Lost Women of Science
Episodes
Profesora de química y caza criminales: La extraordinaria vida de Mary Louisa Willard
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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...
Best Of: Chemistry Professor and Crime Buster: The Remarkable Life of Mary Louisa Willard
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“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...
Elizabeth Roboz Einstein: The Determined Genius Behind a Multiple Sclerosis Breakthrough
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Conversation: If I am right, and I know I am: Inge Lehmann, the Woman Who Discovered Earth’s Innermost Secret
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, host Carol Sutton Lewis speaks with science writer Hanne Strager about her biography of Inge L...
BONUS: Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This bonus episode is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Science History Institute.Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in sur...
Layers of Brilliance: Vanishing Act -- Episode Six
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Layers of Brilliance: The Self You Have to Live With - Episode Five
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Katharine’s relatives lead the production team to a collection of papers and artifacts stored in a New England storage unit, revealing an inner stru...
Layers of Brilliance: The Breakthrough - Episode Four
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The 1930s prove to be an exceptional decade for research at The General Electric Company. Katharine Burr Blodgett works closely alongside her boss, Ir...
Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s...
Layers of Brilliance: The 'House of Magic' -- Episode Two
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Katharine Burr Blodgett arrives at The General Electric Company’s legendary research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, known as the “House of M...
Layers of Brilliance: The Chemical Genius of Katharine Burr Blodgett - Episode One
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the first of this five-part season we trace Katharine’s early years as she picks up European languages, her early scientific education at a progr...
Layers of Brilliance
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Introducing Layers of Brilliance, a five-part season that brings to life the story of a woman whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our...
The Lost Women of Science - Our Book for Young Readers
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Lost Women of Science by Melina Gerosa Bellows and Katie Hafner is an exciting book for young readers that brings to life the stories of ten remar...
For Susan
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2022, Susan Wojcicki was on top of the world—CEO of YouTube, parent to five kids, and running a few miles a day—when she received a shocking di...
The Mouse Lady
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1910s, a relatively unknown cancer researcher named Maud Slye announced the first results of a study with the loftiest ambitions: to identify w...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Rosalind - The Opera
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Composer Peter Hugh White and librettist Clare Heath join host Rosie Millard in front of a London audience to explore why the story of chemist and x-r...
Best Of: Finding Dora Richardson: The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode Two
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this m...
Encontrando a Dora Richardson – La desarrolladora olvidada del tamoxifeno, una terapia vital contra el cáncer de mama
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Aunque los ensayos clínicos iniciales del tamoxifeno como tratamiento del cáncer de mama fueron positivos, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) no cre...
Best Of: Finding Dora Richardson, The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode One
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1960s, Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: tamoxifen....
Encontrando a Dora Richardson – Episodio 1
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A principios de la década de los sesenta, la Dra. Dora Richardson sintetizó un compuesto químico que se convirtió en uno de los medicamentos más ...
Opening Doors to Computer Science
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In high school, Carla Brodley was almost shut out of computer science when boys took over all the computers. But she rediscovered her love for the fie...
Frances Glessner Lee: The Mother of Forensic Science
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Frances Glessner Lee discovered her true calling later in life. An heiress without formal schooling, she was in her fifties when she transformed her f...
The Mothers of Gynecology
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Katie Hafner joins Alexis Pedrick and Mariel Carr to bring you The Mothers of Gynecology, part of Innate: How Science Invented the My...
Best Of: Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, an Ex-Slave’s Daughter, Becomes a Celebrated Doctor
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Born in 1850, Sarah Loguen found her calling as a child, when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage the leg of an injured person escaping ...
La Dra. Sarah Loguen Fraser, hija de un ex esclavo, se convierte en una destacada médica
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nacida en 1850, Sarah Loguen encontró su vocación cuando era niña, cuando ayudó a sus padres y a Harriet Tubman a vendar la pierna de una persona ...
Mujeres perdidas del Proyecto Manhattan: Carolyn Beatrice Parker
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Carolyn Beatrice Parker provenía de una familia de médicos y académicos y trabajó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial como física en el Proyecto Da...
Best Of: Lost Women of the Manhattan Project - Carolyn Beatrice Parker
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 pa...
Emma Unson Rotor: la física filipina que desarrolló un arma ultrasecreta
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emma Unson Rotor se tomó un permiso de su trabajo como profesora de matemáticas en Filipinas para estudiar física en la Universidad Johns Hopkins e...
Best Of: Emma Unson Rotor: The Filipina Physicist Who Developed a Top Secret Weapon
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emma Unson Rotor took leave from her job as a math teacher in the Philippines to study physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1941. Her plans were dis...
Best Of: The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The year is 1897 and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India from England. Her goal: to photograph a total solar...
La mujer victoriana que perseguía los eclipses
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Corre el año 1897 y Annie Maunder, una astrónoma aficionada, aborda un barco de vapor con destino a la India desde Inglaterra. Su objetivo: fotograf...
Lost Women of Science - Mujeres Olvidadas de la Ciencia - En Espanõl
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Esto es Lost Women of Science - Mujeres Olvidadas de la Ciencia. Laura Gómez, conocida por su papel de Blanca Flores en la exitosa serie de Netflix “...
Lost Women of Science - In Spanish!
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After the success of our bilingual season about the first female doctor trained in the Dominican Republic, The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of ...
The Weather Expert Who Answered the $64,000 Question
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-1940s, a teenage June Bacon-Bercey saw the image of a nuclear explosion on the cover of Time magazine and immediately had questions. How wo...
Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode from the Cautionary Tales podcast, Harford teams up with actor Helena Bonham Carter, a distant relative of Florence Nightingale, to te...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Air-borne
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Air-Borne: the Hidden History of the Air We Breathe by Carl Zimmer charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science dealing with airborne...
Buried History: The Feminist Birth of the Home Pregnancy Test
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we take it for granted that you can buy a home pregnancy test at the pharmacy. Before the end of the 1970s, this was not the case. Then along c...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Elements of Marie Curie
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science Dava Sobel celebrates the many women who came to Paris to work ...
In Evangelina's Footsteps | 5
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo died in 1947, the Trujillo regime did its best to erase her legacy, while at the same time appropriating her ideas....
Siguiendo los pasos de Evangelina | 5
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tras la muerte de Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo en 1947, el régimen de Trujillo hizo todo lo posible no solo por borrar su legado, sino también por a...
El dictador y la doctora | 4
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
En 1930, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo toma el poder en la República Dominicana e instaura un reino de terror. El controvertido trabajo de Evangelina la ...
The Dictator and the Doctor | 4
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1930, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo seized power in the Dominican Republic and introduced a reign of terror. Evangelina’s controversial work brought ...
El retorno de la doctora rebelde | 3
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Evangelina recibió una calurosa bienvenida de regreso a su país, y se pone a trabajar de inmediato, introduciendo sus nuevas ideas sobre la atenció...
The Rebel Doctor Returns | 3
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. S...
A Dominican in Paris | 2
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
Una dominicana en París | 2
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 reuni...
La doctora | 1
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 P...
La Doctora | 1
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1890s, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, known as Evangelina, was just another poor girl trying to survive in the provincial town of Sa...
La Extraordinaria Vida y Trágica Muerte de Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ciu...
The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Lady Tan's Circle of Women
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 thi...
Who Discovered the Cause of Down Syndrome ? Episode Two
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 pediatri...
Who Discovered the Cause of Down Syndrome? Episode One
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-1950s Marthe Gautier, a young French doctor and cytogenetics researcher, led a cutting-edge experiment to investigate the cause of Down syn...
Margarethe Hilferding, Sigmund Freud, and the Conspiracy of Silence
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are telling the story of Margarethe Hilferding, a pioneering psychoanalyst and physician from ...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Breaking Through
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, dedicated her life’s work to messenger RNA, which she always believed had the potential to change ...
Best Of: Flora Patterson, the Woman who Kept Devastating Blights from U.S. Shores
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 p...
Lost Women of Science Conversations - Brave the Wild River
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Lost Women of the Manhattan Project: Carolyn Beatrice Parker
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 pa...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Attention is Discovery
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Anna Von Mertens' thoughtful new exploration of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's life describes and illuminates Leavitt's decades-long study of stars, includi...
Finding Dora Richardson: The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode Two
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Although initial clinical trials of tamoxifen as a treatment of breast cancer were positive, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) did not believe this m...
Finding Dora Richardson - The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1960s, chemist Dr. Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer: ta...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Wonder Drug
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S. than originally ...
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Five
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Four
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ab...
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Three
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 wit...
The Devil in the Details - Chapter Two
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling drugs. Contergan’s act...
