Lost Women of Science
Episodes
Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, America's First Black Female Public Health Pioneer
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born in 1831, was the first African American female medical doctor in the U.S. and is considered the first Black person to p...
Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment
26 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s, a Black home economist at Howard University recruited kids for an experimental preschool program. All were Black and lived in poor neigh...
From Our Inbox: A Microbe Hunter in Oregon Fights the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Harriet Jane Lawrence was one of the first female pathologists in the U.S. In the early 1900s she worked in Portland, Oregon, where she hunted microbe...
The English Lit Major Who Cracked Nazi Codes
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a master codebreaker who played a pivotal role in both world wars, ...
Who was Christine Essenberg? A remarkable zoologist almost lost to history
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Christine Essenberg had an unusual life and an unusual career trajectory. She was married, then divorced, and earned her PhD in zoology from Universit...
Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, an ex-slave’s daughter, becomes a celebrated doctor
28 Sep 2023
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 ...
A Flair for Efficiency: The Woman Who Redesigned the American Kitchen
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1920s, Lillian Gilbreth enlisted her children — she had 11— in an experiment: bake a strawberry shortcake in record time. Kitchens at ...
Part 2: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?
14 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We continue the story of Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, the first person to understand that the atom had been split. This is the second in a two-part ...
Part 1: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom?
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
New translations of hundreds of letters explain, in a two-part episode of Lost Women of Science, why physicist Lise Meitner was not awarded the Nobel ...
They Remembered the Lost Women of the Manhattan Project So That We Wouldn't Forget
31 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1990s, two physicists, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, began looking into a question that had aroused their curiosity: Just who were ...
Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create
24 Aug 2023
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 ...
The Story of the Real Lilli Hornig, the Only Female Scientist Named in the Film Oppenheimer
17 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lilli Hornig was only 23 years old when she arrived at Los Alamos to contribute to the development of an atomic bomb that would end World War II. A ta...
No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Naomi Livesay, born in 1916 in the northern reaches of Montana, aspired to one career: mathematics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in math, but when...
Blood, Sweat, and Fears: The Story of Floy Agnes Lee, the Young Woman Who Analyzed the Blood of Manhattan Project Scientists
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Floy Agnes Lee was a hematologist at Los Alamos. Recruited to the Manhattan Project while still a student at University of New Mexico, she collected...
One of Many Lost Women of the Manhattan Project: Leona Woods Marshall Libby
20 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only woman hired onto Enrico Fermi's team at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. She was jus...
Women of the Manhattan Project: Trailer
13 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During World War II, thousands of scientists and engineers worked on the Manhattan project, the top secret push to develop an atomic bomb that would e...
From Our Inbox: Alessandra Giliani, 14th-century Italian anatomist
06 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the first in our From Our Inbox series, in which we give listeners a taste of the mail we get from folks wanting to bring a particular forg...
The Highest of All Ceilings: Astronomer Cecilia Payne
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cecilia Payne was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time....
What's in a Street Name? Everything.
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1992, a Dutch doctor named Josh von Soer Clemm von Hohenberg wrote a letter to Henning Voscherau, the mayor of Hamburg, Germany, requesting that a ...
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 5
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marie Nyswander died in 1986. She’d achieved almost everything she set out to, but she wanted more: even better medications than methadone, fewer re...
Reminder about next episode and an update
27 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A reminder that our next episode is scheduled to come out next Thursday! In the meantime, we’ve hit a slight snag—Katie has COVID—but she’s r...
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 4
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marie Nyswander and her team at Rockefeller unveil their findings at last: methadone has utterly transformed their patients. They’re going back to s...
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 3
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After years of disappointing results in her quest to treat heroin addiction, Marie Nyswander was more than ready to try something new. When she met a ...
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 2
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1950s, Marie Nyswander was ready to move on from addiction. She set up a private practice and specialized in treating women afflicted wit...
The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 1
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1946, Marie Nyswander, a recent medical school graduate, joined the U.S. Public Health Service looking for adventure abroad. Instead, they sent her...
