Maria Popova

I went to high school in Bulgaria, and our high school was very, very science-intense, and we had to choose a major in high school, and I chose chemistry, and we studied from American college-level chemistry or science textbooks.

And, I mean, I loved all the sciences.

I thought there was such a way of touching the heart of reality that we are part of.

It's not this abstract thing that's separate from culture.

It is culture.

It is life.

But I realized only probably I was in my 30s that...

All my science teachers growing up were women.

And I never thought about it.

I just, I mean, you know, young people, they're like, oh, this is what women do.

I never thought about it.

And then I was asked, why don't you write about women in science?

And I was like, I don't.

I write about scientists.

And then I realized how much modeling does for us in how we conceive of the world.

And so I'm very interested in people who are kind of in the margins of their time and place, but modeled possibilities that opened entire doorways for others.

Mm-hmm.

And so anyway, Mary Shelley was one of them, Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin, to people who haven't heard of her, who is most people, Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin is the first and to this day only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in science.

And she decoded the molecular structure of insulin, penicillin and B12, the building blocks of life.

But why I fell in love with her is that she used her celebrity to become a cross-cultural bridge and peace activist, even more so than Einstein, who was, of course, very famously active in that way.