6 Women History Nearly Forgot to Credit

They changed science. Someone else got the applause.

Who gets remembered when a discovery changes the world?

Too often, it is not the person who did the crucial experiment, solved the hardest problem or noticed what everyone else had missed. These six women made enormous contributions to science, only to see recognition arrive late, unevenly or not at all.

#6 Alice Ball

By the time Alice Ball was 23, she had already earned degrees in pharmacy and pharmaceutical chemistry, become the first woman and first Black person to receive a chemistry master’s degree from the College of Hawaiʻi, and joined the school as its first Black chemistry instructor. She was not merely promising. She was already exceptional.

Her greatest achievement began with chaulmoogra oil, a centuries-old treatment for Hansen’s disease, then commonly called leprosy. The oil showed potential, but it was thick, poorly absorbed and extremely difficult to inject. Ball found a way to isolate its active compounds and turn them into a form the body could absorb more effectively.

The treatment became the best available option for thousands of patients. In Hawaiʻi, it even allowed some people confined at Kalaupapa to leave isolation and return to their families.

Ball died in 1916 at only 24, before she could publish her findings. Her exact cause of death remains uncertain. Arthur L. Dean continued the research and published it without crediting her, and the treatment became known for years as the “Dean Method.”

Physician Harry T. Hollmann later identified it correctly as “Ball’s Method,” but widespread recognition took decades. Today, Ball is honored with scholarships, memorials and an official day in Hawaiʻi. None of that can return the career she should have had, but her name is finally attached to the breakthrough that always belonged to her.

#5 Nettie Stevens

Nettie Stevens entered professional science later than most of her male colleagues. Before reaching university, she spent years teaching and saving money for her education. By the time she earned her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in 1903, she was already 42. She had lost time, but apparently had no intention of wasting what remained.

In 1905, Stevens studied the reproductive cells of mealworms and noticed something important. Female cells contained two matching large chromosomes. Male cells contained one large chromosome and one much smaller one.

From this, she correctly concluded that sex was determined by chromosomes and that sperm carrying the smaller chromosome produced male offspring. Those chromosomes later became known as X and Y. It is a concept now introduced in basic biology classes, but Stevens helped provide the first convincing evidence for it.

Biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson reached a similar conclusion independently around the same time. Thomas Hunt Morgan, Stevens’s former professor, later became far more famous for establishing the role of chromosomes in heredity. Stevens’s discovery was consequently overshadowed, and it was sometimes attributed to the men surrounding her.

She died from breast cancer in 1912 at 50, only nine years after earning her doctorate. Her research career was brief, but she used it to answer one of biology’s most fundamental questions. Nettie Stevens did not merely participate in the birth of modern genetics. She helped give it an X and a Y.

#4 Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner spent three decades working with chemist Otto Hahn, becoming one of Europe’s leading nuclear physicists along the way. Then Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and Meitner, who was Jewish, was forced to flee Germany with little more than a small suitcase.

Exile did not end the collaboration. Hahn and Fritz Strassmann continued bombarding uranium with neutrons in Berlin and sent Meitner results they could not explain. Their experiments appeared to have produced barium, a much lighter element. At the time, splitting an atomic nucleus seemed almost impossible.

During a winter walk in Sweden, Meitner and her physicist nephew Otto Frisch worked through the numbers. They realized that the uranium nucleus had split and calculated the tremendous energy released in the process. Meitner and Frisch published the physical explanation in 1939 and gave the process its name: nuclear fission.

The discovery changed physics and eventually helped make nuclear power and atomic weapons possible. Meitner, however, refused an invitation to work on the Manhattan Project, saying she wanted nothing to do with building a bomb.

In 1944, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Hahn alone. Meitner never received a Nobel despite numerous nominations, although later honors increasingly recognized her role.

Element 109, meitnerium, now carries her name. It is fitting recognition for the physicist who helped explain how an atom could be split, even if the scientific world took far too long to give her an undivided share of the credit.

#3 Chien-Shiung Wu

For decades, physicists believed that nature treated left and right as perfect mirror images. This principle was known as parity conservation, and it was considered so dependable that few scientists had bothered to test it properly.

In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang questioned whether parity still applied to the weak nuclear force. They needed someone capable of designing an experiment precise enough to find out. They turned to Chien-Shiung Wu, already regarded as one of the finest experimental physicists in the field.

Wu cooled radioactive cobalt-60 to temperatures near absolute zero and carefully aligned its nuclei inside a magnetic field. Her results showed that the particles were not emitted equally in opposite directions. Nature, at least at the subatomic level, could tell left from right.

