Vote for the "most celebrated female scientist of all time"

L'Oréal's For Women in Science Program is sponsoring a new UK website where you can vote for the most influential woman scientist. The candidates span more than a thousand years* and a wide range of scientific specialties:

• Mary Anning (1799-1847), paleontologist and "the greatest fossilist the world ever knew"
  
• Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), mathematician, electrical engineer and suffragette
  
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943- ), astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars
  
• Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), first woman to graduate from medical school
• Linda Buck (1947-), biologist who helped figure out how the human olfactory (smell) system works
• Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), astronomer who studied the spectra of the stars
  
• Rachel Carson (1907-1964), biologist who campaigned for the environment
  
• Gerty Cori (1896-1957), biochemist who studied energy metabolism in the human body
  
• Marie Curie (1867-1934), physicist and chemist who studied radioactivity
  
• Ann Dowling, professor of mechanical engineering who works on "boys stuff - aeroplanes, submarines and oil exploration"
• Gertrude Elion (1918-1999), innovative pharmacologist who produced new drugs for leukemia, malaria, and herpes
  
• Dian Fossey (1932-1985), expert of the great apes in Rwanda, who was murdered because by poachers
  
• Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), X-ray crystallographer whose work was important in determining the structure of DNA
• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917), pioneering physician and campaigner for women's rights
• Sophie Germain (1776-1831), mathematician who was forced to take on the identity of a man
  
• Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1977), physicist who studied the structure of the atomic nucleus
  
• Jane Goodall (1934- ), expert on chimpanzee behavior and advocate for wildlife conservation
  
• Alice Hamilton (1969-1970), doctor and social reformer who founded the science of occupational medicine
• Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer who discovered comets and stars, first woman (along with Mary Somerville) awarded membership in the Royal Society
• Grace Hopper (1906-1992), pioneer computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the US Navy
  
• Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), one of the main founders of protein crystallography
  
• Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415), mathematician and astronomer who was killed by a mob, who "felt threatened by her scholarship and scientific knowledge"
  
• Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956), daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie who discovered artificially created radioactivity
  
• Hedy Lamarr (1913-2000), actress and inventor of "frequency hopping" method that is used in modern communication technology
  
• Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 - ), biologist who first isolated nerve grown factor
• Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971), crystallographer and first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
• Ada, Countess Lovelace (1915-1852), founder of scientific computing
• Barbara McClintock (1902-1992), geneticist who discovered "jumping genes"
  
• Anne McLaren (1927-2007), geneticist who "paved the way for development of in vitro fertilisation"
• Lise Meitner (1878-1968), physicist who described nuclear fission
• Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), pioneering astronomer
  
• Christiane Nusslein Volhard (1942 - ), developmental biologist and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Biology
• Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), nurse and noted statistician, who was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society
  
• Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), astronomer who showed the sun is mainly composed of hydrogen
  
• Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), respected mycologist and children's book author
  
• Emily Roebling (1844-1903), "silent engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge"
  
• Nancy Rothwell (1957- ), neuroscientist who studies brain injury
  
• Mary Somerville (1780-1872), "the first popular science writer"
  
• Rosalyn Yalow (1921-), "medical physicist" who "won a Nobel prize for her work developing the radioimmunoassay technique"
  

I think it's hard to compare the Nobel Prize winners (Buck, Cori, Curie, Elion, Goeppert Mayer, Hodgkin, Joliet-Curie, Levi-Montalcini, McClintock, Nusslein Volhard, Yalow), to the 19th and 20th century women who were social activists as well as scientists. You can make your choice at www.womeninscience.co.uk**

* But mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries.

** I can't actually get the "Vote Now" button to work. Maybe the site doesn't like Macs? or maybe you have to be in the UK? I don't know.

(via The Telegraph)
Image: "Miss Mary Anning, the celebrated geologist of Lyme Regis"
Tags: women in science

Added to the Blogroll

I've added a bunch of blogs to the blogroll over on the right-hand column in the past week or so, due to some wild surfing and links in the last scientiae carnival.

Not added to the blogroll, but a neat blog nonetheless, is Endless Forms Most Beautiful, the blog for Elissa Hoffman's AP Biology class at Appleton East High School in Appleton, WI. She and her students will be blogging about biology, but she is also looking for guest bloggers who "have an area of expertise, research- or career-wise, that pertains to biology" and are willing to discuss the post (in the comments) with the students.

Data Not Shown is a new science blog by UK postdoc Karen James (aka nunatak). James is also one half of the bloggers at The HMS Beagle Project, with the following mission:

We aim to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators. The voyage will apply the techniques of 21st century science to Darwin's journey, inspiring a new generation of scientists and promoting the public understanding of evolution and wider science.

Rebecca Hunt works at "Augustana College as a Paleontology Research Assistant and fossil preprator" and blogs at Dinochick Blog.

