Ida Noddack

Ida Noddack (1895 - 1978) was a German chemist who overcame obstacles including sexism and restrictive provisions under the Nazi regime preventing women from entering professions and engaging in academic research, to make a meaningful contributions to nuclear science. Together with Walter Noddack, her husband, and Otto Berg she co-discovered element 75, Rhenium. Ndaddack also proposed the idea of fission of an element, before anybody else envisioned it.

Ida Noddack (née Tacke), was born in Lackhausen in the Northern Rhine region. She loved science, but did not want to be stuck teaching, which was considered a woman’s job. Instead, she decided to study chemistry and then work in the chemical industry. Her father who owned a small varnish factory supported her choice.

She was one of very few women (3%) to graduate with a degree in chemistry and chemical and metallurgical engineering from the Technical University of Berlin in 1915. Her first job was in the chemistry laboratory of the Berlin’s turbine factory of AEG, a company affiliated with General Electric in the USA.

In 1924, Ida resigned from her job and instead started working full-time as an unpaid collaborator at the University of Berlin’s Physical Chemistry Department, helping Walter’s research to search for the missing elements of the Periodic Table. In 1926 Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke got married.

In 1925, she co-published a paper about the discovery of two new elements: Rhenium (75) and Masurium (43). While Rhenium was confirmed, the “Masurium” discovery was not accepted since their equipment sensitivity was too poor to separate it chemically. The name “Rhenium” came from the name of the region she came from (Rhine region). Finally, in 1937, “Masurium” was produced in a nuclear reaction Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè and renamed “Technetium.”

In 1929, Walter and Ida were granted a German patent for the Rhenium coating of lamp filaments, and a British patent for the use of Rhenium as a catalyst for oxidation processes. During 1931 and 1932 they secured three patents in the USA for, respectively: filaments for incandescent lamps and vacuum tubes, Rhenium concentrates, and the use of metallic Rhenium as an electric glower for incandescent lamps.

With the onset of the great depression, in 1932, a new law forced married women to leave their jobs and to make them available for men. Luckily, Noddack was able to continue her research because she was an “unpaid collaborator.”

In 1934 Fermi investigated uranium being bombarded with neutrons. He claimed the evidence of new transuranic elements. On the contrary, Ida published a paper “On Element 93” questioning the chemistry of this experiment and suggesting the possibility of fission process way before it was later correctly identified and confirmed by Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner as nuclear fission.

Ida Noddack faced many professional obstacles because of her scientific nonconformity and gender, the resentment of physicists against intrusion in their field, and the overall difficulty of research under and after the Nazi regime, still she was able to persist.

Ida and her husband were nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The two of them were also awarded the German Chemical Society’s prestigious Liebig Medal in 1931. In 1934, they received the Scheele Medal of the Swedish Chemical Society as well as the German patent for rhenium concentrate.

In 1968 Ida retired from her scientific work. She died in 1978 in Bad Neuenahr in Germany at the age of 84.

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Source: "Women in Nuclear History", Series #11 - Ida Noddack - co-discoverer of Rhenium and fission visionary, by Jagoda Urban-Klaehn, February 2, 2025. Originally published: on Facebook.

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Published by Grant Mills in Brilliant thinkers, Fission, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

February 20, 2020

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer who is best known for her work on the structure of DNA, RNA, and coal. She also performed cutting-edge research on the molecular structure of viruses that cause plant and human diseases.

Franklin was born in London, England in 1920. She studied physical chemistry at Newnham Women’s College at the University of Cambridge. During World War II, Franklin researched the physical chemistry of coal and carbon under the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. By studying the porosity of coal, she concluded that substances were expelled in order of molecular size as temperature increased. This work was important for accurately classifying and predicting coal performance for fuel and wartime production and served as her Ph.D. thesis.

After the war, Franklin accepted a position as a research fellow at King’s College London. During this time, she investigated DNA samples. She took clear x-ray diffraction photos of DNA and was able to conclude that the forms had two helices. Her work–specifically her image Photo 51–was the foundation of James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery that the structure of DNA was a double-helix polymer, for which she was not cited or credited.

Afterward, she continued working with x-ray diffraction photos of viruses at the J.D. Bernal’s crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College and collaborated with virus researchers from around the world. She studied RNA of the tobacco mosaic virus and contributed to published works on cucumber virus 4 and turnip yellow mosaic virus.

During her career, she published 19 articles on coal and carbons, 21 on viruses, and 5 on DNA.

Awards & Recognition

1935 – Received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of artificial radioactivity (with Frederic Joliot-Curie)
1940 – Received the Barnard Gold Medal for Meritorious Service to Science (with Frederic Joliot-Curie)
Was an Officer of the Legion of Honour.

