Nobel Prize Women in Science - Final Part

Yesterday morning i started reading Nobel Prize Women in Science By Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

I completed this book and i must admit that this is great book.

1) Emmy Noether(March 23, 1882–April 14, 1935)
MATHEMATICIAN

a) Luckily, Noether herself was so broad and solid, so loud and full of life, that no one who met her could ever have denied her existence. She was the female version of Albert Einstein.She was a founder of abstract algebra, one of the largest and most active fields of mathematics today.

b) Amalie Emmy Noether was born March 23, 1882, the first of four children in a well-to-do Jewish family in the small Bavarian university town of Erlangen.

Her mother, Ida Amalia Kaufmann,came from a wealthy family of wholesale merchants. Emmy’s father,
Max Noether, came from a prosperous family of iron importers.

Max was a professor at Erlangen for forty-six years.

c) At age eighteen,she took charge of her life in a totally unconventional manner. She did not become a schoolteacher. Instead, she spent two years auditing classes at the University of Erlangen.

By 1913, when she was thirty-one years old, she was lecturing at Erlangen as her father’s substitute.

d) David Hilbert, considered the greatest mathematician since Carl Friedrich Gauss, was using highly abstract methods at Göttingen. In Erlangen, Noether began applying his approach to algebra.

e) It took three attempts, four years, a German revolution, and the intercession of Albert Einstein to get Emmy Noether the most junior faculty position possible—without pay.The obstacle was a 1908 Prussian law prohibiting women university lecturers.

Thirteen years after getting her doctorate, at age thirty-nine, she could lecture legally under her own
name. Although still unpaid, she began teaching that fall.

f) Einstein’s general relativity theory has had rather little effect on either physics or science
in general. Relativity is seen only in rare and extreme situations.Nevertheless, it was Einstein who won a Nobel Prize in 1921.Nobels are given for physics but not for mathematics, so Hilbert,Klein, and Noether did not win a Nobel for their mathematical formulation of Einstein’s theories. Nor did Noether receive a Nobel
Prize for her contribution to the development of quantum theory.Physicists who did win include Werner Heisenberg, P. A. M. Dirac,and Erwin Schroedinger.

g) Emmy Noether was Göttingen’s lowest paid faculty member during the 1920s.Today, Noether’s creativity is universally recognized among mathematicians, but at the time her approach was highly controversial.

h) The year 1932, was a happy, banner year marking Noether’s international acceptance as a mathematician. She won a five hundredmark mathematics prize and was the first and only woman invited to address a general session of the International Congress of Mathematics in Zurich, Switzerland.

i) Noether had high blood pressure, and the doctors did not consider her a good operative risk. Removing an ovarian cyst the size of a large cantaloupe, they left two small tumors to avoid prolonging the operation. At Noether’s request, they removed her appendix.

For three days, she had a normal convalescence. Then, on Sunday,the fourth day, she suddenly lost consciousness and her temperature spiked to 109 degrees. Philadelphia consultants diagnosed a stroke, but a postoperative infection is more likely. There was a wide disparity in the quality of treatment available in American hospitals during the 1930s. Perhaps if she had been treated instead at the University of Pennsylvania, then one of the finest hospitals in the country,she would have survived. Instead, Emmy Noether died on April 14, 1935, at the height of her creative powers, exiled from her family,her homeland, and the school she had created.

j) By the 1970s, interest in Emmy Noether had revived, thanks in large part to a biography by an Austrian mathematics teacher Auguste Dick. Although Bryn Mawr had lost Noether’s personal papers, it had stored her ashes. When the Association of Women in Mathematics had a symposium in 1982 on the one-hundredth anniversary
of Noether’s birth, her ashes were buried under a brick walk in the library cloisters. The following year, the collected works of Emmy Noether were published, edited by Nathan Jacobson of Yale University. In an introduction, the French mathematician Jean Dieudonné declared, “The publication of Emmy Noether’s collected papers has long been overdue, since she was by far the best woman mathematician of all time, and one of the greatest mathematicians (male or female) of the twentieth century.” That same year, the city of Erlangen dedicated a new school and named it the Emmy Noether Gymnasium.

