A Woman's Place

Last weekend I had a conversation with a young woman, she was talking about her plans to go to Berkeley and study Paleontology. With other subjects like computer science being so popular, Paleontology seemed liked an unusual choice. The young woman said this was her calling in life and knew this since she was eight years old.

Women have not always been welcomed in the fields science. It seemed "unlady like" for a women to have kind of work outside the home and most professions were practically closed to women. Up until the mid 1800's women were not accepted as college students and even then they were often segregated to women only colleges. By the beginning of the 20th century a few narrow fields such as teaching, nursing or social work where open to women but science was almost exclusively a man's domain.

Here's a challenge, name three women who have made major contributions to science? Automatically most say Marie Currie, then rack their brains for a second name and usually give up after a couple minutes of awkward contemplation.

If you're ever confronted with this question here are three names of women and their contributions to science.

Lise Meitner was born in 1878 in Vienna and became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna in 1905. She was first woman the Max Planck would allow to attend his lectures -up until that point he excluded other women. She became Max Planck's assistant a year later.

Through her work with Max Planck, Lise Meitner met the chemist Otto Hahn. This began a long collaboration where the two discovered new isotopes and expanded sciences understanding of beta-radiation. In 1917 Meitner was award the Leibniz Medal and given her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. 

Meitner had other achievements but her most noteworthy one was her and Otto Hahn co-discovered nuclear fission in 1938. She was the first person to explain the conversion of mass into energy when uranium atoms were bombarded with neutrons. She recognized the possibility of creating a chain reaction and it's explosive potential. When the results were published it rocked the world.

As a twist history Hitler was presented with a feasibility study in the spring of 1939 on building an atomic bomb in five years for 10 billion Reich Marks. Hitler rejected it because he felt the conquest of Europe would be over before the bomb was ready.

Troubled by Meitner and Hahn's results, Einstein was motivated to write his famous letter to President Roosevelt. The letter convince FDR to start what became the Manhattan Project.     

With help of Otto Hahn Lise Meitner was able live out World War 2 in Sweden. Though Lise was a practicing Lutheran, she was the child of Jewish parents and would have killed in the coming holocaust.

Next is Rosalind Franklin, born a generation after Lise Meitner. Franklin found the academic halls of England continued to be as unwelcoming as every other country around the world at that time.

Rosalind Franklin was pioneer in x-ray crystallography. It was a new technique using x-rays to take pictures of things too small photograph with visible light. She earned her PhD from Cambridge and in 1951 accepted a position at King's College in London. At that same time James Watson and Francis Crick were working on the structure of DNA. When Watson and Crick announced their discovery of the double helix they failed mention how the used Rosalind Franklin's work, without her approval or knowledge.

Rosalind Franklin was not to be a martyred victim of science and sexism. She continued to work on with ground breaking research in RNA and the structures of viruses. The real tragedy was she died young of cancer in 1958 at age 37. Nobel Prizes can not  nominated posthumously but she probably would have shared in the one Watson and Crick won in 1962 as well as won one separately for her later research.

When you read in a science book that the sun and all the other stars are made up of mostly hydrogen you accept that as a given fact. But do you who actually discovered that? -  Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

In 1925 Cecilia Payne became the first woman to earn her PhD in Astronomy from Radcliffe College, back then an all women's school and now part of Harvard. Her work in the spectral analysis of sun and star light showed how the absorption lines that make up the fingerprints of ionized elements also indicate the temperature of the star as well as its composition.

Her work was one of the building blocks Edwin Hubble used to later on calculate the size, age and true shape of the universe as we know it today.

So now know you know the names of at least three promenade women scientists. In the United States women now make up the majority in college enrollment so the number of great women scientist can only grow. Maybe in some not too distant tomorrow the issue of gender will be no issue at all and a woman's place is where ever she can make it.