Women Scientists and the Men Who Screwed Them

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Beginning in 1983 and for another eleven years, a Canadian psychologist, based on Montreal, administered his Draw-a-Scientist Test to over 4000 children between the ages of five to eleven.

Not a single boy drew a woman, and very few girls did either.  Probably the results would be similar in the United States. When we think of scientists, we almost always think of a man.

This is hardly surprising, of course, given how children and teenagers learn about scientists in their schools. The list usually begins with Galileo, moves on to Newton, and then continues with such famous scientists as Faraday, Lavoisier, who unfortunately lost his head – literally – during the French Revolution, and then the roster of brilliant scientists rolls on: Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Einstein of course, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and then to our own time, such icons as Steven Hawking and Richard Feynman.

It's difficult to think of a woman scientist who might belong to this passel of stellar scientists.  Oh, sure, there’s Madame Curie, I suppose, but it’s hard to think of any woman who can be listed in the same company of the famous men I have listed.

But there’s reason to think this might change in the years ahead. At least in the United States, more girls now graduate college than boys and tend to get better grades, too. And more germane is the fact that now fully a quarter of people involved in STEM work are women. We can expect that number to increase in the years to come.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Most universities in the U.S. didn’t even accept women until the 20th century. One college of Cambridge University didn’t even allow women to matriculate until 1986, which prompted its male students to hold a funeral possession, complete with a coffin, to mark their displeasure. Male privilege! It’s sickening, isn’t it?   

Things were even worse for girls growing up in Europe well into the last century.  If you were a gifted, even a brilliant young woman, you found barriers and discrimination sufficient to “keep women in their place.”

But, as we will see, some plucky women, even in the 18th century, would not be denied. However, even then, they often had to contend with prejudice against them and be content with low wages or none at all. And, worse, some of these brilliant women, who did original work leading to Nobel Prizes, never got the credit or recognition for their critical contributions.  The prizes always were awarded to men.

In this blog, I want to tell you about some of these women, if only to honor them, however belatedly, for their invaluable contributions to science, recognition that was cruelly denied to them during their lifetimes – or only at the end of their lives, in some cases, or when it was too late to matter.

Lise Meitner

Let’s begin with the case of Lise Meitner.

Born in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish Viennese family in a circle of lawyers, writers and intellectuals, Meitner’s remarkable intelligence was quickly recognized and encouraged by her family. At a time when most European universities were barred to women, she was one of only four girls permitted to study at the University of Vienna.  Despite her uncertainties and shyness, she was determined to become a physicist and eventually succeeded in obtaining her doctorate.

She was so gifted that in 1907, she was invited to Berlin to study under the great Max Planck, where she also met and was befriended by the chemist, Otto Hahn, who was to become a key person in her life.  They began to collaborate in the nearly emerging field of radioactivity. But even then, Meitner, who was, as Hahn soon recognized, much brighter than he, and a much better theoretician, was relegated to work in the basement for a year before being allowed into a lab. It wasn’t long, however, before Meitner’s gifts were recognized by the leaders in the field.  She could then be found sitting with Planck and Einstein in the front row at their theoretical seminars.

In this blog, I will not be able to delve into the work she and Hahn did together, which became of utmost importance in the history of physics, since I want to concentrate on their personal relationship.  But in the end, it led to Meitner’s discovery of how to split the uranium atom, which people had thought to be impossible, and which led eventually to the creation of the atomic bomb within about a half dozen years after Meitner’s discovery of what came to called nuclear fission.  Hahn had nothing to do with it, and confessed he didn’t really understand how Meitner had managed to do it.

Although they never dated, as such, Meitner was clearly attracted to Hahn, who was handsome and charming. Being shy, she kept her feelings to herself, but she never dated anyone after Hahn got married.  Their collaboration continued over many years, with interruptions during the First World War, and, later, as we will see, during the Second.  Hahn always depended on her to further his own work.

However, even though Meitner had converted to Protestantism in 1908, by the time the Nazis came into power, she was forced to leave Berlin since she was still regarded as Jewish. However, since she was Austrian by birth, she could go there to continue her work and collaboration with Hahn, even if they could not be together.

