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In high school, Isabella Karle had to take a science class to fulfill a prerequisite. She chose chemistry at random. Karle would go on to become one of the most important chemists of her time, doing groundbreaking research in the field of X-ray crystallography. Her discoveries in the mid 1950s are a key reason many modern-day pharmaceuticals are available on pharmacy shelves. But Karle’s collaborator–her husband, Jerome–would eventually receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work Isabella also achieved.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, host Elah Feder explores the remarkable resurgence of I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 novel that went largely unnoticed for decades before becoming an international sensation. Harpman was a psychoanalyst and her training informed the book’s speculative fiction, dystopian, and science fiction genres. Elah first speaks with award-winning translator Ros Schwartz, who translated the novel into English twice –once in 1997 and again in 2022, when a new edition helped introduce Harpman’s work to a new generation of readers. Later, Elah is joined by Susan Watkins, Professor of Women’s Writing at Leeds Beckett University, to discuss the novel’s themes of resilience, isolation, and survival, and why this once-overlooked book is resonating so strongly with readers today.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

En 1856, décadas antes de que se acuñara el término “gas de efecto invernadero”, Eunice Newton Foote demostró el efecto invernadero en su laboratorio casero. Colocó un cilindro de vidrio lleno de dióxido de carbono al sol y observó que se calentaba mucho más rápido que un cilindro con aire común. Su conclusión: más dióxido de carbono en la atmósfera da lugar a un planeta más cálido. Años más tarde, un científico británico llamado John Tyndall realizó un experimento mucho más complejo que demostró el mismo efecto y explicó su funcionamiento. Hoy en día, Tyndall es ampliamente reconocido como el hombre que descubrió el efecto invernadero. ¡Incluso hay un cráter en la luna que lleva su nombre! Mientras que Eunice Newton Foote fue olvidada por la historia… hasta que un historiador aficionado redescubrió su legado. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in the sun, and found that it heated up much faster than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet. Several years later, a British scientist named John Tyndall conducted a far more complicated experiment that demonstrated the same effect and revealed how it worked. Today, he’s widely known as the man who discovered the greenhouse gas effect. There’s even a crater on the moon named for him! Eunice Newton Foote, meanwhile, was lost to history—until an amateur historian stumbled on her story. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

How much can you understand about a brain when that brain is long gone? Tilly Edinger, a Jewish paleontologist, used fossilized skulls to study the evolution of brains. That research allowed her to escape Nazi Germany in 1939, and create a new subdivision of paleontology, paleoneurology.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1930s India, Kamala Baghvat dreamed of working alongside the world's greatest scientific minds. But she was repeatedly told “no” when she tried to work in the then male dominated field. Inspired by Gandhi, she used nonviolent protest to pry her way into some of India’s top laboratories. She became the first Indian woman to earn a PhD in biochemistry, and eventually, the first woman to lead India's Royal Institute of Science. Baghvat’s career centered around a topic she was passionate about: solving India’s malnutrition crisis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Sharla Boehm earned a teaching degree from UCLA before channeling her talent for math into computer programming. While working at the Rand Corporation, she built a ground-breaking simulation, originally conceived to strengthen military communications during the Cold War. The simulation –and her work– would ultimately lay the foundation for the modern internet.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal…there was a human arm in the refrigerator,” said J. Peter Willard about his aunt, Mary Louisa Willard. Otherwise, he insisted, she was “very normal.” But Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1920s, left a strong impression on most people, to say the least. Her hometown of State College, Pennsylvania, knew her for stopping traffic in her pink Cadillac to chat with friends, and for throwing birthday bashes for her beloved cocker spaniels. Police around the world knew her for her side hustle: using chemistry to help solve crimes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“La única vez que vi algo que me pareció anormal… había un brazo humano en el refrigerador”, dijo J. Peter Willard sobre su tía, Mary Louisa Willard. Por lo demás, insistió, era “muy normal.” Pero Mary Louisa Willard, profesora de química en la Universidad Estatal de Pensilvania a finales de la década de 1920, dejó una fuerte impresión en la mayoría de las personas. Su ciudad natal, State College (Pensilvania), la conocía por detener el tráfico en su Cadillac rosa para saludar a sus amistades, y por organizar fiestas de cumpleaños para sus queridos perritos cocker spaniels. La policía la conocía por su oficio secundario: usar la química para resolver crímenes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elizabeth Roboz Einstein’s life was shaped by the forces of history. She studied bioorganic chemistry at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and then left her home country of Hungary during World War II, before German troops invaded — practically a miracle for a single, Jewish woman. In the U.S., she blazed a trail in the brand new field of neurochemistry; her seminal research into multiple sclerosis (MS) unlocked key findings that would make effective medical treatments for MS possible.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, host Carol Sutton Lewis speaks with science writer Hanne Strager about her biography of Inge Lehmann, the pioneering Danish seismologist who discovered that Earth has a solid inner core..  Largely unknown outside scientific circles, Lehmann fundamentally transformed our understanding of what lies at the heart of our planet. She did this in 1936 by identifying anomalies in earthquake waves that others had overlooked. At the time, scientists believed Earth’s core was entirely liquid. Lehmann proposed instead that a solid inner core lay hidden within it — a groundbreaking insight that reshaped geophysics. In revisiting Lehmann’s story, Strager highlights that Lehmann’s legacy is one of resilience and perseverance — proof that early setbacks do not define a life, and that brilliance can flourish, even later in life. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This bonus episode is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Science History Institute. Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world.  But the way we talk about Agnes’s life and work often falls back on familiar tropes about women’s domestic roles, assumptions about how science gets done, and what it looked like to do science as a woman in the 19th century.   Agnes's story invites us to rethink how we define success for scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what might we gain if we crack it open a bit wider?  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

How is a legacy preserved, and how is someone forgotten? Determined to make a final name for himself, Irving Langmuir ventures into science that even he might classify as pathological wishful thinking, while Katharine continues her work as the diligent experimenter. But her contributions faded from both the company’s and the public’s memory. We go to visit her, to say good-bye – and we look at the wisdom she imparted to the next generation of ​​inquiring minds.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Katharine’s relatives lead the production team to a collection of papers and artifacts stored in a New England storage unit, revealing an inner struggle she kept carefully out of sight – even as she was making history in the laboratory. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The 1930s prove to be an exceptional decade for research at The General Electric Company. Katharine Burr Blodgett works closely alongside her boss, Irving Langmuir who, in 1932, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In 1938, Katharine’s meticulous experiments with thin film coatings on solid surfaces lead to her most important breakthrough: non-reflecting glass. The General Electric Company’s public relations machine kicks into high gear. Katharine becomes an overnight sensation, both in the scientific community and in the press, which dub her discovery “invisible glass.” The assistant to the Nobel Prize winner, long invisible herself, takes center stage.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices