{"id":8779,"date":"2021-10-17T05:58:13","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T04:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=8779"},"modified":"2024-04-09T08:32:21","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T07:32:21","slug":"nobel-prize-in-chemistry-women-vs-men-up-to-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=8779","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize in Chemistry – Women vs. Men (up to 2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Andy Brunning – October 9, 2018 – Compound Interest<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2018) was awarded to scientists who used directed evolution to produce new enzymes and antibodies, including Frances H Arnold<\/strong>. As the graphic shows, Arnold is only the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The previous women who have won are:
\n– Marie Curie<\/strong> (1911):
\nAwarded the Nobel Prize \u201cin recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.\u201d
\n– Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie<\/strong> (1935):
\nAwarded the Nobel Prize jointly with her husband, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot, \u201cin recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements.\u201d
\n– Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin<\/strong> (1964):
\nAwarded the Nobel Prize \u201dfor her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.\u201d
\n– Ada E. Yonath<\/strong> (2009):
\nJointly with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz \u201cfor studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Nobels have come under fire for their balance of male and female winners of the prizes in the past. The low number of women who\u2019ve won certainly isn\u2019t down to a lack of meritorious nominees. Rosalind Franklin, a commonly cited example, was not awarded a Nobel Prize for her work towards the discovery of the structure of the DNA. However, this was due to her death prior to the award of the prize which rewarded the discovery, and the Nobels are not awarded posthumously.<\/p>\n

Franklin aside, there are plenty of other examples of women who could have won a Nobel Prize but didn\u2019t. One of the most notable is Lise Meitner, considered to be amongst the biggest Nobel snubs. She was nominated a combined 48 times for the chemistry and physics prizes for her part in the discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium. The man she led a research group with, Otto Hahn, was awarded a Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1944, but her contributions were not recognised.
\n\/…\/
\nAs the graphic shows, Arnold\u2019s win this year means that there have now been more female Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry in the past 9 years than there were in the previous 74. Though there\u2019s still a way to go, let\u2019s hope that this is indicative of women in chemistry more regularly being recognised for their achievements.
\nIf you have noticed that there are 176 male figures, in contrast to the 175 male winners mentioned at the top, this is because Frederick Sanger won the prize twice (in 1958 and 1980). He\u2019s still the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry more than once. Marie Curie also won two Nobel Prizes, but her other prize was in Physics.<\/p>\n

[ https:\/\/www.compoundchem.com\/2018\/10\/09\/nobelprize-women\/<\/em><\/span> ]<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

These women scientists should have won the Nobel<\/strong>
\nby Stu Borman \/ September 11, 2017<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Nobel Prize is the most prestigious recognition a scientist can have,\u201d according to Magdolna Hargittai of Budapest University of Technology & Economics. \u201cIt\u2019s also the prize that is best known and appreciated by the general public.\u201d<\/p>\n

Therefore, many have lamented over the years the dearth of women on the list of science Nobel winners. Speaking at last month\u2019s ACS national meeting in Washington, D.C., Hargittai noted that only 17 women have ever won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. Marie Curie, who won chemistry and physics Nobels, her daughter Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Ada E. Yonath are the only women among the 175 chemistry Nobel winners. Physics counts just two women among its 204 awardees, and physiology or medicine has had only 12 women laureates out of 211.<\/p>\n

These 17 women represent about 3% of the total number of science awardees since the Nobels started. Women, meanwhile, make up about 50% of the global population. A possible sign of improvement, Hargittai said, is that about 6% of 21st-century science Nobels have gone to women, compared with only 2% in the 20th century.<\/p>\n

Whether women\u2019s representation among Nobel Prize winners will continue to improve is still an open question. But Hargittai suggested that passages from medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow\u2019s 1977 Nobel ceremony banquet speech are worth remembering: \u201cThe failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination. \u2026We must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us. \u2026The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building on the popularity of a session held at last year\u2019s ACS spring national meeting about chemists who should have won Nobels, Hargittai and others discussed women scientists who\u2019ve been snubbed in the Nobel selection process during a session titled \u201cLadies in Waiting for Nobel Prizes: Overlooked Accomplishments of Women Chemists,\u201d sponsored by the Division of the History of Chemistry and the Women Chemists Committee. The following are some of the women they discussed.<\/p>\n

