{"id":28901,"date":"2022-03-06T20:50:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-06T20:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=28901"},"modified":"2022-03-06T20:57:23","modified_gmt":"2022-03-06T20:57:23","slug":"womens-history-month-5-groundbreaking-researchers-who-mapped-the-ocean-floor-tested-atomic-theories-vanquished-malaria-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/womens-history-month-5-groundbreaking-researchers-who-mapped-the-ocean-floor-tested-atomic-theories-vanquished-malaria-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s History Month: 5 groundbreaking researchers who mapped the ocean floor, tested atomic theories, vanquished malaria and more"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maggie Villiger<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind some of the most fascinating scientific discoveries and innovations are women whose names might not be familiar but whose stories are worth knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there are far too many to all fit on one list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here are five profiles from The Conversation\u2019s archive that highlight the brilliance, grit and unique perspectives of five women who worked in geosciences, math, ornithology, pharmacology and physics during the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Marie<\/a>
Marie Tharp with an undersea map at her desk. Rolled sonar profiles of the ocean floor are on the shelf behind her. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the estate of Marie Tharp<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

1. Revealing and mapping the ocean floor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As late as the 1950s, wrote Wesleyan University geoscientist Suzanne OConnell<\/a>, \u201cmany scientists assumed the seabed was featureless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"sketches<\/a>
An illustration of Marie Tharp\u2019s mapping process. (a) Shows the position of two ship tracks (A, B) moving across the surface. (b) Plots depth recordings as profiles. (c) Sketches features shown on the profiles. The Floors of the Ocean, 1959, Fig. 1<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Enter Marie Tharp<\/a>. In 1957, she and her research partner started publishing detailed hand-drawn maps of the ocean floor, complete with rugged mountains, valleys and deep trenches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tharp was a geologist and oceanographer. Aboard research ships, she would carefully record the depth of the ocean, point by point, using sonar. One of her innovations was to translate this data into topographical sketches of what the seafloor looked like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her discovery of a rift valley in the North Atlantic shook the world of geology \u2013 her supervisor on the ship dismissed her idea as \u201cgirl talk,\u201d and Jacques Cousteau was determined to prove her wrong. But she was right, and her insight was a key contribution to plate tectonic theory. That\u2019s part of why, OConnell writes, \u201cI believe Tharp should be as famous as Jane Goodall or Neil Armstrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Sympathetic observation of bird behavior<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Margaret Morse Nice was a field biologist who got into the minds of her study subjects<\/a> to garner new insights into animal behavior. Most famously she observed song sparrows in the 1920s and \u201830s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rochester Institute of Technology professor of science, technology and society Kristoffer Whitney<\/a> recounted what Nice called her \u201cphenomenological method,\u201d acknowledging the obvious \u201caffection and anthropomorphism\u201d you can see in her descriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I first studied the Song Sparrows,\u201d Nice wrote, \u201cI had looked upon Song Sparrow 4M as a truculent, meddlesome neighbor; but \u2026 I discovered him to be a delightful bird, spirited, an accomplished songster and a devoted father.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite earning no advanced degrees and being considered an amateur, Nice promoted innovations like the \u201cuse of colored leg bands to distinguish individual birds,\u201d gained the respect of her better-known peers and enjoyed a long, successful career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. A medical researcher in Maoist China<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"man<\/a>
Tu Youyou in a pharmacology lab with a colleague in the 1950s. Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the height of China\u2019s Cultural Revolution, a young scientist named Tu Youyou headed a covert operation called Project 523 under military supervision. One of her team\u2019s goals was to identify and systematically test substances used in traditional Chinese medicine in an effort to vanquish chloroquine-resistant malaria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Jia-Chen Fu<\/a> described how \u201ccontrary to popular assumptions that Maoist China was summarily against science and scientists, the Communist party-state needed the scientific elite<\/a> for certain political and practical purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tu followed a hunch about how to extract an antimalarial compound from the qinghao or artemisia plant. By 1971, her team had successfully \u201cobtained a nontoxic and neutral extract that was called qinghaosu or artemisinin.\u201d In 2015, she was honored with a Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. A mathematician who wouldn\u2019t be diverted<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone gets called a \u201ccreative mathematical genius\u201d by Albert Einstein. But Emmy Noether did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mathematician Tamar Lichter Blanks<\/a> wrote about the roadblocks Noether faced as a Jewish woman<\/a> who wanted to pursue a math career in early 1900s Germany. For a while, Noether supervised doctoral students without pay and taught university courses listed under the name of a male colleague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the while, she conducted her own research in theoretical physics, contributing to Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity. Her most revolutionary work was in ring theory and is still pondered by mathematicians today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noether died less than two years after emigrating to the U.S. to escape the Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Testing nuclear theories one by one<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Forever<\/a>
A 2021 U.S. postage stamp featuring Chien-Shiung Wu. U.S. Postal Service<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While sometimes called the \u201cChinese Marie Curie\u201d in her home country, nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu is less well-known in the U.S., where she did the bulk of her work. Rutgers University-Newark physicist Xuejian Wu<\/a> considered Chien-Shiung Wu (no relation) \u201can icon\u201d who inspired his own career path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a grad student, Wu traveled by steamship to California in 1936, where she fell in love with atomic nuclei research<\/a> at UC Berkeley, home of a brand new cyclotron. She worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among her many accomplishments, Wu\u2019s careful experimental work discovered what\u2019s called parity nonconservation \u2013 that is, that a physical process and its mirror reflection are not necessarily identical. Her colleagues who focused on the theoretical side of this breakthrough won the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics, but Wu was overlooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor\u2019s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation\u2019s archives.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie Villiger<\/a>, Senior Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maggie Villiger, The Conversation Behind some of the most fascinating scientific discoveries and innovations are women whose names might not be familiar but whose stories are worth knowing. Of course, there are far too many to all fit on one list. But here are five profiles from The Conversation\u2019s archive that highlight the brilliance, grit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":28902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[292,3410],"tags":[2275,11457,1197,3824,11456,5215,1738,1044,7717],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28903,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28901\/revisions\/28903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}