Sure, most people have heard of Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin, Jane Goodall and Sally Ride. But for every female scientist whose work has been recognized and celebrated, there are thousands who have been accidentally or purposefully forgotten. For a few, that might change, thanks to a beautiful new book, "Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changedthe World," by artist Rachel Ignotofsky.
While she highlights some of the classic women in science, she's also p rofiled some less familiar faces — and discoveries. Here are a dozen of our favorites. Meghan Bartels wrote an earlier version of this post.
 |
| Camera Craft Studios, Minneapolis/Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons |
Florence Bascom: Helped us understand how mountains form
 |
| President Clinton talks with Marjory Stoneman Douglas after presenting her with a Medal of Freedom.Doug Mills/AP |
Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Championed the ecological importance of The Everglades
 |
| Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons |
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Figured out what the Sun was made of
Celia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was the astronomer who discovered that the sun is made of hydrogen and helium. She went to college in Britain for botany, then attended by chance a lecture given by a prominent physicist, which she found so intriguing she changed fields (the lecturer, Arthur Eddington, became an important mentor for her). She moved across the Atlantic to study at Harvard, where she spent the rest of her career.
Her dissertation was called "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy." In addition to our sun, she also studied variable stars, taking more than a million photographs of them with her team.
 |
| Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrating her one hundredth birthday in Rome.Riccardo De Luca/AP |
Rita Levi-Montalcini: Made a breakthrough in understanding the nervous system
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) was the first Nobel Prize winner to reach the age of 100. Born in Italy, she talked her father into letting her study medicine. During the Jewish persecution and World War II, she had to leave her university and eventually flee to the countryside with her family, but she kept working on science, dissecting chick embryos. After the war, she moved to the US, where she discovered nervegrowth factor, which guides the development of the nervous system. She later became an Italian senator for life.
 |
| Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons |
Chien-Shiung Wu: Helped figure out how to enrich uranium
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) grew up in China, then moved to the US for her PhD studies. She was recruited by the Manhattan Project during World War II. During her interview for the top-secret work, she was able to guess what they were researching from an equation left on a blackboard. She helped figure out how to enrich uranium to fuel nuclear bombs. She was snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee for her work showing that nature isn't always symmetrical. (The Prize was awarded to two men who first floated the idea, even though she was the one who proved it experimentally.)
 |
| President Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Katherine Johnson.Evan Vucci/AP |
Katherine Johnson: Calculated Apollo 11's flight path to the moon
Katherine Johnson (1918- ) did the math that launched the manned Mercury mission into orbit around the Earth and calculated the flight path for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon. She also helped write the first textbook about space. As a child, she loved to count — and from that springboard she graduated college at 18 and spent three decades at NASA.
 |
| Dave Pickoff/AP |
Rosalyn Yalow: Developed a technique that tests for diabetes, birth defects, and more
Rosalyn Yalow (1921-2011) spent most of her life in New YorkCity. She and her lab partner developed a technique for studying hormones that is still used today, called radioimmunoassay. They used the process to differentiate between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. It can also determine whether an unborn child has certain birth defects and to make sure the supplies in blood banks are clean.
 |
| Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg/Wikimedia Commons |
Esther Lederberg: Discovered that bacteria mutate randomly
Esther Lederberg (1922-2006) studied bacteria and viruses, helping her work by inventing a technique called replica plating, which made it easy to study certain bacterial colonies across a set of Petri dishes. The technique contributed to a Nobel Prize for her husband. From this work, she confirmed that bacteria mutate randomly, including acquiring resistance to particular antibiotics before ever having been exposed to that particular chemical. She also discovered a type of virus called a lambda phage, which lies low in a cell until the cell is going to die from other causes. It's now used as a model for human viruses like herpes and tumor viruses.
 |
| NASA Science and Engineering Newsletter/Wikimedia Commons |
Annie Easley: Helped write the code behind the Centaur rocket system
Annie Easley (1933-2011) planned to become a nurse, but was inspired to work for the precursor of NASA when she read an article about local twin sisters who worked there as human computers. She became first a mathematician and then a computer programmer, working particularly on the code for the Centaur rocket launcher and navigation system. She also tutored inner-city children (she had previously helped neighbors learn to pass Jim Crowvoting tests) and worked on energy issues.
 |
| A recent science fair presentation about Patricia Bath.Clotee Allochuku/Flickr |
Patricia Bath: Invented a device that removes cataracts
Patricia Bath (1942- ) invented a device for removing cataracts that fog people's vision. She also created the field of community ophthamology, which combines public health outreach with ophthamology. The strategy reduces rates of preventable vision loss, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods.The organization she founded, the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, provides vitamin A eye drops to newborns.
 |
| May-Britt Moser talked with Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at the Nobel banquet in 2014.TT News Agency, Claudio Bresciani/AP |
May-Britt Moser: Discovered how our brains make mental maps
May-Britt Moser (1963- ) helped discover grid cells, special nerve cells in the brain that create mental maps of places we've been — work that won the Nobel Prize. As a psychologist in Norway, she began studying the brains of rats, particularly as they completed mazes. She has also studied how the brain filters out unnecessary information to focus on particular issues and what happens when your brain thinks you're somewhere you aren't.
 |
| Francois Mori/AP |
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi: Helped determine the cause of AIDS
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi (1947- ) is a French scientist who helped discover HIV and determine that the virus causes AIDS. She had been studying retroviruses and was asked to join a team looking to determine whether AIDS was caused by one (it is, as she determined in two weeks). She then researched how the immune system responds to HIV and AIDS in hopes of finding a cure. Although she retired last year, she is still outspoken in encouraging the world to rally against AIDS and fight the stigma surrounding the disease.
And so many more ...
 |
| Reprinted with permission from Women in Science Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Ignotofsky. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. |
Tech Insider learned about all of these women from Rachel Ignotofsky's beautiful book, "Women in Science," which features full profiles of 50 scientists, plus tidbits on women in science more generally — not to mention gorgeous illustrations. She also compiled a great list ofresources for learning more about any of these scientists. The book is available for pre-order now; it will be released on July 26.
No comments