Marietta Blau<\/strong>:
\nSymposium co-organizer Vera V. Mainz, a retired director of the nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, discussed physicist Blau, who, with her student Hertha Wambacher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was first to use film emulsions to capture nuclear processes. Blau and Wambacher developed the use of emulsions to track and identify relativistic particles from radioactive materials, accelerators, and cosmic rays and to record sprays of particles that emerge from high-energy particle collisions. In a 1937 Nature paper, they reported the first indisputable evidence showing the disintegration of heavy nuclei in accelerators, Mainz said. Blau was nominated for the chemistry Nobel once and the physics Nobel four times. But Cecil Frank Powell was sole winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, in part for developing \u201cthe photographic method of studying nuclear processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Katharine Burr Blodgett<\/strong>:
\nMany chemists know that Irving Langmuir helped develop Langmuir-Blodgett films, single-molecule surface layers that have been used to create coatings, membranes, sensors, and electronic devices. Langmuir received the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work and other surface chemistry achievements. But how many know who Blodgett is, asked Margaret Schott of Northwestern University at the ACS symposium. Blodgett worked closely with Langmuir at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., to develop Langmuir-Blodgett films and the apparatus that generates them. Langmuir deserved the prize, but Blodgett helped with key experiments and could have shared it, Schott said.<\/p>\n

Rachel Carson<\/strong>:
\nAmanda Coffman of the University of North Alabama suggested that Carson of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service should have won a Nobel. In September 1962, Carson published \u201cSilent Spring.\u201d The book said that indiscriminate use of six chemical pesticides hurt animals and people, and it recommended increased regulation. There were many critiques of \u201cSilent Spring,\u201d including in the pages of C&EN, but in 2012 ACS designated the book a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Today, the work is widely credited for having launched the modern environmental movement, Coffman said. It helped lead not only to bans or restrictions of all six pesticides it discussed but also to the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and passage of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. Carson \u201cwas not a chemist,\u201d Coffman said. \u201cShe did, however, have a great impact on society and was deserving of a Nobel Prize.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erika Cremer<\/strong>:
\nGerman physical chemist Cremer was overlooked by the Nobel Committee for her work developing solid-state gas adsorption chromatography. She did the work in 1944 in Austria, which was then part of Nazi Germany, said historian Jeffrey Johnson of Villanova University. In spring 1945, a report on her work was in press at Naturwissenschaften, a German journal similar to Science. However, the press was bombed before the paper could be printed, and an air raid damaged Cremer\u2019s lab, disrupting her research program. After the war, one of her students built a gas chromatograph in a nearby high school lab, and another optimized the apparatus and used it to separate gases. But postwar problems with German journals delayed Cremer\u2019s scientific publications until 1951, and even then her work remained obscure. British chemists A. J. P. Martin and R. L. M. Synge won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing liquid partition chromatography. If Cremer\u2019s independent work had been better known at the time, it could have justified a third share of the 1952 prize, Johnson said.<\/p>\n

Rosalind E. Franklin<\/strong>:
\nBurtron H. Davis of the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research told the story of English chemist Franklin\u2019s contributing role to the 1953 determination of the structure of DNA. Working at King\u2019s College London to decipher the structure, Franklin and a postdoc obtained a key X-ray diffraction image called Photo 51. Without Franklin\u2019s approval or knowledge, her colleague Maurice H. F. Wilkins showed James D. Watson the photo, which gave Watson critically important clues about DNA\u2019s architecture. Later on, Francis H. C. Crick wrote, \u201cThe data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin.\u201d Because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, Franklin\u2019s untimely death from cancer in 1958 eliminated the issue of whether she should be included in the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for deciphering the structure. Davis noted that Franklin was not nominated for a Nobel Prize before her death and that Watson, Crick, and Wilkins had also not yet been nominated at that point.<\/p>\n

Elena Galpern<\/strong>:
\nBudapest University of Technology & Economics\u2019 Hargittai thinks Galpern, a computational chemist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, might have been considered for inclusion in the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for buckminsterfullerene (C60). In a 1973 Russian paper, Galpern made the first computational prediction of the stable structure of C60, Hargittai said. In 1985, Harold W. Kroto, Robert F. Curl, Richard E. Smalley, and coworkers published their landmark Nature paper reporting the experimental production and observation of C60. The three principal investigators received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work, but Galpern\u2019s prediction was not recognized. \u201cIf you live in a closed society\u201d like Russia, Hargittai said, \u201cwhere there used to be little opportunity for interaction with world scientists, there is a big chance that if you discover something important, its significance will be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Darleane C. Hoffman<\/strong>:
\nU.S. radiochemist Hoffman, who is 90, could still win a Nobel Prize, said Caroline Mason of Research Applications Corp. In 1971, scientists still believed that transuranium elements did not occur in nature, but in that year Hoffman, working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, discovered small amounts of plutonium-244 in a rock formation. Hoffman also isolated and characterized fermium-257\u2014work that represented a monumental advance in the understanding of the fission process, according to the late Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg. Hoffman also studied the chemical and nuclear properties of rutherfordium, bohrium, and hassium, and she confirmed the existence of seaborgium. She deserves Nobel recognition for those achievements, Mason said.<\/p>\n

