The Nobel Prize is named after Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite.
He died in 1896, in his will he established the most famous of all international
awards the Nobel Prizes. Annual awards are given for peace, literature, and
discoveries in physics, chemistry, and physiology. Economics was added in 1968.
Candidates in science from all over the world are nominated for the Nobel Prize. Since 1896 only nine women have won and five women have played a critical role in winning the prize for someone else. Out of over three hundred men who have won, that means that only 3% of women have won.
A topless woman is on the reverse side of the Nobel Prize
medal. Is it to show how men treat women, as less than equal? Or is it to show
that behind every great man, there is a women who showed him how to it?
This web page takes a small look it some of the women who have won the Nobel Prize in science. Click on their name to see a detail of their lives and what they found in science to put their name into a male award club. To see more about the Nobel Prize you can go to the web page.
This web page was designed by Chuck Hammond
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November 7, 1867 - July 4, 1934
Nobel Prize - 1903 Physics
Marie was born in Poland on Noverber 7, 1867. She was the fifth child of teachers Valdislav and Bronislawa Sklodowski.
Both parents were intensely patritic and believed teachers were the highest anyone could go in life. Named Marya Sklodowskawas
at birth, she changed her name Marya to Marie as a student in France.
Marie took her education to heart and became one of the best students.
She was first in all subjects at the age of fifteen. Having little money for college she made a pact with her sister Bronya. She would work
and put her though college and after Bronya graduated she would work and put Marie though college. After eight years of no schooling Marie
finally enrolled in the University of Paris. She loved science like others loved life itself. After two years of living poor, she won a Polish
fellowship in 1893. The same year she earned a master's degree in physics and was first in her class. In 1895 she earned a master's degree in
mathematics and was second in her class.
In 1896, Herny Becquerel discovered radioactivity in uranium. Marie saw that this discoverly (ionization) could also be used to detect radioactivity
in other substances. Within days she discovered thorium, which produces the same powerful effects as uranium. Soon after she discovered that the strength
of radiation depends on only the amount of uranium or thorium in the compounds. Normally, it was believed that different compounds of the same element share few
common chemical or physical properties. She found that radioactivity does not depend on how atoms are arranged into molecules, but instead, how radioactivity originates
within the atoms themselves.
November 7, 1878 - October 27, 1968
Lise was born at a time when the education of women ended when they were fourteen. It was a man's world and men thought that women should only learn enough to make them a good wife and mother.
Lise didn't believe in that view and had no interest in marriage. Her father knowing her views, hired a private tutor for her. This tutor would get her ready for the university entrance examination. This was after spending three years earning a teaching cerificate to teach French.
Lise had a huge hill to climb for the exam. She needed eight years of schooling to get her ready for the entrance exam. She was already twenty-one years old.
Lise completed those eight years in only two years and of fourteen women who took the exam, only four passed and Meitner was one of them. In 1905, Meitner earned her Physics Doctorate. Becoming only the second women to earn a Physics Doctorate in Vienna.
Meitner was fascinated with Curies' discovery of radium in 1898 and due to this she began investigating radioactivity. This dicovery prove to scientists that atoms of one element can break apart and become atoms of another element. But, could one cut an atom in two?
It was impossible said the male scientists. Meitner thought it could be done and wrote two papers about it in two years.
From 1907 to 1909, having to use a basement laboratory due to being a woman, only a female cleaning woman was allowed upstairs with the men scientists. She worked on radiation experiments. In 1919 Meitner was the director of a center for radiation physics in Berlin.
She stayed there for twenty years. Due to the the up coming Nazi persecution, she fled Germany illegally and went into exile.
At the age of sixty, Meitner discovered the nucleus of an atom could be split and release enormous amounts of energy. For all of her hard work, the fact that she initiated and explained the fission experiment. Her male German partner received the Nobel prize.
March 23, 1882 - April 14, 1935
Emmy was born, Amalie Emmy Noether in Erlangen Germany. The first child of four, she was born into a weathy family of Jewish wholesale merchants. Her father Max, was the first of three generations of mathematiciians.
Emmy upbringing was mathematical to say the least.
Being born a woman, Emmy had an up hill battle for the right education. Schooling for woman was household management, elementary pedagogy,
child care, religious instruction, and aesthetic subjects. Germany had virtually no proper schooling for women until the middle of the 1920's.
Being smarter than the laws of the state, Emmy spent most of her life life waiting for German law to catch up to her.
Emmy did something that every one of her family couldn't believe, she spent two years of her life auditing classes at the University of Erlangen.
At the time she could not receive any credit or a degree from the University. But, what she could do was sit in on lectures, if she got permission from the professor.
