Lost Women of Science

Katharine Burr Blodgett arrives at The General Electric Company’s legendary research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, known as the “House of Magic.” She was just 20 years old when she entered a world built almost entirely for men. She joins as assistant to the brilliant and eccentric Irving Langmuir, a star chemist whose fundamental work in materials science and light bulbs would bring fame to him, and fortune to GE. 

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In the first of this five-part season we trace Katharine’s early years as she picks up European languages, her early scientific education at a progressive New York school for girls and then Bryn Mawr, a women’s college. She seems destined to end up working at the General Electric Company’s industrial research lab, but first she must prove herself at the University of Chicago, where, in the middle of World War I, she works ...

Introducing Layers of Brilliance, a six-part season that brings to life the story of a woman whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our everyday world – but whose legacy was long eclipsed by the famous scientist she worked with.

In 1918, at just twenty years old, Katharine Burr Blodgett arrived at the General Electric Company’s industrial research laboratory in Schenectady, New York – a place known as the Hous...

The Lost Women of Science by Melina Gerosa Bellows and Katie Hafner is an exciting book for young readers that brings to life the stories of ten remarkable women who changed the world of science but have been forgotten, or written out of history completely. Published by Penguin Random House’s Bright Matter imprint, the book transforms podcast episodes into a collection of inspiring biographies written for middle school rea...

In 2022, Susan Wojcicki was on top of the world—CEO of YouTube, parent to five kids, and running a few miles a day—when she received a shocking diagnosis: metastatic lung cancer. She soon resigned from YouTube and dedicated herself to fighting the disease and looking for answers. Why does the leading cause of cancer deaths receive less funding than some less lethal cancers? How could her lung cancer have progressed so far ...

In the 1910s, a relatively unknown cancer researcher named Maud Slye announced the first results of a study with the loftiest ambitions: to identify what causes cancer. To answer that question, the University of Chicago geneticist had bred tens of thousands of mice, enough to fill a three-story building. She carefully documented their ancestry and their morbidities and performed autopsies. And to Slye, her findings were cl...

Composer Peter Hugh White and librettist Clare Heath join host Rosie Millard in front of a London audience to explore why the story of chemist and x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and the race to uncover the structure of DNA makes such a compelling subject for an opera.

We hear excerpts that capture the contrasting personalities at the centre of this scientific drama — James Watson, the brash young researcher at the...

Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this market would be commercially viable. The company had hoped for a contraceptive pill – tamoxifen didn’t work for that – not a cancer treatment. In 1972 the higher-ups at ICI decided to cancel the research.‍

But Dora Richardson, the chemist who had originally synthesized the comp...

Aunque los ensayos clínicos iniciales del tamoxifeno como tratamiento del cáncer de mama fueron positivos, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) no creía que este mercado fuera comercialmente viable. La compañía esperaba una píldora anticonceptiva (el tamoxifeno no funcionó para eso), no un tratamiento contra el cáncer. En 1972, los superiores del ICI decidieron cancelar la investigación. ‍ Pero Dora Richardson, la química qu...

In the early 1960s, Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: tamoxifen. Although her name is on the original patent, her contributions have been lost to history.

In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Katie Couric introduces us to Dora’s story, and we show how Lost Women of Science producer Marcy Thompson tracked down Dora’s firsthand acc...

A principios de la década de los sesenta, la Dra. Dora Richardson sintetizó un compuesto químico que se convirtió en uno de los medicamentos más importantes para tratar el cáncer de mama: el tamoxifeno. Aunque su nombre aparece en la patente original, sus contribuciones fueron olvidadas por la historia. En el primer episodio de este podcast de dos partes, les contamos la historia de Dora y de cómo Marcy Thompson, productor...

In high school, Carla Brodley was almost shut out of computer science when boys took over all the computers. But she rediscovered her love for the field in college and has made it her mission to open doors for others. At Northeastern University, she founded the Center for Inclusive Computing, which now partners with more than 100 institutions to make computer science more accessible. As a result of Brodley’s push to introd...

Frances Glessner Lee discovered her true calling later in life. An heiress without formal schooling, she was in her fifties when she transformed her fascination with true crime and medicine into the foundation of a new field: forensic science. In the late 1920s, she drew inspiration from a family friend, a medical examiner involved in notorious cases— including the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti trial. For Glessner Lee, the p...

In this episode, Katie Hafner joins Alexis Pedrick and Mariel Carr to bring you The Mothers of Gynecology, part of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project produced by the Science History Institute that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine.

Of all wealthy countries, the United States is the most dangerous place to have a baby. T...

Born in 1850, Sarah Loguen found her calling as a child, when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage the leg of an injured person escaping slavery. When the Civil War ended and Reconstruction opened up opportunities for African Americans, Loguen became one of the first Black women to earn a medical license. But quickly, racist Jim Crow laws prevailed. At the urging of family friend Frederick Douglass, Loguen mar...

Nacida en 1850, Sarah Loguen encontró su vocación cuando era niña, cuando ayudó a sus padres y a Harriet Tubman a vendar la pierna de una persona herida que escapaba de la esclavitud. Cuando terminó la Guerra Civil y la Reconstrucción abrió oportunidades para los afroamericanos, Loguen se convirtió en una de las primeras mujeres negras en obtener una licencia médica. Pero rápidamente, prevalecieron las leyes racistas de Ji...

Carolyn Beatrice Parker provenía de una familia de médicos y académicos y trabajó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial como física en el Proyecto Dayton, una parte fundamental del Proyecto Manhattan encargada de producir polonio. El polonio es un metal radiactivo que se utilizó en la producción de las primeras armas nucleares. Después de la guerra, Parker continuó su investigación y sus estudios en el Instituto Tecnológico de...

Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics and worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in the production of early nuclear weapons. After the war, Parker continued her research and her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but she died of leu...

Emma Unson Rotor se tomó un permiso de su trabajo como profesora de matemáticas en Filipinas para estudiar física en la Universidad Johns Hopkins en 1941. Sus planes se vieron interrumpidos cuando el Ejército Imperial Japonés invadió y ocupó Filipinas. Incapaz de acceder a la beca que le había brindado el gobierno filipino para asistir a Johns Hopkins, se unió a la División de Desarrollo de Artillería del Buró Nacional de ...