We’ve all heard of gene editing before in one context or another. For the majority of the term’s existence, gene editing has remained more of a science fiction than an actuality until Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier developed a mechanism by which it can feasibly be done in a real world setting: CRISPR technology.

Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020 for their work on CRISPR, which has been referred to as the most revolutionary development in biology in the past few decades. First announced in the 2010s, Doudna and Charpentier were critical in their early work in characterizing how the CRISPR-cas9 system works. In the past 8 years or so, CRISPR has become a common term to hear in any laboratory across the world.

Emmanuelle Charpentier

CRISPR is short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” and is a microbial ‘immune system’ that prokaryotes (bacteria) use to prevent infection by viruses known as phages. CRISPR provides prokaryotes with a system to recognize the precise genetic sequences that match a phage and target those specific sequences for destruction using specialized enzymes.

While previous work had identified these CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas), Charpentier discovered a key component of the CRISPR system: an RNA molecule that was required to direct the enzymes to the correct target sequences. In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier showed that the system could be programmed to cut specific sites in isolated DNA. This programmable gene-editing system has inspired a boom in medicine, agriculture and basic science.

Their work has pioneered an entire new arena of biology to explore and we’ve yet to fully understand the magnitude of potential possibilities that may arise from this. However, the increasing reality of actual gene editing does raise many ethical concerns, especially as it may make it easier for parents and medical professionals to “select for” or “modify” embryos to possess certain traits and characteristics. With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the nation will be faced with a new wave of eugenics as people once again use biology and “science” to reinforce oppressive and racist ideology.

In fact, this editing of the human genome has already begun: Chinese scientists have begun the effort of developing “crispr” babies. While it remains unclear how the future will unfold, I feel that there will be an increasing prevalence of science in policy and legislature as people have combatting views on how certain technologies should be used and regulated.

Close your eyes and picture and inventor. You probably picture an eccentric genius skinny guy in a lab coat with frizzy hair. What you’ve probably conjured up in your brain is reflective of the majority of people inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. One of the most influential members of that Hall of Fame however, was Edith Clarke, the first female engineer to graduate from MIT.

Her story is one of resilience and determination. Upon graduating from MIT, a world-renowned institution, Clarke initially struggled to find a job — as many firms and corporations didn’t view engineering as a women’s field of work. Eventually she got a job at General Electric as a supervisor of computers (at that time the term referred to people, typically women, who were tasked with performing intensive calculations for engineers), a position she was incredibly overqualified for.

Edith Clarke, a pioneer for women in the field of engineering.

Instead of resting on her laurels, Clarke took advantage of the spare time she had and invented the graphical calculator, applied for a patent in 1921 and approved in 1925 — it served as the basis for the TI-85 calculators that we often use today. Her device was used to solve electric power transmission line problems.

Recognizing her hard work, Clarke received an electrical engineering role in 1923, becoming the first female to hold a professional position as an electrical engineer in the US. During her long career at GE, she developed mathematical methods that simplified and improved the work of electrical engineers, and published 18 technical papers. Additionally, her textbook, Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, became the standard for industry in her time.

She retired from GE in 1945 and became the first female professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. She spent the next 10 years teaching there until she passed away in 1959.

In Dr.James E Brittain’s paper “From Computer to Electrical Engineer — the Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke” he write that “As a woman who worked in an environment traditionally dominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could perform at least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achievements provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women with aspirations to become career engineers.”

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today women make up 55% of Biological scientists, 36% of Chemists and material scientists, 26.9% of computer and mathematical occupations, and only 16.7% of architecture and engineering occupations. Due to push back against women in engineering fields following WWII, the percentage of women in engineering has struggled the most with improving over the past century since Clarke’s time.

Most people our age have grown up hearing about greenhouse gases and their effects on the environment, how they contribute to the changes in climate that we’re seeing around us. While greenhouse gases may seem like a new development, the reality is that we’ve known about their presence for a while. This leads to the question: “who discovered greenhouse gases?”

