After Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo died in 1947, the Trujillo regime did its best to erase her legacy, while at the same time appropriating her ideas. Yet those who had known and loved Evangelina in San Pedro de Macorís, where she spent most of her life, kept her memory alive, sharing stories of her kindness and her work. After the assassination of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1961, Dominicans across the country started to recover her story. Laura Gómez follows in Evangelina?s footsteps across Santo Domingo, the city where Evangelina studied medicine, and visits the memorials that are testament to Evangelina?s role in the fight for women's health and reproductive rights, a struggle that continues in the Dominican Republic to this day.

Tras la muerte de Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo en 1947, el régimen de Trujillo hizo todo lo posible no solo por borrar su legado, sino también por apropiarse de sus ideas. Sin embargo, quienes conocieron y quisieron a Evangelina en San Pedro de Macorís mantuvieron su memoria viva, compartiendo historias sobre su bondad y su trabajo. Tras el asesinato de Rafael Leónidas Trujillo en 1961, los dominicanos de todo el país empezaron a recuperar su historia. Laura Gómez sigue los pasos de Evangelina por Santo Domingo, la ciudad donde estudió medicina, y visita los monumentos que son testigo de su papel en la lucha por la salud y los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres, una lucha que continúa en los derechos reproductivos hasta el día de hoy.

En 1930, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo toma el poder en la República Dominicana e instaura un reino de terror. El controvertido trabajo de Evangelina la puso en conflicto con el nuevo régimen. Sus ideas radicales sobre la sanidad y los derechos de la mujer, junto con su negativa a doblegarse ante Trujillo, la dejaron cada vez más aislada. Cada vez más gente se distanciaba de ella. Con los años, su salud mental se deterioró y perdió todo lo que apreciaba.

In 1930, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo seized power in the Dominican Republic and introduced a reign of terror. Evangelina?s controversial work brought her into conflict with the new regime. Her radical ideas about healthcare and women's rights, along with her refusal to kowtow to Trujillo, left her increasingly isolated. More and more people distanced themselves from her. Over the years, her mental health deteriorated, and she lost everything she held dear.

Evangelina recibió una calurosa bienvenida de regreso a su país, y se pone a trabajar de inmediato, introduciendo sus nuevas ideas sobre la atención en salud a mujeres y niños. Montó su propio consultorio médico, y convenció a algunos campesinos para que distribuyesen leche gratis a niños pobres. Pero su proselitismo alrededor de los métodos anticonceptivos y su trabajo con prostitutas incomodaron hasta a sus amigas. Sus ideas eran muy avanzadas para la época, y aquellos que la rodeaban no supieron valorarlas.

Evangelina got a warm welcome on her return from Paris and went straight to work, introducing her new ideas about healthcare for women and children. She set up a new medical practice, and managed to get farmers to provide free milk for poor infants. But her proselytizing about contraception and her work with prostitutes made even her friends uncomfortable. Her ideas were ahead of her time, and those around her failed to keep up.  

Devastated by the death of her mentor following childbirth, Evangelina decided to devote her life to women?s health. It took a decade to raise the money to go to Paris, which was then the mecca of medical training, but she never gave up. At the age of 42 she boarded a steamship to France. Amidst the post-war scene of France's Roaring Twenties, she studied obstetrics and gynecology with leading specialists and started to absorb modern ideas about public health. Her goal: to return home and revolutionize Dominican healthcare.

Devastada por la muerte de su mentora, ocurrida tras un parto, Evangelina decidió dedicar su vida a la salud de la mujer. Tardó una década en reunir el dinero para ir a París, que en ese entonces era la meca de la formación médica. Nunca se rindió. A los 42 años se embarcó en un buque de vapor rumbo a Francia, país que experimentaba un boom durante los años de la posguerra. Estudió obstetricia y ginecología con los mejores especialistas y empezó a asimilar las ideas modernas sobre salud pública. Su objetivo: volver a su país y revolucionar la sanidad dominicana.

A finales de la década de 1890, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo era una de las tantas niñas pobres luchando por sobrevivir en la ciudad de San Pedro de Macorís, en la República Dominicana. Su vida dio un giro extraordinario cuando dos hermanos, poetas y escritores, llegaron de la capital. Notaron algo especial en la joven, quien vivía cerca. Con su ayuda, Evangelina fue a la escuela y, contra todo pronóstico, decidió ser médica. Fue la primera mujer en estudiar en una escuela de medicina en la República Dominicana y, cuando se graduó en 1911, se convirtió en la primera doctora del país. Pero justo cuando estaba a punto de empezar su carrera, una tragedia inesperada cambiaría el curso de su vida.