2) Gerty Radnitz Cori(August 15, 1896 - October 26, 1957)
BIOCHEMIST - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1947

a) GERTY CORI’S HUSBAND was offered the job of his dreams at an American university—provided he stop working with his wife. When he refused, his would-be employers were appalled. Taking Gerty aside, they gravely informed her that she was ruining her husband’s career. Sternly, they lectured the Czech-born woman, “It
is un-American for a man to work with his wife.”

In private later, Gerty burst into tears. Her husband Carl reassured her. Collaborating with one’s wife in the 1920s was not un-American, he said. “It is merely unusual.” The University of Rochester passed up a good opportunity when it turned Gerty Cori away: she became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. Only Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie had won science Nobels before her.

Together, the Coris laid the foundation for our understanding of how cells use food and convert it to energy. The Cori cycle has become such a basic part of high school science that it is easy to forget
how revolutionary it was during the 1920s. For the first time, it was possible to show how muscles use sugar for quick energy and how the muscles and liver store excess energy until it is needed.

Their other discoveries were even more important. At the time,little was known about enzymes, the proteins that enable cells to function, grow, and reproduce.

b) She was born Gerty Theresa Radnitz to a moderately wealthy Jewish family on August 15, 1896, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

c) Carl’s professor recommended him highly, and Carl got the job for three thousand dollars a year. He sailed steerage for Buffalo in 1922, leaving Gerty behind at her Viennese job for six more months.
Only after Carl had secured a position for her as an assistant pathologist at the institute did she join him. The Coris were twentyfive years old when they arrived in Buffalo. During their nine years
there, they established their scientific reputations and became American citizens.

d) Both Gerty and Carl had become interested in how the body sends energy from one place to another. It is difficult today to realize how little was known at the time about the body’s ability to maintain
a constant supply of energy between meals and bouts of exercise.

A French physiologist had discovered in the nineteenth century that both the liver and the muscles contain a starchlike substance that he called glycogen: the “sugar maker.” But he did not know that each molecule of glycogen consists of hundreds of glucose sugar molecules chemically bonded together. When the body needs energy, it breaks apart the glycogen molecule to make the sugar molecules available for immediate energy.

e) According to their theory, energy moves in a cycle from muscle to the liver and back again to muscle. When a runner starts to sprint, for example, glycogen in the muscles is converted to sugar,
specifically glucose. The muscles extract most of the energy from the sugar, but leave some in the form of lactic acid. To conserve its resources,the body recycles the lactic acid back into glycogen in a series
of elaborate steps. First, it is sent from the muscle to the liver.Next, the athlete pants heavily to supply the body with oxygen so that the liver can convert the lactic acid back into sugar. The sugar
then returns to the muscle, where it is converted back into glycogen for storage. The Coris called their theory “the cycle of carbohydrates.” Everyone else called it “the Cori cycle.”

f) Both Coris read deeply as well as widely outside science. On their way to Stockholm to pick up their Nobel Prize, they stopped off in Buffalo and talked with a young sociologist who had written a
scholarly article on the theory of revolutions. Gerty still screened the scientific literature for the team, too. In 1947, Gerty Cori read Oswald T. Avery’s paper showing that DNA was the chemical basis
of heredity. She went clicking down the hall to tell Arthur Kornberg, “You must read this. It is very important.” She recognized the significance of DNA five years before the famous molecular biology group
at the California Institute of Technology, according to Kornberg.

g) A few weeks later, on October 24, the Coris learned that they had both won the Nobel Prize. They received the prize for discovering the enzymes that convert glycogen into sugar and back again to glycogen. “Your synthesis of glycogen in the test tube is beyond doubt one of the most brilliant achievements in modern biochemistry,” the Nobel Committee declared. The Coris shared their award with their friend Bernardo A. Houssay of Argentina, who had shown that the pituitary gland plays a key hormonal role in sugar
metabolism.

