Nobel Prize Women in Science - Part 1

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

Today i read about Marie Curie and Lise Meitner and i wanted to share few quotations found in the book about them.

What a book i learnt a lot reading about these gr8 personalities.

Tomorrow i will continue this series with another great scientists from this book.

1) Hilde Proescholdt Mangold (1898–1924)

Hilde Proescholdt Mangold’s doctoral thesis in biology won her adviser a Nobel Prize. Mangold conducted the crucial experiments demonstrating the nature and location of the organizer, the chemicals
that direct the embryonic development of different tissues and organs.

Hilde Proescholdt Mangold did not conceive of or design her experiment. Her adviser,Hans Spemann, did so. She executed the project under his direction. In 1924, the gas heater in Mangold’s kitchen exploded. Hilde Proescholdt Mangold, the twenty-six-year-old mother of an infant son and the codiscoverer of the organizer, died of severe burns. Eleven years after her death, Spemann won the Nobel Prize.

2) Frieda Robscheit-Robbins (1893–December 18, 1973)

For thirty-eight years Frieda Robscheit-Robbins was the research partner of George Hoyt Whipple. Although their joint work led to a cure for the deadly disease pernicious anemia, it was Whipple alone who won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934.

“Whipple’s experiments,” the Nobel Committee observed,“were planned exceedingly well and carried out very accurately, and consequently their results can lay claim to absolute reliability.” Frieda Robscheit-Robbins helped to plan and carried out those experiments.

In fact, she was listed as the first author on Whipple’s most important single paper, the report on which his scientific reputation rested. Generally, the first author is primarily responsible for the
work summarized in the paper.

Whipple cited twenty-three scientific papers in his Nobel address.Of these, Robschiet-Robbins was the coauthor of ten. Whipple shared his prize money with Robscheit-Robbins and with two women technicians.

Frieda Robscheit-Robbins was born in Germany, educated in Chicago and California, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. She worked with Whipple from 1917 until her retirement from the University of Rochester Medical School in 1955. After thirty-eight years, she was still an associate in pathology, a juniorgrade employee.

Of scientific research, she said, “You become possessed of a magnificent obsession and determination to learn the truth of your scientific theory if it takes sixteen years or many times sixteen. If you are
successful, you really deserve no great credit, for by that time experiment has become the only thing in life you care to do.”

3) ALFRED NOBEL, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, died in 1896, establishing with his fortune the most famous of all international awards, the Nobel Prizes.Following the dictates of his will,annual awards are given for peace and literature and for discoveries in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine. An economics prize was added in 1968.Approximately five hundred men have received science Nobels since 1901. In the course of almost a century, only ten women scientists have won Nobel prizes, a mere two percent.

4) Few positive factors for women who succeded are

a) First, they adored science.
b) Sympathetic parents and relatives were particularly influential.
c) Religious values stressing education were critical.
d) Behind many of these successful women stood a man.
e) 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 York’s 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.
f) Finally, good luck and good timing were vitally important.





5) Marie Sklodowska Curie (November 7, 1867–July 4, 1934)
PHYSICIST AND RADIOCHEMIST Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911

a) The first woman professor in France, Marie Curie had discovered radium, the world’s first hope for cancer patients.

b) She was the physicist and chemist who turned the attention of the scientific world to radioactivity and
proved that the atom was not inert, indivisible, or solid.

c) For 61 years, she was the only person who had won two Nobel Prizes for science.

d) She was born Marya Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867,just after the American Civil War.

e) Both her parents, Vladislav and Bronislawa Sklodowska, were teachers. Vladislav taught high school physics and mathematics, and although Bronislawa gave birth to five children in eight years and
had tuberculosis, she was the full-time director of a private school for girls.

f) “My father and mother worshiped their profession in the highest degree,” Marie recalled later.By the time Marie was eleven years old, her oldest sister had died of typhus and her mother of tuberculosis.

g) One of the world’s great love stories began in 1894 when Marie Sklodowska met Pierre Curie. Curie was the laboratory director of the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris.At thirty-five, he was already an important physicist specializing in crystals and magnetic materials. He and his brother Jacques had discovered piezoelectricity, the electricity generated by squeezing certain crystals, like quartz. Such crystals are used today in microphones, broadcasting electronics, stereo systems, and wristwatches.

h) Pierre Curie was an idealistic dreamer. He had been raised in the republican, anticlerical tradition of the French Revolution. Unable to adapt to school life, he had been tutored by his father and older brother. Pierre Curie, however, was certainly not part of the French scientific establishment. He had not attended the elite École Normale, and he taught at a new technical school for talented, working-class Parisians. There he earned approximately as much as a day laborer while conducting his famous magnetic experiments in a hallway between his laboratory and a staircase. Totally uninterested in awards for himself, Pierre Curie would see that his wife got her full share of credit for her scientific discoveries.

