Women Scientists of the 20th-century

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958)

Born in London and educated in Cambridge University, she was a crystallographer whose X-ray photographs of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that carries inherited information in “coded” form provided vital clues to the chemical’s structure. Her major contribution was acknowledged by American James Watson and Englishman Francis Crick when they published their work in 1953 on the DNA model as a double helix which brought forward the science of molecular biology. Her work was excluded from a share in the 1958 Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins in 1962, due to her untimely death of cancer.   

Jane Goodall (1934)

Dame Jane Goodall, DBE, is an English zoologist and anthropologist, known as the mother of ethnology. She is famous for her 45-year study of chimpanzees in Tanzania, and for founding the Jane Goodall Institute. She went to Africa at the age of 23 and became secretary to anthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya but left temporarily towards a doctorate at Cambridge University. Goodall married a Dutch photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick. The couple established the Gombe Stream Research Centre.   

Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956)

She was a French physicist who together with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, won the 1935 Nobel Prize of chemistry for their work in radioactive isotopes leading to nuclear fission. The daughter of the Marie and Pierre Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie worked as laboratory assistant of her famous mother at the Radium Institute. She married Joliot, a graduate of Paris Institute for Industrial Physics and Chemistry. Both took the surname Joliot-Curie. The couple achieved high posts in atomic energy research in Paris in the 1940s. However, their commitment to communism after the Second World War put them out of favor with the French government.   

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)

She brought new understanding of how the genetic information passed on from parents to offspring can change living things. McClintock was born in Connecticut but raised in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Cornell University, receiving her Ph.D. in 1927. McClintock showed how changes in plants are related to changes in chromosomes and did work on mutations caused by X rays. Subsequently, she discovered genes that control other genes. In the early 1950s, she presented reports about controlling genes, and received the Kimber Genetics Award and National Medal of Science. In 1981, she received more awards, and two years later, won the Nobel Prize in medicine.   

Lisa Meitner (1878-1968)

She was the first to discover that the atoms could be split, releasing tremendous energy.  She was born in Vienna, received a doctor’s degree in physics. In 1907 she began work with Otto Hahn in Berlin. Meitner and Hahn discovered protactinium. She became Germany’s first woman full physics professor. When the Nazis took control of Austria in 1938, she fled to Sweden. In 1939, Meitner and Frisch published their paper on nuclear fission. In August 1945 US drops atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagazaki, and World War II ends. In 1947 Meitner officially retires but continues research in Sweden. Meitner stops work and moves to England in 1960. Six years later, Meitner received the Enrico Fermi Award.