Profiles the lives and achievements of major women scientists of the twentieth century from a diverse fields of endeavor. These scientists have made a significant legacy in society and culture.
Hazel Bishop (1906-1998)
She was an American chemist and cosmetics manufacturer, born in New Jersey, who founded her own company Hazel Bishop, Inc. In 1950 she invented "lasting lipstick", the first of the "non-smear, long lasting" type. Her sales rose to millions in the early 1950s. She continued to experiment, creating other beauty products. Bishop became the head of the cosmetics marketing program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1978. She was the first person to occupy the Revlon Chair at Fashion Institute of Technology.
Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941)
She was an American astronomer from Dover, Delaware. She was educated at Wellesley and Radcliffe and joined the Harvard College Observatory in 1911 as curator of astronomical photographers. In 1938, she was appointed William Cranch Bord Astronomer at Harvard where she spent her entire career. Cannon classified some 400,000 stars in her lifetime and published The Henry Draper Catalogue which classified the spectra of all stars from the North to the South Poles as studied by photographing their light through a refracting prism.
Marie Curie (1867-1934)
A polish-born French physicist, she is famous for radioactivity. She discovered polonium and radium and the first woman to win two Nobel prizes, one for physics in 1903, and another in 1911 for chemistry. Assisted by her husband Pierre Curie on her researches, she also worked with Henri Becquerel. The properties of radium laid the foundation for research in nuclear physics. Marie Curie served as head of the physics laboratory at the Sorbonne and succeeded her husband as physics professor after his accidental death in 1906. Her daughter, Irène, also became a scientist and Nobel Prize winner. Madame Curie published Traité de radioactivity in 1910.
Dian Fossey (1932-1985)
She was an American zoologist born in San Francisco but moved to Africa in 1967 when she was sponsored by anthropologist Louis Leakey to study the endangered mountain gorillas on the Rwanda-Zaire-Uganda border. She completed an extended study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years, observing them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda. She became an outspoken advocate for the preservation of gorillas. Fossey left briefly to earn a doctorate at Cambridge University and to work on her book Gorillas in the Mist. She died of a tragic unsolved murder in 1985.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958)
Born in London and educated in Cambridge University, she was a crystallographer whose X-ray photographs of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that carries inherited information in "coded" form provided vital clues to the chemical's structure. Her major contribution was acknowledged by American James Watson and Englishman Francis Crick when they published their work in 1953 on the DNA model as a double helix which brought forward the science of molecular biology. Her work was excluded from a share in the 1958 Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins in 1962, due to her untimely death of cancer.
Jane Goodall (1934)
Dame Jane Goodall, DBE, is an English zoologist and anthropologist, known as the mother of ethnology. She is famous for her 45-year study of chimpanzees in Tanzania, and for founding the Jane Goodall Institute. She went to Africa at the age of 23 and became secretary to anthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya but left temporarily towards a doctorate at Cambridge University. Goodall married a Dutch photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick. The couple established the Gombe Stream Research Centre.
Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956)
She was a French physicist who together with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, won the 1935 Nobel Prize of chemistry for their work in radioactive isotopes leading to nuclear fission. The daughter of the Marie and Pierre Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie worked as laboratory assistant of her famous mother at the Radium Institute. She married Joliot, a graduate of Paris Institute for Industrial Physics and Chemistry. Both took the surname Joliot-Curie. The couple achieved high posts in atomic energy research in Paris in the 1940s. However, their commitment to communism after the Second World War put them out of favor with the French government.
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)
She brought new understanding of how the genetic information passed on from parents to offspring can change living things. McClintock was born in Connecticut but raised in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Cornell University, receiving her Ph.D. in 1927. McClintock showed how changes in plants are related to changes in chromosomes and did work on mutations caused by X rays. Subsequently, she discovered genes that control other genes. In the early 1950s, she presented reports about controlling genes, and received the Kimber Genetics Award and National Medal of Science. In 1981, she received more awards, and two years later, won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Lisa Meitner (1878-1968)
She was the first to discover that the atoms could be split, releasing tremendous energy. She was born in Vienna, received a doctor's degree in physics. In 1907 she began work with Otto Hahn in Berlin. Meitner and Hahn discovered protactinium. She became Germany's first woman full physics professor. When the Nazis took control of Austria in 1938, she fled to Sweden. In 1939, Meitner and Frisch published their paper on nuclear fission. In August 1945 US drops atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagazaki, and World War II ends. In 1947 Meitner officially retires but continues research in Sweden. Meitner stops work and moves to England in 1960. Six years later, Meitner received the Enrico Fermi Award.