But not for long. There was the Anschluss in 1938 when the Nazis took over Australia.  But even before that, there was nasty talk by other scientists about “the Jewess endangering the institute.” When Meitner became aware of this, she asked Hahn to intervene on her behalf.  He did.

He told them to get rid of her.

Meitner was shocked at his betrayal. In her diary she wrote, “Hahn says I should not come to the institute anymore.  He has, in essence, thrown me out.” She was forced to flee to Sweden for safety to start a new life in Stockholm at the age of sixty.

It gets worse.

Fast-forward to 1944 when Hahn, not Meitner, was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery – Meitner’s, of course – of nuclear fission.  Though a colleague of Meitner’s who also worked with her and Hahn later testified that “she was the intellectual leader of our team,” Hahn claimed full credit for “his” discovery.  According to David Bodanis, who has written extensively about Meitner and Hahn, he “as ever, seemed to have been the slowest to grasp what [Meitner had discovered] and admitted he didn’t have a clue.” And again:  “Hahn, as ever, seemed the slowest….After the outlines of fission had been worked out, he still had troubles. ‘Bohr will think I’m a cretin,’ Hahn wrote to Meitner in July, 1939….I don’t understand it.”

Here comes the worse part. After Hahn had claimed the Nobel Prize for himself. Bodanis comments:

What’s more serious – or at least seems inexplicable only by Hahn’s realizing he’d done something very wrong – was the way Hahn tried to rewrite the history of his relationship with Meitner after the war: treating her as if she had been some sort of junior assistant [in an interview just before receiving his Nobel Prize, and] later, giving mocking, almost sighing references to how foolishly misguided her attempted advice had been.

Some men are just shits, but Hahn seems to have been a real bastard.

There is, however, a happy, if belated, coda to this sad story of intellectual usurpation.

According to another author who has also written about the Meitner affair:

When the records of the Nobel Prize committee were unsealed in the 1990s, historians…excavated the true extent to which Meitner had been overlooked in the Nobel judgment.  In 1997 she was rewarded for her contributions to science with her own element: meitnerium.  

Too late for Meitner, though, since she had died in 1968 at the age of ninety.

Cecilia Payne

For a curious child, gazing at the stars, it is natural to wonder what makes them shine so brightly.  Such a child was Cecilia Payne, growing up with England. One night, when she was five years old, she was out with her mother when she saw a shooting star. She never forgot that moment.  It was a seed experience and little Cecilia always remembered being entranced by that luminous star as it tumbled down from the heavens.

That night set her on the path to become one of the pre-eminent astronomers of the 20th century, but it was not always easy for her to attain that status.  In her family, it was her brother who was given every chance to get into Oxford. His sisters, including Cecilia, were left to fend for themselves. But Cecilia, who had always yearned to go to Cambridge, found a way by winning a scholarship to Newnham College.

At that time, according to Cecilia, she was “a dowdy and studious” young woman.  She agonized over dances and other social events, and was drawn to books, not boys. She was mocked as “the girl who read Plato for pleasure.”

Cambridge turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Women were segregated from men in lecture halls and sequestered in separate colleges. But she persevered and did well enough to be admitted to the Harvard College Observatory to pursue a doctorate in astronomy. And there, to her delight, she found that she was treated by her colleagues as a fellow scientist:  “We met as equals. We were scientists, we were scholars, and neither of these words has a gender.”

She was still focused on what caused stars to burn so brightly. It was a mystery.  Almost all astronomers in the nineteen twenties thought that they were composed mainly of iron since that metal had been found to be in asteroids, but, to Cecilia, that made no sense.  Iron does not combust into light.  For two years, she worked doggedly at this problem, and she finally found the answer.  Stars were mostly composed of hydrogen and, secondarily, of helium.  

Nobody believed her. Her thesis advisor, Henry Norris Russell, said to be a pompous know-it-all, scorned her findings, would not accept them, and decreed she delete them from her thesis. At first, Cecila refused and stood her ground.

