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Eunice Newton Foote
Born
Eunice Newton Foote showed in 1856, using glass cylinders in sunlight, that air containing carbon dioxide heats up more than ordinary air, and suggested this could affect the planet's temperature. Her paper was read at a scientific meeting by Joseph Henry, not by her. John Tyndall's more detailed 1859 work became the standard reference, and her priority was largely rediscovered only in 2011.
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Nettie Stevens
Born
Nettie Stevens, working at Bryn Mawr, showed in 1905 from studies of mealworms that sex is determined by particular chromosomes, the X and Y system. Edmund Beecher Wilson reached a similar conclusion independently, and textbooks long credited him or Thomas Hunt Morgan. She died in 1912, before her work was widely attributed to her.
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Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Born
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, one of the women employed as computers at Harvard College Observatory, published in 1912 the relationship between the brightness and pulsation period of Cepheid variable stars. It became the yardstick Edwin Hubble used to measure distances to other galaxies. She was paid little and died in 1921; a Swedish mathematician tried to nominate her for a Nobel prize in 1925, unaware she had died.
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Alice Ball
Born
Alice Ball, a young Black chemist at the University of Hawaii, developed around 1915 a method to make chaulmoogra oil injectable, the most effective treatment for leprosy until antibiotics. She died in 1916 at 24, and the university's president published the work without crediting her. The University of Hawaii formally recognised her in 2000, and the treatment is now known as the Ball method.
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Emmy Noether
Born
Emmy Noether proved in 1915, published in 1918, the theorem linking symmetries in physics to conservation laws, now fundamental to modern physics, and went on to transform abstract algebra. For years she lectured at Göttingen without pay or a formal post because she was a woman, and in 1933 she was dismissed by the Nazis as a Jew. Physicists widely recognised the theorem's importance only decades later.
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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Born
Cecilia Payne showed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars are made overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium. The leading astronomer Henry Norris Russell persuaded her to call the result probably not real; he reached the same conclusion by other means in 1929 and was often credited. She stayed at Harvard on low pay for decades before becoming its first woman full professor in 1956.
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Ida Noddack
Ida Noddack, a chemist who co-discovered the element rhenium in 1925, suggested in 1934 that bombarding uranium with neutrons might break the nucleus into large fragments. Physicists, including Enrico Fermi, largely ignored the idea. Nuclear fission was confirmed four years later, and her early suggestion is now noted in histories of the discovery.
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Lise Meitner
Born
Lise Meitner worked with Otto Hahn for three decades, and after fleeing Nazi Germany she and her nephew Otto Frisch provided the physical explanation of nuclear fission in early 1939, based on Hahn's experimental results. Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel prize in chemistry. Recognition followed later, including the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 and the element meitnerium, named in 1997.
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Ruby Payne-Scott
Born
Ruby Payne-Scott was among the first radio astronomers, making pioneering observations of solar radio bursts and early interferometry in Sydney in the late 1940s. Australian public service rules barred married women from permanent posts; having hidden her marriage, she left in 1951. Her role in founding radio astronomy was largely forgotten until historians revisited it from the 1990s.
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Esther Lederberg
Born
Esther Lederberg discovered the lambda bacteriophage in 1951 and helped develop replica plating, a technique central to bacterial genetics. Her husband Joshua Lederberg shared the 1958 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine partly for work they had done together, and she was not included. Wider acknowledgement of her contribution came mainly after her death in 2006.
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Rosalind Franklin
Born
Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction work at King's College London, including the image known as Photo 51 taken in 1952, was shown to James Watson without her knowledge and helped him and Francis Crick deduce the structure of DNA. She died in 1958, four years before the Nobel prize went to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Her central role is now widely recognised.
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Marie Tharp
Born
Marie Tharp, plotting sonar soundings in the early 1950s, identified the rift valley running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, evidence that later supported plate tectonics. Her colleague Bruce Heezen at first dismissed it as "girl talk", and as a woman she was kept off research ships for years. Her maps became famous, but honours such as the Library of Congress naming her among leading cartographers came late in life.
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Chien-Shiung Wu
Born
Chien-Shiung Wu designed and led the 1956 experiment on cobalt-60 that showed nature does not always respect mirror symmetry, the violation of parity. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, who proposed the idea, received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics; she did not. She later became the first recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.
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Marthe Gautier
Born
Marthe Gautier, working in Paris in 1958, cultured the cells and counted the chromosomes that revealed an extra chromosome 21 in children with Down syndrome. Jérôme Lejeune, who took her slides to be photographed, was named first author and received most of the credit. In 2014 the French medical research institute Inserm formally acknowledged her role.
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Dorothy Vaughan
Born
Dorothy Vaughan joined the segregated West Area Computing unit at Langley in 1943 and in 1949 became the first Black supervisor at NACA, the forerunner of NASA. When electronic computers arrived she taught herself and her staff the FORTRAN programming language. Her work was little known outside the agency until the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures.
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Katherine Johnson
Born
Katherine Johnson calculated trajectories for early American spaceflight, and in 1962 John Glenn asked for her to check the computer's figures before his orbital flight. For decades her name rarely appeared outside NASA. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and Hidden Figures made her widely known the following year.
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Born
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a Cambridge research student, noticed the odd signal in 1967 that turned out to be the first pulsar. The 1974 Nobel prize in physics went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. Honours followed over the decades, and in 2018 she gave her entire Breakthrough Prize of three million dollars to fund physics scholarships for under-represented students.
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Tu Youyou
Born
Tu Youyou led a secret Chinese research project that in 1972 isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood, guided by a fourth-century herbal text. The drug has since saved millions from malaria, but her role was little known abroad for decades. She received the Lasker Award in 2011 and the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2015, more than forty years after the discovery.
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Katalin Karikó
Born
Katalin Karikó spent years struggling for grants to pursue messenger RNA as a medicine and was demoted at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s. Her 2005 paper with Drew Weissman showed how modified RNA could avoid triggering inflammation. That work underpinned the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, and the pair received the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2023.
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