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Lost Women of Science
Lost Women of Science
Lost Women of Science

For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at... more

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Episodes

Finding Dora Richardson: The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode Two

Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not... more

31 Oct 2024 · 36 minutes
Finding Dora Richardson - The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen

In the early 1960s, chemist Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs... more

24 Oct 2024 · 41 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Wonder Drug

While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S.... more

17 Oct 2024 · 36 minutes
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Five

It’s September 2024 and a group of American thalidomide survivors arrive in Washington D.C. to lobby the government for support.... more

10 Oct 2024 · 36 minutes
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Four

It’s the summer of 1962 and thalidomide has been off the market in Europe for months. But in the U.S.,... more

03 Oct 2024 · 33 minutes
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Three

It’s 1961 and Widukind Lenz, a German pediatrician, is going door to door in his efforts to find out what... more

26 Sep 2024 · 28 minutes
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Two

It’s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling... more

19 Sep 2024 · 30 minutes
The Devil in the Details - Chapter One

In this first chapter of a new five-part season we meet Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a physician and pharmacologist who... more

12 Sep 2024 · 29 minutes
Trailer: The Devil in the Details

In the 1950s, a German drug company developed a new sedative that was supposed to be 100% safe: thalidomide. So... more

29 Aug 2024 · 1 minute
In the 1920s, female writers pioneered the field of science writing for the mass market, making it their mission to help ordinary people understand everything from astronomy to venereal disease.

In the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase stories about science, many of the early science journalists were... more

22 Aug 2024 · 28 minutes
The Quest for Everything

By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of... more

08 Aug 2024 · 29 minutes
Dr. Jess Wade, Physicist and Wikipedia Maven

Dr. Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who’s made it her mission to write and update the... more

25 Jul 2024 · 15 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Exceptions

Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who made major discoveries in cancer genetics, became an unlikely activist in her early... more

11 Jul 2024 · 34 minutes
Chemistry Professor and Crime Buster: The Remarkable Life of Mary Louisa Willard

“The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal…there was a human arm in the refrigerator,” said... more

27 Jun 2024 · 30 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Wild By Design

When Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go... more

13 Jun 2024 · 26 minutes
Revisiting The Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 4 Breakfast in the Snow

In our final episode, we explore Dorothy Andersen’s legacy — what she left behind and how her work has lived... more

30 May 2024 · 42 minutes
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 3 The Case of the Missing Portrait

The missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization and who gets to... more

23 May 2024 · 29 minutes
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 2 The Matilda Effect

Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story.... more

16 May 2024 · 44 minutes
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement

A few important things have happened in the three years since we first aired The Pathologist in the Basement, the... more

09 May 2024 · 31 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Mathematics for Ladies

When poet Jessy Randall started researching the lives of female scientists she became angry. And we certainly can relate here... more

02 May 2024 · 26 minutes
Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language

“We were each put on earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist... more

25 Apr 2024 · 37 minutes
The Theoretical Physicist Who Worked With J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

Melba Phillips, who grew up on a farm in Indiana at the turn of the 20th century, was one of... more

18 Apr 2024 · 30 minutes
Best Of: The Highest of All Ceilings, Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and... more

11 Apr 2024 · 29 minutes
The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses

The year is 1897 and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India from England. Her... more

04 Apr 2024 · 30 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Mischievous Creatures

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered... more

28 Mar 2024 · 25 minutes
The Cognitive Scientist Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Language

While working at the Salk Institute in California, Ursula Bellugi discovered that sign language was made up of specific building... more

21 Mar 2024 · 16 minutes
Best Of: Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create

Katharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive... more

14 Mar 2024 · 23 minutes
How Lilian Bland Built Herself A Plane

“Hoots and derision, which did not worry me at all,” Lilian Bland wrote, describing her visit to an airshow in... more

07 Mar 2024 · 39 minutes
Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Black Angels

In the first of a new series we’re calling Lost Women of Science Conversations—and a fitting choice for Black History... more