i) Maria Sklodowska still dreamed of returning to Poland to teach physics. Pierre Curie, on the other hand, talked about their sharing a life consecrated to scientific research. He argued, correctly, that she
could do more and better research in France than in impoverished Poland. “It is necessary to make a dream of life, and to make a dream a reality,” he wrote her. He asked her to marry him and, failing that,
to share an apartment with him. Eventually, he made the ultimate sacrifice: he offered to give up his research career and live in Poland with her. At that, she gave in and agreed to marry him. Marie and
his father, however, convinced Pierre to finish his doctoral dissertation in order to qualify for a professorship and a laboratory. His thesis on the relationship between temperature and magnetism became
known as Curie’s law. With his doctorate and a strong recommendation from the great English physicist Lord William Thomson Kelvin, Pierre Curie was promoted to professor and was paid the comfortable income of six thousand francs a year.

j) Few scientists paid great attention when Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in uranium in 1896.

k) She deduced, radioactivity does not depend on how atoms are arranged into molecules. Instead, radioactivity originates within the atoms themselves. This simple but breathtaking discovery is Marie Curie’s most important scientific contribution.

Next, she had what the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Emilio Segrè considered a stroke of genius. She extended her research beyond uranium and thorium and their simple compounds to their natural ores. Testing museum samples, she discovered that two uranium ores—pitchblende and chalcolite—were three and four times more radioactive than could be predicted from the amount of uranium or thorium they contained. What could be producing the extra amount of radioactivity? She hypothesized the presence of an unknown,highly radioactive element in the ore. She also coined a new word, radioactivity.

l) Clearly, the barium and bismuth compounds must have something radioactive in them. So they began separating those compounds into their components as well. When the bismuth compound was heated red-hot in
a vacuum, the radioactive element was deposited on the cooler part of the test tube. The new substance was four hundred times more active than uranium. Marie Curie named it polonium in honor of her native land. Not only had she discovered a new element, she had also opened a new field of physics; radioactivity became the primary technique for exploring the interior of the atom.

m) While separating out polonium at the end of 1898, Marie Curie also discovered a second, even more active element, which she named radium.A third radioactive element, actinium, was found in the pitchblende by André Debierne, the shy but devoted chemist who was reportedly deeply in love with Marie Curie.

n) The Curies announced the discovery of their two new elements,polonium and radium, in articles published in July and December 1898. For her work, Marie won a thirty-eight-hundred-franc prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

o) Marie and Pierre shared the physics and chemistry work, moving back and forth between the disciplines as they proceeded, according to their granddaughter Hélène Langevin-Joliot, a nuclear physicist who has studied their notebooks in detail.

p) Radium was the most important element to be discovered since oxygen. Glowing with a bluish light, it emits electrically charged particles. A piece of radium roughly the size of a penny produces approximately
five hundred calories of heat every day for a thousand years. Clearly, something important was happening inside the radium atoms. As late as 1897 when the electron was discovered, physicists had assumed that atoms were solid, indivisible, stable, and immutable. Yet radium was proof that some powerful force existed
inside the atom, a force powerful enough to emit heat and give off light for years on end. In his lab, Ernest Rutherford showed that atoms of radioactive substances even change from one element to another. More than any other scientist, Marie Curie forced her colleagues to pay attention to the invisibly small world inside the atom. Scientists were forced to alter their definition of an element and to recognize a new force of nature.

q) The June evening was warm, and at eleven P.M., the group moved outdoors into the garden. In the darkness, Pierre reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube of radium. Watching it glow, the
group fell silent. Rutherford could see that Pierre’s hands were so raw and inflamed that he could barely hold the tube. A doctor diagnosed rheumatism and prescribed strychnine.

In 1903, the French Academy of Sciences nominated Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie to share the Nobel Prize for physics for their work on radioactivity. Marie Curie was not included. Luckily,one of the most powerful Swedish physicists on the nominating committee, Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, was a great supporter of
women scientists. The Swede wrote Pierre Curie that he and he alone was being considered for the prize.

r) The problem was that Marie Curie had not been nominated for the 1903 prize. She had, however, received two nominations the previous year. With some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, one of those nominations was declared valid for 1903, and she was nominated with her husband and Becquerel.

s) When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences met to discuss the Curies’ nomination, it changed their prize in a small but crucial way. As originally conceived, the Curies would have won the physics prize for “their discovery of the spontaneously radioactive elements.” Chemists objected, however. They wanted to leave a way open to award the Curies a second Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium.

t) Until the 1980s, when the Nobel archives opened its records of the 1903 debate, many scientists considered Marie Curie’s second prize in 1911 undeserved because they assumed that it was awarded for her later, less crucial research.

u) The end of 1903, Marie Curie was a household word, the world’s most famous scientist. Her discovery of radium followed soon after the invention of the Linotype, telegraph, and telephone,which in turn created the mass media with their scandal sheets,popular magazines, and large-circulation newspapers.

v) A few months after Pierre’s death, Marie Curie faced a scientific crisis. In August 1906, Lord William Thomson Kelvin wrote the editor of the Times of London to announce, incorrectly, that radium was
not an element after all.

To defend her discovery, she began another arduous four year project to purify the radium salts. In the end, with enormous persistence and determination, she produced a few grains of pure radium. She had proved that radium is indeed an element.

w) At the height of the sensationalism, on November 4, 1911,Marie Curie received a letter from the Nobel Foundation notifying her that she would be awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry for her discovery of radium. It was the prize that the Nobel Committee had paved the way for in 1903 by excluding radium from her first Nobel. With Pierre dead, she shared this award with no one.

The timing of the second award may not have been coincidental, however. It had been engineered by Svante Arrhenius,an eminent Swedish physicist and a powerful figure on the Nobel committees.

x) Marie Curie dedicated the rest of her life to building a French research institute for the study of radioactivity.

y) The Curie circle tried to convince the French public that a nation that does not invest in research is a nation on the decline.Unfortunately, France preferred the image of poor self-sacrificing scientists like Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie toiling in their attics and sheds.

As the Scientific American gushed, she was “unassuming,plainly but neatly dressed, womanly and motherly in appearance…. She remains just plain Madame Curie, working for the good of humanity and for the expansion of scientific knowledge.”

z) Thanks to her, the Radium Institute became one of the world’s leading centers for nuclear research.
In it, Marguerite Perey discovered francium, a new radioactive element; Salomon Rosenblum analyzed alpha rays; and Irène Curie and her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, discovered artificial radioactivity.





6) Lise Meitner(November 7, 1878–October 27, 1968)
NUCLEAR PHYSICIST

a) At the age of sixty, she deciphered the experiment of the century by explaining that, incredibly, the nucleus of an atom could split and release enormous amounts of energy. For the fission experiment that she initiated, directed, and explained, her German partner received the Nobel Prize.

b) Lise was born in 1878, the third of eight children in a gifted and liberal Viennese family. Her grandparents were Jewish, but her lawyer father, Philipp Meitner,was an agnostic.

Lise’s mother, Hedwig Skovran Meitner, was a talented pianist who taught her children music.

c) When Meitner showed no interest in marriage, her worried father inquired how she planned to support herself without a husband.Lise replied that she wanted to study physics.Her dream must have seemed pathetically impractical. There were practically no jobs for physicists of either sex.

As the Nobel Prize–winning physicist James Franck explained, “Everyone who went into physics at that time went into physics because he had to…because he felt he could not be happy in any other way.”

d) Luckily, her tutor had a gift for making mathematics and physics extraordinarily stimulating. He even showed his students a real physics laboratory; most tutors taught only from diagrams of experimental
apparatus. When Lise saw the lab, she was astonished. Some of the equipment looked very different from what she had imagined.

Of the fourteen women who took the university entrance examination,only four passed. Meitner was one of them. Austria had recently opened its universities to women, and Meitner enrolled in Vienna in 1901.

Professor Ludwig Boltzmann was her other salvation. His theory class was located in a rundown building that reminded her of a henhouse. “If a fire breaks out here, very few of us will get out alive,” she thought.
Boltzmann was an emotional, enthusiastic lecturer who talked about science in the most personal terms.

e) In 1905, Meitner became the second woman to earn a physics doctorate in Vienna; her doctoral dissertation concerned conduction in nonhomogeneous materials.

f) The discoveries of natural radioactivity and of radium’s spontaneous change into polonium and then into lead provided scientists with the first evidence that atoms of one element can break apart and become atoms of another element.