David Bodanis, who has written about Cecilia Payne and her struggles to win acceptance takes up the story from here:

The old guard knew. Hydrogen would do nothing. It wasn’t there, it couldn’t be there; their careers – all their detailed calculations, and the power and patronage that stemmed from it – depended on iron being what was in the sun. 

Russell was adamant – retract or else! Against him, as Bodanis goes on to say, “there was very little recourse….Russell would never accept that he could be wrong – and he also controlled most grants and job appointments on the East Coast.”

Cecilia reached out to other astronomers who had befriended her in the past, but they all demurred when it came to opposing Russell’s dictum. No mere woman was going to convince him.  In the end, like a modern-day Galileo, she was forced to recant. Nevertheless, her published thesis was said by other authorities years later to be “the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy.” All 600 copies of the resulting monograph sold out.  As a result of her work, Cecilia was then listed as a youngest astronomer ever in Cattell’s American Men [sic] of Science.

Still, Russell insisted that she include this humiliating sentence in her thesis:  “The enormous abundance [of hydrogen]… is almost certainly not real.” 

This was 1925, and Russell never forgave Cecilia for her seeming impudence and initial defiance of his edict.  The following years were not easy for her after she began teaching at Harvard. The president of the university explicitly said she would not be appointed to an official position as long as he remained in office. Despite teaching a full course load, she was listed as a “technical assistant,” and was underpaid. “I was paid so little that I was ashamed to admit it to my relations in England,” she wrote.” They thought I was coining money in a land of millionaires.”

In the end, however, Cecilia was vindicated. We now know that our galaxy is 74% hydrogen, 24% helium, and just 2% of other elements. She went on to have a very distinguished career and ended up becoming chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard while her former professors were forced to eat crow. She was right all along, and they, so sure of themselves, were dead wrong. But Russell, like Trump, was never willing to admit he had erred or had anything to apologize for. Years later he was heard to say that he had “always” known that the stars were full of hydrogen.  What he was full of is obvious.

Whether Cecilia Payne ever learned to dance is unknown.

Emmy Noether

After Emmy Noether died in her early fifties in 1935, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the New York Times about her in which he wrote the following:

In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.

Einstein was not alone in writing an encomium about Noether.  Hermann Weyl, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and Noether’s colleague at the University of Göttingen, made this astonishing admission about her:

I was ashamed to occupy such a preferred position beside her whom I knew to be my superior as a mathematician in many respects. Tradition, prejudice, external considerations weighed the balance against her scientific merits and scientific greatness, by that time denied by no one.

When David Hilbert, who was the pre-eminent mathematician of his era and world-famous, and who also taught at Göttingen, invited her to join his team, he discovered that Noether had been toiling away for seven years in an unpaid position. Hilbert was outraged at this and was even more incensed when the university refused his request to promote her to a junior professorship, citing her gender. To this rebuff, Hilbert relied angrily:

I don’t see why the sex of the candidate is relevant. This is after all an academic institution, not a bath house.

The university administrators were adamant, however, and would not yield. And other professors objected, too, one of them protesting:  “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” During her 18-years at Göttingen, Noether was never officially paid as a professor, though Hilbert was able to cadge enough money to provide a small stipend for her to lecture on algebra.

Finally, following her death, she received this tribute from the leading mathematicians of the day:  “She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.”

So, who was this woman, Emmy Noether, this paragon of mathematical genius, whom the New York Times once described as “the mighty mathematician you’ve never heard of.”

Well, now you’ve heard of her. What you need to know next is where she came from and what – very briefly – she achieved, despite all the obstacles she faced in the halls of academe, to establish herself as one of truly outstanding mathematicians of her time in the eyes of her peers. And, finally, nearly a century after her death, where does Emmy Noether now rank in the pantheon of history’s legendary mathematicians?

Noether was born into a Jewish family in the Franconian town of Erlangen. Her father was the mathematician Max Noether. She originally planned to teach French and English after passing the required examinations but instead studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen, where her father lectured. After completing her doctorate in 1907 she worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen without pay for seven years. At the time, women were largely excluded from academic positions.