h) Gerty and Carl continued with their plans to attend the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm as if nothing had
happened. They stopped off in Buffalo and visited parts of Europe on the way. As with all their work, they split up their Nobel Lecture.Carl gave the first and third parts, and Gerty presented the second
part. Only Carl spoke at the banquet. Looking at Gerty, he thanked the Nobel Committee for including her in the prize. “That the award should have included my wife as well has been a source of deep
satisfaction to me. Our collaboration began thirty years ago when we were still medical students at the University of Prague and has continued ever since. Our efforts have been largely complementary,
and one without the other would not have gone as far as in combination.”

i) Carl Cori retired from Washington University School of Medicine in 1966 and took a position with Harvard University and the Massachusetts General Hospital. His friends were happy when he remarried.
Although his scientific achievements after Gerty’s death were never as great as they had been during the years of their partnership, he continued research until shortly before his death at age eighty-eight in 1984. During his last illness he told a visitor, “You know, Gerty was heroic.”

3) Irène Joliot-Curie(September 12, 1897–March 17, 1956)
RADIOCHEMIST - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1935

a) Irène’s mother, physicist Marie Curie, had not hesitated to leave her teenage daughter alone at the front. “My mother had no more doubts about me than she doubted herself,” Irène recalled later. And Marie Curie was right.

b) Irène Curie was born a month prematurely on September 12, 1897, after her parents, the Nobel Prize–winning scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, had taken a long bicycle ride.

c) The Joliot-Curies were nominated for the physics Nobel Prize in 1934 for artificial radioactivity. Passed over that year, they won the chemistry prize in 1935. Irène was thirty-seven years old. When she
heard the news, her childhood dread of reporters enveloped her, and she fled to the Bon Marché department store, where she bought oilcloth for the kitchen table. She was right to be worried about the
press; the prize was popularly attributed to Fred’s talent and her assistance.

Their Nobel Prize brought her family’s total to three. When Ève’s husband, diplomat Henry R. Labouisse, accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund in 1965, the total for the entire Curie clan rose to four.

d) To the end, she maintained her faith in science. During the last year of her life, she wrote, “Science is the foundation of all progress that improves human life and diminishes suffering.” She died at the
age of fifty-eight on March 17, 1956. When the French government staged a national funeral for her, her family requested that the military and religious portions of the ceremony be omitted.Fred and Irène Joliot-Curie had lived and worked together for thirty years. Two years after her death, he died—also of what he called “our occupational disease.” He, too, received a national funeral.Of the four Curie scientists, only Marie Curie had lived past sixty.

4) Barbara McClintock(June 16, 1902–September 2, 1992)
GENETICIST - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1983

a) Barbara McClintock had revolutionized maize genetics; one of her early experiments still ranks among the twentieth century’s most important biological experiments. She was the vice president of the Genetics Society of America and was about to become its president. She had not yet done her Nobel Prize–winning project, but she had already received an honorary doctorate from a well-known university and would soon be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, then the nation’s highest scientific honor.

b) McClintock had wanted to be free and independent all her life.Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 16, 1902, she was the youngest of the three daughters of Dr. Thomas Henry McClintock and the former Sara Handy. “My parents were wonderful,” McClintock recalled.“I didn’t belong to that family, but I’m glad I was in it. I was an odd member.”

c) Barbara was ready to take on the world. When she learned that the Statue of Liberty was 152 feet high, she announced with confidence, “That’s no problem! I can shinny up!”

d) The announcement that Barbara McClintock had won the Nobel Prize electrified the scientific community like no other recent prize—as much for the beauty of her motivation and dedication as for her scientific tour de force. When McClintock accepted her award from King Carl Gustaf in Stockholm, the ovation from the
normally reserved and formal audience was so loud that it made the concert hall floor vibrate. Her solitary excellence, her quiet thoughtfulness, and her perseverance in the face of male prejudice and scientific
rejection had captured their imaginations. Talking briefly with a Carnegie trustee afterward, McClintock parted with the words, “We women have to stick together.”