The Doctor and the Fix: Trailer
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1965, a team of doctors at Rockefeller University announced what sounded like a miracle—they’d found a treatment for heroin addiction that actu...
Of Chestnuts, Cherry Trees, and Mushroom Catsup: Flora Patterson, the Woman who Kept Devastating Blights from U.S. Shores
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1909, the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees to Washington, D.C. But the iconic blossoms enjoyed each spring along the Tidal B...
A Complicated Woman: Leona Zacharias
12 Jan 2023
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...
Introducing Lost Women of Science Shorts: Trailer
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Each season of Lost Women of Science tells the story of one remarkable female scientist, but hundreds more remain overlooked. That’s why we’re int...
The Woman Who Knocked Science Sideways
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We’re hard at work producing the next season of Lost Women of Science, but we wanted to bring you this special guest episode from Portraits, a podca...
The Feminist Test We Keep Failing
17 Nov 2022
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, the F...
The First Lady of Engineering: An Interview with Y.Y.'s Daughter, Carol Lawson
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we’re bringing you an episode from another podcast hosted and produced by Katie Hafner, Our Mothers Ourselves. It’s a show that celebra...
The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 4
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
YY taught at Tennessee State University, a historically Black university, for 55 years. In this episode, we hear from YY’s colleagues, students and ...
The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 3
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is mechanical engineering? What was YY actually doing? This episode is about the work itself – specifically, the work Yvonne Young Clark did at...
The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 2
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When YY started college at Howard University as a mechanical engineering student, there were three things she swore she’d never do: marry a tall man...
The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 1
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With a librarian mother and a physician father, YY was brought up in a supportive, educated, and prosperous Black enclave of Louisville, Kentucky. Her...
The First Lady of Engineering: Trailer
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Yvonne Y. Clark, known as YY throughout her career, has also been nicknamed “The First Lady of Engineering,” because of her groundbreaking achieve...
Meet our new cohost!
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Carol Sutton Lewis, host of the podcast Ground Control Parenting, has long been interested in Black history. This season, she’s joining Lost Women o...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: The Weather Myth
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We saw the story over and over again: computer programmer Klára Dán von Neumann was a pioneer in weather forecasting. But when we talked to Thomas H...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 5
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
After Johnny’s death, Klári becomes the keeper of his legacy. It’s an exhausting, full-time commitment that takes her out of the computing world...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 4
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
After World War II, tensions build between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Scientists at Los Alamos continue developing nuclear weapons, helped by the r...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 3
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When John von Neumann runs into fellow mathematician Herman Goldstine at a train station, Goldstine clues him into a new powerful computer called the ...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 2
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With John von Neumann absorbed in work, Klári struggles to find a niche in her new suburban home while dealing with devastating losses. A new chapter...
A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 1
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
To understand how Klára Dán von Neumann arrived at computer programming, we need to first understand where she came from. Born in Budapest to a weal...
A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass: Trailer
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The first modern-style code executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann–or Klári to her family and fri...
The Pathologist in the Basement: The Resignation
23 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1949, at the height of his career, Rustin McIntosh, the director of pediatrics at Columbia University’s Babies Hospital, submitted his letter of ...
The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 4
25 Nov 2021
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 ment...
The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 3
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization—and who gets to be remembered. Dr. Scott Baird hunts for...
The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 2
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A passionate outdoorswoman, a “rugged individualist,” and a bit of an enigma—the few traces Dr. Andersen left behind give us glimpses into who s...
The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 1
04 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Dr. Dorothy Andersen confronted a slew of confounding infant deaths, she suspected the accepted diagnosis wasn’t right. Her medical sleuthing l...
The Pathologist in the Basement: Trailer
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Dr. Dorothy Andersen confronted a slew of confounding infant deaths, she knew the accepted diagnosis couldn’t be right. Her medical detective w...
Lost Women of Science: Trailer
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. We illumina...