Stories by The Lost Women of Science Initiative

As the first trained Black TV meteorologist, June Bacon-Bercey always worked to help women and people of color to follow in her footsteps

Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke

Author Dava Sobel discusses how she discovered the many forgotten female scientists who were mentored by Marie Curie in early 20th-century Paris

The regime of dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo all but erased Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo’s legacy after she died. But since his assassination in 1961, Dominicans have been gradually reclaiming her story

Beginning in the 1930s, the work—and eventually the life—of Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the Dominican Republic’s first female doctor, became threatened by the country’s then new dictator

Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo started innovative health programs on her return from France in 1925, but her advocacy for sex workers and contraception soon plunged her into controversy

Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the Dominican Republic’s first female doctor, raised the funds to set sail for Paris so that she can learn about the latest advances in women’s health

Born into poverty and abandoned by her parents, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo rises from a life selling sweets in the street to become the first female Dominican doctor in 1911

A Chinese medical textbook published in 1511 led to a novel about an all-but-forgotten female doctor who practiced during the Ming Dynasty

Marthe Gautier speaks out about how she found the genetic cause of Down syndrome

It took more than 50 years for Marthe Gautier to set the record straight about her discovery of the genetic cause of Down syndrome

Margarethe Hilferding was the first woman admitted to Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but her radical work on maternal instinct was dismissed and ignored

Despite decades of doubt and dismissal, biochemist Katalin Karikó never gave up on the research that gave us mRNA COVID vaccines in record time

This is a science adventure story. Take a wild journey down the Colorado River in the company of two pioneering botanists: Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter.

This Black physicist’s work on the Manhattan Project inspired a County in Florida two generations after her death

Visual artist Anna Von Mertens looks to astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her vision of the universe for inspiration

When chemist Dora Richardson’s employer decided to terminate the breast cancer research on the drug Tamoxifen in the early 1970s, she and her colleagues continued the work in secret.

Her name was on the patent for tamoxifen, but Dora Richardson’s story was lost until now

In her book Wonder Drug, Jennifer Vanderbes explores the history of thalidomide’s secret history—and harms—in the U.S.

Decades after FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey stopped thalidomide from going on the market in the U.S., the legacy of the drug persists

 FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey saved American lives by refusing to approve thalidomide. But millions of pills had been sent to doctors in the U.S. for so-called clinical trials

FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham wanted data that would show that thalidomide was safe to use during pregnancy. It wasn’t

In the U.S. in the early 1960s the distributor of a thalidomide drug was impatient to get it on the market. But FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey wanted more information to prove its safety

Starting with her rejection of an FDA application for thalidomide in 1960, physician and pharmacist Frances Oldham Kelsey took a stand against the now infamous drug