The Nobel Prize with its competition, publicity, fawning hangers-on, and name-droppers was a burden for McClintock. “You put up with it,” she remarked tersely. “It’s a good thing that it happened so late in life,” she told a friend. Otherwise, it would have interfered with her work. Overall, she said, “It’s been very, very difficult on a person. It hasn’t been easy or pleasant.”

e) The tiger in McClintock mellowed, and there were fewer blasts of impatience. As McClintock neared ninety, she began to slow down to an eight- or nine-hour work day. Minor health problems
irritated her. “I’m almost ninety,” she told a caller. “And in my family ninety is the end, and I’m beginning to feel it.”

She still passionately resisted anything that bored or distracted her from the main joys of life. As she protested, “I want to be free.” On September 2, 1992, Barbara McClintock died. At age ninety,she was free.

5) Maria Goeppert Mayer(June 28, 1906–February 20, 1972)
MATHEMATICAL PHYSICIST - Nobel Prize in Physics 1963

a) Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is the second female laureate in physics after Marie Curie.

b) Goeppert-Mayer was born Maria Goeppert in Kattowitz (today: Katowice, Poland), within the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. Her family moved to Göttingen in 1910 when her father Friedrich was appointed Professor of Paediatrics at the town's university. On her father's side, Goeppert-Mayer a seventh generation professor. From a young age, she was surrounded by the students and lecturers from the university, intellectuals including future Nobel winners, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli. In 1924 Goeppert passed the university's abitur entrance examinations and enrolled there in the fall. Among her professors were three Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. In 1930 Goeppert married Dr Joseph Edward Mayer, the assistant of James Franck. The couple moved to the United States, Mayer's home country.

Goeppert-Mayer died in San Diego, California, in 1972 after a heart attack the previous year left her comatose.

After her death, an award in her name was set up by the American Physical Society to honour young female physicists at the beginning of their careers. Open to all female physicists who hold PhDs, the winner receives money and the opportunity to give guest lectures about her research at four major institutions. Two of Goeppert-Mayer's former universities also honor her. The University of Chicago presents an award each year to an outstanding young woman scientist or engineer, and the University of California, San Diego hosts an annual Maria Goeppert-Mayer symposium, bringing together female researchers to discuss current science.

c) Maria Mayer’s last years were limited by her health. She had fulfilled her father’s dream, and the Nobel Prize had made her a symbol of Superwoman: the brilliant professional with a happy marriage
and successful children. She tried to continue working. As she said,“If you love science, all you really want is to keep on working. The Nobel Prize thrills you, but it changes nothing.” As her health deteriorated,she acquired a pacemaker and published less. She died of a pulmonary embolism on February 20, 1972.

Joe gave her papers to the University of California at San Diego.They include personal letters and scientific notes; her daughter’s report card from nursery school and travel plans to conferences;
hand-copied notebooks of German poems and party menus—all mixed together in one woman’s life.

6) Rita Levi-Montalcini(April 22, 1909)
NEUROEMBRYOLOGIST - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1986

a) Levi-Montalcini’s nerve growth factor (NGF) may play a vital role in certain degenerative
diseases of the central nervous system like Alzheimer’s disease.

b) As for retiring, she declares, “The moment you stop working,you are dead…. For me, it would be unhappiness beyond anything else. … I don’t work for the sake of mankind. I work for my own sake.” For, as she quotes Dante,

Take thought of the seed from which you spring.You were not born to live as brutes.

7) Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin(May 12, 1910–July 29, 1994)
PHYSICAL CHEMIST - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964

a) Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot OM, FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a British chemist, credited with the discovery of protein crystallography
She pioneered the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the determination of the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. She is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field of X-Ray crystallography studies of natural molecules. Besides her extraordinary scientific abilities, she was unassuming, very communicative, and passionate about social inequalities and peace.

b) Apart from the Nobel Prize, she was a recipient of the Order of Merit, a Fellow of the Royal Society, The Lenin Peace Prize, and was Chancellor of Bristol University from 1970 to 1988. Council offices in the London Borough of Hackney are named Dorothy Hodgkin House.

