Harriet Brooks

Harriet Brooks was a physicist whose experiments helped to solve the question of what particles were emitted during radiation. As a young researcher in 1901, working in a newly established physics laboratory at McGill Univeristy, Brooks showed that radioactivity involved the creation of an entirely new atomic element. Working along with Ernest Rutherford, her mentor, she identified the element that was later named radon. Unfortunately, over time, Rutherford was deemed the "father of nuclear physics" for work done by Brooks, as her career in physics was cut permaturely short, because of her marriage.

Born in Exeter, Canada in 1876, Brooks was the first Canadian nuclear physicist and the first woman to earn a master's degree from McGill University. SHe became Rutherford's first graduate student assistant at McGill.

In her short tenure in her career, she resolved one of the most perplexing problems of early 20^th century chemistry when she discovered that radioactive heavy elements release an entirely different element as they decay. Specifically, by analyzing emissions from the radioactive element thorium she determined that it wasnot just thorium in vapor form, but rather a new element, that we now call radon. This discovery demonstrated that radioactive elements transform to other elements, a fact that is core to the modern conception of radioactivity. Brooks’ contributions stand at the foundation of contemporary nuclear science.

Although Brooks authored research papers by herself and together with Rutherford, who vividly cited her work and gave her credit in his publications and lectures, Brooks' contributions went largely unnotices and the discovery of radon attributed to Rutherford alone. It took 70 years after her death, for her contributions to be formally acknowledged and for her to be inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame, which did not occur until 2002. Still, in 2010, the American Physical Society honored Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, another collaborator for hteir work on radioactivity but Brooks' contributions went unmentioned.

Brooks managed to overcome many obstacles over the course of her career. Her lack of wealth was addressed by earning fellowships. When she was dismissed from a teaching position at Barnard College as a result of her engagement, she found employment as a full-time researcher at the Curie-led Radium Institute in Paris, and later secured an appointment at the University of Manchester that allowed her to continue her work. It was only her marriage to a man who wanted her to settle down with him in Montreal, away from universities and research laboratories, that effectively ended her scientific career.

Awards & Honors

Inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 2002, 70 years after her death.

Source:

Slate: Women have been disappearing from science for as long as they've been allowed to study science,by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan and Hossein Taheri, May, 2, 2022

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

February 20, 2020

Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu, also known as the “First Lady of Physics,” was a Chinese American particle and experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan project and played an important role in the advancement of nuclear and particle physics.

Madame Wu was born in 1912 in Shanghai. She received a degree in physics from what is now known as Nanjing University and later enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where she completed her Ph.D. She worked as a physics instructor at Princeton University and Smith College before joining the Manhattan Project in 1944. Her work at the Substitute Alloy Materials Lab was meant to support the gaseous diffusion program for uranium enrichment. Her research also improved Geiger counters for radiation detection.

As a leading physicist on beta decay, Madame Wu was able to confirm Enrico Fermi’s 1933 theory of beta decay. She was also responsible for disproving “the law of conservation of parity” in what is known as the Wu Experiment. In this experiment, she measured the small particles released from cobalt-60 atoms and found that they were emitted asymmetrically. This proved the theory that parity is not reserved for beta decay, vastly altering long-held beliefs in the physics community.

Awards & Recognition

1958 – Became the 7^th female member elected to the National Academy of Sciences
1964 – Was the first woman to win the Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences
1975 – Became the first woman president of the American Physical Society
1975 – Honored with the National Medal of Science
1978 – Received the first Wolf Prize in Physics
1990 – 2753 Wu Chien-Shiung asteroid was named after her
Held honorary degrees from Harvard University, Dickinson College, University of South Carolina, University of Albany, SUNY, Columbia University, and National Central University

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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

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