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A Passion for Discovery
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle, History
WHY SO FEW? Why have only ten women won Nobel
Prizes in science when more than five hundred men have done so?
Ten out of several hundredonly two percent of all Nobel Prize scientists are women.
The fifteen women portrayed here are Nobel-class scientists.
None is a typical, everyday researcher. They all either won a Nobel
Prize in science or played a critical role in discoveries that won a
Nobel for someone else.
Many of these women faced enormous obstacles. They were confined to
basement laboratories and attic offices. They crawled behind furniture to attend science lectures. They worked in universities for
decades without pay as volunteersin the United States as late as
the 1970s. Science was supposed to be tough, rigorous, and rational;
women were supposed to be soft, weak, and irrational. As a consequence, women scientists wereby definitionunnatural beings.
Sandra Harding, writing about women in science from a feminist
perspective, concluded that women have been more systematically
excluded from doing serious science than from performing any other
social activity except, perhaps, frontline warfare.
No sooner did these women overcome one barrier than another
cropped up. Pioneers like the mathematician Emmy Noether were
not only legally barred from universities, they were also excluded
from the academic high schools that prepared men for university
educations. Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls
were finishing schools. Women who wanted university training had
to hire tutors to learn mathematics, science, Latin, and Greekall
required subjects for entrance to a university. The father of physicist
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
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Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
4 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Lise Meitner refused to hire a tutor until she had completed teachers training school. The dictatorial father of Rita Levi-Montalcini
prevented her from obtaining an academic education until she was
twenty years old; later she discovered the nerve growth factor, which
may play a vital role in degenerative diseases like Alzheimers. Both
Meitner and Levi-Montalcini started their scientific careers a decade
behind their male counterparts. Once in universities, women like
Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, and Meitner worked for years without
salaries or positions.
In the United States, the situation was different but no less
difficult. American universities admitted women as students but
refused to hire them as researchers. Women scientists were supposed
to teach in womens colleges or in coeducational universities; they
were not to do research. Expected to remain single, they needed
husbands to give them access to research laboratories. Yet until the
Federal Equal Opportunity Act of 1972, state laws and university
rules banned hiring wives of university employees. These rules were
devastating for women scientists. Even today, 70 percent of American women physicists are married to scientists. As a result, the
academic landscape was littered with husband-and-wife teams in
which the man had the salary, job security, and prestige, and the
woman assisted him at his pleasure. Universities have dealt with the
issue of married women researchers for a relatively short time.
Gerty Cori, who studied carbohydrate metabolism, enzymes,
and childrens diseases caused by enzyme deficiencies, did not become a professor until the year she won a Nobel Prize. Maria
Goeppert Mayer, who developed the shell model of the atomic
nucleus, worked for decades as a volunteer at some of North Americas most prestigious universities. When Barbara McClintock was
president-elect of the Genetics Society of America, she quit science
for a time because she could not get a university job. Gertrude Elion
spent almost a decade studying to be a secretary and working in temporary, marginal jobs before she landed a position as a research
chemist. Then she helped develop a new approach to drug-making.
Even the most successful women scientists faced ridicule and
hostility. Rosalind Franklincaricatured as Rosy in James
Watsons best-seller The Double Helixwas a commanding leader.
But Watson and Francis Crick used her experimental evidence
without her knowledge, permission, or creditto explain the molecular structure of DNA. After her death, they won the Nobel Prize.
Irne Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie Curie, was a teenage heroine of World War I. Yet after she won a Nobel Prize for discovering
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
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Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
A Passion for Discovery 5
artificial radioactivity, the American press vilified her for her support
of the Soviet Union following World War II.
If a woman formed a with a
man, the scientific community assumed that he was the brains of the
team and she was the brawn. Medical scientists concluded that
Rosalind Yalows male collaborator was the creative force behind
their discovery of the radioimmunoassay, a phenomenally sensitive
test that revolutionized endocrinology and the treatment of hormonal disorders like diabetes. When her partner died, Yalow had to
establish her reputation all over again.
In addition to professional discrimination, these women suffered
their share of racial and religious discrimination, as well as poverty,
war, substance abuse, physical handicaps, and illness. Marie Curie,
Irne Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Gerty Cori worked for
decades despite life-threatening and crippling diseases. World War II
destroyed Lise Meitners career. her research in her bedroom, hidden from the Nazis. Gertrude Elion
worked her way through school during the Depression and quit
graduate school without a Ph.D. Chien-Shiung Wu, the experimental physicist who overturned the fundamental law of parity, could
not get a research job during World War II because of discrimination against Asianseven though her country was allied with the
United States. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a graduate student when she discovered pulsars, later worked part-time while raising a family.
In the face of such obstacles, what sustained these women?
What prevented them from giving up, as many other women
scientists did?
First, they adored science. They triumphed because they were
having a wonderful time. Their hobbies ranged from music to mountain climbing, books, gourmet cooking, church, and childrearing. But
it was science that illuminated their lives. Words like pleasure,
joy, and satisfaction permeate their speech. They survived in science because they were passionately determined and in love with
their work.
Science thrilled them because they were making some of the
most important scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.
Two of the greatest intellectual achievements of the century occurred
in evolution and in atomic and subatomic physics. These women
helped explain how individual characteristics are passed down
through generations of organisms and how atoms and their constituent particles behave. They opened up new fields of science in
mathematics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and medicine.