All in the Mind "life and beyond through the mind's eye", an ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting Company) Radio National Blog by science/health journalist Natasha Mitchell

Make No Bones is the blog of paleontology graduate student Sally Pine.

Bio/Rocks is the blog of Sarah, a graduate student in vertebrate paleontology at UC Berkeley.

Amanda, another student paleontologist blogs at Self-Designed Student

a geocentric view by "mollishka" a graduate student in astronomy (even if she isn't interested in the whole "women in science" discussion)

Theorema Egregium is Brazilian physicist post grad Christine Dantas' "place for personal studies on Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy"

I’m an astrophysicist turned into a software engineer turned into a condensed matter physicist. What I really would like to be: a mathematician, a philosopher, and a writer. But above everything, I am a mother.

Quantum Diaries followed "physicists from around the world as they live the World Year of Physics" - which was 2005. No, they haven't been updated since then, but they do provide a glimpse into the work of some international physicists.

• Sophie Trincaz-Duvoid (IN2P3, in French)
• Maaike Limper (NIKHEF, in Dutch and English)
• Debbie Harris (Fermilab, in English)
• Caolionn O'Connell (SLAC, in English)
• Ursula Bassler (IN2P3, in English)
• Sandra Leone (INFN, in Italian)
• Rosa Alba (INFN, in Italian)
• Claire Gray (Wits University, Jefferson Lab, in English)
• Sarah Phillips (Jefferson Lab, in English)
  

Qulog 2.0 is "Florine Meijer's weblog on science poems, mathematical crocheting and whatever else springs to mind." (in Dutch and English).

Astronomer and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville faculty member Dr. Pamela L. Gay blogs at Star Stryder.

Amanda blogs at A Chemist's Laboratory Notebook

Jes Sherman, aka Ψ*Ψ , blogs at Carbon-Based Curiosities. From her profile:

Ψ*Ψ is the one who inevitably does most of the device posts, not entirely by choice. She’s currently a synthetiker in one lab and an analytical chemist in another and also a ninja. Most of her time is spent making colorful aromatic things, cursing at heterocycles and trying to graduate with her sanity (mostly) intact.

Taitauwai is a Malaysian blogger who writes about Chemistry & Cooking

LouScientist blogs at A scientist's life. The description:

Diary of an ex-postdoctoral scientist, who used to work tirelessly in a lab somewhere. (I might be back in a lab sometime soon though)

Zero Divides is written by "a 24 year old female undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Mathematics"

Unbalanced Reaction is the "Experiences of a female science graduate student (soon-to-be Ph.D.) struggling to reach equilibrium"

ScienceMama is molecular biologist/geneticist trying to balance being a postdoc and a mom. She blogs at Mother of All Scientists.

Cherish Maunders is an electrical engineering graduate student who blogs at the excellently-named Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat

Dr. Medusa is a science faculty member at a US research university who blogs about diversity in science, math, and engineering.

Young Stellar Objects is the blog of Hannah, an astronomer.

Finally, geologist and pie-lover Green Gabro now blogs at Science Blogs under her own name, Maria Brumm.

Tags: women in scienceblogs

Added to the Blogroll

Women blogging about science who have been recently added to the blog roll:

• The Afro Scientress is a science student in Australia. I especially like this post.
• Kate Seip, PhD student in neuroscience and former blogger at the Anterior Commissure ("The science of sex and mating, gender and attraction, pregnancy and parental behavior.") now blogs at Pure Pedantry
• Julia Heathcote's blog is the The Ethical Paleontologist, which focuses on earth sciences and paleontology.
• Talia Page blogs at Talking Science Abroad ("we're a new non-profit that's dedicated to bringing the latest discoveries, innovations, controversies and cures out of the lab and to the public. Our first stop: India.")
• Anne Marie Helmenstine, PhD, writes about chemistry for About.com at Anne Marie's Chemistry Blog, written for a non-technical audience.
• Kim Hannula is a "forty-something tenure geology professor at a public college in the Rockies" who blogs at "All of My Faults Are Stress Related"

Tags: women in science, blogs

One of the smelliest jobs in science?

I know I said "family obligations" last week, and so I did: family visited from out of town. One nice thing about vacationing from home was being a tourist in my own back yard. One day we took a trip to the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. Pit 91 was being excavated in what has to rank among the dirtiest jobs in science: painstakingly excavating bones from gooey smelly asphalt. The afternoon we were there, all the excavators were women.
Anyone who claims that women won't do dirty work is just clueless. Here's a video showing the kind of excavation going on there (note: it's set to The Who, so you might want to turn the volume down if you're pretending to do something productive!).

Painstaking, to be sure, but it must be thrilling to make a find. If you are at least 16 years old and in the Los Angeles area, you can volunteer to either work on the Pit 91 excavation or in the science laboratory, no previous experience required! Check out the Page Museum/tar pit web site for details.

