While the Pap test is named for Greek pathologist Georgios Papanikolaou, few people acknowledge that it was his wife, Andromachi “Mary” Papanikolaou, who spent more than 20 years having her own cervix scraped on a daily basis to provide the testing materials he needed, in addition to managing his laboratory and recruiting her friends to donate their own samples as well.
1978 National Inventor of the Year (US) Barbara Askins waited until her children were in school to finish her chemistry Bachelors and Masters degrees, then went on to work for NASA, developing a new way to process film using radioactive materials. The astronomical and geological images she worked on held much more detail, making them significantly more valuable to scientists, and her process was also applied to x-rays and restoration of old photos.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) finally had to let a woman on board a research vessel in 1959 when oceanographer Betty Bunce secured funding for an expedition with herself as chief scientist—no Bunce meant no funding and therefore no expedition.
1600s French chemist who published La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames (Easy Chemistry for Women)
Lt. Col. Annie Graham was the highest-ranking army nurse serving in the Vietnam War to die in the line of duty.
American astrophysicist and writer
Mexican psychologist and writer
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi won a Nobel Prize for her role in discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
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.
A novelist and scientist, her efforts went beyond translation of English works into her native French—she also added her own commentary, which pushed her writing from the acceptable to the unacceptable for women of the 1700s, particularly given her interest in the sciences.