In the late 1890s, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, known as Evangelina, was just another poor girl trying to survive in the provincial town of San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic. Her life took an extraordinary turn when two brothers, both poets and writers, arrived from the capital. They noticed something special about the young girl who lived nearby. With their help, Evangelina went to school and, against overwhelming odds, decided to become a doctor. She was the first woman to enter medical school in the Dominican Republic, and when she graduated in 1911 she became the country's first female doctor. But just as she was about to start her career an unexpected tragedy changed the course of her life.

En la década de 1880, una pequeña niña Afro-Dominicana pasaba sus días vendiendo dulces en las calles de San Pedro de Macorís, una bulliciosa ciudad portuaria en la República Dominicana. Abandonada por sus padres, quienes la tuvieron por fuera del matrimonio, su futuro parecía gris: en esta sociedad profundamente estratificada, pocas personas lograban escapar de la vida en la que habían nacido.

Pero Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo tenía algo que hacía que los demás se fijaran en ella. Así ocurrió con dos hermanos influyentes, ambos poetas e intelectuales, quienes reconocieron en ella una mente brillante y un espíritu tenaz. Con el apoyo de ellos, Evangelina logró hacerse un camino inimaginable: convertirse en la primera mujer médica de su país.

En esta temporada de cinco capítulos seguiremos a Evangelina mientras estudia medicina, primero en su país natal y luego en París, donde aprende nuevas técnicas en el campo emergente de la ginecología y se encuentra con ideas radicales sobre la salud de las mujeres, ideas que espera transformen la sociedad de su país natal. 

Poco imaginaba que sus nuevos enfoques sobre la salud femenina eventualmente la llevarían a su trágica caída. Las contribuciones de Evangelina Rodríguez como reformadora y pionera de la salud pública serían prácticamente borradas por el dictador cuyo régimen la persigue hasta su muerte. Aquí reconstruimos su vida y su legado.

In the 1880s, a small Afro-Dominican girl spent her days selling sweets on the streets of San Pedro de Macorís, a bustling port town in the Dominican Republic. Born out of wedlock and abandoned by her parents, her horizons seemed narrow ? in this deeply stratified society, few people ever broke free from the life they were born into.

But Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo had something that made people take notice. Two influential brothers, both poets and intellectuals, recognized a brilliant mind and a tenacious spirit. With the brothers? support, Evangelina went on to chart a path that was unheard of for any Dominican woman at that time: she became her country?s first female doctor.

In this five-part season, we will follow Evangelina as she studies medicine, first in her home country, then in Paris, where she learns new medical techniques in the emerging field of gynecology and encounters radical ideas about women?s health: ideas that she hopes will transform her society back in the Dominican Republic. Little does she think her new approaches to women?s health will eventually lead to her tragic downfall. Evangelina Rodríguez?s contributions as a reformer and pioneer in public health were all but erased by the dictator whose regime hounds her to death. Here, we piece together her life and her legacy. 

Lisa See?s novel Lady Tan?s Circle of Women is inspired by a medical textbook published in 1511  by an eminent female doctor, Tan Yunxian. In this episode, we talk to See about the origin of her novel, and to Lorraine Wilcox, the scholar who translated the original Chinese text, about what the practice of medicine was like for a female doctor during the Ming Dynasty. Tan Yunxian was almost lost to history, but the chronicle of her cases was reprinted by a great nephew and, amazingly, one copy survived through the centuries. Through serendipitous scholarly connections, Wilcox translated it and See used that translation as the inspiration for her novel.

In 1960 Marthe Gautier left the lab where she had discovered the genetic cause of Down syndrome, and went on to have a successful career as a pediatric cardiologist. For decades, she remained silent as her former colleague Jérôme Lejeune continued to take credit for this pioneering discovery, and history wrote her out of the story. Until 2009. On the 50th anniversary of the paper that announced the discovery of trisomy 21, she decided to set the record straight. The process of changing history did not always go smoothly. In 2014, at the age of 88, she was set to give a talk and receive a medal at a conference, but the event was canceled hours in advance, and she was given the medal privately the next day. Finally, toward the end of her life, Gautier got the recognition she deserved. Before she died in 2022, she was also decorated by the French government for her contributions to science. 

