Born: 20 May 1900, Germany
Died: 21 September 1996
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
During World War II, physical chemist Erika Cremer was working in Nazi-occupied Austria, developing solid-state gas adsorption chromatography. In spring 1945, Cremer was hit with a double dose of destruction: the press where a report of her work was being printed was bombed and her lab was damaged in an air raid. After the war, her students were able to build a gas chromatograph, optimise it, and use it to separate gases. Post-war issues with German science journals further delayed her publications until 1951, and her work garnered little attention. The following year, male British chemists A. J. P. Martin and R. L. M. Synge won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing liquid partition chromatography; if Cremer’s work, separate from theirs, had been better known at the time, it arguably would have justified a share of the prize.