Lost Women of Science
A weekly Science podcast
Lost Women of Science
Episodes
Episodes of Lost Women of Science
Mark All
While researching her book about thalidomide in America, Jennifer Vanderbes discovered that there were far more survivors in the U.S. than originally thought – at least ten times more. These survivors were born with shortened limbs and other se
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 have gone by since Frances Kelsey first stalled the New Drug Approval application from pharma co
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 about the scandal. The Washington Post breaks the story and puts a picture of Frances Kelsey on th
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 with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions. In the U.S., drug company Merrell is bat
It’s the early 1960s and the German pharmaceutical market is booming. A sedative called Contergan is one of the bestselling drugs. Contergan’s active ingredient is thalidomide and it is touted as a wonder drug, a non-addictive sedative safer th
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 Administration as a medical reviewer in 1960. Before the year is out, Dr. Kelsey finds herself s
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 women as a treatment for morning sickness. It quickly became a bestseller. But in the early 1960s,
In the 1920s, when newspapers and magazines started to showcase stories about science, many of the early science journalists were women, working alongside their male colleagues despite less pay and outright misogyny. They were often single or d
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 in all the way to the tiniest bits that can’t be broken down anymore. They had a kind of treas
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 as she possibly can. She inspired us at Lost Women of Science to start our own Wikipedia project
Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who made major discoveries in cancer genetics, became an unlikely activist in her early fifties. She had always believed that if you did great science, you would get the recognition you deserved. But aft
“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 just “very normal.” But Mary Louisa Willard,
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 uncover its beginnings. What she found, however, deep in the archives, was evidence of a network of
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 mentor’s influence on her life and career, Dr. Celia Ores gives us a rare look at what Dr. Andersen
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, Dorothy Andersen’s biographer, looks for the portrait, and Drs. Nientara Anderson and Lizzy Fitzs
Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story. Pediatric critical care physician Dr. John Scott Baird, who published a biography of Dorothy Andersen
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 first to identify cystic fibrosis. It’s safe to say that Dr. Anderson is now a little less lost
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. So many women made important discoveries but received little recognition. In this episode of
“We were each put on earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged the prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. Bates believed that language emerges from intera
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 University of California, Berkeley. Together they discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips Process, w
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 their time. Continuing the legacy of women working at the Harvard College Observatory, Cecilia
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 eclipse. Like the many people whose gaze will turn upwards in North America on April 8, Maund
In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered the lives and work of Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris, two natural scientists who made significant contribut
While working at the Salk Institute in California, Ursula Bellugi discovered that sign language was made up of specific building blocks that were assembled following strict rules, much like in spoken language. Her subsequent discoveries about t
Katharine “Kay” Way was a nuclear physicist who worked at multiple Manhattan Project sites. She was an expert in radioactive decay. But after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, she became increasingly concerned about the ethics of nuclear
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