scientist women :

Ladies, take a bow

In the history of science, there has not been much notice paid to the contributions of the "weaker" sex. Some like Madame Curie have gained fame in her lifetime although it was initially in association with Pierre Curie, her husband. Others have also rightfully won their Nobel prizes. However, by and large, we do not hear so much about them in comparison to scientists like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei, invariably males.

Lise Meitner
In the 1930's, Professor Meitner worked with Otto Hann and Fritzh Strassman, on bombardment of uranium with neutrons, then a revolutionary technique. Leaving Germany because of the Nazi persecution of Jewish intellectuals, she continued her research with her nephew, Otto Frisch, in Sweden. After her former collaborators discovered that a radioactive form of barium was produced when neutrons hit uranium nuclei, she set out in a paper, the explanation for the event. Using the idea of a cell splitting into two from biology, she interepted the result as the splitting of the uranium nucleus into barium, or fission. Her calculations showed that enermous amounts of energy can be released when the process is controlled. This explanation helped to convince the scientific community that indeed an atomic bomb might be feasible. She won the Enrico Fermi Award with Otto Hann and Fritz Strassman for contributions to atomics energy.

Maria Mayer
Physicists have known for a long that electrons move at different energy levels around the nucleus of an atom. In the early 1950's, a German-born American female physicist at the University of Chicago, shocked the scientific world by suggesting than protons and neutrons in the nucleus likewise existed in definite energy levels or shells. Each shell could only hold a definite number of protons and neutrons. Using her shell model of the nucleus, she predicted accurately that the most stable nuclei are those with completely filled shells. For this work, she shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Rosalyn Yalow
Radioactive iodine, radiaoactive phosphorus and radioactive nitrogen to diagnose and locate thyroid problems, brain tumours and lung activity respectively, are all not more than 50 years in the making. These medicals tools have since become crucial weapons in the battle againts diseases.

Dr.Yalow, an American physicist, started looking into medical uses of radiaoisotopes in the 1950s. This search led to the technique called radioactive immunoassay (RIA). RIAs help in the diagnosis and analysis of a wide range of medical conditions, including drug abuse, viral blood diseases and pituitary gland problems in young people.

For this contribution of RIA, Dr.Yalow, was bestowed the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1977. We are bringing the frontline for medical treatment further forward because of the contribution of this remarkable woman.

Other notable lady scientists are Admiral Grace Hopper (inventor of first computer complier and the COBOL language), Eve Curie (codiscoverer of artificial radioactive elements), Sarah Mather (underwater telescope), Chien-Shiung Wu (asymmetry in subatomic particles) and Hypatia (hydrometer and astrolable coinventor)

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