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
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Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
6 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Before Emmy Noether escaped from Nazi Germany to the
United States, she created abstract algebra, a major new field of
mathematics known in its elementary school version as The New
Math. Barbara McClintock revolutionized genetics several times
over as a young woman, yet molecular biologists ignored her discovery of transposable genetic elements for decades. Dorothy Hodgkin,
an English physical chemist, pioneered the use of molecular structure to explain biological functions by deciphering the atomic structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin.
Marie Curie, winner of two Nobel Prizes in science, focused
scientific attention on radioactivity, the key to the atomic nucleus,
and discovered radium, the first real hope in cancer therapy. Lise
Meitner, officially retired after her escape from the Nazis, deciphered
the experiment of the century by explaining that the atomic nucleus
can split and release enormous amounts of energy. For the fission
project that she initiated and explained, her German partner received
the Nobel Prize.
Sympathetic parents and relatives were particularly influential. All of
these women, with the exception of Rosalyn Yalow, came from
professional or academic families: their fathers were architects,
engineers, physicians, dentists, lawyers, and university professors.
Yalows father owned a small paper and twine shop in one of New
Yorks immigrant neighborhoods. Emmy Noethers father, on the
other hand, was a prominent mathematician who nurtured his
daughters talent. Maria Goeppert Mayers father urged her to have
a career; she wanted to become the seventh-generation professor in
his family. Chien-Shiung Wus father was one of Chinas leading
feminists. Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin received financial assistance from mothers and aunts. Marie Curie and her sister
forged a pact to support each other through the university; Marie in
turn then helped her daughter Irne Joliot-Curie. In contrast, the
fathers of Levi-Montalcini and Rosalind Franklin vehemently opposed their daughters aspirations. In Barbara McClintocks family,
it was her mother who disapproved of women professors.
Religious values stressing education were critical. Jocelyn Bell Burnell
is a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, a small denomination that has produced a disproportionate number of the worlds
great scientists. Half of the women have Jewish backgrounds. The
Jews commitment to learning and abstract thinking has helped men
as well as women in science; Jews number only three percent of the
United States population, but they account for approximately
twenty-seven percent of the Nobelists brought up in the United
States. Being Jewish was particularly helpful to women. Of the three
Nobel winners who were born and educated in the United States,
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
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Momentous Discoveries
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A Passion for Discovery 7
two were Jews. Conversely, Catholic and Protestant America has
produced only one woman Nobel Prize winner in science: Barbara
McClintock.
Behind many of these successful women stood a man. More than half of
the women married and raised children. All but one of the husbands
supported their wives science, sometimes at considerable sacrifice.
Pierre Curie and Carl Cori refused prestigious job offers in leading
laboratories to further their wives careers. Wu and her husband had
a commuter marriage. Three prominent male physicists encouraged
a generation of English women in crystallography, including
Dorothy Hodgkin. Mathematician David Hilbert and physicist
Albert Einstein were Emmy Noethers mentors. Joseph Mayer may
have been more of a feminist than his wife, Maria Goeppert Mayer.
Gertrude Elions research partnership with George Hitchings endured for decades, as did Yalows with Solomon Berson. Unfortunately for Jocelyn Bell Burnells career, her thesis adviser failed to
become her mentor, and she received little or no career counseling.
The importance of institutional support for women scientists is highlighted
by one remarkable fact: Two schools account for the majority of Nobel
Prizes received by American women scientists. Of the six American
women who won science Nobels, four were associated with either
Hunter College in New York City or Washington University in
St. Louis. Gertrude Elion and Rosalyn Yalow were undergraduates
at Hunter College during its heyday as a free municipal college for
New Yorks brightest women. Gerty Cori and Rita Levi-Montalcini
won Nobels for research conducted at Washington University in
St. Louis, Missouri. At the time, Washington University was notably
liberal in its treatment of working women. How many more women
might have succeeded had they enjoyed such support! Girls schools
played a role too. Barbara McClintock is the only one in the group
who never attended a girls-only school.
Finally, good luck and good timing were vitally important. Pioneers like
Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Emmy Noether came of age just as
European universities opened their doors to women. Most of the
womeneight out of fifteenwere born within fifteen years of each
other. Eleven of the fifteen were born within a single generation:
from 1896 to 1921. Their formative years spanned the first womens
movement, when suffrage campaigns swept North America and
Europe; World War I, when women took over mens jobs; and the
1920s, when the social constraints on womens behavior moderated.
Four of the women slipped into jobs vacated by men during World
War II. Will the second womens movement of the 1960s and 1970s
have a similar effect on the Nobel Prize?
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 9/29/2013 12:02 AM via AMERICAN PUBLIC
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AN: 63244 ; McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch.; Nobel Prize Women in Science : Their Lives, Struggles, and
Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
8 NOBEL PRIZE WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Given the enormous problems they faced and the important
discoveries they made, the real question to be asked about these
women is not Why so few? A better question is Why so many?
As about women physicists, Never before
have so few contributed so much under such trying circumstances.
***
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
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Momentous Discoveries
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FIRST
GENERATION
PIONEERS
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 9/29/2013 12:02 AM via AMERICAN PUBLIC
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Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
Copyright 1998. Joseph Henry Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 9/29/2013 12:02 AM via AMERICAN PUBLIC
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AN: 63244 ; McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch.; Nobel Prize Women in Science : Their Lives, Struggles, and
Momentous Discoveries
Account: s7348467
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