A quick google will tell you that John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, discovered and set our foundational understanding of greenhouse gases, and throughout much of history this achievement was accredited to him. In actuality however, Eunice Foote, an American climate scientist performed the experiments that proved the existence of greenhouse gases.

Eunice Foote was a pioneer in her field. She performed experiments in the 1850s that demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to have an effect on solar heating. Her experiments foreshadowed John Tyndall’s later experiments that illustrated the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect — she beat him by at least three years!

Drawing of Eunice Foote by Carlyn Iverson, NOAA Climate.gov.

Despite her incredible contributes and remarkable insight into the influence of raised CO2 levels on the Earth’s temperature, she went forgotten in the history of climate scientists until very recently.

Foote utilized glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, and found that the heating effect of the sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest in a cylinder containing CO2. While her experimental design was simple and didn’t give to much insight into the exact nature of how things worked, Foote was still able to draw remarkable insight from her studies, writing in 1856:

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at once a period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than present, an increased temperature…must necessarily resulted.”

Her findings were presented in August of 1856 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by a male colleague, Joseph Henry. Her paper, nor Henry’s presentation of it, were included in the proceedings of the conference however.

Foote’s paper “Circumstances affecting the heat of Sun’s rays.”

A summary of her work was published in the 1857 volume of Annual of Scientific Discovery by David A.Wells. When reporting on the meeting, Wells wrote: “Prof. Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foote, prefacing it with a few words, to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of a woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.”

Her work was later used in a column of the September 1856 issue of the Scientific American to counter the held sentiment that “women do not possess the strength of mind necessary for scientific investigation.” The writer highlighted that her experiments were direct evidence to the contrary: “ the experiments of Mrs.Foote afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.”

While much has changed since the time of Eunice Foote, there is still much work to be done to acknowledge the past contributions of women scientists and ensure that future efforts do not go unseen.

In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures came out, detailing the incredible contributions made by Katherine Johnson that made the Apollo Missions to the moon possible. Without her doing the math by hand, we would have never achieved the incredible feat that we did. Unfortunately, most still do not know her name. Her name is Katherine Johnson.

Katherine Johnson, sitting at her desk at NASA.

As the United States was facing World War II, the push for aeronautical advancement led to a increasing demand for mathematicians, people who could crunch the numbers and allow engineers to focus on the other aspects of their tasks. In other words, there was a growing need for “Human Computers” to carry out the complex mathematics before digital computers were available to handle that burden. Women were the obvious solution for these highly computational roles. Katherine Johnson was one of the “West Computers,” designated these name after the building to which they resided.

Katherine was gifted with numbers from an early age: she started attending high school at 10 years old, and graduated with honors from West Virginia State College with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. In 1953 she began her work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics West Area Computing unit where she analyzed test data and provided mathematical computation that was vital to the success of the U.S. space program at the time.

Her contributions stem far beyond her work on the Apollo Mission as she became the first woman in her devision to received credit as an author of a research report; as a member of the Space Task Group she coauthored a paper on how to place spacecraft in orbit in 1960. She went on to author/coauthor 26 research reports throughout her career.

Astronauts of the Mercury Program: the first U.S. space explorers.

She played a crucial role in NASA’s Mercury program from 1961-1963 which was for the development of crewed spaceflights. In 1961, she calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that put the first U.S. astronaut into space (Alan B. Shepard Jr.). In 1962, at the request of the astronaut John Glenn, Katherine verified by hand that the electronic computer had planned his flight correctly. Glenn went on to make history about the Friendship 7, as he became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth. Most notably, she was a part of the team that calculated where and when to launch the rocket for the Apollo 11 mission, which sent the first three men to the moon.

Clearly, without Katherine Johnson, we would not have the NASA we know today. Perhaps even the Space Race and Cold War would have ended up differently if not for her incredible accomplishments and contributions to NASA’s space program. Given how impactful her efforts are on our everyday lives, we should all know the name Katherine Johnson.

