Credit Bypasses the Woman Scientist
Do women get credit for their discoveries in science? In talking with Joan Steitz about her early life, I heard that Marianne Grunberg-Manago had been the only woman who had lectured to any of her classes at Harvard University during her PhD work. Grunberg-Manago, she said, discovered polynucleotide phosphorylase. That enzyme enabled early molecular biologists to synthesize simple-sequence RNA molecules they used as test messenger RNAs to decipher the genetic code. And, Joan Steitz said, Severo Ochoa, the lab chief, won the Nobel Prize in 1959 for Grunberg-Manago's work.
Indeed, the pdf of his Nobel Lecture on December 11, 1959 (which you can see if you click on the color-highlighted text above), begins the section on his work, entitled Polynucleotide Phosphorylase, with these words, "In 1955 we isolated a bacterial enzyme capable of catalyzing the synthesis of high molecular weight polyribonucleotides from nucleoside diphosphates with release of orthophosphate 1,2." The references 1 and 2 that he cited have Marianne Grunberg-Manago as first author. The first one is by Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa alone. She is the other half of "we" who isolated this enzyme. But her name is not mentioned in the lecture, nor in the speech in which he thanked the nameless students and associates who had worked in his laboratory. The woman is invisible.
I am sorry to say this is not the first case of an invisible woman I've run across in my desultory and more-or-less random exploration of the history of science.
I wonder, do any of you know of women who've made major contributions to (or made) important discoveries that got attributed to men alone? I'd love to hear about cases you know.
Another classic case of overlooked female scientist was Esther Zimmer Lederberg. She was truly one of the founding mothers of molecular biology and made many original discoveries including the lambda bacteriophage, fertility factor F and replica plating. Unfortunately credit for every one of these contributions almost always goes to her first husband Joshua Lederberg. A wonderful memorial web site can be found at www.estherlederberg.com
Here is a book that someone just recommended to me:Women of Science: Righting the Record, 1993, edited by Gabriele Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, MD. Still in print and available on Amazon.com.
One woman featured in the essays in this book is Ethel Brown Harvey, a marine biologist/embryologist who worked at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. She apparently discovered induction of a new animal by a specific tissue using Hydra; later Hans Spemann got the credit for this discovery using a different organism some 20 years later.
I really like reading about Rosalind Franklin, who was not only a woman but also Jewish at a time when that meant discrimination in England. Brenda Maddox wrote a good, readable biography of her not too long ago that I would recommend. I love to tell my students, male and female, about biographies of successful women in science they should read. it provides them with more role models. Small Science Woman
Thanks, Helen! I can Google these names and will enjoy finding out more about them. But I need to know the name to Google it. I do, sometimes, cruise around on Susan Forsburg's Women in Biology site looking at lists of women scientists. I wish I felt it was easy to know how much women have contributed in science, but it's almost subversive to think so.
cheers,
Laura
Maud Menten, of Michaelis-Menten kinetics, has a biography in Wikipedia, as does Katharine Blodgett, of Langmuir-Blodgett fame. They're both pretty easy to google. I heard recently about Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars as a grad student and seems to be matter-of-fact about not winning the Nobel Prize. Wikipedia, on pulsars, says: In 1974, Antony Hewish became the first astronomer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Considerable controversy is associated with the fact that Professor Hewish was awarded the prize while Bell, who made the initial discovery while she was his Ph.D student, was not. And of course there's Rosalyn Franklin and her DNA.
Jennifer Doudna was the first person to get catalytic RNA to make more RNA instead of break RNA apart. 9 out of 10 people would say it was...Gerald Joyce. But his paper came out later the same year.
Great examples, Phoebe! I've always wondered about Menten.
Your Annie CY Chang example reminds me of Daisy Dussoix, who worked on restriction and modification in Werner Arber's lab. Arber received a lot of kudos for the uses of the range of enzymes he found, but Daisy disappeared.
Also, TH Morgan argued for years against sex chromosomes while his former student at Bryn Mawr, Nettie Stevens demonstrated them very clearly. Yet Morgan gets the credit because his lab (I believe it was his wife) isolated the white-eyed fly and figured out its genetics. Stevens used cytological evidence for a mixed size pair of chromosomes where the male always had the small one of the set, in a whole range of insects.
cheers,
Laura
Hi, Laura.
I've always thought it's a shame that we don't remember Annie C. Y. Chang more explicitly when we discuss recombinant plasmids used for cloning. There's a reason those plasmids are called "pACYC..." so there's some herstory. http://jb.asm.org/cgi/reprint/134/3/1141
I would also like to know the story of how Maude Menten contributed to the Michaelis-Menten equation. does anyone know?
But my biggest story of an overlooked scientist is about a pro-feminist, anti-racist Jewish man, not a woman. Jon Beckwith's lab was the first to "isolate" functional genes (the lac operon), yet he was likely overlooked for a Nobel Prize after giving his Lily Young Investigator Award prize money to the Black Panther Defense Fund. (1969 ISOLATION OF PURE LAC OPERON DNA by SHAPIRO J, MACHATTI.L, ERON L, IHLER G, IPPEN K, BECKWITH J; NATURE 224 Pages: 768-&)