It was at this point that Noether came to the attention of David Hilbert who then brought her to the University of Gottingen.

When it comes to the matter of what Noether achieved during her subsequent career at Gottingen, I have to confess that as much as I have long been fascinated by mathematicians and regard the great ones as a superior species to us mere mortals, I myself have never had a head for mathematics. So, I can only briefly provide a cursory summary of just one of her monumental contributions to the field, which I have had pretty much had to take from a Wikipedia entry about her.

For example, she made major contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Her work on differential invariants in the calculus of variations now called Noether’s theorem has been called "one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics.” It is now taught on university campuses all over the world, and from what I have read, some scientists regard it as just as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Noether’s theorem would go on to revolutionize science. According to what I have read, “it is now woven into our understanding of everything from the orbit of the planets to the search for the Higgs boson.”

This is just one instance of the lasting importance of Noether’s work. For those of you math maniacs, you might want to read that extensive entry in Wikipedia about the full scope of her work, how much it has influenced scores of mathematicians, including many of her own students, as well as other aspects of her life. 

But now we must begin to bring this brief introduction to Noether’s importance to its sad close. Once the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, Noether, being Jewish, lost her job and in order not to lose her life as well, was forced to leave Germany.

She was able to get to the United States and found a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College. She also lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study, though she remarked that she felt quite unwelcome at Princeton University, at the time only reserved for men.  Even though by then she was an internationally celebrated mathematician, she still faced sexism in academic settings.

In 1935, she developed some tumors in her pelvis, which came to be infected, sending her temperature soaring and leading to her death at 53.  After her death, as I noted at the outset of this blog, tributes from all over the world, including from the highest ranks of mathematicians, poured in.

But that was then. Within a few years following her death, World War Two began, then the atomic bombs were dropped over Japan, and after the war was over, the Cold War began.  And the juggernaut of history rolled on to the present chaotic and worrisome era.  Would anyone remember Noether after all these years?

I was doubtful after I first discovered her in a little book called Forgotten Women: The Scientists. Lise Meitner and Cecilia Payne also appeared in that book, but I had already heard of them.  Noether’s story, however, was new to me. Had she really been forgotten?

I decided to check in one of my big books on mathematicians with the (sexist) but alliterative title of Men of Mathematics. Despite the title, the author, E. T. Bell, does discuss at some length other women mathematicians in its nearly 600 pages, but not Noether. She rates only a passing sentence, but the content of the sentence is significant for it states that she was “the leading woman mathematician of our own time” (however, it should be noted that this book was originally published two years after her death, though the copy I have was printed in 1957).  Don’t you think “the leading woman mathematician our own time” would rate more than a glancing reference and a footnote? Did sexism follow Noether even beyond the grave?

On the other hand, somebody – doubtless another mathematician who was deeply familiar with and knowledgeable about her life and work prepared that extensive Wikipedia entry about her. Someone at least remembered her.

Still, I can’t help wondering if she had been born Edward Noether whether her name might today be as familiar to us as Einstein’s is.

Rosalind Franklin

Despite having an entry devoted to her in the book Forgotten Women: The Scientists, Rosalind Franklin is by no means “a forgotten scientist.” Quite the opposite. Her role in the discovery of the double helix is well known and the controversy about it – and her --  has continued to rage like a swarm of angry bees in the history of this discovery for well over the past half century and has never been resolved.  Some of you reading this blog may well already be familiar with it, but, if not, let me take a few moments to give you a brief account of this tortured tale, which raises the question of whether Rosalind Franklin was cheated out of her share in the Nobel Prize and otherwise unjustly maligned by one the co-discoverers of the structure of the double helix, one James Watson.

The basic facts, however, are not in dispute.

In the race to discover the biological structure of life, there were two teams of researchers in the hunt: James Watson and Francis Crick at Cambridge and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London.

The relationship between Franklin and Wilkins was fraught from the start. The director of King’s Medical Research Center, John Randall, had informed Franklin, who was an expert in X-ray crystallography, that she would be the sole investigator, never mentioning to her that a molecular biologist and physicist, Maurice Wilkins, would also be working with her on this quest.