29 Feb 2024 · 27 minutes
The Industrial Designer Behind the N95 Mask

Sara Little Turnbull was a force in the world of material science and industrial design. It’s safe to say most... more

15 Feb 2024 · 12 minutes
The Universe in Radio Vision

The Australian physicist Ruby Payne-Scott helped lay the groundwork for a whole new kind of astronomy: radio astronomy. By scanning... more

08 Feb 2024 · 28 minutes
From Our Inbox: Forgotten Electrical Engineer’s Work Paved the Way for Radar Technology

Sallie Pero Mead was first hired at AT&T in 1915 as a “computer”—a human calculator—shortly after completing her master’s degree... more

01 Feb 2024 · 15 minutes
Best of: A Complicated Woman, Leona Zacharias

Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a degree in biology, followed... more

25 Jan 2024 · 37 minutes
From Our Inbox: Vera Peters - The Doctor Who Helped Spare Women From Radical Mastectomy

Vera Peters began her career studying treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. She used techniques that had seen positive outcomes on Hodgkin’s... more

11 Jan 2024 · 12 minutes
Adventures of a Bone Hunter

Annie Montague Alexander was an adventurer, amateur paleontologist, and the founding benefactor of two venerated research collections at UC Berkeley... more

04 Jan 2024 · 32 minutes
Emma Unson Rotor: The Filipina Physicist Who Helped Develop a Top Secret Weapon

Emma Unson Rotor took leave from her job as a math teacher in the Philippines to study physics at Johns... more

14 Dec 2023 · 20 minutes
Flapper of the South Seas: A Young Margaret Mead Travels To The South Seas

In 1925, a young anthropologist named Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa to explore the impact of cultural factors on adolescent... more

07 Dec 2023 · 26 minutes
The Devastating Logic of Christine Ladd-Franklin

Christine Ladd-Franklin is best known for her theory of the evolution of color vision, but her research spanned math, symbolic... more

30 Nov 2023 · 27 minutes
Best Of: The Feminist Test We Keep Failing

There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test. Named for the science... more

23 Nov 2023 · 21 minutes
From Our Inbox: Mária Telkes, The Biophysicist Who Harnessed Solar Power

Today we tell the story of Mária Telkes, one of the developers of solar thermal storage systems, who was so... more

16 Nov 2023 · 11 minutes
The Woman Who Demonstrated the Greenhouse Effect

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home... more

09 Nov 2023 · 31 minutes
Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, America's First Black Female Public Health Pioneer

Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born in 1831, was the first African American female medical doctor in the U.S. and is... more

02 Nov 2023 · 34 minutes
Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment

In the 1960s, a Black home economist at Howard University recruited kids for an experimental preschool program. All were Black... more

26 Oct 2023 · 36 minutes
A Microbe Hunter in Oregon Fights the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Harriet Jane Lawrence was one of the first female pathologists in the U.S. In the early 1900s she worked in... more

19 Oct 2023 · 11 minutes
The English Lit Major Who Cracked Nazi Codes

Known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a master codebreaker who played a pivotal role in both... more

12 Oct 2023 · 35 minutes
Who was Christine Essenberg? A remarkable zoologist almost lost to history

Christine Essenberg had an unusual life and an unusual career trajectory. She was married, then divorced, and earned her PhD... more

05 Oct 2023 · 29 minutes
Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, an ex-slave’s daughter, becomes a celebrated doctor

Born in 1850, Sarah Loguen found her calling as a child, when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage... more

28 Sep 2023 · 31 minutes
A Flair for Efficiency: The Woman Who Redesigned the American Kitchen

In the late 1920s, Lillian Gilbreth enlisted her children — she had 11— in an experiment: bake a strawberry shortcake... more

21 Sep 2023 · 34 minutes
Part 2: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?

We continue the story of Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, the first person to understand that the atom had been split.... more

14 Sep 2023 · 26 minutes
Part 1: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?

New translations of hundreds of letters explain, in a two-part episode of Lost Women of Science, why physicist Lise Meitner... more