But most of the professor's believed that women would destroy the true meaning of the lectures and they would not admit women. Luckly for Emmy, she had family friends as
professor's and they agreed to allow her to sit in.
In 1913 or 1914, Emmy and her father Max went to Gottingen to visit David Hilbert and Felix Klein. Two great mathematicians at the time. Hilbert and Klein were working with Albert Einstien on his general theory of relativity.
At the time Einstein had underestimated the difficulty of the mathematics involved. Emmy was an authority on invariants and they needed her help. Over the next few years Max received many letters from Hilbert and Klein. They
prasied her work and felt that if it was not for Emmy their work would have no meaning.
August 15, 1896 - October 26, 1957
Nobel Prize 1947
Born Gerty Theresa Radnitz in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her father was chemist and business-man
who managed beet-sugar refineries. Cori was tutored at home until she was ten. Gerty's uncle,
a pediatrics professor, encouraged her over and over to attend medical school.
In her first year of college she fell in love with biochemistry. This was a field that could help mankind and
biochemistry was a new science that applied chemistry to biological problems. She also met her future husband,
Carl Cori. In 1922, Carl got a job at the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo,
New York. Carl moved and six months later Gerty joined him.
While in Buffalo, Gerty and Carl wrote fifty papers together. Gerty herself wrote eleven articles. In 1938 and 1939 Gerty took
their research toward enzymology. Between these years Gerty had ten papers published, of these Carl was the major writer of two and
one was from another colleague. Gerty was the major contributor of seven.
During this time the Coris discovered phosphorylase, an enzyme that breaks glycogen down into the Cori ester. Phosphorylase tears
apart the bonds that holds glycogen's sugar molecules together. This was the first time carbohydrate metabolism was studied at the
molecular level.
Also in 1939, the Coris made glycogen in a test tube. This was never done before and was thought impossible. Over the next few
years they discovered enzyme after enzyme. By 1947, for study of enzymes the Coris lab was the world's vivacious. Many of the enzymes
that we know today is because Gerty and Carl Cori discovered them in their lab.
September 12, 1897 - March 17, 1956
Nobel Prize - 1935 Chemistry
Does the name ring a bell in your head? It should Irene's mother is the Nobel Prize winning scientist Marie Curie.
Irene's mother disliked the public school system, so she organized a private cooperative school. Six professors join in
and each professor would teach the class for one week. Here the children learned physical chemistry, mathematics,
experimental physics, literature, art, natural sciences, English, and German.
By the time she was eighteen, she was teaching doctors of World War I how to read an x-ray on the front line.
She spent most of her life learning all she could about x-rays. In the 1930's, Irene and her husband Fred read
an article by German Physicist Walther Bothe. Bothe had tested beryllium, a lightweight steely metal, by bombarding it with
particles from radioactive polonium. He found that rays emerged with such power that they could penetrate lead that was
two centimeters think.
The Joliot-Curies read this article and decided to do some testing of their own. They placed different elements in the path of the new rays.
They bombarded paraffin wax with the rays. The wax ejected energetic protons at a tenth of the speed of light. The Joliot-Curies believed that
they had found gamma rays, the energetic cousins of X rays that move at the speed of light. This was wrong but, they did not see the error.
Another scientist, James Chadwick, repeated their experiment with some polonium and by doing so he discovered the neutron.
This error did not stop the Joliot-Curies. They put polonium next to a thin sheet of aluminum foil, expecting hydrogen nuclei to pop out.
Instead, neutrons and positrons emerged. They had found artificial radioactivity.
GENETICIST
Nobel Prize - Medicine or Physiology 1983
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she was the youngest of three daughters of Dr. Thomas Herny McClintock and Sara Handy.
Her parents had wanted a boy and her parents treated her like she was a boy. She learned how to fight, play baseball,
and enjoyed playing with the boys more than playing with the girls. She had a hard time dealing with her mother, but,
her father was always on her side. Her mother felt that too much schooling would make her daughters unmarriageable and
she tried to convince they from going to college. Her father had other plans and supported Barabara's plans to attend
Cornell University.
After College she found that College was easy compared to getting a research job. Genetics was wide open and Barbara was
born and raised with Genetics. Cornell geneticists worked with corn but did not spend any time looking at the chromosomes
of the corn, they looked only at the maize. Barbara worked night and day to track the chromosome of the corn. She found that genes for physical traits are carried
on the chromosomes.
Barbara spent the next 20 years mapping the structure of DNA. No one had done this before, she was the first.
Nobel Prize - Physics 1963
Maria was born Maria Gertrud Kate Goeppert in Upper Silesia, Germany. The only child of Friedrich and Maria
Wolff Goeppert. Her father was professor of pediatrics at the University of Gottingen. She was very close to her father,
for he was a scientist.