They did not get along, and didn’t relish having to work together. Wilkins was reserved and timid; Franklin, strong-willed and direct. But Franklin was not interested in winning any popularity contests; the only contest that interested her was the one to solve the biological structure of life, so despite their personal animosity toward each other, Franklin and Wilkins soon got down to work.

Assisted by a graduate student named Raymond Gosling, Franklin soon discovered through her crystallographic X-rays that there wasn’t just a single strand of the helix; there appeared to be two of them. But Franklin was a meticulous scientist; she wanted to be sure, so she did some additional analysis.  Still, she seemed to be close to identifying the double helix form of DNA.

The plot thickens, however, when Watson happened to visit Wilkins at King’s. Wilkins, in the course of a rant when he was bitching about his difficulties with Franklin, showed Watson a key photograph, taken by Gosling, and when Watson saw it, he went nuts, as he later recounted:

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” Photograph 51, as it was called, served to set Watson and Crick ahead of Franklin and Wilkins in the race to identify the structure of the double helix.  In addition, an unpublished paper by Franklin also “somehow” fell into the hands of Watson and Crick and provided further evidence of the breakthrough they needed to cement their lead. Watson later admitted how crucial all this was: “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data.  For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands.”

Not long afterward, in April 1953, Watson and Crick announced their discovery – the now famous double helix, the basic structure of life.  Nine years later, they, together with Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize. By then, Rosalind Franklin had died of cancer at the age of 38, but she was not included among the Nobel Laureates. At the time, it was not possible to receive a Nobel posthumously, but my understanding is that is no longer the case.  In any event, Rosalind Franklin never received formal credit for the role she played in the discovery of the double helix.

There is a great deal of further information on this continuing controversy that you can find on the Internet. Here, for example, is a brief extract from Wikipedia that provides more background on the affair:

In a 1954 article, Watson and Crick acknowledged that, without Franklin's data, "the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible." In The Double Helix, Watson later admitted that "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands". In recent years, Watson has garnered controversy in the popular and scientific press for his "misogynist treatment" of Franklin and his failure to properly attribute her work on DNA. According to one critic, Watson's portrayal of Franklin in The Double Helix was negative, giving the impression that she was Wilkins' assistant and was unable to interpret her own DNA data.  Watson's accusation was indefensible since Franklin told Crick and Watson that the helix backbones had to be on the outside. 

Other comments dismissive of "Rosy" in Watson's book caught the attention of the emerging women's movement in the late 1960s. "Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place ... Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot". And, "Certainly a bad way to go out into the foulness of a ... November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained."

******************* 

It wasn’t until the publication of Watson’s bestselling book, The Double Helix, in 1968, when he, begrudgingly and with unmistakable condescending misogyny (“Rosy”), would disclose to the world the pivotal role that Franklin had played in his and Crick’s great discovery. Ironically, his co-discoverer, Francis Crick, later remarked that he regarded Watson's book as a "contemptible pack of damned nonsense.”

Watson, who was a child prodigy and who is still alive at 96, has now compiled a long history of making controversial statements about race and gender, and a variety of other subjects. Some examples:

Watson repeatedly supported generic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and that "the really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." If you troll the Internet, you can find many more of his misogynistic and other noisome statements.

E. O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, once described Watson as “the most unpleasant human being I have ever met.” One can understand why.

Coda

It goes without saying that many men have gone out of their way to help, support and encourage talented women scientists and mathematicians.  Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, who taught at Gottingen for many years, and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, was known to have befriended gifted women who came to his attention.  Indeed, it would have been easy enough for me to write a blog about such exemplary and generous-hearted men. Not all men are stinkers like those I referred to in this blog. But here I was concerned to show the struggles that many women faced in earlier years to overcome the prejudices of men who often blocked their way and sometimes took the credit for the discoveries that these women had made.

And given the often vicious misogyny of the last election and the subsequent rise of a very worrisome new era of male machismo in the United States, I thought that a blog on this theme would be particularly timely. Women will still have to fight for recognition and against male privilege and domination, and good men everywhere must be prepared to do battle with and for them.