In the mid-1950s Marthe Gautier, a young French doctor and cytogenetics researcher, led a cutting-edge experiment to investigate the cause of Down syndrome. She painstakingly cultured cells in a ramshackle lab until one day she discovered an extra chromosome in the cells of patients with Down syndrome. This proved beyond a doubt that Down syndrome is genetic.

In this first episode of our two-part series about Gautier, she sees her discovery appropriated by a male colleague as he rushes to publish her findings. Jérôme Lejeune is listed as the lead author of the discovery even though Gautier did the work. Her name is listed second on this groundbreaking paper, published in 1959. And to add insult to injury, it is misspelled. It will take decades for Gautier to speak out.

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are telling the story of Margarethe Hilferding, a pioneering psychoanalyst and physician from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. She was the first woman to earn a medical degree at the University of Vienna and the first woman to join Sigmund Freud?s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In her paper On the Basis of Mother Love, presented to the society in 1911, she argued that the maternal instinct is not innate but can develop after birth, a theory Freud and the rest of her male colleagues rejected. Margarethe soon left the society and devoted much of her life to treating women in working class neighborhoods and advocating for their reproductive health. Her theory of maternal instinct remains controversial even today.

Dr. Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, dedicated her life?s work to messenger RNA, which she always believed had the potential to change the world. After decades of being ignored, she persisted with the research that eventually revolutionized the field of medicine and enabled the development of lifesaving vaccines in record time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Karikó tells her story in her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life In Science, sharing her journey from young researcher in Hungary to Nobel Prize-winning biochemist.

In this conversation, she reflects on the challenges and breakthroughs that defined her career, her resilience, and the scientific curiosity that fueled her passion for mRNA research

At this festive time of year, when many people are bringing trees into their homes to decorate for the holidays, we are going back to our story of a pioneering scientist who made it her mission to ensure that plants traveling across borders did not carry any diseases. It was in 1909, that the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees to Washington, D.C. But the iconic blossoms enjoyed each spring along the Tidal Basin are not from those trees. That?s because Flora Patterson, who was the Mycologist in Charge at the USDA, recognized the original saplings were infected, and the shipment was burned on the National Mall. In this episode, we explore  Patterson?s lasting impact on the field of mycology, starting with a blight that killed off the American chestnut trees, and how she helped make the USDA?s National Fungus Collection the largest in the world.

Two female botanists ? Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter ? made headlines for riding the rapids of the Colorado River in 1938 in an effort to document the Grand Canyon?s plant life. In Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, author Melissa L. Sevigny retraces their journey and shows how the ambitious river expedition, one that many believed impossible for women, changed not only Clover and Jotter but also our understanding of botany in this remote corner of the American West.

Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics and worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in the production of early nuclear weapons.) After the war, Parker continued her research and her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but she died of leukemia at age 48 before she was able to defend her PhD thesis. Decades later, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, citizens in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida voted to rename an elementary school in her honor. November 18th would have been her 107th birthday.

Anna Von Mertens' thoughtful new exploration of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's life describes and illuminates Leavitt's decades-long study of stars, including the groundbreaking system she developed for measuring vast distances within our universe simply by looking at photographic plates. Leavitt studied hundreds of thousands of stars captured on the glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, where she worked as a human computer from the turn of the 20th century until her death in 1921. Von Mertens explores her life, the women she worked alongside, and her discoveries, weaving biography, science, and visual imagery into a rich tapestry that deepens our understanding of the universe and the power of focused, methodical attention.

Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this market would be commercially viable. The company had hoped for a contraceptive pill ? tamoxifen didn?t work for that ? not a cancer treatment. In 1972 the higher-ups at ICI decided to cancel the research. But Dora Richardson, the chemist who had originally synthesized the compound, and her boss, Arthur Walpole, were convinced they were on to something important, something that could save lives. They continued the research in secret. Tamoxifen was eventually launched in the U.K. in 1973 and went on to become a global success, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Dora Richardson?s role in its development, however, was overshadowed by her a male colleague and all but forgotten.

In the early 1960s, chemist Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: tamoxifen. Although her name is on the original patent, her contributions have been lost to history. 

