For the first time since 1963, a woman has won a Nobel Prize in physics – only the third time in the history of the coveted award. Donna Strickland, who was awarded for her fundamental research in laser physics, shares the prize with two men. Unbelievable but true: the Canadian only received a Wikipedia entry 90 minutes after the winners were announced.
This neglect by the online encyclopedia can itself be rightly described as symptomatic. It is only very gradually that the Nobel committees have felt comfortable recognizing women for their outstanding achievements. After all, this year’s chemistry prize also went to a woman – the American Frances Arnold received it “for the directed evolution of enzymes”.
SubscribeIf the Nobel Grail Guardians in Stockholm and Oslo had not viewed the potential laureates through their patriarchal lens, many more women would certainly have received the prize that remains the most important and best known in the world. Here we present seven women who deserve a Nobel Prize – a selection from a much larger field of worthy candidates.
At the end of 1938, the German physicist Otto Hahn wrote a letter to his colleague Lise Meitner asking for help. He had conducted experiments with uranium 239 together with his assistant Fritz Strassmann and sought advice from the physicist who was born in Vienna in 1878. Meitner, who as a Jew had hastily fled from Germany to Sweden in 1938, promptly provided the physical explanation for Hahn’s experiments: she recognized that he had actually split the uranium nucleus. Her role in the discovery of nuclear fission was so important that she is still called the “mother of the atomic bomb.”
But in 1945, when the Royal Swedish Academy awarded Otto Hahn the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for 1944) for the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner came away empty-handed – as a woman and as a Jew, she fell through the cracks twice. She was probably also struck by the fact that Hahn, a friend of hers, did not mention her achievements at all. After the award ceremony, she wrote to a friend: “Hahn absolutely deserves the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, there is no doubt about that. But I believe that Frisch [Meitners Neffe] and I have contributed something not insignificant to the elucidation of the uranium fission process – how it comes about and the fact that it is related to such a major energy development was something that was far from Hahn’s mind.
Rosalind Franklin had no opportunity to mourn missing out on the Nobel Prize: she died in 1958, four years prematurely. The British biophysicist had done groundbreaking research into the structure of DNA at King’s College in London, but others took the credit. The research duo James Watson and Francis Crick, together with Maurice Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for proving the double helix structure of DNA.
Wilkins had worked in the laboratory with Franklin, with whom he did not get along, and made their unpublished research results available to the other two researchers – without their knowledge. Although Franklin’s contribution was crucial, Watson and Crick only mentioned her briefly at the end of their article. In their speech of thanks during the award ceremony, they did not say a word about their colleague. Had Franklin been alive in 1962, she might have received the award. But that is unlikely: until then, only three women had won a Nobel Prize in a scientific category.
In 1967, while still a student, the young Northern Irish astrophysicist Joycelyn Bell Burnell came across an unusually regular radio signal while analyzing vast amounts of data at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge. She had just made one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century: the signal came from a pulsar, an extremely rapidly rotating neutron star.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this in 1974 – but it was not Bell Burnell who received it, but rather her supervisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, another astronomer involved. The Nobel Committee was heavily criticized for this wrong decision, because the young astrophysicist had not only made the actual discovery, but also rightly emphasized that the ominous signal was not background noise. Bell Burnell later attributed her negligence to the fact that she was still a doctoral student at the time. Theoretically, she could still get the Nobel Prize, but this is unlikely to happen.
What a sad fate: Clara Immerwahr was the first woman with a PhD in chemistry in Germany, a brilliant mind – and then became the wife of the intellectually underappreciated professor at the side of a dominant, famous man. She finally took her own life in 1915, in the middle of the war in which the poison gas developed by her husband killed thousands of people. Her suicide was not only an escape from an unfulfilling life, but even more a protest against her husband’s activities – the pacifist Immerwahr had publicly denounced them as a ‘perversion of science’.
Hardly anyone remembers the name of the German Jew from a good family who had to put aside all her scientific ambitions in favor of her husband and died before her 45th birthday. Fritz Haber, on the other hand, whose name is immortalized in the Haber-Bosch process for the production of fertilizers and explosives, made a career and received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918. By then he had already remarried.
Her first important contribution revolutionized cell biology: around 1900, the American geneticist Nettie Stevens introduced the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a scientific object of study. Since then, numerous insights have been gained using this experimental organism. After Stevens received her PhD in 1903, she discovered that the male (XY) and female (XX) chromosomes of fruit flies differ. For this fundamental discovery, Thomas Hunt Morgan and Edmund B. Wilson – their teachers at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania – received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1933.
In his obituary for Stevens, who died in 1912 at the age of 50, Morgan praised herself as a “specialist” while relegating her to a quasi-provider: “Modern cytological research involves a complexity of detail that only the specialist can only have. can perceive; “But Ms. Stevens made a significant contribution and her work will never be forgotten because her meticulous, detailed research results were integrated into the overall picture of the research topic.” Today their contribution is given more weight; without Stevens, Morgan and Wilson would hardly have received the Nobel Prize.
Esther Lederberg, born in the Bronx, New York in 1922 and raised in poverty, was a gifted molecular biologist. A professor in this field said of her that she was experimentally and methodologically “a genius in the laboratory.” In 1946, she married fellow professor Joshua Lederberg, with whom she worked at the University of Wisconsin. There she discovered a new virus, which she named Lambda, that can kill the bacteria Escherichia coli to contaminate. Analysis of this virus allowed for a better understanding of DNA.
Lederberg also developed his own method that made it easier to investigate mutations in bacteria and provided insight into how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. In 1958, her husband received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – together with George Beadle and Edward Tatum – for ‘his discoveries on genetic recombinations and the organization of genetic material in bacteria’. In fact, these discoveries were largely based on his wife’s work. However, he only mentioned it once in his acceptance speech. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966.
Simone de Beauvoir does not really fit into this series of women working in the natural sciences – the writer, feminist and ‘intellectual woman of the 20th century par excellence’ (‘Emma’) wrote ‘Le Deuxième Sexe’ (‘The Other Sex’) . “, 1949). a worldwide success. This major work by de Beauvoir – probably one of the most influential writings of the twentieth century – anticipated all the problems with which feminists still struggle today, long before the women’s movement gained momentum. And it should have won her the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But if you enter the search terms ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ and ‘Nobel Prize’ into Google, you will find – Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, but did not accept it. Rightly so, as some critics of the philosopher and writer believe: they believe that the pioneer of existentialism was largely inspired by De Beauvoir in his work, both philosophically and literary. De Beauvoir, who had an open relationship with Sartre for 51 years until his death, literary anticipated Sartre’s most important philosophical work “L’Être et le néant” (1943) with her novel “L’Invitée” (1943).
Source: Blick
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