Born: 23 March 1920, United States
Died: 10 January 2019
Country most active: United Kingdom, United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Biochemist Barbara Low was one of the first scientists in the U.S. to study X-ray diffraction of crystalline proteins in a lab and, through that work, 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. In an ironic twist, the very importance of Low’s discovery was why she and her supervisor Dorothy Hodgkin went unacknowledged—their work on penicillin was classified for decades, though Hodgkin did win the Nobel in Chemistry in 1964, for her work mapping the structure of vitamin B12.