Women Reinventing Science - Part 1

Eds Note: We’re delighted to share with our readers excerpts from The Reinvention of Science by Bernard Jones, Vicent Martínez and Virginia Trimble, which describes women scientists who helped reinvent science. To learn about the book, watch a video summary.

In honor of "Nobel Prize Week", below is text excerpted from the chapter about a few women deserving of the Nobel Prize: Marietta Blau, Rosalind Franklin, Lise Meitner, and Jocelyn Bell.

By Vicent J. Martínez, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universitat de València

Marietta Blau (1894–1970)

The Anschluss4 in 1938 affected the career of the brilliant Jewish woman physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) and contributed to her exclusion from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission that was awarded to her collaborator Otto Hahn (1879–1968). A similar series of events happened to Marietta Blau (1894–1970), an Austrian Jewish physicist who also had to leave her country in 1938, for the same reason. She probably deserved to share the Nobel Prize for the use of photographic emulsions for particle detection (cosmic rays, radioactivity and accelerators) — a prize that later went to the British physicist Cecil Powell (1903–1969).

“Could have” means alive when the topic they had worked on was recognized. This excludes both Henry Moseley killed at Gallipoli in 1915 and Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) who imaged the X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline DNA that led Watson and Crick to the double helix structure but died of cancer well before the 1962 Chemistry Nobel went to James D. Watson, Francis H.C. Crick (1916–2004) and Maurice H.F. Wilkins (1916–2004) who had been Franklin’s boss.

“Should have” means that the person made a major, perhaps irreplaceable, contribution to an invention or discovery that did earn a Nobel Prize for someone else. Many physicists would put near the tops of their lists Lise Meitner, and perhaps Fritz Strassmann or Otto Robert Frisch (1904–1979) for the discovery of nuclear fission. That 1944 Chemistry prize went exclusively to her contemporary, Berlin chemist Otto Hahn, who remained in Berlin when she necessarily left, because her Austrian citizenship was no longer protecting her from German actions against Jews after Anschluss in 1938.

For many astronomers, the list is topped by S. Jocelyn Bell. A near tie for top ranking is Vera Cooper Rubin (1918–2016) for her role in the discovery of dark matter, a topic which has not yet been distinguished by a Nobel. Vera sadly died in 2016 and so is no longer in the “could have” category, while Jocelyn (b. in 1943) is  still alive and well.

On a later occasion, Jocelyn Bell said “I think there are still a number of inbuilt structural disadvantages for women”, as Coroniti and Williams remarked in their chapter about Jocelyn Bell in Out of the Shadows (2006, edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, CUP).

Prof. Dame S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell has had a rather peripatetic career and has a much longer WIKI than Hewish. For some years after their marriage, she followed her husband, Martin, back and forth across Britain, picking up research and teaching jobs where she could. Thus, she was a gamma-ray astronomer for a while, then an X-ray astronomer, working particularly with the British satellite Ariel V and participating in the discovery of X-ray pulsating and bursting sources.

Later Bell Burnell became an infrared astronomer and project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell submillimeter telescope in Hawaii (1986–1990), then on to a professorship at the Open University in Milton Keynes. She was Dean of Sciences at the University of  Bath (2001–2004) and in 2018 was appointed Chancellor of the University  of Dundee in Scotland.

Bell-Burnell (b. 1943)

Meanwhile, as it were, Jocelyn has received prizes and lectureships associated with the names of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Beatrice Tinsley, William Herschel, Karl Jansky, Grote Reber, John Bolton (three of the founders of radio astronomy), Magellan and Gordon. She has served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society (2002–2004) and was the first female president of the Institute of Physics (2008– 2010) and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2014–2016). She was “promoted” to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007. Her various accolades mention not only pulsars but also her extended contributions to education and the promotion of the status of women in science. Bell was awarded the Honoris Causa doctorate by the University of Valencia in 2017.

Jocelyn Bell was awarded a Breakthrough prize in 2018 ($3 million US) for the discovery of pulsars. We agree with Brian Keating, who has said that this Breakthrough award “rights past injustices and properly honors the pioneering and pivotal contributions of a scientist who opened a new window on the cosmos.”