g) As her first postdoctoral project in Vienna, Meitner devised a simple but ingenious method to show that the alpha particles streaming out of naturally radioactive materials are deflected slightly while
traveling through matter. She did the experiment with a piece of radium donated to the university by Marie and Pierre Curie, in thanks for Austria-Hungary’s gift of pitchblende. Ernest Rutherford and Hans Geiger made similar measurements in Manchester at approximately the same time in preparation for their 1909 gold foil experiment, which proved that atoms have nuclei. Although Meitner was a beginner working alone, she had been on the track of an important discovery. She also explained an optics experiment conducted by John W. Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, an Englishman who won the fourth Nobel Prize for physics, and made several predictions based on his experiment.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the Nazi takeover in 1933, Germany was the scientific center of
the world.Berlin had famous Nobel Prize–winning physicists like Max Planck, Albert Einstein,
and Max von Laue. Thanks to Planck’s far-sightedness, Berlin physicists accepted the existence of atoms and Einstein’s special theory of relativity long before scientists elsewhere.

h) Otto Hahn, a young German chemist who had worked on radioactivity with Ernest Rutherford, was looking for a collaborator in physics. Hahn was informal and extremely charming.Unfortunately for Meitner, however, Hahn worked in Professor Emil Fischer’s chemistry institute, and Fischer did not allow women in his building. Only when Rutherford recommended
Hahn did Fischer agree to let Meitner work in his institute—provided that she stay in a converted carpenter’s shop in the basement and never enter any part of the building used by men. Meitner
agreed. Although she studied radioactivity for the rest of her life, she did not remain in the basement for long.

i) During World War I, Meitner spent two years as an X-ray nurse in an Austrian army hospital at the front, much like Marie and Irène Joliot-Curie.

j) The first time she met the great Danish theoretical physicist, Niels Bohr, they spoke about “everything under the sun, whether grave or gay.”

k) In 1926, at age forty-eight, she became Germany’s first woman physics professor.

l) After the discovery of fission, a myth arose that Hahn and Meitner had worked together throughout their careers. But during the 1920s and 1930s, no one thought of them as a team. And no one thought of them as equals. Meitner was indisputably the leader. “She was a great physicist during physics’ golden age. Radiochemistry wasn’t an exciting field then,” as Professor Emeritus Peter Brix of the University of Heidelberg noted. Günter Herrmann agreed, “She was more famous than Hahn. The glory of the Berlin institute in the 1920s came mainly from Meitner. Hahn’s reputation came from his earlier work with her on the radioactive decay chains in nature and from his personality. She was among the people discussed for a Nobel Prize every year.” Einstein called her “our Madame Curie”.

m) For me, she’s really a great scientist,” added Wolfgang Paul, 1989 Nobel Prize winner from the University of Bonn and former president of the Max Planck Society.His name is only one letter different from that of Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian Nobel Prize winner who was a giant in theoretical physics earlier in the century.

n) At Meitner’s apartment one Sunday afternoon, she told Barbara Jaeckel, “The wives of physicists are martyrs.

o) The development of physics became, she said, “a magic, musical accompaniment to my life.” The
first time she heard Einstein speak, he explained that energy is trapped in mass, according to his famous equation E=mc2, and that every radiation has mass associated with it. Those two facts were so
overwhelmingly new and surprising to Meitner that she remembered every detail of his lecture for decades.

p) Years after Meitner’s death, physicists in Darmstadt, Germany, fused two isotopes of bismuth and iron to make Element 109, the heaviest known element in the universe. In 1992, the physicists named their
new element meitnerium—in honor of Lise Meitner.

Lise Meitner should be honored for her fundamental work on the physical understanding of fission,” declared Peter Armbruster, the physicist leading the Darmstadt team. “She should be honored as the most significant woman scientist of this century.”

q) A few days before her ninetieth birthday, Lise Meitner slipped almost imperceptibly away. Although she had never talked about the Nobel Prize, she left her letters and papers to Cambridge University.
She made sure that her side of the story would be told.

r) After the war, a veritable personality cult grew up around Hahn.One of the few German scientists trusted by the Allies, he became president of the Max Planck Society. He appeared on German medals,
buildings, coins, and stamps. Meitner and Strassmann faded from view. When the Max Planck Society identified her as Hahn’s “junior colleague,” she demanded of Hahn, “Will my scientific past
also be taken away from me?” The Deutsches Museum in Munich exhibited her experimental apparatus—the equipment she had designed for the fission experiment—and identified it as Otto Hahn’s
worktable. The museum’s sign did not include Meitner as a team member until the American chemist Ruth Sime complained publicly at a historians’ convention held in the museum itself in 1989.

s) Meitner was pained that he said nothing about her or their thirty years together. “He is convinced that Germans are being treated unjustly, the more so in that he simply suppresses the past,” she wrote a friend. “As for me, I am part of that suppressed past.”

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.