21 Nov,2023
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There’s a joke among science nerds that goes like this: “What did Crick and Watson discover? Rosalind Franklin’s notes.” While that’s something of an exaggeration, it’s often held that Franklin should get an equal share of the credit for the discovery of DNA.
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He gave as good as he got, and was finally vindicated in later life. Unlike some of the scientists on this list, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar did eventually get this credit he deserved, winning a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 – though it is worth noting he had to wait until he was 73 years old to receive that honour.
Ida Noddack (née Ida Tacke, and sometimes cited under that name) was denied credit for her achievements twice over. The discovery for which she is known and credited is that of the element rhenium (atomic number 75), which she predicted and later extracted with her collaborator Walter Noddack, who became her husband.
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The Nobel Prize Committee’s track record of including some of the people who contributed to a discovery but not others has not solely involved the exclusion of women (though it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that women have been disproportionately excluded). This was also the case for the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin in 1923, shared by Sir Frederick Banting and John Macleod.
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Nicknamed ‘the First Lady of Physics’, Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, her colleagues theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that the existing hypothesis of the law of conservation of parity (very loosely, the idea that a mirrored version of this world would also behave in a mirror-image way) didn’t hold for weak interactions in particle physics.
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Irish physicist John Tyndall is usually credited with discovering the greenhouse effect, publishing results in 1859 that demonstrated that gases such as carbonic acid trapped heat, and that this effect could and did take place in the Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to a changing climate over time.
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For most of human history, it’s been a mystery as to what determines whether a pregnancy produces a boy or a girl. Theories abounded that it was a result of nutrition, or different body temperatures, or assorted other things. But that was disproven by Nettie Stevens. She was a secondary school teacher who decided in her late 30s to go to university, where she completed a BA, then an MA, then a PhD in genetics.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell made one of the most significant astronomical discoveries of the 20th century while still a PhD student. She worked on the construction of a radio telescope and ran an experiment monitoring quasars, when she noticed an unexpected pattern of regular radio pulses.