WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Marion Donovan

In 1951 Marion Donovan had a problem. The diapers of the day were made of cloth. As a young mother, she had to wash her baby's diapers by hand in hot water, then bleach and boil them. The only alternative was an expensive diaper service. Marion Donovan's solution was "The Boater." Made of an absorbent layer coated with a piece of shower curtain, The Boater was a disposable diaper held in place by snaps (instead of the usual safety pins). Remarkably, manufacturers were not interested in the product. Donovan manufactured her product herself and was quite successful.

Rosalyn Yalow

The term supermom refers to a woman with a career who also successfully raises a family. A prime example is Rosalyn Yalow. After graduating from college, she was denied positions in graduate school on the grounds that a Jewish woman did not belong in science. She persevered and received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois in 1945. She worked at a Veterans Administration hospital in New York with a physician, Dr. Solomon Berson. With Berson's medical knowledge and Yalow's knowledge of radioactive materials, they developed the technique known as radioimmunoassay (RIA), used to measure accurately the presence of various substances (such as hormones and viruses, for example) in the body, even if they are only present in very small amounts. RIA is used in numerous medical and nonmedical fields today. Yalow raised two children successfully. She also won the Nobel Prize for her work on RIA.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards did a remarkable bit of experimental work in pure theoretical physics. She disproved the theory of conservation of parity—the molecular equivalent of handedness (like left-handedness or right-handedness). The theory held that nature is always symmetrical. Whatever happens on a left-handed molecule will happen as a mirror image on a right-handed molecule. Wu worked with electrons at ultralow temperatures and proved that atomic parity was wrong. Her two male colleagues received the Nobel Prize for their theoretical work in the field. Wu did the experimental work that proved their ideas, but the Nobel committee failed to recognize her role.

Barbara McClintock

Another innovator was Barbara McClintock. She, too, was rejected by various graduate school programs before she earned a Ph.D. in botany and studied plant genetics using corn. In 1951 she published her work proving that genes do not always behave in the predictable ways described by Gregor Mendel many years earlier. The chromosomes in every cell contain DNA, which includes genes—regions of DNA that determine the structure of proteins using a special molecular code. In 1866 Mendel had concluded that the inheritance of genes is perfectly predictable, and his theory of genetics was accepted until McClintock stunned the scientific world by proving that genes could jump around in ways that were totally unpredictable and almost random. She showed that genes can shift within chromosomes and even between different cells. Her studies were ridiculed, and she continued her work through the Carnegie Institute for decades without publishing or gaining any recognition from colleagues. Eventually, the value of her work was recognized and she won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Rosalind Franklin

One of the saddest stories of women scientists of the 1950s was that of Rosalind Franklin. She experienced repeated scorn by male supervisors and colleagues throughout her career. Her work was in X-ray studies of the structure of complex molecules. In 1951 she deduced the complex helical structure of DNA. Her colleague at King's College (London), Maurice Wilkins, resented her. Without her permission, he gave Franklin's research findings on DNA structure to two of his friends, Watson and Crick. Franklin never received credit for her efforts. She developed cancer and died a bitter and lonely person at age thirty-seven in 1958. In 1962 Wilkins, Watson, and Crick received the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE

More Female Scientists

The number of female scientists increased substantially in the 1930s, rising approximately 320 percent beyond what it was in the early 1920s yet remaining low in relation to the number of men who earned degrees in the sciences. A 1938 survey listed a total of 1,726 women scientists, excluding the medical sciences. The largest numbers in 1938 were spread over zoology (281), psychology (277), and botany (256), while the lowest were in engineering (8), anthropology (29), and astronomy (36). The statistics, however, only indicate the number of female scientists who actually got jobs, as opposed to those who had trained in those fields but got by on various grants. How widely a scientific field was taught, in addition, was likely to influence the accessibility of the field to women. Female zoologists graduated from 105 different institutions, while the sixty-three physicists came from some thirty-three schools. Thus, the greater number of some women in one discipline reflected its wider presence in the culture. Many of these women had earned Ph.D's.

Source:

Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).