c) In 1937, Dorothy married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin who was also a one-time member of the Communist party, as well as a charming, intelligent, energetic and impulsive suitor. She also loved him and always consulted him concerning important problems and decisions. Dorothy bore quietly the many difficulties of these situations. He later had a varied career as a schoolteacher, worker's educationist, historian and economist. He became an advisor in 1961 to Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, where he remained for extended periods, often visited by her. The couple had three children. All three children are still alive today. One has a girl named Alexandra Dorothy after their grandmother.

d) WHEN DOROTHY CROWFOOT HODGKIN was a small child in 1914, she was left in England with her younger sisters and a nursemaid while her parents returned to the Middle East. Trapped there by World War I, Dorothy’s mother saw her children only once in the next four years.

e) Dorothy Hodgkin liked doing the impossible. She enjoyed life at the edge of the scientific frontier. As a result, she made not one brilliant breakthrough, but a series of them, deciphering the atomic
structure of one medically important substance after another, each larger and more complicated than the last. Using X-ray crystallography, she uncovered the structure of penicillin during World War II.
Later, she solved the structure of vitamin B12, the cure for pernicious anemia, and the structure of insulin, the lifeline for diabetics.

8) Chien-Shiung Wu(May 31, 1912–February 16, 1997)
EXPERIMENTAL NUCLEAR PHYSICIST

a) Chien-Shiung Wu (May 13, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-born American physicist with an expertise in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project (to enrich the uranium fuel) and disproved the conservation of parity. Her nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics”, “Madame Curie of China,” and “Madame Wu.” She died after her second stroke on February 16, 1997.

b) Although her ancestral family home is Taicang , she was born in 1912, in Shanghai, but was raised in Liuhe, a city about 30 miles from Shanghai. Her father, Wu Zhongyi , was a proponent of gender equality and founded Mingde Women's Vocational Continuing School. She left her hometown at the age of eleven to go to the Suzhou Women's Normal School No. 2. Her mother was Fan Fuhua .

c) She was admitted to the National Central University in Nanjing in 1929. According to the government regulations of the time, normal school students entering universities needed to serve as teachers for one year, so in 1929 she went to teach in the Public School of China founded by Hu Shi in Shanghai. From 1930 to 1934, she studied in the Physics Department of National Central University (renamed Nanjing University in 1949). For two years after her graduation, she did postgraduate study and worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University

d) In 1936, she went to the USA with a female friend, Dong Ruofen , a chemist from Taicang, China. Wu studied at the University of California, Berkeley under Ernest Orlando Lawrence and received her Ph.D in 1940.

She married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, also a physicist, two years later. They had a son, Vincent, who became a physicist as well. The family moved to the East Coast, where Wu taught at Smith College, Princeton University, and Columbia University

At Columbia she contributed to the Manhattan Project by developing a process to separate uranium isotopes by gaseous diffusion and by developing improved Geiger counters. She assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development (with Chen Ning Yang) by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. Some consider this very instrumental in the creation of the laws, but she did not share their Nobel Prize – a fact widely blamed on sexism by the selection committee.

e) Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists.

She later conducted research into the molecular changes in the deformation of hemoglobins that cause sickle-cell disease.

Wu set precedents for womankind on several occasions. She was:

the first female instructor in the Physics Department of Princeton University;
the first woman with a Princeton honorary doctorate;
the first female President of the American Physical Society (1975, through an election).

f) Honors
Wu won numerous honors and recognitions:

Member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1958)
Research Corporation Award 1958
Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960
Comstock Award, National Academy of Sciences 1964
Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965
Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974
Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975
National Medal of Science (U.S.) 1975
Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978
Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh
Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow American Physical Society
At the time of her death, Wu was Pupin Professor Emerita of Physics at Columbia

9) Gertrude B. Elion(January 23, 1918–February 21, 1999)

BIOCHEMIST - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988

a) Gertrude Belle Elion (January 23, 1918 – February 21, 1999) was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, and a 1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Born in New York City to immigrant parents, she graduated from Hunter College in 1937 and New York University (M.Sc.) in 1941. Unable to obtain a graduate research position due to her gender, she worked as a lab assistant and a high school teacher. Later, she left to work as an assistant to George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company (now GlaxoSmithKline). She never obtained a formal Ph.D., but was later awarded an honorary Ph.D from Polytechnic University of New York in 1989.

b) Quotes
"I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided nobody should suffer that much."