In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Katie Couric introduces us to Dora?s story. Lost Women of Science producer Marcy Thompson tracked down Dora?s firsthand account of the history of the drug?s development. This document, lost for decades, tells the story of how the compound was made and how Imperial Chemical Industries, where Richardson worked, almost terminated the project because the company was hoping to produce a contraceptive, not a cancer therapy.

While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S. than originally thought ? at least ten times more. These survivors were born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions after their mothers unwittingly took thalidomide in the early 1960s in so-called clinical trials. Wonder Drug tells the story of Vanderbes? trek across the U.S. in search of these thalidomide survivors. It also revisits the role of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration medical reviewer Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey ? the subject of our recent five-part season ? who refused to approve thalidomide for sale in the U.S. In the process of writing her book, Vanderbes became an advocate for the survivors, now in their sixties, and their search for justice and support. 

It?s September 2024 and a group of American thalidomide survivors arrive in Washington D.C. to lobby the government for support. More than 60 years have gone by since Frances Kelsey first stalled the New Drug Approval application from pharma company Merrell for thalidomide. Although she stopped the drug from going on the market in the U.S., hundreds of pregnant women still took thalidomide in Merrell?s so-called clinical trials, and many had babies with shortened limbs and serious medical conditions. Others had miscarriages or stillborn babies. Here we look at the legacy of thalidomide, the changes in drug regulations in the wake of the scandal, and what happened to our hero, Frances Kelsey. 

It?s the summer of 1962 and thalidomide has been off the market in Europe for months. But in the U.S., people are only just beginning to find out about the scandal. The Washington Post breaks the story and puts a picture of Frances Kelsey on the front page. She?s the hero who saved American lives. President John F. Kennedy gives her a medal and her image is splashed across newspapers around the country. At the end of the previous year, Merrell, the company that wanted to sell thalidomide in the U.S., had made a half-hearted attempt to contact some of the doctors who had been given millions of thalidomide samples for so-called clinical trials. Just how many pregnant women might have thalidomide in their medicine cabinets?

It?s 1961 and Widukind Lenz, a German pediatrician, is going door to door in his efforts to find out what is causing the epidemic of babies born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions. In the U.S., drug company Merrell is battling with Dr. Frances Kelsey at the Food and Drug Administration about the approval for thalidomide. She?s asking for data that shows it?s safe in pregnancy (spoiler alert: it?s not). Meanwhile, Merrell continues to send hundreds of thousands of thalidomide pills to doctors in so-called clinical trials. In November 1961, Dr. Lenz goes public with the results of his medical sleuthing and, as host Katie Hafner puts it, ?the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.?

It?s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling drugs. Contergan?s active ingredient is thalidomide and it is touted as a wonder drug, a non-addictive sedative safer than barbiturates. In the U.S., the drug is called Kevadon, and its distributor is impatient to get the drug on the market. But Dr. Frances Kelsey, a medical examiner at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is stalling the approval of Kevadon. She wants more information from the manufacturer to prove it is safe. Meanwhile, doctors in Scotland and Australia are beginning to suspect thalidomide might, in fact, be very toxic. And in Germany, reports are beginning to emerge of a mysterious epidemic of babies born with missing limbs and other serious medical conditions, but doctors have no idea what's causing it.

In this first chapter of a new five-part season we meet Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a physician and pharmacologist who joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical reviewer in 1960. Before the year is out, Dr. Kelsey finds herself standing up to big pharma. 

It?s September 1960 and a thick New Drug Application lands on Dr. Kelsey?s desk. The drug has already been on the market in Europe for three years and Dr. Kelsey?s supervisors expect her to rubber stamp the application. The drug is called Kevadon. Active ingredient: thalidomide. And to Frances Kelsey?s keen eye, something looks off.

In the 1950s, a German drug company developed a new sedative that was supposed to be 100% safe: thalidomide. So safe, in fact, it was promoted to women as a treatment for morning sickness. It quickly became a bestseller. But in the early 1960s, shocking news started coming out of Europe. Thousands of babies were being born with shortened arms and legs, heart defects, and other serious problems. Many died. 

In the United States things were different, thanks to one principled, strong-minded skeptic who joined the Federal Drug Administration in 1960 as a medical reviewer. One of her first assignments was to review the approval application of that very wonder drug, thalidomide. But the application was, to her mind, flawed. 

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey was a physician, a pharmacologist, and a nitpicker who refused to be intimidated by big pharma.