And here I am next to a giant sloth which I hope isn't going to end up my blogging mascot . . .

Tags: La Brea tar pits, paleontology, Los Angeles

Free Fictional Female Scientists

For those of you out there who like science fiction, here are a couple of free stories that feature female scientists:

The first is the eco-thriller The Rhesus Factor from Australian science fiction writer Sonny Whitelaw:

Marine engineer Kristin Baker advises the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu on environmentally sustainable development projects. After meeting US Navy Commander Nicholas Page, she discovers her unwitting role in the Exodus Project, a scheme to protect the West's interests in the face of global warming. But what neither know is that a stealth virus has quietly become a global pandemic; one that health authorities cannot stop. For this virus hasn't emerged from an African jungle or a remote Chinese province, it's come from within our own DNA.

Whitelaw studied geography and anthropology as an undergraduate, and almost completed her Master's thesis on "sea level change and global warming", but gave up science to write fiction. You can download Rhesus Factor from Double Dragon Books or SonnyWhitelaw.com.

The June Issue of Hub Magazine includes the story "More than a Butterfly"by January Mortimer (pdf version, Mobi Pocket version, MS Reader version). As the SF UK Review sums it up: "It’s a story of genetic manipulation, fashion, butterflies and one woman’s passion for her work. There are some nice touches that help to flesh out the main character, showing her to be a complex person while hinting at the complexity of the subject without getting bogged down in technicalities."

If TV's more your thing, you might want to check out Dinosapian. The star is teenage Lauren, a counselor at her paleontologist mother's Dinosaur Explorer camp. The twist? You guessed it - real dinosaurs in the wilds of Canada. According to the review at SciFi.com, most of the supporting characters are pretty cardboard-like.

Beyond Lauren and Eno [the dinosaur], the writers do their best to people their world in the short half-hour. That doesn't leave much time to develop the secondary characters. The conceited best friend, the hunky counselor, the distracted mom, the bratty brother and sister and the rest come off as caricatures initially. Luckily, there's a season to get to know these characters.

Overall it got a positive review:

It's great to see a very accessible kids' show that works on so many levels for so many age ranges, and the special effects are just great. The younger kids will enjoy the dinosaurs, and the older kids will identify with Lauren's journey.

It definitely sounds better than some of the Saturday kids shows I've stumbled on. It's shown on Saturdays on Discovery Kids (BBC Kids in Canada).

Tags: Sonny Whitelaw, January Mortimer, Dinosapien

Women in Science Friday Link Roundup

Articles and posts from the past week I didn't get around to blogging:

Harvard physicist Lisa Randall "enters the Seed Salon to discuss shape, magic tricks, and the definition of "see" with architect/designer" Chuck Hoberman.

Voice of America broadcast a program on the "Mercury 13." You can download the MP3 or read the transcript.

Afarensis links to a video interview with Dr. Louise Leakey on the Archaeology Channel about human evolution.

So Sioux Me explains how the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters is "a fantastic way to empower girls." Who says girls don't enjoy blowing stuff up?

Cybernoon.com of Bombay, India writes about three young women "from very economically disadvantaged backgrounds" who are pursuing engineering degrees, supported by the L'Oréal India Scholarship for Young Women in Science.

These are all the first ever engineers in their respective families! And they hope others follow in their footsteps. As [Scholarship recipient] Devika wisely says, “I have learnt from my own life that you can make it even without the finances, provided you develop your talents and have a goal you are aspiring toward. Parents must support their girls to study further, and not worry about where the money will come from because where there is a will, there is a way.”

Voice of America profiles two of Burkina Faso's professional women: government mediator Amina Ouedraogo, and Alice Tiendrebeogo, a founder and vice president of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). They are exceptions in a country where only one quarter of the girls complete primary school, and 80% never learn to read.

[Tiendrebeogo] recounts an experience at a summer science camp for teenage girls, which featured evening talks with women with successful careers in science.

"At the beginning of the camp, we asked the girls what they wanted to be when they grew up, and all their ideas were of traditional female professions, like primary school teachers or typists," she recalled. "By the end of the camp, the girls were more forward-thinking, Tiendrebeogo says. They said they wanted to be engineers, university professors, doctors.

Cary Tennis tackles the issue of the "two body problem" at Salon.com when a graduate student in analytical chemistry writes that his girlfriend is heading to Berkeley, while he is still finishing up grad school and just received an offer from a lab in Toronto. Tennis doesn't think it's so complicated:

Whose career has priority right now? I think hers does, since she has already accepted a position. Hers also does for her personally, since she is trying to reverse a gender-based legacy. That can be touchy for couples. Duh. Plus, this whole reversing a gender-based legacy thing is not foolproof: We find in reversing the mistakes of our parents that we make equal and opposite mistakes. But since she's made the first move, yours is, for now, the subordinate position. So deal with it.

