Lost Women of Science

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in the sun, and found that it heated up much faster than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet. Several years later, a British scientist named John Tyndall cond...

In 1930s India, Kamala Baghvat dreamed of working alongside the world's greatest scientific minds. But she was repeatedly told “no” when she tried to work in the then male dominated field. Inspired by Gandhi, she used nonviolent protest to pry her way into some of India’s top laboratories. She became the first Indian woman to earn a PhD in biochemistry, and eventually, the first woman to lead India's Royal Institu...

Sharla Boehm earned a teaching degree from UCLA before channeling her talent for math into computer programming. While working at the Rand Corporation, she built a ground-breaking simulation, originally conceived to strengthen military communications during the Cold War. The simulation –and her work– would ultimately lay the foundation for the modern internet. 

“The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal…there was a human arm in the refrigerator,” said J. Peter Willard about his aunt, Mary Louisa Willard. Otherwise, he insisted, she was “very normal.” But Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1920s, left a strong impression on most people, to say the least. Her hometown of State College, P...

“La única vez que vi algo que me pareció anormal… había un brazo humano en el refrigerador”, dijo J. Peter Willard sobre su tía, Mary Louisa Willard. Por lo demás, insistió, era “muy normal.” Pero Mary Louisa Willard, profesora de química en la Universidad Estatal de Pensilvania a finales de la década de 1920, dejó una fuerte impresión en la mayoría de las personas. Su ciudad natal, State College (Pen...

Elizabeth Roboz Einstein’s life was shaped by the forces of history. She studied bioorganic chemistry at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and then left her home country of Hungary during World War II, before German troops invaded — practically a miracle for a single, Jewish woman. In the U.S., she blazed a trail in the brand new field of neurochemistry; her seminal research into multiple sclerosis (MS) unlocked key...

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, host Carol Sutton Lewis speaks with science writer Hanne Strager about her biography of Inge Lehmann, the pioneering Danish seismologist who discovered that Earth has a solid inner core.. 

Largely unknown outside scientific circles, Lehmann fundamentally transformed our understanding of what lies at the heart of our planet. She did this in 1936 by identifying anomalies in ...

This bonus episode is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Science History Institute.

Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world. 

But the way we talk about Agnes’s life and work often fall...

How is a legacy preserved, and how is someone forgotten? Determined to make a final name for himself, Irving Langmuir ventures into science that even he might classify as pathological wishful thinking, while Katharine continues her work as the diligent experimenter. But her contributions faded from both the company’s and the public’s memory. We go to visit her, to say good-bye – and we look at the wisdom she impar...

The 1930s prove to be an exceptional decade for research at The General Electric Company. Katharine Burr Blodgett works closely alongside her boss, Irving Langmuir who, in 1932, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In 1938, Katharine’s meticulous experiments with thin film coatings on solid surfaces lead to her most important breakthrough: non-reflecting glass. The General Electric Company’s public relations machine kick...

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall th...

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...

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, s...

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 Lost Women of Science by Melina Gerosa Bellows and Katie Hafneris 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 readers...

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 f...

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 clear: vuln...