Think back to your high school biology class. What stuck with you? If your experience was anything like mine, you probably remember all of two things: The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, and a lot of dead white dudes looked into microscopes for hundreds of years to figure that out. For many people — myself included — the intrigue of science is lost at an early age in heavy textbooks, dry lectures, and a cultural attitude that science is reserved for nerdy boys.
But if you ask Rachel Ignotofsky, that couldn't be further from the truth — and it's way past time to change the way we talk about science, especially in regards to women scientists who too often go ignored. Ignotofsky ’s upcoming book, Women In Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, aims to change the everyday conversation about science — where we access information about science, whose work we see represented when we do, and how we digest the facts we’re given. Through eye-popping, brightly illustrated pages, Ignotofsky tells the stories of 50 women — some well-known and some who were left behind in mainstream history books — whose research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics influenced the world through their respective fields. Not only did these women make incredible strides in science and medicine, but in doing so they shouted a huge "fuck you" to a society that, historically, has actively and purposefully discouraged them from pursuing their work.
An illustrator by trade whose work often focuses on scientific topics, Ignotofsky realized the power of her work after receiving a fan letter from a father of a young girl with a rare respiratory condition. “He was using an illustration I did to explain to his four-year-old-daughter why she would need a respirator,” she tells Refinery29. “I realized that this work is important; I’m taking information that’s super dense and complicated and making it digestible for kids and adults in a way that no one’s really doing.”
With the success of her scientific illustration — and frustration by male-dominated curricula in high school history and science classes — Ignotofsky decided that her work could help tackle women’s underrepresentation in STEM in an accessible format.
“I just kept saying over and over again, ‘Young girls are testing just as well as boys in these STEM subjects, but aren’t pursuing it as a degree. We’re not taught about women in our history classes. We’re not taught about them in our science classes. We need to be taught about these women at an early age, so that strong and powerful women are the norm.’ So I decided I was going to use my skill set to shape the conversation in a better way.”
The book includes the narratives of women such as Hypatia, a mathematician born in Alexandria, Egypt in 315 CE, as well as modern women like current Stanford University professor and 2014 Fields Medal winner Maryam Mirzakhani, giving the book a breadth of history while proving a point that, yes, women in science have always been around, even if our history textbooks didn't include them.
Ignotofsky also stresses the importance of scientific literacy for everyone: “To make educated choices in life, you need to know how the world works — whether it’s understanding global warming or understanding why your computer turns on,” she says. “There’s a fight for scientific literacy in this country, and if drawing a little happy face on a cell can help it, then I definitely want to be a part of it.”
Women In Science will be released on July 26 and is currently available for pre-order. Click through to see eight illustrations as well as the bios of women whose pioneering work changed the way we think about health.
Reprinted with permission from Women In Science Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Ignotofsky. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Nettie Stevens, Geneticist
Nettie Stevens was born in 1861 in Vermont. She pinched pennies to pay for her education, and often taught classes to help pay her way. She had a very long road to follow to get to her short but groundbreaking career. Nettie slowly finished her undergrad education at the newly formed Stanford University in California. After earning her master’s degree, her interest in genetics brought her back to the East Coast, where she received her PhD at Bryn Mawr College at the age of 41.
The big question in genetics at the time was a simple one: what makes a baby a girl or a boy? At the time, sex determination was a still a mystery. For centuries doctors thought sex was determined by what a woman ate during pregnancy or how warm she kept her body. Nettie and other scientists had their suspicions that there was more to sex determination than that.
Nettie got to work by dissecting bugs. She took the sex organs from butterflies and mealworms to look at the cells under a microscope. Male insects had an XY-shaped chromosome, and females had an XX. Her flawless technique and use of different kinds of bugs strengthened the hypothesis she made based on her observations. In 1905 she published her groundbreaking research in a 2-part book, which overturned hundreds of years of misconceptions.