The Boston Globe reports on the dilemma of Sophie Currier, who needs to pass National Board of Medical Examiners by August to start her medical residence. The problem? She is breastfeeding her 7-month-old daughter, but is unable to get extra break time during the 9 hour exam to express milk, since that is not considered a disability covered by the American with Disabilities Act. She is also not allowed to use the breast pump inside the testing room, and the whole situation is complicated by the fact that Currier is already being allowed extra time to take the exam for a disability.

Tara Bishop writes about "Dr. Mom: The Truth about the Mommy Track" for MIT Alumni News.

I wasn't completely comfortable quitting my job, so I told people that I was "taking a break." In fact, I was embarrassed to be wasting an undergraduate degree from MIT in chemical engineering and a medical degree from Cornell. Before my son was born, I read the "Opt-Out Revolution" in the New York Times and saw a Sixty Minutes segment about highly educated and successful women who gave up their work to be home with their kids. At the time, I vowed never to sacrifice my career.

Five years later, I found myself doing exactly that. The first few weeks at home were a series of adjustments. I went to the playground and tried to become friends with other stay-at-home moms. I beamed as my son played his mini guitar better than all the other kids in his music class. I loved that I once again had time to read novels.

But I was also very, very bored.

Bishop ultimately decided she made the right choice. She is planning to go back to work when her sons are in preschool.

IT Pro reports on the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology seminar last week.

Dr Wendy Faulkner of the University of Edinburgh told attendees that women workers are turned away from the sector because of poor work-life balance and a male dominated culture. "The sector is more comfortable to men than women," she said.

The LaCrosse (Wisconsin) Tribune takes a look at the some myths in the battle of the sexes, including "Women aren’t as good at science and math".

“(Women) don’t have good role models,” Sudhakaran said. “I see girls when I teach general education courses who are so talented, so smart, and I always ask them why they didn’t go for science and engineering because they’re so good at it. They say, �my parents told me that science is not for girls.’

Articles about summer science programs for girls:

NASA Ames Research Center in California is collaborating with the Girl Scouts of the San Francisco Bay Area for the "Launch into Technology Program." Fifty high school-aged Girl Scouts will have two week-long programs, one on robotics, and one on aeronautics. ABC7 News has a video segment on the program.

The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota has a program after which "seventh-grade girls from throughout Minnesota will have built and flown their own radio-controlled model airplanes." The airplanes are built completely from scratch, based on information the girls learn in classes on plastics, electricity, machining, computer-aided design, assembly, Web design, chemistry, physics, engineering and robotics. There are four one-week sessions of the STEPS program in July.

The Bridgwater (UK) Mercury writes about the WISE (Women Into Science and Engineering) project at Robert Blake Science College that "gave girls from four Somerset schools the chance to release their inner Einsteins." The girls each constructed a "fully functioning perfume emitting, aromatherapy fan," which seem like a bizarre choice of engineering projects to me. Hopefully the girls enjoyed it.

Tags: women in science, women in engineering, Lisa Randall, Mercury 13, Louise Leakey, Mythbusters, India Scholarship for Young Women in Science, Alice Tiendrebeogo, two-body problem, mommy track, summer camp, science for girls

Women with Significant Contributions to Science

The San Diego Supercomputer Center presents biographies of 16 women who had "significant contributions" to science. The women they included:

• Mary Anning (1799-1847): "Finder of Fossils"

• Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852: "Analyst, Metaphysician, Founder of Scientific Computing"

• Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941): "Theorist of Star Spectra"

• May Edward Chinn (1896-1960): "Physician", member of the Society of Surgical Oncolgy and master of Public Health.

• Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1858-1947): "First Woman Ichthyologist of Any Accomplishment"

• Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958), "Pioneeer Molecular Biologist", who helped determine the structure of DNA

• Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972): "Mother of Modern Management"

• Sophie Germain (1776-1831): "Revolutionary Mathematician"

• Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972): "Nobelist in Physics", developer of the nuclear shell model of atomic nuclei.

• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994): "A Founder of Protein Crystallography"

• Helen Sawyer Hogg (1905-1993): "A Gift of Stars", researcher on variable stars in globular clusters, and writer of a popular astronomy column in the Toronto Star

• Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992): "Pioneer Computer Scientist"

• Lise Meitner (1878-1968): "A Battle for Ultimate Truth", who produced the first theoretical explanation of the fission process.

• Emmy Noether (1882-1935): "Creative Mathematical Genius"

• Rózsa Péter (1905-1977): "Founder of Recursive Function Theory"

• Roger Arliner Young (1899-1964): "Lifelong Struggle of a Zoologist", first African-American woman to receive a zoology doctorate