Starting in September, a new five-part series from Lost Women of Science: The Devil in the Details, the story of Frances Oldham Kelsey, The Doctor Who Said No To Thalidomide. 

In the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase stories about science, many of the early science journalists were women, working alongside their male colleagues despite less pay and outright misogyny. They were often single or divorced and, as Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette explains, writing for their lives. From Emma Reh, who traveled to Mexico to get a divorce and ended up trekking to archeological digs on horseback, to Jane Stafford, who took on taboo topics like sex and sexually transmitted diseases, they started a tradition of explaining science to non-scientists, accurately and with flair. 

By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of the universe. What you get when you zoom in all the way to the tiniest bits that can?t be broken down anymore. They had a kind of treasure map, a theory describing these building blocks and where we might find them. But to actually find them, physicists needed to recreate the blistering-hot conditions of the early universe, when many of these particles last existed. That?s why, in the mid-1970s, a major national laboratory entrusted Helen Edwards with a huge task: to oversee the design and construction of the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the first of a new generation of particle colliders built to uncover the inner workings of the universe. 

Dr. Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who?s made it her mission to write and update the Wikipedia pages of as many women in STEM as she possibly can. She inspired us at Lost Women of Science to start our own Wikipedia project to ensure that all the female scientists we profile have accurate and complete Wikipedia pages. In this episode, Jess talks with us about what she does and why she does it. 

Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who made major discoveries in cancer genetics, became an unlikely activist in her early fifties. She had always believed that if you did great science, you would get the recognition you deserved. But after years of humiliations ? being snubbed for promotions and realizing the women's labs were smaller than those of their male counterparts ? she finally woke up to the fact that her beloved MIT did not value women scientists. So measuring tape in hand, she collected the data to prove her point. In The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, Kate Zernike tells Nancy's story, which led to MIT?s historic admission of discrimination against its female scientists in 1999. Host Julianna LeMieux talks with Kate and Nancy about the journey.

 ?The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal?there was a human arm in the refrigerator,? said J. Peter Willard about his aunt, Mary Louisa Willard. Otherwise, he insisted, she was just ?very normal.? But Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1920s, left a strong impression on most people, to say the least. Her hometown of State College, Pennsylvania, knew her for stopping traffic in her pink Cadillac to chat with friends and for throwing birthday bashes for her beloved cocker spaniels. Police around the world knew her for her side hustle: using chemistry to help solve crimes.

When Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn?t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to uncover its beginnings. What she found, however, deep in the archives, was evidence of a network of early female botanists from the turn of the last century who had been written out of history. Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration sets the record straight. It tells the stories of Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts and the wild and wonderful gardens they planted and studied. 

In our final episode, we explore Dorothy Andersen?s legacy ? what she left behind and how her work has lived on since her death. Describing her mentor?s influence on her life and career, Dr. Celia Ores gives us a rare look at what Dr. Andersen was really like. We then turn to researchers, physicians, and patients, who fill us in on the many areas of progress that have grown out of Dr. Andersen?s work. These major developments include the discovery of the cystic fibrosis gene, the tremendous impact of the drug Trikafta, and the lifesaving potential of gene editing techniques. We end the episode with an update on the effect Trikafta has had on the lives of many CF patients, who can now expect to live a normal life. 

The missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization and who gets to be remembered. Dr. John Scott Baird, Dorothy Andersen?s biographer, looks for the portrait, and Drs. Nientara Anderson and Lizzy Fitzsousa, former medical students at Yale University, explain how ?dude walls? ? the paintings of male scientists that line institutional walls ? can have an insidious effect on those who walk past them every day. And we go back to Columbia University to give you an update on the hunt for the missing portrait.

Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen?s life story. Pediatric critical care physician Dr. John Scott Baird, who published a biography of Dorothy Andersen in 2021, suggests we take a second look at the conventional wisdom surrounding the evolution of cystic fibrosis research in the 1950s. And in this updated episode, we interview science historian Margaret Rossiter, who coined the term ?Matilda Effect? to describe how credit for work done by female scientists too often goes to their male colleagues. We examine how this affected Dorothy Andersen and her groundbreaking research into cystic fibrosis.