"The idea was to do research, find new avenues to conquer, new mountains to climb

c) Working alone as well as with Hitchings, Elion developed a multitude of new drugs, using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT. Rather than relying on trial-and-error, Elion and Hitchings used the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens (disease-causing agents) to design drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of particular pathogens without harming the host cells.

d) Elion's inventions include:

6-mercaptopurine (Purinethol), the first treatment for leukemia.
Azathioprine (Imuran), the first immuno-suppressive agent, used for organ transplants.
Allopurinol (Zyloprim), for gout.
Pyrimethamine (Daraprim), for malaria.
Trimethoprim (Septra), for meningitis, septicemia, and bacterial infections of the urinary and respiratory tracts.
Acyclovir (Zovirax), for viral herpes.
In 1988 Elion received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, together with Hitchings and Sir James Black. Other awards include the National Medal of Science (1991) and the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award (1997). In 1991 she became the first woman to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

e) Gertrude Elion died in North Carolina in 1999, aged 81. She had moved to the Research Triangle in 1970, and for a time served as a research professor at Duke University. She was unmarried.

10) Rosalind Elsie Franklin(July 25, 1920–April 16, 1958)

PHYSICAL CHEMIST

a) Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 Notting Hill, London – 16 April 1958 Chelsea, London) was an English biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of DNA, viruses, coal and graphite. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which were an important influence on Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA. When her work was published it represented evidence in support of their hypothesis. Later she led pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. She died at the age of 37 of complications arising from cancer of the ovary.

b) Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London into an affluent and influential British-Jewish family. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894-1964), a London merchant banker and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894-1976); she was the elder daughter and second of the family of five children.

Her uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) who was Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. He was also the first High Commissioner (effectively governor) for the British Mandate of Palestine.

Her aunt Helen Carolin Franklin was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. She was active in trade union organization and women's suffrage, and was later a member of the London County Council.

Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls' School where she excelled in Latin and sport. Her family were actively involved with a Working Men's College, where Ellis Franklin, her father, taught electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War in the evenings and later became vice principal. Later they helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis.

c) In the summer of 1938 Franklin went to Newnham College, Cambridge. She passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded a degree titular, as women were not entitled to degrees (BA Cantab.) from Cambridge at the time. In 1945 Rosalind Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University.

d) She worked for Ronald Norish between 1941 and 1942. Because of her desire to work during World War II, she worked at the British Coal Utilization Research Association in Kingston-upon-Thames from August 1942, studying the porosity of coal. Her work helped spark the idea of high-strength carbon fibres and was the basis of her doctoral degree - "The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal and related materials" that she earned in 1945.

e) After the war ended Franklin accepted an offer to work in Paris with Jacques Mering.She learned x-ray diffraction techniques during her three years at the Laboratoire central des services chimiques de l'État. She seemed to have been very happy there and earned an international reputation based on her published research on the structure of coal. In 1950 she sought work in England and in June 1950 she was appointed to a position at King's College London.

11) Rosalyn Sussman Yalow(July 19, 1921–)

MEDICAL PHYSICIST - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (born July 19, 1921) is an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique.

Born Rosalyn Sussman in New York City to Simon Sussman and Clara Zipper, Dr. Yalow attended Walton High School and graduated in 1941 from Hunter College, where she developed an interest in physics.

In mid-February she received an offer of a teaching assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because World War II came up and many men went off to war and the university offered scholarships for women rather than close down. That summer she took two tuition-free physics courses under government auspices at New York University. At the University of Illinois, she was the only woman among the department's 400 members, and the first since 1917. She married fellow student Aaron Yalow in 1943, and received her Ph.D. in 1945. After graduating, Yalow joined the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital to help set up its radioisotope service. There she collaborated with Solomon Berson to develop RIA, a radioisotope tracing technique that allows the measurement of tiny quantities of various biological substances in the blood. Originally used to study insulin levels in diabetes mellitus,the technique has since been applied to hundreds of other substances – including hormones, vitamins and enzymes – all previously too small to detect. Despite its huge commercial potential, Yalow and Berson refused to patent the method.