It is unlikely to have gone through a Highschool chemistry class without hearing the name Marie Curie uttered at some point in the course. Known for her work on radioactivity, Marie Curie is a two-time winner of the Novel Prize, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to ever win the award in two different fields.

Marie Curie in her laboratory.

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw Poland and was the daughter of a secondary-school teacher, from whom she learned mathematics and physics. As a young student she became involved in a students’ revolutionary organization and soon realized that it was necessary for her to leave Warsaw. She continued to pursue an education, receiving Licentiateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences from Sorbonne in Paris (a university degree that is between a bachelor’s and a doctor’s degree). She later gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903 and was eventually appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris (founded to commend her work).

Marie Curie and her husband carried out revolutionary work in regards to radiation, they isolated two new elements (Polonium and Radium), which is not an easy feat to accomplish. Marie Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues, allowing for its characterization and the careful study of its properties. She had a special interest in the potential therapeutic properties.

Before the end of the 19th century, surgery was the only treatment option available to cancer patients, and that only worked if the cancer was localized to a specific region of the body and had yet to spread. However, it is very difficult to detect cancer before it spreads to other regions of the body. The discovery of X-rays and radium changed this as treatment with ionizing radiation was developed. The goal of radiotherapy is to kill the cancer cells via targeted radiation.

Radiotherapy machine in the 1960s.

Marie Curie’s discovery provided cancer patients to an alternative treatment method. One that is still being used today in conjunction with oncology drug specialized for targeting cancer cells.

She is an incredible role-model for all women in STEM, especially when one takes into consideration that women were not yet able to vote in America when Marie Curie was busy discovering radioactivity and encouraging the use of radium to alleviate suffering during World War 1. She was an amazingly brilliant scientist, who sought to improve the world around her. Something that we should all strive to achieve.

Anyone who has taken a biology course that covered DNA likely has heard the names Watson and Crick before. However, these people are likely unfamiliar with the name Rosalind Franklin despite the fact that it was her X-ray diffraction images of DNA and insights that made deciphering the structure of DNA possible.

Rosalind Franklin was one of the most pivotal scientists of the 20th century.

Rosalind Franklin is one of the most unfairly sidelined scientific figures in history. She was born on July 25th, 1920 and unfortunately died from cancer on April 16, 1958. She pursued physical chemistry at the University of Cambridge before turning down a fellowship in 1941 to assist in the war effort.

She later used the research for doctorate and received it in 1945. From 1947 to 1950 she worked at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris, where she studied X-ray diffraction technology.

X-ray diffraction is “the only laboratory technique that non-destructively and accurately obtains information such as chemical composition, crystal structure, crystal orientation, crystallite size, lattice strain, preferred orientation and layer thickness.” It is an incredibly powerful tool used to obtain a detailed view. X-rays are produced by a source to illuminate the sample, the particles hit the sample and then diffract. The specific diffraction resulting from the X-ray diffraction allows scientists to determine what the structure of the sample is. While X-ray diffraction technology has come a long way since Rosalind Franklins time, it is still a commonly used technique today.

Diagram showing x-ray passing through a lead screen, crystalline solid, photographic plate showing spots of diffracted x-rays.

Later in her career, Rosalind Franklin worked at the Biophysical Lab at King’s College in London, where she applied what she learned about X-ray diffraction to study the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). When she started working there, there wasn’t much known about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA. However, she soon discovered DNA’s density and established the helical conformation of DNA.

The determination of the molecular structure of DNA had a huge impact on our understanding of biology. An often repeated phrase in biology is that “structure determines function.” For example, the determination of the structure of DNA provided with it a potential mechanism for the inheritance of the genetic information contained within, a mechanism that had eluded biologists since Darwin coined the term “descent with modification.”

Rosalind Franklin’s work to make clearer X-ray patterns of DNA molecules made it possible for James Watson and Francis Crick to later suggest that the structure of DNA is a double-helical polymer. They would not have been able to make that inference without Rosalind’s clear images of the DNA molecules. Despite this, however, Rosalind did not stand with them to receive a Nobel Prize and unfortunately died from cancer before the error could be corrected.