To celebrate International Women’s Day, LGC Standards is honouring the lives and achievements of seven female science pioneers whose names have gone somewhat under the radar. Many of us are familiar with stellar women scientists like Marie Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Rosalind Franklin – and we’re also convinced that these legends would be happy to step out of the limelight for once, and let Alice Ball, Gertrude Elion, Alice Hamilton, Ruth Patrick, Ellen Swallow Richards, Anna Wessels Williams, and Jane C. Wright receive their long-overdue tribute.
Alice Ball (1892-1916)
Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ball’s life and career were both cut tragically short at the age of 24, when she inhaled acidic chlorine gas during a lecture. But, in her short lifetime, she achieved a startling amount.
After studying at the University of Washington, she became both the first woman and the first African-American to earn a master’s degree in chemistry from the College of Hawaii. It was also in Hawaii that she pioneered a treatment for Hansen’s Disease, or leprosy. This became known as the ‘Ball Method’, and until the invention of antibiotics was the only treatment for the condition.
Ball successfully adapted the folk remedy chaulmoogra oil into an effective medicine that worked against leprosy – “finding a way to create a water-soluble solution of the oil’s active compounds that could be injected with minimal side effects.” This meant many patients on the quarantine island of Kalaupapa were discharged and allowed to return to their families, when previously they would have died there. Ball, however, would not live long enough even to publish her groundbreaking findings.
Gertrude Elion (1918-1999)
Picture Credit: GSK Heritage Archives
Nobel Prize winner Elion become a scientist because of the death of her grandfather from stomach cancer when she was 15, saying: “I was highly motivated to do something that might eventually lead to a cure for this terrible disease.” But her mother was also a powerful influence on her success. “She was a housewife,” Elion said, “but... she wanted me to have a career.”
Due to sexism, and lack of opportunity in the Great Depression, Elion began her unusual science journey in a food quality control laboratory, testing the acidity of pickles. She finally switched to drug discovery with Burroughs Wellcome in 1944, when World War Two meant there were fewer male chemists available in the US. She began a fruitful partnership with George Hitchings, and by 1950, she had synthesised 6-mercaptopurine - a compound that disrupted the formation of leukaemia cells, and just one of 45 life-saving and life-changing drugs she would eventually help create.
Hitchings and Elion were also credited with revolutionising drug design – moving the industry away from “the beaten path of trial-and-error drug development” and towards a so-called ‘rational drug design’ process based on interfering with cell growth.
Her final major breakthrough was the antiviral drug acyclovir (Zovirax) - which successfully fought herpes, Epstein-Barr, chickenpox and shingles, but also “ushered in a new era of antiviral therapy” that made the world’s first AIDS treatment possible. “As a result”, says the Nobel Prize organisation, “although she died in 1999, Gertrude Elion is still saving lives.”
Alice Hamilton (1869-1970)
Picture Credit: Wellcome Images
Despite a comfortable upbringing, Hamilton was inspired throughout her life by progressive ideas – which together with her training in pathology helped make her “the spearhead of the occupational safety and health movement in the United States.”
“I went as a pioneer into a new, unexplored field of American medicine, the field of industrial disease,” she said of her early career – which included an investigation into the 1902 Chicago typhoid outbreak that prompted a complete reorganisation of the city’s health department. Hamilton also produced a landmark study into improving safety in white lead and lead oxide manufacturing, at a time when the dangers of lead poisoning had not been generally recognised, as well as a report on the poisonous effects of manufacturing explosives during World War One.
Hamilton first became a professor at the Women's Medical School of Northwestern University in Chicago in 1897, and went on to become Harvard University’s first ever woman professor in 1919. Over the years, she helped educate the US government and industry about the dangers of aniline dyes, carbon monoxide, mercury, radium, benzene, and many other substances – prompting significant workplace reforms, including statutory compensation for workers’ industrial injuries.
Throughout her career, Hamilton reportedly adopted “a default persona of self-deprecation”, which may have helped her maintain her cool, even when confronted with the weird sexism of the time: her Harvard professorship was only granted provided that she never entered the Harvard Club, and relinquished her allocation of college football tickets.
Ruth Patrick (1907-2013)
Picture Credit: Jerry Freilich/Wikimedia Commons
A few scientists can claim they ‘wrote the book’ on their field of expertise. But Patrick went one better: she wrote the law that to this day protects America’s water from pollution more than any other.
