Marie Curie (1867-1934): The first woman to win a Nobel Prize (for Physics in 1903) and she won a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911. Despite her achievements, Curie was never admitted to the French Academy of Science - they did not start to accepting women until 1979. She discovered radium, the first hope for cancer sufferers, and her work on radioactivity led to the development of X-rays and radiotherapy.
Alice Hamilton (1869-1970): US doctor and social reformer, who founded occupational medicine. her work on ill health caused by workplace hazards, such as lead, was so influential that Harvard engaged her as Assistant Porfessor of Industrial Medicine, three decades before they accepted women as medical students. She received many honours, including a listing in Men of Science (1944) but Harvard never made her up to full professor. Even when she was 90, the FBI considered her peace campaigning to be a subversive activity.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968): Austrian Physicist who experimentally explained the process of nuclear fission, only to see the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944, which should have been hers, awarded to her junior, Otto Hahn. The only room Meitner was allowed to use in Berlin's Chemistry Institute was a workman's store - if she needed the toilet, she had to go to a nearby hotel. When she gave a lecture entitled 'The Problems of Cosmic Physics' in berlin, it was reported in the papers as a lecture on 'cosmetic physics'! Years after her death and in final recognition of her achievements, the elelment meitnerium was named after her.
Alice Evans (1881-1975): US biologist whose work led to recognition of the dangers of unpasteurised milk.
Emmy Noether (1882-1935): Described by Einstein as 'the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began', Noether was nevertheless denied a lectureship at the University of Gottingen where she had an honorary (i.e. unpaid) position. Noether was expelled from germany by the Nazis in 1933 and went to work in the US with Einstein. Her work underpins quantum physics adn Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956): A Nobel prize winner like her mother Marie Curie, who also died from leukaemia after being exposed to radioactivity. Joliot-Curie's work on radio isotopes has been essential in the fields of medicine, science and industry.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (nee Payne, 1900-1979): A British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. Initially rejected as it contradicted scientific wisdom of the time and Henry Norris Russell (director of Princeton University observatory) stated this was "clearly impossible" but four years later confirmed she was correct. Sadly he was the one to get the credit for the discovery. In 1976 the American Astronomical Society gave her a lifetime award - ironically named the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship.
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992): Decades ahead of her time in scientific terms, during the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered gene transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She
developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic
information from one generation of maize plants to the next. She persevered despite male prejudice and scientific rejection, leaving one university where she was demied a research post because they were reserved for men. Due to
skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing
her data in 1953. She was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work.
Grace Hopper (1906-1992): Computer programmer and the oldest person to serve on active duty with the US Navy, Hopper coined the term 'computer bug' and verified the computer language COBOL.
Rita Levi Mantalcini (1909-2012): Winner of a Nobel Prize in 1986 for her discovery of nerve growth factor, which plays a vital role in understanding degenerative disease and nerve repair after injury.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994): Despite crippling arthritis, Hodgkin made a series of brillaint breakthroughs that showed the structure of medically important molecules including penicillin and vitamin B12. In 1964 she became the first British woman to receive a Nobel Prize. (The Dail Mail's headline was 'British wife wins Nobel Prize'!) Margaret Thatcher was one of her students.
Mary Leakey (1913-1996): In 1978, fossil hunter Leakey discovered human footprints 3.75 million years old, firmly establishing Africa as the cradle of the human race.
Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000): Better known as a film star, Lamarr patented a 'secret communication system'. It formed the basis of spread spectrum communications and was the forerunner of the modern digital cellular phone technology.
Gertrude Elion (1918-1999): American pharmacologist forced to teach high school chemistry because she couldn't get a job as a researcher. She joined the Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories, developing many drugs, including the anti-viral acyclovir and the AIDs drug AZT. She shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. Worked in Paris on the structure of coal and developed a specialist skill in X-ray diffaction. She joined King's College, London to work on the structure of DNA in 1951. She was close to finding the structure but refused to jump to conclusions prematurely. Crick and Watson of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge saw her unpublished data and diffraction photographs and identified it as a double helix. Franklin then did four years of outstanding work on virus structure at Birkbeck before her death from ovarian cancer in 1958. [Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine in 1962; the Nobel committee does not award prizes posthumously, otherwise it is likely that Franklin would have shared the prize.]
Rosalyn Yalow (1921-2011): Her technique for studying insulin allowed minute quantities of some of the substances in body tissues and fluids to be measured and is used extensively in medicine today. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977.
Vera Rubin (1928-2016): The only astronomy major to graduate from prestigious women's
college Vassar in 1948. Refused entry to Princeton (women not allowed in the
university's graduate astronomy programme until 1975), studied physics at Cornell University, and earned her doctorate at Georgetown University in
1954. Later worked at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Awarded US National Medal of Science in 1993. Her pioneering work in astronomy led to the discovery of dark matter. In 1974, Rubin helped provide further convincing evidence that the stars at the edges of galaxies moved faster than expected from gravity calculations using only visible matter. To reconcile her observations with the law of gravity, scientists
proposed there was matter we cannot see and called it dark matter.
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard (1942- ) - still alive 31 March 2016: German geneticist whose work on the genetics of the fruit fly led to major insights into birth defects in humans and earned her the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1995.
