Kathy Hays

Thanks to Kelly Herbon, who contributed this post about STEM-ma Kathy Hays.

My mother, Kathy Hays, is a 64 year-old grandmother of 3 children under 4.  She was a middle school and high school language arts teacher for 29+ years who used a typewriter to create quizzes, study guides, and lesson plans for much of her teaching career.  Remember those tiny little white strips you had to use to cover up mistakes you made with a typewriter??  Yeah, I’m sure she remembers them, too.

Now, in retirement, she is intrigued by all things technological.  She spends hours a day experimenting and “trouble-shooting” on her computer doing various activies:  looking up gardening and quilting information, searching for cheap airfare and travel information for herself and her family, and uploading pictures and making “smile box” movies to share recent visits with the grandchildren with her extended circle.  She buys about 3 computers for each 1 that my family buys, and she is always interested in delving into the newest technology and trying to figure it out.

Most recently, she was watching you tube videos about how to fix her dishwasher.  She was determined to look up the information on her own saying, “You can figure out how to fix almost everything on you tube!”

If she would have had these technological tools available to her during her teaching career, I know she would have been even more efficient and effective at her job.  She works with whatever gadgets are available and adapts as new technology is invented.  She is truly a fine example of a technological grandma!

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

This picture of Dorothy Hodgkin is from the Nobel Prize website, which states that she won the prize “for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances”.

The following biography is quoted from a Public Broadcasting Service (WGBH) site A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries

Though born in the twentieth century, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin had a typical late-nineteenth century upbringing. She was born in Cairo, Egypt, then a British colony. When Hodgkin was four, the family was back in England and World War I broke out. The parents returned to Egypt, leaving the children with family and governesses for four years. Hodgkin found an interest in chemistry and crystals, a popular hobby for women of leisure in the 1800s. But on her sixteenth birthday, she received a book by William Henry Bragg (a Nobelist in physics) about using x-rays to analyze crystals. She had found her life’s work.

When Hodgkin graduated from Oxford in 1932, jobs were scarce. She found a position in an x-ray crystallography lab studying biological crystals. This technique helped tease out the structure of molecules. Though diagnosed at age 24 with rheumatoid arthritis, she became one of the most skilled crystallographers of her time. In Cambridge and later at Oxford, she always chose projects that no one else thought quite possible. She ran into Ernst Chain one day, who was beaming from his recent animal trials of penicillin. It took four years, but she cracked penicillin’s complex and misleading structure in 1946. That knowledge would help manufacturers create semisynthetic penicillins. Ten years later she announced the structure of vitamin B12, and in 1964 won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1969, she finally solved the puzzle of the structure of insulin.

Since her youth, Hodgkin was involved in organizations promoting peace, such as the League of Nations. Her mother had lost four brothers in World War I. In addition, Hodgkin had organized an international association of crystallographers. In 1953, she was denied a visa to the United States to attend a scientific conferences because she had belonged to Science for Peace, a group that included some communists. She was later allowed into the country with special permission of the attorney general. She retired in 1977, remaining active in peace organizations. In 1990, her passport was approved “for indefinite reentry.” She died in 1994.

Sabine McNeill

Last week Sabine McNeill left a comment on Grandma got STEM and I realized her story would make a great post.  Here it is!  The picture is of Sabine winning an ipad after buying a Samsung tablet.  She now uses it to show people screenshots of her 3 innovative software methods.

Once upon a time, my mum read in “The Best of Reader’s Digest: what is a computer?” and said to me: that’s something for you!

Last month I was invited as the only woman to celebrate 50 years of Computing @ CERN, where I used to diagnose software for Nobel prize winners, until I got bored… Unfortunately, that led me to California where a car accident was the beginning of 40 years of chronic pain management.

I bought my first APPLE in 1979. But my most significant achievement is the fine tuning of ‘software-aided thinking’ that resulted in the invention of 3 ‘outside the box’ software methods: http://bit.ly/L6HFaL

I’m grouping my various websites on http://www.SabineMcNeill.co.uk and am conscious of my granny age, but have only two nephews to be proud of. I am equally conscious of generally less than 10% women in STEM meetings that I attend. But I can’t help it, except keep going!

When I had an APPLE User group meeting in my office in Geneva, the best contribution I got was from one guy who said “it’s better than crossword puzzle”.  The monitor had only 40 characters across and only capital letters. But I got a letter quality printer for I wanted to hide that I was using a computer.  I used it to produce mailing lists, newsletters and conference programs – instead of employing people [to do that work].

My conceptual thinking has resulted in a prototype and in software specifications that an ‘under-employed professional woman’ is now turning into code. I do hope to be able to post some success stories here! Until then: CONGRATULATIONS for having set this site up!

Here is Sabine in 2008 in the Star Cave in the Visualisation Centre of the University of San Diego.  She says “I had to be careful not to tell guys how I’m doing what I’m doing. Obviously they all want to know it.”

Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Thanks to the blogger at Synthetic Environment for a post about impressive female chemists, including Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958).

Here’s an article from The Human Touch of Chemistry about Franklin:

A woman scientist from Cambridge University published an article in the April 25, 1953 on the journal Nature about the molecular structure of DNA. However two male scientists had written another article on the same subject in the same issue of the magazine. Those male scientists – Francis Crick and James Watson – got all the credit. The woman, Rosalind Franklin, vanished into history.

Rosalind Franklin (born 25th July, 1920) was born into an affluent family, but being a woman, she faced many difficulties. After school, she went to Cambridge University to study science in 1938. But though she passed her exams in 1941, she could not get a formal degree, as Cambridge did not give degrees to women (it would do so only after 1947). But she went on to finish her PhD in 1945.

She later went to study X-Ray crystallography in Paris. This was the technique that scientists were using to find out the physical structures of complex bio-molecules. The experience she gained helped her get a position as a scientist at the Medical Research Centre (MRC) at Cambridge University in 1951.

However, she faced many difficulties there. The director of the MRC, John Randall, had asked her to do experiments to find the structure of DNA. However, Maurice Wilkins, who had been working on the same project, was very upset. This led to intense rivalry between them.

Franklin had made many X-ray photographs of DNA crystals. The best by far was Photo 51 (above [from Wikipedia], taken 1952). Had it remained with her, she would have decoded the structure. Unfortunately, the picture (or a copy) fell into the hands of Maurice Wilkins.

Wilkins showed the picture to Francis Crick and James Watson on 30 January, 1953. They were also working to solve the structure of DNA, and they too disliked Rosalind Franklin. Working fast, by 7 March, they had solved the structure – the famous double helix. Eternal credit would go to them, Franklin was sidelined.

Franklin had meanwhile planned to give up her DNA research. She joined the legendary crystallographer J.D. Bernal to study the structure of viruses. There she formed a team, which would go on to discover the structure of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV). However, her health was failing fast (she had ovarian cancer), and she died on 16th April, 1958, aged just 37.

Wilkins, Crick and Watson won the Nobel Prize in 1962. As the Prize can only be given to living people, and because her work wasn’t taken seriously, her contribution was never acknowledged well enough. That changed when Watson wrote his immensely popular book, The Double Helix, in 1968.

Watson’s unfair attitude towards Franklin irritated many. The writer Anne Sayre wrote a book that clarified Rosalind Franklin’s actual role in the discovery. Unpublished manuscripts of Franklin show that she had more or less solved the structure of DNA herself. It’s a mystery that she did not publish her data in time.

Nevertheless, Franklin is now known as the fourth (and equal) contributor to the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure. The Royal Society, the US National Cancer Institute and Groningen University of the Netherlands have created prizes for women scientists in her honour. 

Ellen Swallow Richards

Thanks to the blogger at Synthetic Environment for a post about impressive female chemists, including Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911).  The Chemical Heritage foundation has an interesting post about Richards, which includes this information:

Born Ellen Henrietta Swallow, she was the daughter of an old but relatively poor New England family. By the time she reached her mid-20s, and after years of teaching school, tutoring, and cleaning houses, she had earned enough money to attend one of the new women’s colleges. With the $300 she had saved, she entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1868 as a special student and graduated two years later.

At Vassar she was attracted to astronomy and chemistry. Upon graduation she applied for positions with various industrial chemists, but was turned down in all cases. At the suggestion of one of these chemists, however, she applied and was accepted as a special student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, making her the first woman in America to be accepted by a scientific school. Three years later she received a second bachelor’s degree—a B.S. from MIT—as well as a master’s degree from Vassar, to which she had submitted a thesis on the chemical analysis of an iron ore. She then continued at MIT with hopes of earning a doctorate, but MIT was not to award its first doctorate to a woman until 1886.

In 1875 she married Robert Hallowell Richards, chairman of the MIT’s mining engineering department. Supported in her ambitions by her husband, Richards volunteered her services as well as $1,000 annually to further women’s scientific education at MIT. Through her efforts, the Women’s Laboratory was established in 1876, and in 1879 she was recognized as an assistant instructor, without pay, for teaching the curriculum in chemical analysis, industrial chemistry, mineralogy, and applied biology. The laboratory was closed in 1883 after MIT began awarding undergraduate degrees to women on a regular basis and there was no more need for a special track.

Coincidentally, in the same year MIT opened the nation’s first laboratory of sanitary chemistry (1884), she was appointed as an instructor. In 1887, at the request of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Richards and her assistants performed a survey of the quality of the inland bodies of water of Massachusetts, many of which were already polluted with industrial waste and municipal sewage. The scale of the survey was unprecedented: it led to the first state water-quality standards in the nation and the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant, in Lowell, Massachusetts. From 1887 to 1897 Richards served as official water analyst for the State Board of Health while continuing as an instructor at MIT—the rank she held at her death. She and her colleague A. G. Woodman wrote a classic text in the field of sanitary engineering: Air, Water, and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint (1900).

From her days at the Women’s Laboratory, Richards was very concerned to apply scientific principles to domestic topics—good nutrition, pure foods, proper clothing, physical fitness, sanitation, and efficient practices that would allow women more time for pursuits other than cooking and cleaning. In 1882 she published The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for Housekeepers. By setting up model kitchens open to the public, establishing programs of study, and organizing conferences, Richards campaigned tirelessly for the new discipline of home economics. Growing out of several summer conferences held at Lake Placid, New York, the American Home Economics Association was formed in 1908 with Richards as its first president.

Sylvia Block Goodman

Thanks to Nina Karp, who submitted this post about her grandmother, Sylvia Block Goodman, b 1917.

The picture is marked “BI [Beth Israel] Hospital, Spring 1938, Bacteriology Lab”. It was taken during a 15-month training program for laboratory technicians. After that she worked as a clinical laboratory technician at Beth Israel, doing mostly hematology.  She was married in 1942 and then worked for a private physician as an x-ray technician.

In 1945 she became pregnant with my mother, and as she said, “that was the end of that.” But when my mother and her sister were in school, she went back to doing temporary lab work. As her children grew, she earned her bachelor’s degree and M.Ed., and began a 25-year career teaching biology at Lasell College.  After she retired in 1989, she was a longtime volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science, where she worked at the Human Body exhibit.

My image of a grandma was never of a flowery-apron’d woman gardening and baking cookies. My grandma lived in an apartment building and taught science!  I remember visiting her at her lab at the college. Once I was looking for something to bring in for show and tell; she let me borrow a full cat skeleton. I was and am a lucky girl.

I’m including a picture of us at her 90th birthday bash in 2007, and one with her namesake newborn great-grandson (my son) in 2009.   I’m grateful to say that at age 96 she is still going strong, sharp as a tack, and delightful company.

Mary Horner Lyell

Thanks to Emily Lakdawalla, who suggested Mary Horner Lyell (1808-1873). Emily found this article from on Dana Hunter’s Scientific American Blog which included the portrait above of Lady Lyell, after a crayon drawing by George Richmond, R.A. Image from the Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, bart. Vol II.

Here are a few excerpts of that article, reprinted with permission from Dana Hunter.  For more of the story, check out the blog!  Hunter writes about Mary Horner Lyell’s education facilitated by her Geologist father and later work with her husband, Charles.

Marrying Charles didn’t confine Mary to the domestic life of a housewife: far from it. She traveled the world with her husband as his partner in geology. She did the packing: their clothes, his geologic equipment and specimens. While Charles investigated, she sketched and painted the outcrops, geologic structures, and cross-sections they discovered. When circumstances prevented her from going out into the field with him, Charles didn’t neglect her. He created detailed journals of his investigations for her, and wrote affectionate letters beginning, “My dearest Mary…”

Hunter also describes Lyell’s collaboration with Charles Darwin:

When Darwin and Mr. Lyell discussed evolution, Mary was an active part of the conversation. When Darwin needed barnacles, she supplied them (“I am much obliged for the Barnacles,” he wrote to her, and then launched into a discussion of the glacial geology of the Scottish glens. In a letter a few years previously, he had described Mary as “a monument of patience” for putting up with his and Sir Charles’s “unsophisticated geology” talk – it seems that by the time she began slipping him barnacles, he’d figured out she actually enjoyed this geology stuff).

A further aspect of the story Hunter tells is how Lyell’s work was respected or overlooked by others:

Though her contemporaries and later historians too often overlooked her, it was clear she understood geology thoroughly. And she was certainly a scientist in her own right. In 1854, she collected and studied land snails in the Canary Islands, her own version of Darwin’s finches. In another age, her work may not have been so merged with and overshadowed by her husband’s. She was a geologist to the core. If Charles Lyell was one of geology’s fathers, Mary Horner Lyell was certainly one of its mothers, an extraordinary and dedicated woman we need to remember.

Hunter’s article includes another picture of Lyell later in life and a nice set of references.