Great Women Scientists in the World Who are Unknown and Unfamous...

From the Continuation of Previous blog……………………..

Lise Meitner

Another woman praised by Einstein as the “German Marie Curie,” Lise Meitner’s story is one of quiet tragedy. Like Emmy Noether, Meitner was born in an era when women were explicitly prohibited from higher learning. Meitner was the second woman ever to earn a degree from the University of Vienna, obtaining a PhD in physics in 1905. Meitner’s father encouraged her ambition, and gave her the money to work in Berlin, where she met physics heavyweight Max Planck.

Planck was notorious for turning away female students, but he begrudgingly allowed Meitner into his lectures. A year later he made her a research assistant to chemist Otto Hahn, with whom she made several groundbreaking discoveries.

Though it was her insights that led to the recognition that nuclear energy was not atomic fusion, but what she termed “fission,” she was forbidden from being granted credit on Hahn’s article. Hahn was granted the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1944, but Meitner did go on to win several prestigious awards and, like Noether, has a few heavenly objects named in her honor.

Dorothy Hodgkin

 

Dorothy Hodgkin was born in Egypt, where she lived with her archaeologist parents. During World War One, Hodgkin returned to England and began her education. Hodgkin displayed a preternatural talent for chemistry early, and was accepted by into Somerville University despite lacking knowledge of Latin. There she became aware of X-Ray crystallography, which would lead to her greatest discoveries.

After successfully structuring a steroid in 1945, she published her findings on penicillin. Nine years later, Hodgkin and her team published their findings on the structure of B12, for which she won the Nobel Prize. She went on to chart the structures of several key organic molecules, helping to determine their function in the body and their artificial creation in a laboratory.