07 Sep 2023 · 26 minutes
They Remembered the Lost Women of the Manhattan Project So That We Wouldn't Forget

In the early 1990s, two physicists, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, began looking into a question that had aroused their... more

31 Aug 2023 · 11 minutes
Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create

Katharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive... more

24 Aug 2023 · 21 minutes
The Story of the Real Lilli Hornig, the Only Female Scientist Named in the Film Oppenheimer

Lilli Hornig was only 23 years old when she arrived at Los Alamos to contribute to the development of an... more

17 Aug 2023 · 18 minutes
No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work

Naomi Livesay, born in 1916 in the northern reaches of Montana, aspired to one career: mathematics. She earned a bachelor’s... more

03 Aug 2023 · 15 minutes
Blood, Sweat, and Fears: The Story of Floy Agnes Lee, the Young Woman Who Analyzed the Blood of Manhattan Project Scientists

Floy Agnes Lee was a hematologist at Los Alamos. Recruited to the Manhattan Project while still  a student at University... more

27 Jul 2023 · 14 minutes
One of Many Lost Women of the Manhattan Project: Leona Woods Marshall Libby

Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only woman hired onto Enrico Fermi's team at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University... more

20 Jul 2023 · 11 minutes
Women of the Manhattan Project: Trailer

During World War II, thousands of scientists and engineers worked on the Manhattan project, the top secret push to develop... more

13 Jul 2023 · 1 minute
Alessandra Giliani: 14th-century Italian anatomist

Welcome to the first in our From Our Inbox series, in which we give listeners a taste of the mail... more

06 Jul 2023 · 7 minutes
The Highest of All Ceilings: Astronomer Cecilia Payne

Cecilia Payne was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and... more

22 Jun 2023 · 29 minutes
What's in a Street Name? Everything.

In 1992, a Dutch doctor named Josh von Soer Clemm von Hohenberg wrote a letter to Henning Voscherau, the mayor... more

01 Jun 2023 · 19 minutes
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 5

Marie Nyswander died in 1986. She’d achieved almost everything she set out to, but she wanted more: even better medications... more

04 May 2023 · 35 minutes
Reminder about next episode and an update

A reminder that our next episode is scheduled to come out next Thursday! In the meantime, we’ve hit a slight snag—Katie... more

27 Apr 2023 ·
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 4

Marie Nyswander and her team at Rockefeller unveil their findings at last: methadone has utterly transformed their patients. They’re going... more

20 Apr 2023 · 38 minutes
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 3

After years of disappointing results in her quest to treat heroin addiction, Marie Nyswander was more than ready to try... more

13 Apr 2023 · 34 minutes
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 2

In the early 1950s, Marie Nyswander was ready to move on from addiction. She set up a private practice and... more

06 Apr 2023 · 27 minutes
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 1

In 1946, Marie Nyswander, a recent medical school graduate, joined the U.S. Public Health Service looking for adventure abroad. Instead,... more

30 Mar 2023 · 28 minutes
The Doctor and the Fix: Trailer

In 1965, a team of doctors at Rockefeller University announced what sounded like a miracle—they’d found a treatment for heroin... more

16 Mar 2023 · 1 minute
Of Chestnuts, Cherry Trees, and Mushroom Catsup: Flora Patterson, the Woman who Kept Devastating Blights from U.S. Shores

In 1909, the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees to Washington, D.C. But the iconic... more

26 Jan 2023 · 24 minutes
A Complicated Woman: Leona Zacharias

Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a degree in biology, followed... more

12 Jan 2023 · 35 minutes
Introducing Lost Women of Science Shorts: Trailer

Each season of Lost Women of Science tells the story of one remarkable female scientist, but hundreds more remain overlooked.... more

05 Jan 2023 · 1 minute
Lost Women of Science
A Complicated Woman: Leona Zacharias
Lost Women of Science
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Description

Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a degree in biology, followed by a... more