During World War II, the U.S. Navy was trying to find a solution for “fouling”—when barnacles attach to ship hulls en masse, which slows the ship and increases fuel consumption. Yet when Dr. Dora Henry, the leading expert in the country, if not the world, on barnacles offered her services to help with the research, the men in charge declined.
1600s English entomologist
In 1944, Albert Schatz, Elizabeth Bugie and Selman Waksman published their discovery of streptomycin, yet when Waksman and Schatz patented it, her name was left off the application.
Biologist Marion Bidder worked as a lecturer and director of studies at Newnham College for more than ten years before marrying in 1899. Suddenly her published works were all about domestic economy—even though she’d married a fellow biologist.
Marthe Gautier was studying Down Syndrome when she noticed an extra chromosome while studying cell samples from a patient. Due to her poorly equipped lab—she had only a low-power microscope—she couldn’t identify or photograph the chromosome.
The 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three men—George Whipple, George Richards Minot, and William P. Murphy—for their research into the use of liver tissue in treatment of pernicious anaemia. Frieda Robscheit-Robbins, who had co-authored twenty-one papers with Whipple (almost his entire body of published work) on the topic, was left out.
Marian Diamond is considered one of the founders of modern neuroscience, not least for her experimental discovery of brain plasticity—the fact that the brain physically changes with experience.
Immunologist Marian Koshland is known for discovering that the differences in antibodies’ amino acid make-up explain how efficient and effective they are at fighting off foreign elements.
Conducted by Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey, the Hershey-Chase experiment earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969—not for Chase, but for Hershey.
Biochemist Barbara Low discovered the elemental components of penicillin that enabled mass production and conversion into other antibiotic compounds. Until then, the life-saving drug had not been successfully synthesised.