Women who should have won Nobels: Lise Meitner, Mary Maynard Daly, Jocelyn Bell Burnell скачать в хорошем качестве

Women who should have won Nobels: Lise Meitner, Mary Maynard Daly, Jocelyn Bell Burnell

In 1938 Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner and her lab partner Otto Hahn discovered how to split atoms, releasing incredible amounts of energy. Meitner was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany, but lost all of her academic positions thanks to Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. Meitner had fled the country but continued to collaborate with Hahn remotely. Hahn and his assistant conducted an experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons - barium was produced. He wrote to Meitner, “Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation.” Meitner realised that the uranium was split into smaller elements, producing energy as it lost mass. She wrote the first theoretical explanation of the fission process, published in Nature in 1939. Indeed, Meitner was the one who told Hahn to test the radium in more detail, and that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Yet when the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded in 1944, only Hahn was acknowledged, even though Meitner was nominated 49 times in her lifetime - including several times before the nuclear fission discovery. Hahn had the gall to depict her as only his assistant. When the Nobel Committee’s decision-making process was made public 50 years later, Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Max Perutz wrote that “the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner’s written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin.” In addition to being the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry, Marie Maynard Daly did pioneering work in researching the connection between heart health and cholesterol, as well as cellular biochemistry, protein synthesis, how compounds human bodies produce impact our digestion, the impact of cigarette smoke on health, and how muscles absorb creatine. She developed methods to separate tissues’ nuclei to examine protein composition, used radiolabeling to monitor their metabolism and did foundational work in studying proteins found in cell nuclei. As one of the earliest researchers looking at the relationships between diet and cardiac health, Daly was the first to establish that high blood pressure was a warning sign of atherosclerosis, and to identify a connection between cholesterol and clogged arteries. She showed how high cholesterol led to clogged arteries and that high blood pressure accelerated this, finding that both cholesterol and sugar intake were connected to high blood pressure. Given that cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, ending almost 18 million lives each year, it cannot be overstated how important Daly’s work was and remains. She was also active in supporting women of colour pursing education and careers in the sciences. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsar as a doctoral student in the Cambridge University radio astronomy lab in the late 1960s, identifying its unusual signal as an object of significance. Yet she was excluded from the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, which went instead to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle. Many scientists argued at the time and since that she should have been recognised as well, including Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold, who completed the puzzle that Bell’s find was indeed a spinning, pulsing neutron star. Bell Burnell herself took a humble approach - presumably to avoid making waves that could make it more difficult for her future career - saying in 1977, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." That argument simply doesn’t hold water, however, given that plenty of men were students when they did their Nobel-winning work - just among the physicists, that includes Lawrence Bragg (1915), Bob Schrieffer (1972), Brian Josephson (1973), Russell Hulse (1993), Douglas Osheroff (1996), Frank Wilczek (2004), and Konstantin Novoselov (2010). Hewish also took lead authorship of the paper announcing Bell Burnell’s discovery - she was placed second among five authors. More videos on women in STEM:    • Women in STEM