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For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. In this series, we illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season we focus on a different scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and work ...
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Evangelina recibió una calurosa bienvenida de regreso a su país, y se pone a trabajar de inmediato, introduciendo sus nuevas ideas sobre la atención en salud a mujeres y niños. Montó su propio consultorio médico, y convenció a algunos campesinos para que distribuyesen leche gratis a niños pobres. Pero su proselitismo alrededor de los métodos antico…
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Evangelina got a warm welcome on her return from Paris and went straight to work, introducing her new ideas about healthcare for women and children. She set up a new medical practice, and managed to get farmers to provide free milk for poor infants. But her proselytizing about contraception and her work with prostitutes made even her friends uncomf…
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Devastated by the death of her mentor following childbirth, Evangelina decided to devote her life to women’s health. It took a decade to raise the money to go to Paris, which was then the mecca of medical training, but she never gave up. At the age of 42 she boarded a steamship to France. Amidst the post-war scene of France's Roaring Twenties, she …
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Devastada por la muerte de su mentora, ocurrida tras un parto, Evangelina decidió dedicar su vida a la salud de la mujer. Tardó una década en reunir el dinero para ir a París, que en ese entonces era la meca de la formación médica. Nunca se rindió. A los 42 años se embarcó en un buque de vapor rumbo a Francia, país que experimentaba un boom durante…
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A finales de la década de 1890, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo era una de las tantas niñas pobres luchando por sobrevivir en la ciudad de San Pedro de Macorís, en la República Dominicana. Su vida dio un giro extraordinario cuando dos hermanos, poetas y escritores, llegaron de la capital. Notaron algo especial en la joven, quien vivía cerca. Con…
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In the late 1890s, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, known as Evangelina, was just another poor girl trying to survive in the provincial town of San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic. Her life took an extraordinary turn when two brothers, both poets and writers, arrived from the capital. They noticed something special about the young gir…
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En la década de 1880, una pequeña niña Afro-Dominicana pasaba sus días vendiendo dulces en las calles de San Pedro de Macorís, una bulliciosa ciudad portuaria en la República Dominicana. Abandonada por sus padres, quienes la tuvieron por fuera del matrimonio, su futuro parecía gris: en esta sociedad profundamente estratificada, pocas personas logra…
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In the 1880s, a small Afro-Dominican girl spent her days selling sweets on the streets of San Pedro de Macorís, a bustling port town in the Dominican Republic. Born out of wedlock and abandoned by her parents, her horizons seemed narrow — in this deeply stratified society, few people ever broke free from the life they were born into. But Andrea Eva…
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Lisa See’s novel Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is inspired by a medical textbook published in 1511 by an eminent female doctor, Tan Yunxian. In this episode, we talk to See about the origin of her novel, and to Lorraine Wilcox, the scholar who translated the original Chinese text, about what the practice of medicine was like for a female doctor during…
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In 1960 Marthe Gautier left the lab where she had discovered the genetic cause of Down syndrome, and went on to have a successful career as a pediatric cardiologist. For decades, she remained silent as her former colleague Jérôme Lejeune continued to take credit for this pioneering discovery, and history wrote her out of the story. Until 2009. On t…
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In the mid-1950s Marthe Gautier, a young French doctor and cytogenetics researcher, led a cutting-edge experiment to investigate the cause of Down syndrome. She painstakingly cultured cells in a ramshackle lab until one day she discovered an extra chromosome in the cells of patients with Down syndrome. This proved beyond a doubt that Down syndrome …
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In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are telling the story of Margarethe Hilferding, a pioneering psychoanalyst and physician from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. She was the first woman to earn a medical degree at the University of Vienna and the first woman to join Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanal…
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Dr. Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, dedicated her life’s work to messenger RNA, which she always believed had the potential to change the world. After decades of being ignored, she persisted with the research that eventually revolutionized the field of medicine and enabled the development of lifesaving vaccines in record time during th…
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At this festive time of year, when many people are bringing trees into their homes to decorate for the holidays, we are going back to our story of a pioneering scientist who made it her mission to ensure that plants traveling across borders did not carry any diseases. It was in 1909, that the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees …
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Two female botanists – Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter – made headlines for riding the rapids of the Colorado River in 1938 in an effort to document the Grand Canyon’s plant life. In Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, author Melissa L. Sevigny retraces their journey and shows how the ambitio…
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Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics and worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive metal that was used in the production of early nuclear weapons.) After the war, Parker continued her research and…
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Anna Von Mertens' thoughtful new exploration of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's life describes and illuminates Leavitt's decades-long study of stars, including the groundbreaking system she developed for measuring vast distances within our universe simply by looking at photographic plates. Leavitt studied hundreds of thousands of stars captured on the gla…
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Finding Dora Richardson: The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode Two
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Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this market would be commercially viable. The company had hoped for a contraceptive pill – tamoxifen didn’t work for that – not a cancer treatment. In 1972 the higher-ups at ICI decided to cancel the resear…
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In the early 1960s, chemist Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: tamoxifen. Although her name is on the original patent, her contributions have been lost to history. In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Katie Couric introduces us to Dora’s story. Lost Women…
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While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S. than originally thought – at least ten times more. These survivors were born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions after their mothers unwittingly took thalidomide in the early 1960s in so-called …
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It’s September 2024 and a group of American thalidomide survivors arrive in Washington D.C. to lobby the government for support. More than 60 years have gone by since Frances Kelsey first stalled the New Drug Approval application from pharma company Merrell for thalidomide. Although she stopped the drug from going on the market in the U.S., hundred…
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It’s the summer of 1962 and thalidomide has been off the market in Europe for months. But in the U.S., people are only just beginning to find out about the scandal. The Washington Post breaks the story and puts a picture of Frances Kelsey on the front page. She’s the hero who saved American lives. President John F. Kennedy gives her a medal and her…
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It’s 1961 and Widukind Lenz, a German pediatrician, is going door to door in his efforts to find out what is causing the epidemic of babies born with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions. In the U.S., drug company Merrell is battling with Dr. Frances Kelsey at the Food and Drug Administration about the approval for thalidomide. She’…
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It’s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling drugs. Contergan’s active ingredient is thalidomide and it is touted as a wonder drug, a non-addictive sedative safer than barbiturates. In the U.S., the drug is called Kevadon, and its distributor is impatient to get the drug…
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In this first chapter of a new five-part season we meet Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a physician and pharmacologist who joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical reviewer in 1960. Before the year is out, Dr. Kelsey finds herself standing up to big pharma. It’s September 1960 and a thick New Drug Application lands on Dr. Kelsey’s desk.…
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