Ada Lovelace Day: celebrating women in science and technology
In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, (see also oursin's post, I thought I would look through the recently added Lives of 215 people who died in 2005 to the Dictionary of National Biography, and see which women working in science and technology were there. I found five.
Two reasonably well-known ones:
Cicely Saunders (1918-2005), who started to train as a doctor in 1951, after PPE at Oxford, nursing and working as an almoner, and then started the modern hospice movement, working in pain management and changing the way (some of) the dying are cared for.
Miriam Rothschild (1908-2005), naturalist. I came across her recently in Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No.1, when he recalled her working at the Natural History Museum, where she was the first woman Trustee. She worked on snail parasites initially, then later on ecological biochemistry, and on fleas - identifying them as spreaders of myxomatosis and also (with others) working out how fleas jump.
Three a bit less so:
Elizabeth Macgregor (1920-2005), cytologist. She was a doctor and professor of pathology, and from 1960 started up 'the first successful population-based cervical cancer screening programme in the UK'. (ODNB entry) She worked to get GPs to accept the importance of screening, to train those carrying it out and with epidemiologists and statisticians to evaluate its effectiveness. She was later president and chair of the British Society for Clinical Cytology. The NHS national screening programme for cervical cancer was finally set up in 1988.
Helen Muir (1920-2005), biochemist, who studied under Dorothy Hodgkin 1940-43, and then worked on penicillin for her DPhil, then from about 1954 on cartilege and rheumatology. With colleagues at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Hammersmith, she established that arthritis was not just about joints getting old and worn, but that there was a disease process involved. She worked there from 1966-90, and was director from 1977. Since my mother's someone who has suffered from arthritis since her 20s, I found this particularly interesting.
Finally, I think Jean Medawar (1913-2005), counts - she read zoology at Somerville in the 1930s and then later was a family planning campaigner, chair of the Family Planning Association from 1967-75 after working in a clinic and then in public relations for them. Her emphasis was on sustainable development and conservation, and she argued that lack of population control would lead to drought and starvation. She wrote various books with her husband Peter Medawar, including Aristotle to Zoos: a Philosophical Dictionary of Zoology.
(The links are all to the ODNB, so will only work if you or your library have a subscription, sorry.)
ETA: Oops, I think I was only supposed to blog about one person. Too late now...
Two reasonably well-known ones:
Cicely Saunders (1918-2005), who started to train as a doctor in 1951, after PPE at Oxford, nursing and working as an almoner, and then started the modern hospice movement, working in pain management and changing the way (some of) the dying are cared for.
Miriam Rothschild (1908-2005), naturalist. I came across her recently in Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No.1, when he recalled her working at the Natural History Museum, where she was the first woman Trustee. She worked on snail parasites initially, then later on ecological biochemistry, and on fleas - identifying them as spreaders of myxomatosis and also (with others) working out how fleas jump.
Three a bit less so:
Elizabeth Macgregor (1920-2005), cytologist. She was a doctor and professor of pathology, and from 1960 started up 'the first successful population-based cervical cancer screening programme in the UK'. (ODNB entry) She worked to get GPs to accept the importance of screening, to train those carrying it out and with epidemiologists and statisticians to evaluate its effectiveness. She was later president and chair of the British Society for Clinical Cytology. The NHS national screening programme for cervical cancer was finally set up in 1988.
Helen Muir (1920-2005), biochemist, who studied under Dorothy Hodgkin 1940-43, and then worked on penicillin for her DPhil, then from about 1954 on cartilege and rheumatology. With colleagues at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Hammersmith, she established that arthritis was not just about joints getting old and worn, but that there was a disease process involved. She worked there from 1966-90, and was director from 1977. Since my mother's someone who has suffered from arthritis since her 20s, I found this particularly interesting.
Finally, I think Jean Medawar (1913-2005), counts - she read zoology at Somerville in the 1930s and then later was a family planning campaigner, chair of the Family Planning Association from 1967-75 after working in a clinic and then in public relations for them. Her emphasis was on sustainable development and conservation, and she argued that lack of population control would lead to drought and starvation. She wrote various books with her husband Peter Medawar, including Aristotle to Zoos: a Philosophical Dictionary of Zoology.
(The links are all to the ODNB, so will only work if you or your library have a subscription, sorry.)
ETA: Oops, I think I was only supposed to blog about one person. Too late now...