Around the same time, Edmund Wilson, Nettie’s former advisor, made the same discovery of XY chromosomes on his own, but Nettie’s work had the strongest proof. She wrote about her findings with great scientific conviction, but it was received by a skeptical public. Unfortunately, her untimely death in 1912 has rendered her largely overlooked and forgotten.
We now recognize Nettie for her amazing work, which allowed scientists to better understand sex determination and genetics.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Patricia Bath, Ophthalmologist & Inventor
Patricia Bath was born in 1942 in Harlem, New York City. Her parents worked hard to provide her with a good education. Patricia was a genius, finishing high school in just 2 ½ years and helping with cancer research in a workshop when she was only 16. She was bound to change the world.
Patricia was no stranger to racism or sexism. She didn’t know any female doctors when she was growing up, and many of the medical schools at the time were for whites only. Despite this, Patricia knew she wanted to be a doctor. After earning her medical degree from Howard University, she interned at Harlem Hospital and was accepted into Columbia University’s fellowship program.
Her research showed that African-Americans were more prone to certain vision problems like glaucoma. People living in poor communities could not afford regular eye care, so relatively minor eye problems could turn into blindness. Patricia couldn’t just stand by and watch this injustice, so she started the first community outreach volunteer-based eye-care program. Patricia went into parts of her hometown, Harlem, which had a high rate of poverty, and convinced a fellow surgeon to operate on patients for free. She believed that “eyesight is a human right,” and she went on to cofound the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness (AiPB).
Patricia became a professor at UCLA. She was the first female faculty member at the ophthalmology school and often did not get the respect she deserved from her peers, who assigned her an office next to where the lab animals were kept. She stood up for herself and refused that office. Eventually she became the chair of the ophthalmology residency training program, but she had had enough of dealing with the “glass ceiling” of the university. She traveled to Europe to do research and did some of her best work there.
In 1986, she finished her invention, the Laserphaco Probe, a device that removes cataracts, a major breakthrough that helped restore sight around the world. Patricia continues to work with the AiPB, bringing preventive eye care and sight-restoring surgery all around the globe.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Mae Jemison, Astronaut, Educator & Doctor
Mae Jemison always knew she would go into space. She was born in 1956 in Alabama and grew up in Chicago. She was obsessed with the Apollo missions but noticed that there was no one who looked like her going up into space. However, the fictional TV show Star Trek featured people of different genders and races working together. This had an impact on young Mae, and Lieutenant Uhura became her role model.
Mae went to Stanford and double majored in chemical engineering and African-American studies. She went on to Cornell and became a medical doctor. She worked in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia for several years. She continued working as a doctor until it was time to chase her space dream. Mae applied to NASA and became an astronaut.
In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space. On the space shuttle Endeavour, she took an Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority flag, a West African Bundu statue, and a poster of Judith Jamison dancing. She wanted African and African-American culture to be represented in space and no longer left out. The following year, she left NASA and started numerous companies, including her own technology consulting firm, the Jemison Group Inc. Mae is the founder of the BioSentient Corporation, which creates devices that will allow doctors to monitor patients’ day-to-day nervous system functions.
The technology and problem solving to get humans in space created inventions that we use today on earth. Mae was inspired by this and became principal of the 100 Year Starship project. The goal is to make sure human beings will be able to travel to the next solar system within the next 100 years. This project will also inspire new solutions to materials, recycling, energy, and fuel, just as the space race did. Dr. Mae Jemison still has her eyes on the stars while helping solve problems here on earth.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Jane Cooke Wright, Oncologist
Jane Cooke Wright was born in 1919 into a family of famous doctors. Her grandfather was the first African-American to graduate from Yale’s medical school, and her father founded Harlem Hospital’s Cancer Research Foundation. She and her father changed cancer treatment forever. In the 1940s, a cancer diagnosis was often considered a sure death sentence. Doctors were just starting to experiment with ways to attack cancer cells; they even tried injecting a form of mustard gas into patients. After Jane graduated from New York Medical College in 1945, she started her career in cancer research, working with her father at Harlem Hospital. After her father died, Jane became the head of the cancer research center at age 33.