Drafting the 1972 US Clean Water Act was one of many high points in Patrick’s several decades of work with the aquatic environment, which she began as a volunteer at US Academy of Natural Sciences in the 1930s. After eight years working gratis, Patrick finally made it onto the payroll in 1945, and in 1948 made her scientific breakthrough when leading a survey of the highly-polluted Conestoga Creek in Pennsylvania.
This study was one of the first to employ a team with expertise in different chemistry, biology, and physics disciplines to survey ecosystems, and was quickly copied by scientists in other states. Patrick’s early work also established a first set of aquatic indices to assess the health of post-industrial water systems - as well as the principle that, under healthy conditions, many species of organisms representing different groups should be present.
When the environmental crisis began in the 1970s, Patrick was already an eco-pioneer and “the dominant figure in the field of water pollution.” As well as advising presidents and becoming the first environmentalist (and the first woman) on the Du Pont company’s board of directors, she also wrote several books, published more than 200 scientific papers, waded into 900 rivers or lakes, and received the National Medal of Science during her brilliant career.
Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911)
Picture Credit: Jerry Freilich/Wikimedia Commons
Before becoming a scientist, Richards spent years teaching, tutoring, and cleaning houses to raise money for her fees at Vassar College, eventually being recognised as an assistant professor – although still without pay. But no matter: she helped to establish the Women’s Laboratory at MIT – a parallel science programme which opened in 1876, with “two rooms flanked by big windows that showed off the spectacle: women studying industrial chemistry, mineralogy, and physiology”. Seven years later, the lab closed because women were finally allowed into MIT classes with men.
Richards also excelled in the field of sanitation: her 1887 survey of the sewage- and industrial waste-polluted waterways of Massachusetts was not just unprecedentedly large – with 20,000 samples analysed – but also “led to the first state water-quality standards in the nation and the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant.” She also co-wrote the classic text Air, Water and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint, and later became president of the American Home Economics Association – helping teach the public about safe and nutritious food, and providing a route for more women to study science at university.
Anna Wessels Williams (1863-1954)
Picture Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Fascinated by science from the age of 12, when she looked into a school microscope, Williams was inspired to become a professional scientist after witnessing the ineffective medical treatment received by her sister Millie, who almost died while giving birth to a stillborn child in 1887. After graduating from the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, Williams studied in Europe and then began as a volunteer at the new diagnostic laboratory of the New York City Department of Health, where she would work for 39 years.
During the 1890s, Williams’ research enabled the development of an effective vaccine against diphtheria – then a fatal disease. She also worked on the early detection of rabies and the cellular markers the disease caused, now known as Negri bodies. However, she was eclipsed by two men – firstly diagnostic laboratory director William H. Park, whose name was given to the key antitoxin strain Park 8, despite it being isolated solely by Williams and initially being called Park-Williams No.8. Then, in the early 1900s, Williams reportedly “cautiously waited” before releasing her rabies findings - enabling Adelchi Negri to publish his own paper first, and be credited with the breakthrough.
Today, the American Association of Immunologists cites Williams as “one of a number (of women) who stand out for their enduring contribution to immunology”. What’s more, “texts that she co-authored helped to define how generations of researchers and clinicians would conduct research (and) assist the general public in understanding infectious diseases.” Upon her retirement, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia described Williams simply as “a scientist of international repute”.
Jane C. Wright (1919-2013)
Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Known as ‘the mother of chemotherapy’, Wright was also the daughter of the cancer surgeon and researcher Louis Tompkins Wright – one of the first African American graduates of Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital in New York. After switching from studying art and graduating from medical school, Wright worked together with her father on experimental chemical treatments for leukaemia from 1949 – firstly in mice, and then with some success in humans.
At the age of just 33, Wright became the foundation’s research group head, specialising in ‘made to order’ chemotherapy solutions that were tested on samples from the patient’s own tumour. As the author Rachel Swaby observes, Wright’s approach “didn’t waste a patient’s time on ineffective drugs and it was faster and more personalized than using mice as proxies.” What’s more, she was also innovating in drug delivery at the same time – for example, delivering treatments to difficult-to-reach areas such as the kidneys via catheter.
In 1964, Wright was appointed to President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke – an initiative that led to treatment centres for all three diseases being established throughout the US. By 1967, she was the highest ranking African American woman in an American medical institution, and by the end of her career had published more than 100 scientific papers. In 2006, the American Association for Cancer Research established the Jane Cooke Wright Lectureship in her honour.