Celebrating Women in STEM

In honor of Women’s History Month, we wanted to celebrate the many women whose spectacular work shaped the current scientific field. Without these brilliant scientists and mathematicians, many advances in history would not have been possible. So, we invite you to read into their stories and appreciate the work that many have overlooked, as the world we know today would be quite different without them.

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 -1997)

Chien-Shiung was born on May 31, 1912, and raised in a small town near Shanghai, China. Although most girls did not go to school back then, Wu received an education at an all-girl school founded by her father. Then, she moved on to study physics at the National Central University in Nanking, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1934.

After getting her degree, Wu worked in a physics lab, where her mentor Dr. Jing-Wei Gu encouraged her to continue studying in the United States. With financial support from her uncle, she moved to San Francisco and enrolled at Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in 1940.

Despite her knowledge and capabilities, jobs were scarce in California as anti-Asian movements grew with the beginning of World War II. Looking for more opportunities, Wu moved with her husband to the East Coast and started teaching physics at Smith College and Princeton University.

In 1944, she was offered a job at Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project, a government-funded investigation to develop atomic weapons. Wu’s work helped determine the process for separating uranium into two isotopes by gaseous diffusion. This was an important step towards producing enough uranium to build the atomic bomb. After her contributions were proved essential, Wu continued working in experimental physics after the war.

This also established her as an expert in nuclear physics and dedicated most of her time to proving and disproving other scientists’ theories. When two physicists at Princeton claimed to make a significant discovery in the law of conservation of parity, it was Wu’s experiment that proved their theories and convinced the scientific community of their validity.

However, when they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, her participation was not acknowledged. Many believed she, too, deserved the award, as the research would not have been recognized without her experiment.

Wu was aware of her industry’s sexism and the impact it had on most female scientists. Still, she refused to be limited by these biases. She worked until others accepted and celebrated her contributions, leading her to win many prestigious awards.

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)

Katherine Johnson was born in West Virginia, United States, on August 26, 1918. She started high school at just 10 years old and college when she was 15. At age 18, she graduated with honors with a B.S. degree in French and Mathematics from West Virginia State University.

In 1939, West Virginia integrated its graduate schools and Johnson was invited, along with two other black men, to be the first black students at the state University. Therefore, the following year, she returned to West Virginia University to get a graduate degree in the mathematics program. However, she left the program to start a family and then dedicated to teaching.

Many years later, in 1953, Johnson joined the Research Center (LaRC) as a research mathematician for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). At first, she performed math calculations along with many other women. Then she was temporarily assigned to aid an all-male research group. Soon enough, her expert knowledge gained her a permanent position on the team.

NACA then became National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Johnson moved on to work as an aerospace technologist, a position in which she completed some of the biggest accomplishments of her career. She calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space, as well as the trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon in 1969. Johnson also verified the mathematics of John Glenn’s orbit around the Earth.

She retired from NASA in 1986 after 33 fruitful years. Even though she experienced racial and gender barriers throughout her career, Katherine ignored them and made sure she was listened to. Her assertiveness and clever mind got her into editorial meetings, convincing people that is where she belonged.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920, as the second of five children in a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. From a young age, she showed great intelligence and a particular passion for science.

Therefore, it came as no surprise when, in 1945, she earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge, at a time when very few women were working in scientific and research fields. Despite the challenges being a Jewish woman presented, she continued following her dream and pursued a postgraduate and became an expert at crystallography.

Due to this technical mastery, in 1950 she was offered a fellowship at King’s College London to investigate the structure of DNA. Working alongside student Dr. Gosling, Dr. Franklin suspended a DNA fiber and bombarded it with an X-ray beam, getting a pattern on a photographic plate. She then mathematically analyzed the pattern to reveal the structure of DNA.

Her results confirmed the 3-D structure that Watson and Crick had theorized for DNA, but it is not clear if she knew that her unpublished work had helped the two scientists construct it. Apparently, Franklin’s partner, Maurice Wilkins, was the one who showed them Photo 51, before Franklin published it. In 1953, the image was released to the public in the same issue as the journal in which Watson and Crick announced their model.

That same year, Franklin left Cambridge and went to another lab to work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, before dying of cancer in 1958.

Four years after her death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA. As the Nobel committee does not give posthumous prizes, Franklin’s essential and brilliant analysis was mostly uncredited and disregarded.

Bibliography

Angelucci, A. (2021). Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu. National Women's History Museum. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dr-chien-shiung-wu

Biography 19: Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) :: CSHL DNA Learning Center. (n.d.). DNA Learning Center. Retrieved from https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/16439-Biography-19-Rosalind-Elsie-Franklin-1920-1958-.html

Chien-Shiung Wu | Chinese-American physicist | [Image]. Britannica. (2022, February 12). Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chien-Shiung-Wu

Dr. Rosalind Franklin · Rosalind Franklin University. (n.d.). Rosalind Franklin University. Retrieved from https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/about/facts-figures/dr-rosalind-franklin/

Franklin, R., & Klug, A. (n.d.). Rosalind Franklin. [Image]. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin#/media/File:Rosalind_Franklin_(1920-1958).jpg

Johnson. (n.d.). National Space Grant Foundation. Retrieved from https://spacegrant.org/programs/service-award/johnson/

Katherine G. Johnson's Biography. (2012, February 6). The HistoryMakers. Retrieved from https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/katherine-g-johnson-42

Lee, M. (2020, February 24). Katherine Johnson Biography. NASA. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Life Story: Chien-Shiung Wu, 1912-1997 - Women & the American Story. (n.d.). Women & the American Story. Retrieved from https://wams.nyhistory.org/confidence-and-crises/world-war-ii/chien-shiung-wu/

Tang, W. (2020, January 23). Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, The First Lady of Physics (US National Park Service). National Park Service. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/people/dr-chien-shiung-wu-the-first-lady-of-physics.htm