Born: 1981, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Clarice Salone
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Clarice Phelps was a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor when, in 2008, she helped isolate and purify 22mg of berkelium, which collaborators used to create a new element: tennessine, element 117. Phelps became the first African-American woman to contribute to the discovery or creation of a new element. Yet only months after physicist and Wikipedia activist Jess Wade put a bio up for her on Wikipedia on August 31, 2018, it was removed by another editor, user TonyBallioni, on February 11, 2019 because he deemed Phelps “not notable” enough. Wade recreated the page that April and the same user deleted it the same day. It took almost a year of fighting before it was restored in January 2020. It’s also worth noting that dozens of editors besides Wade had worked on the page while it was up the first time, but it only took one man to decide a woman didn’t matter enough.
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