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For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. In this series, we illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season we focus on a different scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and work ...
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At this festive time of year, when many people are bringing trees into their homes to decorate for the holidays, we are going back to our story of a pioneering scientist who made it her mission to ensure that plants traveling across borders did not carry any diseases. It was in 1909, that the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees …
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Two female botanists – Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter – made headlines for riding the rapids of the Colorado River in 1938 in an effort to document the Grand Canyon’s plant life. In Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, author Melissa L. Sevigny retraces their journey and shows how the ambitio…
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Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics and worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in the production of early nuclear weapons.) After the war, Parker continued her research and…
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Anna Von Mertens' thoughtful new exploration of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's life describes and illuminates Leavitt's decades-long study of stars, including the groundbreaking system she developed for measuring vast distances within our universe simply by looking at photographic plates. Leavitt studied hundreds of thousands of stars captured on the gla…
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Finding Dora Richardson: The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode Two
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Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this market would be commercially viable. The company had hoped for a contraceptive pill – tamoxifen didn’t work for that – not a cancer treatment. In 1972 the higher-ups at ICI decided to cancel the resear…
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In the early 1960s, chemist Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: tamoxifen. Although her name is on the original patent, her contributions have been lost to history. In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Katie Couric introduces us to Dora’s story. Lost Women…
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While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S. than originally thought – at least ten times more. These survivors were born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions after their mothers unwittingly took thalidomide in the early 1960s in so-called …
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It’s September 2024 and a group of American thalidomide survivors arrive in Washington D.C. to lobby the government for support. More than 60 years have gone by since Frances Kelsey first stalled the New Drug Approval application from pharma company Merrell for thalidomide. Although she stopped the drug from going on the market in the U.S., hundred…
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It’s the summer of 1962 and thalidomide has been off the market in Europe for months. But in the U.S., people are only just beginning to find out about the scandal. The Washington Post breaks the story and puts a picture of Frances Kelsey on the front page. She’s the hero who saved American lives. President John F. Kennedy gives her a medal and her…
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It’s 1961 and Widukind Lenz, a German pediatrician, is going door to door in his efforts to find out what is causing the epidemic of babies born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions. In the U.S., drug company Merrell is battling with Dr. Frances Kelsey at the Food and Drug Administration about the approval for thalidomide. She’…
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It’s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling drugs. Contergan’s active ingredient is thalidomide and it is touted as a wonder drug, a non-addictive sedative safer than barbiturates. In the U.S., the drug is called Kevadon, and its distributor is impatient to get the drug…
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In this first chapter of a new five-part season we meet Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a physician and pharmacologist who joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical reviewer in 1960. Before the year is out, Dr. Kelsey finds herself standing up to big pharma. It’s September 1960 and a thick New Drug Application lands on Dr. Kelsey’s desk.…
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In the 1950s, a German drug company developed a new sedative that was supposed to be 100% safe: thalidomide. So safe, in fact, it was promoted to women as a treatment for morning sickness. It quickly became a bestseller. But in the early 1960s, shocking news started coming out of Europe. Thousands of babies were being born with shortened arms and l…
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In the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase stories about science, many of the early science journalists were women, working alongside their male colleagues despite less pay and outright misogyny. They were often single or divorced and, as Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette explains, writing for their lives. From Emma Reh, who travele…
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By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of the universe. What you get when you zoom in all the way to the tiniest bits that can’t be broken down anymore. They had a kind of treasure map, a theory describing these building blocks and where we might find them. But to actually find them…
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Dr. Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who’s made it her mission to write and update the Wikipedia pages of as many women in STEM as she possibly can. She inspired us at Lost Women of Science to start our own Wikipedia project to ensure that all the female scientists we profile have accurate and complete Wikipedia pages. In this ep…
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Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who made major discoveries in cancer genetics, became an unlikely activist in her early fifties. She had always believed that if you did great science, you would get the recognition you deserved. But after years of humiliations — being snubbed for promotions and realizing the women's labs were smaller than t…
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“The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal…there was a human arm in the refrigerator,” said J. Peter Willard about his aunt, Mary Louisa Willard. Otherwise, he insisted, she was just “very normal.” But Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1920s, left a strong impression on most…
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When Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to uncover its beginnings. What she found, however, deep in the archives, was evidence of a network of early female botanists from the turn of the last century who had been written out of history. Wild by Desi…
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In our final episode, we explore Dorothy Andersen’s legacy — what she left behind and how her work has lived on since her death. Describing her mentor’s influence on her life and career, Dr. Celia Ores gives us a rare look at what Dr. Andersen was really like. We then turn to researchers, physicians, and patients, who fill us in on the many areas o…
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The missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization and who gets to be remembered. Dr. John Scott Baird, Dorothy Andersen’s biographer, looks for the portrait, and Drs. Nientara Anderson and Lizzy Fitzsousa, former medical students at Yale University, explain how “dude walls” — the paintings of male scienti…
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Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story. Pediatric critical care physician Dr. John Scott Baird, who published a biography of Dorothy Andersen in 2021, suggests we take a second look at the conventional wisdom surrounding the evolution of cystic fib…
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A few important things have happened in the three years since we first aired The Pathologist in the Basement, the story of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the first to identify cystic fibrosis. It’s safe to say that Dr. Anderson is now a little less lost. In Episode 1, Dr. Andersen sleuths her way to the discovery of cystic fibrosis, a fatal disease that aff…
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When poet Jessy Randall started researching the lives of female scientists she became angry. And we certainly can relate here at Lost Women of Science. So many women made important discoveries but received little recognition. In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Randall talks to Carol Sutton Lewis about Mathematics for Ladies: Po…
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“We were each put on earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged the prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. Bates believed that language emerges from interactions between our brains and our environments, and that we do not have an innate language capacity. To ma…
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