. After that, the next category held stars with only hydrogen lines. In under three seconds, Cannon could look at a spectrum, assess the type of lines and their strengths, and choose from the 70 different possibilities for classification.

Cannon’s system is still used today. Astronomers later realized that her order perfectly ranks stars from hottest to coldest. All O stars, Cannon's first designation, are blazing hot stars with temperatures between 25,000-50,000 Kelvin while M stars, the final designation, are the coolest with temperatures less than 3,500 Kelvin.

In her lifetime, Cannon classified over 300,000 stars.

Astronomers from around the globe recognized and celebrated her work. She was the first woman to receive an honorary doctor of science degree from Oxford University, and became an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). She was nominated in 1919 for elevated standing as an Associate which would have put her at the same standing as men in the RAS. The Society members declined to do so. Harlow Shapley, who succeeded Pickering as director of the Harvard Observatory, nominated Cannon for the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Science and wrote her a personal congratulatory announcement when she was awarded.

A portrait of Annie Jump Cannon in 1922.

By New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper [Public Domain]

The Association to Aid Scientific Research by Women awarded Cannon a $1000 prize in 1932, then dissolved claiming that since “women are given opportunities in research equally as men the objectives of the association have been achieved.” Cannon thanked them for the prize money but questioned their dissolution. She decided to use the money to endow the Annie Jump Cannon Prize which is still given every three years to a woman of any nationality by the American Astronomical Society. The first Prize went to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Cannon had a jeweler, Marjorie Blackman, fashion a beautiful gold pin in the shape of a spiral galaxy for the prize. When she saw the result, she said, “Isn’t it the first universe ever made by a woman?” Even to this day, Cannon Prize winners receive an individualized piece of jewelry created by a different craftswoman.

In 1938, Cannon was finally recognized by Harvard as the William Cranch Bond Astronomer and Curator of Astronomical Photographs. Cannon reported to the Observatory six days a week until mid-March of 1941 when she became ill. She died in April of 1941, age 77.

JoEllen McBride studies
Astrophysics
.