Since Gottingen had two large schools, they only prepared boys for the University. Mayer attended a private school with suffragettes. The school shut down due to the World War I inflation .
So Mayer took her university examination a year early and passed. She studied mathematics and became good friends with David Hilbert, Emmy Noether's mentor. Hilbert gave public lectures every saturday
and invited Maria to attend. Here she got her first glimpse of atomic physics.
When she entered college she was going to study mathematics but, when she got a taste of quantum physics she was hooked.
A couple of years later she met and fell in love with Joseph Mayer. When Maria was procrastinating with her thesis, Joe took
her to visit one of Albert Einstein's closest friends, Paul Ehrenfest, a physicist. Maria talked with Ehrenfest about her thesis,
until her grew tired of her talking and shut her in a room until she had an out line for her thesis.
Maria had calculated the probability that an electron orbiting an atom's nucleus would emit two photons or quantum units of light as it
jumps to an orbit closer to the nucleus. Eugene P. Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize with Maria, called her thesis "a masterpiece of
clarity and concreteness". Maria solution was confirmed by lasers in the 1960's.
Nobel Prize - Medicine or Physiology 1986
Rita was born Rita Levi in Turin, Italy. Her father was a engineer, authoritarian, and Victorian paterfamilias who owned an ice factory.
Rita was fearful of her father like one is fearful of the dark. She never dreamed of disobeying his orders.
Her father believed that a womans place is in the home and he forbided his girls to get any education for college.
When Rita was twenty she told her father that she did not what to be a housewife, she wanted to be a doctor. With the
help of her mother, they talked her father into allowing her to go to college. He hired a tutor to get her ready for the University.
He told her at this point "If this is really what you want, then I won't stand in your way, even if I'm very doubtful about your choice".
Soon after, Adam Levi suffered a massive heart attack and died.
Rita completed medical school in 1936 and after two years of specializing in neurology and psychiatry, she still did not know what she
wanted to do. Research or clinical practice? Mussolini made the decision for her. In 1938,II Duce issued the "Manifesto per la difesa della razza"-
"The Manifesto for the Defense of the Race". The Prime Minister banned marriage between Jews and Non-Jews and prohibited Jews from
pursuing academic or professional careers.
Rita assembled a secret homemade lab and started to work with chick embryos. She studied the nervous system as it the embryos developed.
As the war's nightly bombing raids forced her to the basement shelters, she kept ahold of her mircoscope and slides. Soon the war forced her
to the country, here she begged farmers for eggs "for my babies". She buried herself into the development of nerve cells. This laid the
ground work for her discovery of growth factors, molecules that influence the development of immature cells. Today there is many growth factors that help
cells talk. Levi-Montalcini nerve growth factor may play a vital role in certain degenerative diseases of the central nervous system like
Alzheimer's disease.
Nobel Prize - Chemistry 1964
Dorothy was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1910, at the time it was a British colony. Her father supervised Egyptian schools and the ancient
monuments for the British government. During a vacation to England, World War I broke out. Her father fearing an attack back at the colonies,
left his family with in England and returned alone. Soon after, Dorothys mother left her daughters and returned to the colonies to be with her
husband. They did not see their daughters for four years.
Dorothy loved chemisty at a very young age and she enjoyed doing the impossible. She made a series of billiant breahthough's. She deciphered
the atomic structure of one medically important substances after another. Each time the next one was more complicated than the last one.
She uncovered the structure of penicillin during World War II, and she solved the structure of vitamin B12, the cure for pernicious anemia,
the structure of insulin, and the lifeline for diabetics.
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© Copyright Sharon Bertsch McGrayne "Nobel Prize Women in Science, Their Lives, Struggles and Momentous Discoveries"
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Marie Sklodowska Curie
PHYSICIST and RADIOCHEMIST
Nobel Prize - 1911 Chemistry
An Electroscope.
To give you a simple look at how Marie detected radioactive substances, cut and fold a piece of gum foil. Tape the folded end to a pencil in a glass to avoid drafts. Rub a
metal pen or a balloon on wool to create static electricity and bring the pen or balloon close to one side of the foil. The strips separate and, as the electricity leaks away,
the foil will close.
Lise Meitner
NUCLEAR PHYSICIST
Emmy Noether
MATHEMATICIAN
Gerty Radnitz Cori
BIOCHEMIST
Irene Joliot-Curie
RADIOCHEMIST
Barbara McClintock
June 16, 1902 - September 2, 1992
Maria Goeppert Mayer
June 28, 1906 - February 20, 1972
MATHEMATICAL PHYSICIST
Rita Levi-Montalcini
April 22, 1909 -
NEUROEMBRYOLOGIST
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
May 12, 1910 -
PHYSICAL CHEMIST