The Devil in the Details - Chapter One
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 Ad...
Trailer: The Devil in the Details
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1950s, a German drug company developed a new sedative that was supposed to be 100% safe: thalidomide. So safe, in fact, it was promoted to wome...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Writing for Their Lives
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase stories about science, many of the early science journalists were women, working along...
The Quest for Everything
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of the universe. What you get when you zoom ...
Dr. Jess Wade, Physicist and Wikipedia Maven
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who’s made it her mission to write and update the Wikipedia pages of as many women in STEM a...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Exceptions
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who made major discoveries in cancer genetics, became an unlikely activist in her early fifties. She had alwa...
Chemistry Professor and Crime Buster: The Remarkable Life of Mary Louisa Willard
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“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 au...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Wild By Design
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to unco...
Revisiting The Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 4 Breakfast in the Snow
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In our final episode, we explore Dorothy Andersen’s legacy — what she left behind and how her work has lived on since her death. Describing her me...
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 3 The Case of the Missing Portrait
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization and who gets to be remembered. Dr. John Scott Baird, Dor...
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement: Episode 2 The Matilda Effect
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story. Pediat...
Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A few important things have happened in the three years since we first aired The Pathologist in the Basement, the story of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the f...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Mathematics for Ladies
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When poet Jessy Randall started researching the lives of female scientists she became angry. And we certainly can relate here at Lost Women of Science...
Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“We were each put on earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged the pre...
The Theoretical Physicist Who Worked With J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Melba Phillips, who grew up on a farm in Indiana at the turn of the 20th century, was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s first graduate students at the ...
Best Of: The Highest of All Ceilings, Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of ...
The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The year is 1897 and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India from England. Her goal: to photograph a total solar...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: Mischievous Creatures
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered the lives and ...
The Cognitive Scientist Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Language
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
While working at the Salk Institute in California, Ursula Bellugi discovered that sign language was made up of specific building blocks that were asse...
Best Of: Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Katharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive decay. But after the ...
How Lilian Bland Built Herself A Plane
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“Hoots and derision, which did not worry me at all,” Lilian Bland wrote, describing her visit to an airshow in Blackpool, England in 1909. She’d...
Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Black Angels
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the first of a new series we’re calling Lost Women of Science Conversations—and a fitting choice for Black History Month—we talk to Maria Smi...
The Industrial Designer Behind the N95 Mask
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sara Little Turnbull was a force in the world of material science and industrial design. It’s safe to say most people will have used something that ...
The Universe in Radio Vision
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Australian physicist Ruby Payne-Scott helped lay the groundwork for a whole new kind of astronomy: radio astronomy. By scanning the skies for radi...
From Our Inbox: Forgotten Electrical Engineer’s Work Paved the Way for Radar Technology
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sallie Pero Mead was first hired at AT&T in 1915 as a “computer”—a human calculator—shortly after completing her master’s degree in math...
Best of: A Complicated Woman, Leona Zacharias
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a degree in biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia Uni...
From Our Inbox: Vera Peters - The Doctor Who Helped Spare Women From Radical Mastectomy
11 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vera Peters began her career studying treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. She used techniques that had seen positive outcomes on Hodgkin’s to treat brea...
Adventures of a Bone Hunter
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Annie Montague Alexander was an adventurer, amateur paleontologist, and the founding benefactor of two venerated research collections at UC Berkeley -...
Emma Unson Rotor: The Filipina Physicist Who Helped Develop a Top Secret Weapon
14 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Emma Unson Rotor took leave from her job as a math teacher in the Philippines to study physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1941. Her plans were dis...
Flapper of the South Seas: A Young Margaret Mead Travels To The South Seas
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1925, a young anthropologist named Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa to explore the impact of cultural factors on adolescent development. In her subs...
The Devastating Logic of Christine Ladd-Franklin
30 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Christine Ladd-Franklin is best known for her theory of the evolution of color vision, but her research spanned math, symbolic logic, philosophy, biol...
Best Of: The Feminist Test We Keep Failing
23 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test. Named for the science writer, Ann Finkbeiner, ...
From Our Inbox: Mária Telkes, The Biophysicist Who Harnessed Solar Power
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today we tell the story of Mária Telkes, one of the developers of solar thermal storage systems, who was so dedicated to the world of solar energy th...
The Woman Who Demonstrated the Greenhouse Effect
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She p...