Tribute to Pioneering Women in Science

Science World specially pays tribute to the great women scientists whose discoveries were stolen or not commensurately appreciated as those of their male counterparts.

You are all true heroines.

Marie Salomea Curie, nee  Sklodowska, (1867 – 1934) stands out for mention. She is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize as well as first person (and still the only woman) to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields – Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911).

Her first Nobel Prize was shared with her husband, Pierre, and French physicist, Antoine Henry Becquerel, but she was the sole winner of the second Nobel Prize for discovering the radioactive elements — Polonium and Radium.

She coined the word “radioactivity.”

The elder of the two daughters, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, in 1935 jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering artificial radioactivity.

The Curie family has the most Nobel laureates to date of father, mother and daughter.

In 1903, the French Academy of Sciences had nominated only Antoine Becquerel and Pierre Curie for that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, but Pierre rejected it saying, “Any award for work on radioactivity without Marie will be a travesty.”

Specially remembered is Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsating stars, or pulsars, as a young British astrophysicist in 1967, but she was denied a Nobel Prize for her discovery in 1974.

That Nobel Prize rather, went to two men – her former lecturer, Antony Hewish, and radioastronomer, Martin Ryle.

In 2018, 50 years after her discovering pulsars, she won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery with a cash prize of three million US dollars – the highest for any award in science throughout the world.

She gave the entire money to the UK Institute for Physics to fund graduate scholarships for under-represented groups to study Physics.

The first Nobel Prizes were in 1901 with a cash award of Swedish Kronor, SEK, 150,000 for a full Nobel Prize.

This has been adjusted for inflation: In 2020, it was SEK 10 million or 1,145,000 US dollars (968,000 euros or 880,000 pounds). In 2019, it was SEK nine million.

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard the Russian Vostok 6 spacecraft.

Sally Ride (1951 – 2012), who in 1983 became the first American woman in space, deserves our tribute.

On 12 September, 1992, Mae C. Johnson, engineer and astronaut, became the first African-American woman to travel to space (which was) aboard the Endeavour spacecraft.

You and many others are specially remembered.

As a result, younger women like 22-year-old Dr Aisha Musa Muhammad, together with millions like her, can aspire and be all they can be today.

 

 

 

pictures courtesy: nasa, bbc