Jane developed new techniques to approach cancer treatment that saved precious time. Instead of testing chemo drugs on the patient directly, Jane tested only samples of their cancer tissue. This allowed her to quickly create the most effective treatment. She understood that individual people and different types of cancer all needed to be factored into creating a unique cocktail of chemotherapy drugs.
Jane also innovated a new way to treat hard-to-reach tumors. As an alternative to surgically removing all tumors, which sometimes necessitated removing whole organs along with them, Jane developed a less invasive way to precisely deliver chemo to certain areas in the body using a catheter.
In a time when there were few African-American doctors, and even fewer who were women, Jane became a leader in the field of oncology. She was an original cofounder of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the associate dean of the New York Medical College. She was also the first woman president of the New York Cancer Society. Jane Wright was not only an excellent doctor but also a trailblazer for women in medicine.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Gertrude Elion, Pharmacologist & Biochemist
Gertrude Elion was born in 1918 and grew up in the Bronx in New York City. She was a great student who loved all of her subjects in high school and graduated early at age 15. She didn’t know what her career would be until her grandfather died of cancer. She decided to dedicate her life to fighting the disease.
During the Great Depression, universities prioritized hiring men. Gertrude graduated with high honors from Hunter College, but graduate schools were offering no financial aid to women, and chemistry jobs were scarce. Finally, after many odd jobs and one cash-strapped year in NYU’s graduate program, she found a home for her cancer research at the Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company.
That group broke away from the usual trial-and-error way of developing drugs. With George Hitchings, she studied the difference between healthy and abnormal cells and how abnormal cells reproduce so they could create drugs that destroy only unhealthy cells. Gertrude was tasked with studying the nucleic acids in DNA and how they can be used to stop tumors from spreading.
She started working toward finishing her PhD part time at night. Her school demanded that she attend full time and quit her job, but she loved her work so much that she quit the PhD program instead. It was the right choice. Gertrude went on to create many different medications that saved thousands of lives. In 1950, she created 2 drugs to treat leukemia, which began a new era of cancer research.
Gertrude continued to work with many different diseases. Another major breakthrough came in 1978, when she created a way for antivirals to accurately target a virus without harming healthy cells. A resulting drug is used to treat herpes and has been the basis for many other antivirals.
Gertrude’s drug research saved thousands of lives and made tremendous advances in drug treatment. When asked her favorite achievement, she responded, “I don’t discriminate among my children.”
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Elizabeth Blackwell, Doctor
Elizabeth Blackwell had no interest in medicine until a friend of hers died from what was most likely uterine cancer. Her friend said she might have experienced less pain and suffering if only she had had a female doctor. This put Elizabeth on the path to becoming the first woman medical doctor in the United States.
Elizabeth was born into a family of abolitionists in 1821, with an upbringing that valued justice and equality. While working as a school teacher, she was mentored by male doctor friends and read books from their medical libraries. Although many didn’t believe it was possible, she was accepted into Geneva Medical College.
Medical school is hard for any student, but Elizabeth faced additional challenges. Often met with hostility, she had to sit separately from the male students, and her teachers were embarrassed by her presence during anatomy lessons. When asked to leave a lecture about reproduction to protect her “delicate sensibilities,” she argued her way into staying. During the summer she worked in a hospital in Philadelphia and saw how the hospital conditions contributed to the spread of infectious disease. The experience inspired her thesis on how good hygiene could prevent the spread of typhus. In 1849, she graduated from Geneva Medical College, first in her class.
Elizabeth’s sister, Emily, also became a doctor. Together with Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, they opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857. It was a place for the poor to get treatment and for female medical students and nurses to learn.