Isabella Karle<\/strong>:
\nBudapest University of Technology & Economics\u2019 Hargittai believes Karle, the spouse and scientific collaborator of Nobelist Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory, should have won a chemistry Nobel. Jerome Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing crystal structure determination methods, work to which Isabella made critical contributions. When Jerome first learned he had won, he immediately asked whether Isabella had won too, but she had not. Isabella Karle, now 95, told Hargittai that she and Jerome \u201cworked together, separately.\u201d Hargittai has found that many scientific couples have a similar arrangement, complementing each other\u2019s efforts to achieve important goals.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Lonsdale<\/strong>:
\nMary Virginia Orna of the College of New Rochelle and Maureen Julian of Virginia Tech named crystallographer Lonsdale as another Nobel-deserving scientist. At the University of Leeds in 1927, Lonsdale provided the first experimental proof of the planarity of the benzene ring, the geometry of which was uncertain at the time. This finding provided a major foundation for organic chemistry as we know it today, Orna said. Working with W. H. Bragg at the Royal Institution in the 1930s, Lonsdale also helped confirm the concept of \u03c3 and \u03c0 molecular orbitals by measuring their dimensions experimentally.<\/p>\n

Lise Meitner<\/strong>:
\nTina Leaym of Dow Chemical offered Meitner\u2019s name on behalf of her Dow colleague Jaime Curtis-Fisk, who prepared the presentation on Meitner\u2019s work but couldn\u2019t attend the session. Meitner and Otto Hahn led a group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin that first discovered nuclear fission of uranium. Hahn won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that discovery. According to the Nobel Prize nomination database, Meitner received 48 total chemistry and physics Nobel Prize nominations for her contributions to that effort, but she never received a prize.
\nIn 1938, Meitner, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany and her research post with Hahn but continued to collaborate with him remotely. Soon after she left, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and unexpectedly found that barium had been produced. \u201cPerhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation\u201d to explain the result, Hahn wrote to Meitner. Meitner was first to realize that uranium had split into smaller elements, losing mass that had converted into energy. Meitner and a coworker published a note in Nature in 1939 on the experiment, calling the process \u201cfission.\u201d Their findings were key to the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
\nWhen the Nobel Committee\u2019s deliberations on the 1944 prize were made public a half century later, Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Max Perutz wrote that \u201cthe protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner\u2019s written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin.\u201d Curtis-Fisk agrees, calling the snub an underestimation of Meitner\u2019s role and noting that Meitner is one of the top women to have been overlooked for a Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

Ida Tacke Noddack<\/strong>:
\nAt the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin-Charlottenburg, German chemist Noddack and her husband Walter discovered rhenium in 1925, explained the College of New Rochelle\u2019s Orna. Noddack was also the first person to propose the concept of nuclear fission but did not confirm it experimentally, as did Meitner, Hahn, and Strassmann. Ida Noddack\u2019s work should have earned her a Nobel, Orna said.<\/p>\n

Marguerite Perey<\/strong>:
\nFrench chemist Perey, discoverer of the last natural element, francium, should have been in the Nobel club, according to Sarah Preston of Ursuline College. In 1929, Perey became a chemical technician at the Radium Institute in Paris, where Marie Curie assigned her the task of isolating actinium from uranium ore. In 1939, Perey noted that actinium she had obtained by fractional precipitation of uranium ore emitted an unexpected type of radiation. This finding led to her discovery of a new element, which she named francium.
\nFrancium is the rarest and most unstable of all naturally occurring elements, so the achievement was considerable, Preston said. Perey received five Nobel nominations but never received the prize. The 1952 Nobel Committee decided that her francium studies \u201cundoubtedly are worth being recognized\u201d but fall short of the importance required for a Nobel Prize, according to Erling Norrby\u2019s book \u201cNobel Prizes and Nature\u2019s Surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agnes Pockels<\/strong>:
\nThe Center for Applied Energy Research\u2019s Davis discussed the Nobel-worthiness of German chemist Pockels. In the 1880s, while living at home with her parents, Pockels read the scientific literature by borrowing publications from her brother, a professor of physics. In 1882, she developed a slide trough and beam balance that could measure soap-film surface tension, the pressure exerted by soap films as they spread on water. She recorded scientific results in a diary, and beginning in 1891, she also published papers about her work in Nature and German journals. In 1917, Irving Langmuir reported having upgraded Pockels\u2019s experimental apparatus. He went on to win the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work and other surface chemistry achievements, but Pockels was not included. \u201cLangmuir did better surface science work than Pockels,\u201d Davis said, but it was in part \u201cmerely an improvement of her work.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ https:\/\/cen.acs.org\/articles\/95\/i36\/female-scientists-should-won-Nobel.html<\/em><\/span> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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