Eleven Women Who Changed What Science Could Show

Merian watched insects through their full life cycles in the field, in an age when many naturalists still believed insects sprang from spontaneous generation. Her 1705 book on the insects of Suriname paired each insect with the plant it fed on across sixty engraved plates, an early picture of what ecology would later study.

Du Chatelet argued against the physics of her day that the quantity conserved in a moving body goes with mass times velocity squared, an early statement of kinetic energy. In 1738 she became the first woman to have a paper published by the French Academy of Sciences, and her French translation of Newton's Principia was published after her death in 1749.

Herschel began as her brother William's observing and recording assistant and independently discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797. The Royal Astronomical Society gave her its Gold Medal in 1828 for a catalogue of star clusters and nebulae, an honor no other woman received from it for another 168 years.

In 1843 Lovelace added notes to her translation of an article on Babbage's Analytical Engine, three times longer than the article itself, including a step by step method to compute Bernoulli numbers. She also argued the machine could work on any symbols that follow rules, not only numbers, though the engine was never built in her lifetime.

Nightingale analyzed the army's own mortality records and showed that preventable disease in unsanitary hospitals killed far more soldiers than combat wounds. She designed the polar area diagram so officials could see that at a glance, and became the first woman elected a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, Meitner worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch that uranium nuclei had split, and named the process nuclear fission. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to her longtime collaborator Otto Hahn alone, and she was nominated 49 times for a Nobel Prize without receiving one.

In 1952 Hopper wrote the first compiler, arguing when most programmers wrote machine instructions directly that computers could be made to understand something closer to English. That work led to FLOW-MATIC and then COBOL, and she retired from the United States Navy as a rear admiral after more than four decades of service.

Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring drew on published toxicology and field studies to show DDT accumulating up the food chain and thinning the eggshells of birds of prey. Chemical manufacturers contested it, but a 1963 President's Science Advisory Committee review upheld her central findings.

Wu designed and ran the 1956 experiment that confirmed the prediction by Lee and Yang that conservation of parity fails in the weak nuclear interaction. The 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Lee and Yang for the theory alone, and she received the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Franklin used X-ray diffraction to produce Photograph 51 in 1952, a sharp image of the B form of DNA that made its helical structure visible. In January 1953 the photograph was shown to James Watson without her knowledge or permission, and her unpublished data reached Francis Crick soon after. Their model credited her only in a footnote, and she died in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for the structure was awarded.

Saruhashi published tables in 1955 for calculating dissolved carbon dioxide in seawater from temperature, pH and salinity, a tool oceanographers still use. With Yasuo Miyake she measured caesium-137 and strontium-90 in Pacific seawater and found far higher fallout in the western Pacific than the Atlantic, evidence that supported a ban on above ground nuclear tests.