In the 1800s, there was little known about communicable diseases, and hand-washing was not mandatory for doctors like it is today. It was very common for doctors to go straight from treating someone with the flu to delivering a baby without even washing up. This caused the spread of diseases like typhus. Elizabeth realized that “prevention is better than cure,” and in her lectures she advocated for better hygiene standards in hospitals and homes. Elizabeth went on to found the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary in 1868 and the London School of Medicine for Women around 1874. An inspiration to many women, she also made it possible for many of them to become doctors.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Neurologist & Italian Senator
Rita Levi-Montalcini never let her circumstance keep her from science. She was born in 1909 in Italy to a well-to-do Jewish family. Her father expected her to become a proper lady and marry well, but she hated finishing school and was determined to become a doctor.
Though Rita graduated summa cum laude from medical school in 1936, she had no real job prospects. Italy was one of the Axis powers in World War II, and in 1938, anti-Semitic laws forbade Jewish people to practice medicine. But nothing could keep Rita from pursuing her dreams.
She created a makeshift laboratory in her bedroom and started her research. She borrowed eggs from farmers and used sewing needles to dissect the nervous systems of embryonic chicks. She wanted to know why and how nerve cells developed. By severing the limbs of the chick embryo, she accurately documented how the motor neurons began to grow and then die. This work laid the foundation for her entire career.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Neurologist and Italian Senator Rita Levi-Montalcini never let her circumstance keep her from science. She was born in 1909 in Italy to a well-to-do Jewish family. Her father expected her to become a proper lady and marry well, but she hated finishing school and was determined to become a doctor. Though Rita graduated summa cum laude from medical school in 1936, she had no real job prospects. Italy was one of the Axis powers in World War II, and in 1938, anti-Semitic laws forbade Jewish people to practice medicine. But nothing could keep Rita from pursuing her dreams. She created a makeshift laboratory in her bedroom and started her research. She borrowed eggs from farmers and used sewing needles to dissect the nervous systems of embryonic chicks. She wanted to know why and how nerve cells developed. By severing the limbs of the chick embryo, she accurately documented how the motor neurons began to grow and then die. This work laid the foundation for her entire career.
When the war ended, Rita reentered the formal scientific world, already well into her research. She was asked to come to Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, for one semester, which turned into 30 years of teaching and research.
While learning how to grow tissues in a glass dish, Rita observed that a tumor sample was affecting the embryonic cells in the same dish. The nerves started to grow very quickly—but why? By experimenting with snake venom, tumors, and finally mouse saliva, she discovered nerve growth factor (NGF), a protein that regulates nerve growth and keeps our neurons healthy. This was a very important finding for understanding and fighting diseases.
Rita received the 1986 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. When asked if she was bitter about how the Italian government treated her during the war, she said, “If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel prize.” She went on to become a senator-for-life in the Italian government, where she fought for civic equality and promoted the sciences.
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.
Rosalind Franklin, Chemist & X-Ray Crystallographer
Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 in London. Her father wanted her to do work that he considered fit for a lady; he disapproved of women going to university. The women in Rosalind’s family helped her stand up to her father. She went on to earn a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge University.
The big question of the day was this: what is the shape of DNA? Scientists knew that DNA formed the building blocks for the body, but they had no proof of what it really looked like. Rosalind Franklin was one of the scientists at King’s College who were on the case.
Rosalind spent hours and hours using an X-ray on the delicate fibers of DNA. She captured the famous photo that proved DNA is a double helix.
Meanwhile, 2 scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, were also trying to figure out the structure of DNA. They snuck a peek at Rosalind’s work, without her permission, and used her findings to publish their own work without giving her any credit. As a result, she was overlooked. Rosalind left the toxic work environment of King’s College and continued her research. She went on to a top research lab and started doing interesting research with the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus.
Unfortunately, Rosalind was diagnosed with terminal cancer, probably caused by radiation from her dedicated work with the X-rays. She died in 1958 at only 37 years old.
James Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel prize after Rosalind died. James Watson wrote scathing, tasteless comments about Rosalind in his book The Double Helix. He also admitted that he had looked at her data, and people started to figure out how the discovery really happened.
Rosalind is remembered as a woman who should have won a Nobel prize. Now that we know the story of her groundbreaking work, we can celebrate all that she accomplished!
Photo: Courtesy of Ten Speed Press; Illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky.Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
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