A few important things have happened in the three years since we first aired The Pathologist in the Basement, the story of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the first to identify cystic fibrosis. It?s safe to say that Dr. Anderson is now a little less lost. In Episode 1, Dr. Andersen sleuths her way to the discovery of cystic fibrosis, a fatal disease that affects the lungs, the pancreas, and a host of other organs. So, who was Dorothy Andersen, and how did she come to make this seminal medical contribution?

When poet Jessy Randall started researching the lives of female scientists she became angry. And we certainly can relate here at Lost Women of Science. So many women made important discoveries but received little recognition. In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Randall talks to Carol Sutton Lewis about Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science, the collection of poems born of that anger. They discuss what it means to be the first in a field, the ethics of poetic license, and the importance of female role models in STEM. Randall?s poems are about some of the women we?ve featured in our podcast, including the first Black female doctor, Rebecca Lee Crumpler, and the physicist Lise Meitner.

?We were each put on earth to torment the other,? says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged the prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. Bates believed that language emerges from interactions between our brains and our environments, and that we do not have an innate language capacity. To many, that sounds like an innocuous statement. But in making these claims, Bates challenged formidable linguists like Pinker and Noam Chomsky, placing herself at the center of a heated debate that remains unresolved half a century later.

Melba Phillips, who grew up on a farm in Indiana at the turn of the 20th century, was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer?s first graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips Process, which explained a particular kind of nuclear reaction. In this episode, we explain what that is, with a little help from generative AI. Phillips did not follow Oppenheimer to Los Alamos, and was vocal in her opposition to nuclear weapons. During the McCarthy era, she lost her teaching job, and did not return to academia until 1957. In 1962, then in her mid-fifties, she finally became a full professor at the University of Chicago.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time. Continuing the legacy of women working at the Harvard College Observatory, Cecilia charted the way for a generation of female astronomers to come. This Best Of episode of Lost Women of Science follows Cecilia?s journey of discovery, journals her drive and determination against all odds, and takes you to the Harvard College Observatory itself to walk in Cecilia?s footsteps.

The year is 1897 and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India from England. Her goal: to photograph a total solar eclipse. Like the many people whose gaze will turn upwards in North America on April 8, Maunder was fascinated by the secrets of the sun and was determined to travel the globe and unlock them. She understood that the few minutes of darkness during a solar eclipse presented a special opportunity to explore the nature of the sun. Her observations led to our greater understanding of how the sun affects the earth, but like so many early female scientists, her contributions and achievements have been forgotten.

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered the lives and work of Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris, two natural scientists who made significant contributions to botany and entomology in the mid-19th Century. Elizabeth collected rare plant species and sent them to institutions around the world, and Margaretta not only discovered new insects but also helped farmers combat the pests that were devastating their fields. Nevertheless, by both design and accident, these women were lost to history. McNeur tells us how that happened and how, piece by piece, she recovered their stories.

While working at the Salk Institute in California, Ursula Bellugi discovered that sign language was made up of specific building blocks that were assembled following strict rules, much like in spoken language. Her subsequent discoveries about the complexities of sign language led both to linguistic breakthroughs and to changes in the way deaf people felt about signing. Bellugi demonstrated that sign language is as rich and complex as any spoken language. Her work deepened our understanding of what it means to communicate as humans.

Katharine ?Kay? Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive decay. But after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, she became increasingly concerned about the ethics of nuclear weapons. Dr. Way signed the Szilard Petition and worked to spread awareness of the moral responsibility surrounding atomic weaponry, including co-editing the influential One World or None: a Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, remaining an outspoken advocate for fairness and justice.

?Hoots and derision, which did not worry me at all,? Lilian Bland wrote, describing her visit to an airshow in Blackpool, England in 1909. She?d been telling everyone there that she intended to build and fly her own airplane. They were unimpressed. Lilian was undeterred. She built a DIY plane of bamboo, wood, and fabric, with a bicycle handlebar for steering and an engine she carried from England back to her home in Ireland. But would the Mayfly, as she called it, fly?

In the first of a new series we?re calling Lost Women of Science Conversations?and a fitting choice for Black History Month?we talk to Maria Smilios, author of a new book that tells the story of Black nurses who were lured from the Jim Crow South to work at a tuberculosis (TB) hospital called Sea View on Staten Island, N.Y. Facing unsanitary conditions and racial prejudice, these ?Black Angels? cared for TB patients for decades before a cure that they helped develop was found. It?s a story of bravery and dedication that Smilios pieced together from oral histories and medical records because there were no archives that described these nurses? work.