Today marks an incredible moment in the science and art community that has been blooming over on Mad Art Lab. It also is proof that there are a whole heck of a lot of women in science that you may not know about.
Dale at Mad Art Lab has published the 50th edition of his series on Women in Science! This series is brilliant and not only incredibly well researched and well written, the series is also beautifully illustrated.
For number 50 he has chosen, More Than a Prize Unwon: The Manifold Legacies of Rosalind Franklinas his subject. I will put the first two paragraphs in this post for you to read and then you can click through for the remainder and the fabulous drawings on Mad Art Lab. Dale has also taken the first year of his Women in Science posts and turned them into a book, which you really should pick up. I have it and I love it. It’s a great gift for anyone, young or old, who wants to learn about the history of science and the contributions that women have made throughout the years.
We are so incredibly happy to have Dale as part of our network and so incredibly proud of the work he has done.
Now, for your entertainment and education, here is the first two paragraphs of the 50th edition of Women in Science! The link to the rest of the story is at the bottom.
When Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-seven, she left behind monumental contributions to three different fields of science, any one of which would have placed her on the short list of the world’s most significant twentieth century scientists. And yet, when we talk about Franklin, we don’t tend to say, “She ascertained the structural relation of the protein and genetic content in the tobacco mosaic virus,” or, “She discovered the molecular reason that certain types of coal can’t be graphitized,” but rather, “She wasn’t sufficiently recognized for her part in the discovery of DNA’s double helical structure.”
Unique among scientists, she’s remembered for something that happened to her, at the expense of the magnificent things she actually did. Nothing would have irritated her more than to have the stupendous scientific output of her final five years doing virus research at Birkbeck systematically ignored in favor of lascivious conspiracy theories about Watson and Crick stealing DNA’s structure from under her nose. For there is much, much more to Rosalind Franklin than a citation scandal.
Read the entire post with links to Dale’s book and his illustrations here.