The finding overturned a principle that had shaped physics for roughly 30 years. Lee and Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize for proposing the theory. Wu, whose experiment proved it, was not included.

She had already worked on uranium enrichment during the Manhattan Project and later made major contributions to the study of beta decay. She went on to receive the National Medal of Science and became the first woman to lead the American Physical Society.

Wu is sometimes called the “First Lady of Physics,” but even that feels slightly too polite. She designed the experiment that forced physicists to abandon one of their basic assumptions about the universe. The Nobel committee overlooked her. Physics could not.

#2 Rosalind Franklin

By the time Rosalind Franklin began studying DNA at King’s College London in 1951, she was already an accomplished chemist and an expert in X-ray diffraction. Her job was to fire X-rays at carefully prepared DNA fibers and use the resulting patterns to work out the molecule’s structure. Delicate, exacting work suited her well.

Working with graduate student Raymond Gosling, Franklin produced Photograph 51, an exceptionally clear diffraction image of DNA’s B form. Its distinctive X-shaped pattern offered powerful evidence that DNA had a helical structure. Her measurements also helped establish the molecule’s dimensions and showed that its phosphate backbone faced outward.

Maurice Wilkins showed Photograph 51 to James Watson without Franklin’s knowledge. Watson and Francis Crick also received access to an internal report containing her unpublished measurements. Those details helped them build their successful double-helix model.

The familiar version sometimes reduces Franklin to a photograph stolen from a drawer. The reality gives her more agency. She was conducting her own sophisticated analysis of DNA, and her paper appeared beside those of Watson and Crick and Wilkins’s team in the same 1953 issue of Nature. She was not merely supplying a useful picture. She was independently closing in on the structure.

Franklin later produced important research on coal, graphite and viruses before dying from ovarian cancer in 1958 at 37. Four years later, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, but Franklin had received too little recognition while she was alive.

Today, Photograph 51 is among the most famous images in science. The woman who understood what it revealed deserves to be just as recognizable.

#1 Jocelyn Bell Burnell

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Cambridge. She had helped build a radio telescope covering several acres, then took responsibility for examining the enormous rolls of paper it produced.

While studying the recordings, Bell Burnell noticed a tiny patch of “scruff” that kept returning from the same part of the sky. The signal was easy to dismiss. Her supervisor initially believed it might be interference. Bell Burnell kept looking.

She eventually found a series of pulses arriving every 1.3 seconds with astonishing regularity. The team briefly considered whether the signal could come from extraterrestrial intelligence and jokingly labeled it “LGM-1” for “Little Green Men.” Bell Burnell then found similar signals elsewhere in the sky, making aliens a less convenient explanation.

The sources were pulsars: rapidly rotating neutron stars sending beams of radiation through space like cosmic lighthouses. Their discovery confirmed that neutron stars existed and opened an entirely new field of astronomy.

In 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics recognized the discovery of pulsars but went to Bell Burnell’s supervisor, Antony Hewish, and radio astronomer Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell was excluded. She later said she accepted the decision because she had been a graduate student, although many scientists argued that the person who identified and pursued the signal deserved a place on that stage.

Recognition eventually arrived in other forms. In 2018, Bell Burnell received a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize. She donated the entire award to help women, refugees and other underrepresented students become physicists.

History nearly reduced her to the graduate student who noticed something unusual. Instead, Jocelyn Bell Burnell became one of astronomy’s most respected figures and used her long-delayed recognition to make sure more people could follow her into science.

Sources and Further Reading

Alice Ball: University of Hawaiʻi

Nettie Stevens: National Women’s History Museum

Lise Meitner: American Physical Society

Chien-Shiung Wu: American Physical Society

Rosalind Franklin: King’s College London

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: University of Cambridge

Image Note

Images in this article are AI-assisted historical reenactments incorporating genuine archival material. Archival photographs were resized and integrated into the compositions.

Archival Image Credits

Alice Ball portrait: Unknown photographer. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons

Nettie Stevens portrait: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn laboratory photograph, 1912: Unknown photographer. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons

Chien-Shiung Wu photograph: Smithsonian Institution Archives. No known copyright restrictions. Wikimedia Commons

Rosalind Franklin photograph: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, from the personal collection of Jenifer Glynn. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons

Jocelyn Bell photograph, June 1967: Roger W. Haworth. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Wikimedia Commons

First pulsar chart photograph: Billthom. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons