Gimme some female scientists (please)

February 28, 2019 7:37 AM

My local bouldering gym (called "The Lab") has named all their walls after men: Einstein, Hubble, Tesla, Darwin, Newton, Edison. I proposed to give some walls the names of women scientists but I'm out of inspiration beyond Curie.

Ideally finding scientists that had a lab would be great.
Non-white ones are very welcome.

(And any suggestions of which of the male scientists didn't have a lab would be useful as well).

Btw the female manager said ok, she's willing to name two walls, but I feel like there should be more.

posted by Thisandthat to Science & Nature (41 answers total)

Response by poster: ps I'm aware of the online lists of female scientist, but I like how Metafilter can always come up with better examples and reasonings.
posted by Thisandthat at 7:39 AM on February 28, 2019

Rosalind Franklin.
posted by notsnot at 7:41 AM on February 28, 2019 [20 favorites]

Grace Hopper
posted by noneuclidean at 7:42 AM on February 28, 2019 [22 favorites]

Cecilia Payne.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:43 AM on February 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Off the top of my head:

Rosalind Franklin
Heddy Lamar
Marie Curie
Mae Jemison
posted by bilabial at 7:44 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Karen Wetterhahn.
posted by Arctic Circle at 7:44 AM on February 28, 2019

Ada Lovelace

Donna Strickland
posted by wenestvedt at 7:44 AM on February 28, 2019 [7 favorites]

Oh and Ada Lovelace as well as the previously mentioned Grace Hopper.
posted by bilabial at 7:45 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Margaret Heafield Hamilton
posted by JamesBay at 7:45 AM on February 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

[Mary] Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. She nearly died in 1833 during a landslide that killed her dog, Tray.

posted by Etrigan at 7:50 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Here's a list of brilliant women who were fucked over by asshole men, which includes several scientists with labs:

Rosalind Franklin (structure of DNA)
Vera Rubin (Dark Matter)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Pulsars)
Esther Lederberg (microbiology)
Chien-Sheng Wu (particle physics / Manhattan Project)
Lise Meitner (nuclear fission)
Nettie Stevens (genetics)
Ada Lovelace (computing)
Candace Pert (neuroscience)
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:51 AM on February 28, 2019 [14 favorites]

Jane Goodall. Wangari Maathai. Tu Youyou. Darwin didn't really have a lab.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:54 AM on February 28, 2019 [9 favorites]

Emmy Noether. Best known as a mathematician, she also made contributions to physics.
Sally Ride wins for most inspiration for most girls in a generation.
posted by SemiSalt at 7:56 AM on February 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

Emmy Noether
posted by likedoomsday at 7:56 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Roberta Bondar
posted by Ftsqg at 7:56 AM on February 28, 2019

Annie Jump Cannon, astronomer who classified 350,000 stars. I'd say astronomy observatory's close to a lab.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 7:58 AM on February 28, 2019

Sau Lan Wu, who has been a major force in establishing the Standard Model in particle physics. She should have won a Nobel for co-discovering the gluon particle, but beyond that she was also heavily involved in discovering the charm quark and the Higgs boson. She's currently working at CERN.
posted by theory at 7:58 AM on February 28, 2019

Anne Treisman (hugely influential researcher on visual attention)
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 7:59 AM on February 28, 2019

Patricia Bath invented the Laserphaco probe, which was a giant leap forward in the treatment of cataracts (h/t to rangefinder 1.4, who sent me a postcard about Bath, which is how I learned about her).

Also, Wikipedia has a good timeline of women in science.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:07 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Vera Rubin, who "usher[ed] in a Copernican-scale change in cosmological theory" but never got her Nobel.
posted by praemunire at 8:09 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

How about:

• Maria Goeppert Mayer, Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 for discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964 for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances
• Ada E. Yonath, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome
• Frances H. Arnold, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for the directed evolution of enzymes

I will also mention that there were two female Nobel Prize winners named Curie.
posted by ubiquity at 8:12 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work in maize cytogenetics.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 8:19 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Mae Jemison - an American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space
posted by nuclear_soup at 8:44 AM on February 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

Lynn Margulis is a heroic figure to me. She fought the status quo to promote the idea that eukaryotes arose as a result of symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This was a giant step in 20th C. evolutionary biology.
posted by Glomar response at 8:53 AM on February 28, 2019 [6 favorites]

The Smithsonian's blog has had a Women in Science Wednesday feature for years now. The linked site collects several hundred entries.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:04 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Oh, also Hypatia, though she didn't have a lab. But as a name to compete with the likes of Newton and Einstein, I think it works better than Mayer, Hodgkin, Yonath and Arnold.
posted by ubiquity at 9:08 AM on February 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Docker software program generates random names for containers using names of scientists. Don't worry about what that previous sentence means, just click here to see the source code with the names and descriptions.

They aren't all female but a large number of them are (in fact, the source code says "Please, for any amazing man that you add to the list, consider adding an equally amazing woman to it, and vice versa")
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:11 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Lucy Wills¹: folic acid²

¹Lucy Wills, MA (Cantab), LRCP, MB BS (Lond) (10 May 1888 – 26 April 1964) was a leading English haematologist. She conducted seminal work in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s on macrocytic anaemia of pregnancy. Her observations led to her discovery of a nutritional factor in yeast which both prevents and cures this disorder. Macrocytic anaemia is characterised by enlarged red blood cells and is life-threatening. Poor pregnant women in the tropics with inadequate diets are particularly susceptible. The nutritional factor identified by Lucy Wills (the ‘Wills Factor’) was subsequently shown to be folate, the naturally occurring form of folic acid.

²The story of Lucy Wills has been reviewed by Daphne Roe (1978). She was born in England in 1898 and went to school at Cheltenham College for Young Ladies under the tutelage of Miss Beale and Miss Buss, pioneers of women's education. In 1911, she obtained a double first honours degree in Botany and Geology at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after the First World War, being interested in Freud's work, intended to specialize in Psychiatry. She became a medical student at the London School of Medicine for Women, later to become the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. She then worked in Chemical Pathology and in 1928, with a grant from the Tata Trust, went to Bombay to investigate macrocytic anaemia in pregnancy, prevalent in female textile workers. The fact that the anaemia was most frequent in poorer populations with diets deficient in protein, fruit and vegetables led Wills to study the effects of changes in diet on the macrocytic anaemia of albino rats produced by a deficient diet and Bartonella infection. The anaemia was prevented by yeast added to a diet otherwise lacking B vitamins (Wills & Mehta, 1930, 1931). Yeast or a yeast extract (`Marmite') was then found to correct the macrocytic anaemia in the pregnant Bombay patients (Wills, 1931). Lucy Wills continued active research in the field on her return to England in 1932. She kept handwritten day books (now in the possession of the Royal Free Hospital Archives) with detailed clinical and laboratory records of those patients with macrocytic anaemia who she treated with yeast extract (Fig 2) or, after 1945, with the newly synthesized folic acid, given to her by Tom Spies. She was a strict and stimulating teacher of medical students (all female) at the Royal Free School of Medicine. She is remembered as aristocratic, independent and radical in outlook, critical of established conservative medical and scientific committees. She rode to work on a bicycle rather than in a large car as did many of her colleagues. Lucy Wills retired soon after the War, developed a botanical garden and became a Labour Councillor in Chelsea. She died in 1964.

posted by Thella at 10:16 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Nancy Grace Roman, astrophysicist whose work made the Hubble possible.
Mary Seacole, Jamaican woman who moved to Britain and helped nurse soldiers in the Crimean War (surpasses in fame but equally as crucial as Florence Nightingale).
Jocelyn Elders, pediatrician and first African-American US Surgeon GenerL.
posted by stillmoving at 10:20 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of uranium nuclear fission. Albert Einstein called her the "German Marie Curie."
posted by Sunburnt at 11:03 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Charlotte Angas Scott, first woman to sit the mathematical tripos at Cambridge.
posted by SereneStorm at 11:24 AM on February 28, 2019

The first female astronomer in the United States, Maria Mitchell was also the first American scientist to discover a comet, which brought her international acclaim. Additionally, she was an early advocate for science and math education for girls and the first female astronomy professor.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:36 AM on February 28, 2019

Hypatia, Greek-Egyptian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.
Ada Lovelace. Mother of Code. Mathematician. Writer.
Maria Sibylla Merian. Entomologist, and scientific illustrator
Jane Goodall. Primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist. Also, one of the nicest people you will meet in real life.
Sylvia Earle, marine biologist, explorer, oceanographer.
Mae Jemison. Engineer. doctor. astronaut.
Rosalind Franklin. Chemist, X Ray crystallographer
Edith Clarke. Electrical Engineer
posted by alathia at 11:45 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier. She was instrumental in the creation of the standard scientific method we use today, and made a number of other contributions to early chemistry. Antoine Lavoisier owes much of his success and fame to their partnership.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:27 PM on February 28, 2019

Rachel Carson!
posted by wintersweet at 1:32 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ideally finding scientists that had a lab would be great.
You are limiting yourself to modern, if not contemporary scientists with this one. Very few, if any, breakthrough female medical or chemical scientists had their own labs that weren't attached to their husbands prior to, what? the 1970s or later?
posted by Thella at 2:19 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Emmy Noether should be as highly regarded as Einstein; Noether’s Theorem is just... man. Seriously. Otherworldly.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:36 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Marie Tharp was a geologist who mapped the ocean floor, leading to acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. It would be pretty nifty to name a climbing wall after a geologist.
posted by topophilia at 3:36 PM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Just to say the obvious - every wall should be named after a woman. They had it all men for a while, so they are clearly fine with them all being named after people of a single gender.

Sue Hendrickson - for whom the T-rex 'Sue' is named. (though I'm not sure about the history wrt native lands).
posted by lab.beetle at 8:48 PM on February 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

What name could better grace your wall than that of a brilliant superstar of experimental solid-state physics: the Queen of Carbon, Mildred Dresselhaus.
posted by ContinuousWave at 10:36 PM on March 1, 2019

Here are some posters from A Mighty Girl. “If she can’t see it, she can’t be it.” Rename all the damn walls and put up these posters to explain why.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:43 AM on March 3, 2019 [1 favorite]