Centres

SET Women - Leicestershire Women in Science Engineering & Technology

e-Book - Discoveries by women

Often unsung are the women behind some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. Ridiculed, bullied and sometimes outright robbed of their work, scientific women are only in recent times being recognised for how their cutting edge research findings changed our understanding of the world.

Chemical Composition of Stars Cecilia Payne in 1925 completed her PhD dissertation explaining that the Sun was mostly made of Hydrogen, not Iron as was commonly believed. Although male astronomers bullied her about her claim, she was quickly proven correct. We now know that to make Iron or any other element, you must first fuse millions of tons of Hydrogen into larger elements inside a star. In fact, because of Payne's work, we understand that every atom in our bodies was once inside a star.

Image from Harvard Magazine.

Double Helix Structure of DNA Rosalind Franklin in 1953 authored a professional research paper for journal publication based on her unparalleled work on the X-ray crystallography of DNA. In this paper she described how her chemical interpretation of images suggested a double helix structure for DNA. Credit for this discovery is given to competitors Watson, Crick and Wilkins who used stolen copies of her key X-ray photographs, published their paper in the same issue of the journal, and were later awarded the Nobel Prize without her.

Image from Wellesley College.

Earth's Inner Core Inge Lehmann in 1936 published a paper detailing a seismological discontinuity in the middle of the planet Earth. She explained that this meant the core was actually in two parts, an inner and an outer core. Thanks to her work, we now know the sloshing of movement and the transfer of heat between the layers is what gives the Earth its magnetic field, a protective electromagnetic boundary between our planet and the eruptions of deadly charged particles from the Sun.

Image from St.-Michael-Gymnasium Monschau.

Nuclear Fission Lise Meitner in 1939 coined the phrase "nuclear fission" in a publication detailing her physics experiments to split a nucleus of uranium into barium, krypton and lots of energy. Her long time colleague, chemist Otto Hahn, became her competitor and claimed the discovery for himself, accepting a Nobel Prize as the spoils. Meitner's discovery of nuclear fission was to spark the Atomic Age.

Image from Hahn-Meitner Institut.

X and Y Chromosomes Nettie Stevens in a 1905 report presented her discovery of the existence of a Y chromosome. She explained the determination of the sex of an individual is based on the presences of this and the X chromosome in the nuclei of cells. From her work, we now know that the Y chromosome determines maleness, contains the fewest number of genes of any of the chromosomes found in most mammals, and can be used to trace ancestry back thousands of years.

Image from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.