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Source: Versant Physics, "The Seven Most Influential Women in Radiation History."

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

February 20, 2020

Tikvah Alper

Tikvah Alper (1909 - 1995) was a renowned radiobiologist and physicist whose work on identifying the infection agent in Scrapie revolutionized scientific understanding of diseases like mad cow disease and kuru.

She was born in 1909 in South Africa and graduated with a distinction in physics from the University of Cape Town in 1929. She was mentored by Lise Meitner as a doctoral student in Berlin from 1930 to 1932 where she published an award-winning paper on delta rays produced by alpha particles.

In addition to her life as a mother and homemaker, she was a physics lecturer at Witwatersrand University and researched in Britain on the irradiation of bacteriophage. She became head of the Biophysics Section in South Africa’s National Physics Laboratory; however, she was forced out of this position in 1951 due to her opposition to apartheid. Afterward, she moved to London with her family and worked her way up to director of Hammersmith Hospital’s MRC Experimental Radiopathology Research Unit in 1962.

Alper found that radiation did not kill the infective agent in Scrapie, an infectious brain disease found in sheep. Instead, by irradiating scrapie samples with different wavelengths of UV light, Alper was able to prove the infective agent was able to replicate despite its lack of nucleic acid. This work became extremely important during Britain’s Mad cow disease outbreak in the 1990s.

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Source: Versant Physics, "The Seven Most Influential Women in Radiation History."

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

February 20, 2020

Edith Quimby

Edith Quimby (1891 - 1982) was a pioneer in the field of radiation physics, a founder of nuclear medicine, and is considered the first female medical physicist in the United States.

She was born in 1891 in Rockford, Illinois, and earned degrees in physics and mathematics from Whitman College and the University of California, Berkeley. Much of her early work at the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York focused on the medical effects of radiation and limiting side effects with proper dosages. Furthermore, she was also interested in the safe application of radioactive isotopes in the treatment of thyroid disease, brain tumors, and other cancers.

Edith Quimby helped found the Radiological Research Laboratory at Columbia University, was the first female physicist president of the American Radium Society and was influential in the founding of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. She was a professor at both Cornell University Medical College and Columbia University, and she authored several books throughout her career, including the classic Physical Foundations of Radiology (1944), and over 70 scientific papers.

Awards & Recognition

1940 – Recipient of the Janeway Medal from the American Radium Society
1941 – Awarded the Gold Medal of the Radiological Society of North America
1963 – Awarded the Gold Medal from the American College of Radiology
AAPM established a lifetime achievement award in her honor.

Source: Versant Physics, "The Seven Most Influential Women in Radiation History."

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID

February 20, 2010

Irene Joliot-Curie

Irene Joliot-Curie (1897 - 1956) was a chemist and physicist known for her work on natural and artificial radioactivity, transmutation of elements, and nuclear physics.

She was born in Paris, France in 1897 to Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie. She studied chemistry at the Radium Institute and completed her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Paris. Her doctoral thesis focused on radiation emitted by polonium.

During World War I, Irene worked alongside her mother on the battlefield as a nurse radiographer. For a time, she also taught doctors how to locate shrapnel in soldiers using radiological equipment.

Alongside her husband, chemical engineer Frederic Joliot, Irene studied atomic nuclei. Together they were the first to calculate the accurate mass of the neutron and discovered that radioactive elements can be artificially produced from stable elements. The pair shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the first artificially-created radioactive atoms, which had practical applications in radiochemistry, specifically in medicine and the treatment of thyroid diseases. In addition, her research on the action of neutrons on heavy elements was an important step in the discovery of nuclear fission.

Outside of her research, Irene was the Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Sorbonne and a Professor in the Faculty of Science in Paris. Beginning in 1946 she served as the director of the Radium Institute and was instrumental in the design of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Orsay, France. She died in 1956 of leukemia, likely a result of her work with polonium-210. Her daughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot (1927-present), is a retired professor of nuclear physics and third generation of Curie women working in nuclear science.

Awards & Recognition

1935 – Received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of artificial radioactivity (with Frederic Joliot-Curie)
1940 – Received the Barnard Gold Medal for Meritorious Service to Science (with Frederic Joliot-Curie)
Was an Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Sources:
Versant Physics, "The Seven Most Influential Women in Radiation History."
DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, "5 Women Who Changed History in Nuclear Science," March 24, 2023.

Published by editor in Brilliant thinkers, History-making, Nuclear R&D, Women in Nuclear, WOMEN IN NUCLEAR GRID