In 1975 Yalow and Berson received the AMA Scientific Achievement Award. The following year she became the first female recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 1977 she received the Nobel Prize, together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally. Berson had died in 1972, and so could not share the latter prizes. She received the National Medal of Science in 1988.

Dr. Yalow still lives in the same house in Riverdale, Bronx, New York that she bought when she first began working at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in the 1940s.

12) Jocelyn Bell Burnell(July 15, 1943–)

ASTRONOMER AND PHYSICIST

a) Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born Susan Jocelyn Bell on 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish, for which he won a Nobel Prize.

b) The paper announcing the discovery had five authors, Hewish's name being listed first, Bell's second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Martin Ryle, without the inclusion of Bell as a co-recipient, which was controversial, and was roundly condemned by Hewish's fellow astronomer Fred Hoyle. Others, however, have noted that the prize was given to Ryle and Hewish for their work across the field of radio-astronomy as a whole, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis, and Hewish's on pulsars.
radio-astronomy as a whole, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis, and Hewish's on pulsars.

c) Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where her father was an architect for the nearby Armagh Planetarium, she enjoyed a large library and was encouraged to read. She was especially drawn to the books on astronomy. She attended Lurgan College and lived in Lurgan as a child. She was one of the first girls at the college permitted to study science. Previously, the girls' curriculum had included cross-stitch and cookery. At eleven, she failed the 11+ exam and her parents sent her to the Mount School, York, a Quaker girls' boarding school. There she was impressed by a physics teacher who taught her:

She married Martin Burnell in 1968, and they have one son, Gavin, born in 1973, and two grandsons.

d) She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965 and received her Ph.D. from New Hall (renamed Murray Edwards College) of the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct[4] a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered (interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones). Detecting a bit of "scruff" on her chart recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars, Bell Burnell found that the signal was regularly pulsing, about once each second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" the source was eventually identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

After finishing her PhD, Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton (1968-73), University College London (1974-82) and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982-91). In addition, from 1973 to 1987 she was also a tutor, consultant, examiner and lecturer for the Open University. In 1991 she was appointed Professor of Physics at the Open University, a position she held for ten years. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University. Before retiring Bell Burnell was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 2001 and 2004, and was President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004. She is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. She has been elected President of the Institute of Physics for the year commencing October 2008.

13) Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard(October 20, 1942–)

DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGIST
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995

a) Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (born October 20, 1942 in Magdeburg) is a German biologist who won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1991 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for their research on the genetic control of embryonic development.

b) Since 1985 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen and also leads its Genetics Department. In 1986, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. Since 2001 she has been member of the Nationaler Ethikrat (National Ethics Council of Germany) for the ethical assessment of new developments in the life sciences and their influence on the individual and society. Her primer for the lay-reader, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development was published in April 2006.


Oxford University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Science degree in June 2005.

c) In 1994 Nüsslein-Volhard started the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation (Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Stiftung). It is meant to aid promising young female German scientists with children. The foundation's main focus is to facilitate childcare as a supplement to existing stipends and day care.


Hope you enjoy this great book.

About the Author

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is a former newspaper reporter and writer-editor on physics for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her books have been featured on the Charley Rose show and reviewed in Nature,Physics Today, the Washington Post, Ms., JAMA, Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN), New Scientist, American Scientist, and elsewhere. She has appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday” and been invited to speak at more than twenty universities, at national laboratories such as Argonne National Laboratory and the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), and at the Centennial meeting of the American Physical Society. She has written for Science,Isis, American Physical Society News, Times Higher Education Supplement,and Notable American Women. Excerpts of her books have appeared in The Chemical Educator, The Physics Teacher, and Chemical Heritage Foundation Magazine.

Nobel Prize Women in Science is used extensively in college courses in the United States and Europe. The National Academy of Sciences presented the Empress of Japan with a copy of the book.

McGrayne is also the author of Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives in Seattle, Washington. Her web page address is
http://www.McGrayne.com.