ALL POSTS

The Ice Woman: Mary Engle Pennington’s Revolutionary World of Refrigeration.

Dale DeBakcsy

Jul 8

The Ice Woman: Mary Engle Pennington’s Revolutionary World of Refrigeration.

In the early 20th century, buying and consuming food of any sort in an urban center was a fraught proposition, particularly in the days...

337 views

Sex After Sixty: The Geriatric Gynecology of Anna Kleegman Daniels.

Dale DeBakcsy

Jun 10

Medicine

Sex After Sixty: The Geriatric Gynecology of Anna Kleegman Daniels.

Sex after menopause. Drug addiction. Abortion. In the early to mid-twentieth century, to be seen as casting an understanding eye on any...

199 views

Semi-Social: Biruté Galdikas and the Complicated Simplicity of the Bornean Orangutan.

Dale DeBakcsy

May 10

Animal Behavior

Semi-Social: Biruté Galdikas and the Complicated Simplicity of the Bornean Orangutan.

By 1971, when a 24 year old anthropology student by the name of Biruté Galdikas set foot in the wilds of Borneo to study the largely...

199 views

Emma Darwin and the Invisible Heroism of the Scientific Caretaker.

Dale DeBakcsy

May 2

Biology

Emma Darwin and the Invisible Heroism of the Scientific Caretaker.

The road leading to the creation and publication of The Origin of the Species was one of the most tortuous and personally costly in the...

235 views

The Last Woman Who Knew Everything: The Omnivorous Mind of Clémence Royer.

Dale DeBakcsy

Apr 21

Biology

The Last Woman Who Knew Everything: The Omnivorous Mind of Clémence Royer.

When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...

216 views

Jeanne Altmann, Baboon Moms, and the Justice League of Primatology.

Dale DeBakcsy

Mar 18

Animal Behavior

Jeanne Altmann, Baboon Moms, and the Justice League of Primatology.

It is a long standing saying* that the pantheon of primatology is essentially the Justice League of America, with Jane Goodall as...

89 views

The Strangers Within: Lynn Margulis and the Rebirth of Endosymbiosis

Dale DeBakcsy

Mar 5

Biology

The Strangers Within: Lynn Margulis and the Rebirth of Endosymbiosis

In terms of cell count, ninety percent of you isn't you at all. Bacteria, though by mass they only make up about two percent of a human...

141 views

Raising Nature Girls: How 18th Century Botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien Created Girls' Science Education.

Dale DeBakcsy

Mar 1

Biology

Raising Nature Girls: How 18th Century Botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien Created Girls' Science Education.

Pondering the Enlightenment, one's thoughts tend to turn Frenchwards. The verbal barbs of Voltaire, the neuroses of Rousseau, the...

573 views

Lead, TNT, and Rayon: Alice Hamilton's Battle Against Industrial Poisons.

Dale DeBakcsy

Feb 27

Medicine

Lead, TNT, and Rayon: Alice Hamilton's Battle Against Industrial Poisons.

The lack of regulation in American industry during the early Twentieth Century is the stuff of horrific legend - from the grotesqueries...

282 views

Taking the Wheel: Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the CRISPR-Cas9 Revolution in Gene Editing.

Dale DeBakcsy

Feb 19

Biology

Taking the Wheel: Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the CRISPR-Cas9 Revolution in Gene Editing.

Over the course of the last two decades, humanity has taken its first quiet steps from being the blind victims of genetic-molecular...

156 views

The Professor and the Frogs: The Ecology and Herpetology of Margaret Stewart.

Dale DeBakcsy

Feb 6

Biology

The Professor and the Frogs: The Ecology and Herpetology of Margaret Stewart.

Amphibians today are experiencing a population crisis of unprecedented scale. Frogs are going extinct, according to the most...

81 views

Anne Innis Dagg, Giraffe, and the Winding Road of the Citizen Scientist.

Dale DeBakcsy

Jan 25

Animal Behavior

Anne Innis Dagg, Giraffe, and the Winding Road of the Citizen Scientist.

Before Jane and Dian, Biruté and Jeanne, there was Anne. In 1957 Anne Innis (b. 1933) became the first woman to attempt a solo animal...

54 views

All Creatures Small: Libbie Hyman's Invertebrates.

Dale DeBakcsy

Dec 6, 2023

Biology

All Creatures Small: Libbie Hyman's Invertebrates.

Science is a creature of lurches and inchings, presided over by two (mostly) mutually exclusive castes. We know the lurchers well,...

65 views

Capping the Chromosome: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Discovery of Telomerase

Dale DeBakcsy

Nov 26, 2023

Biology

Capping the Chromosome: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Discovery of Telomerase

Telomerase is one of those enzymes which just won’t let you come to a settled opinion. When it runs wild, it promotes cancer. But it...

303 views

Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell.

Dale DeBakcsy

Nov 23, 2023

Biology

Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell.

One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...

47 views

Born Not Taught: Marian Koshland and the Source of Antibody Variation.

Dale DeBakcsy

Oct 24, 2023

Biology

Born Not Taught: Marian Koshland and the Source of Antibody Variation.

The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...

747 views

Making the Gradient: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and the Mysteries of Embryo Development

Dale DeBakcsy

Oct 20, 2023

Biology

Making the Gradient: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and the Mysteries of Embryo Development

How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...

48 views

Chronicler of the Path Untread: The 19th Century Journeys of Isabella Bird.

Dale DeBakcsy

Oct 15, 2023

Biology

Chronicler of the Path Untread: The 19th Century Journeys of Isabella Bird.

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...

65 views

A Life in Service to the Birds: America’s Pioneering Woman Ornithologist, Florence Merriam Bailey

Dale DeBakcsy

Sep 10, 2023

Biology

A Life in Service to the Birds: America’s Pioneering Woman Ornithologist, Florence Merriam Bailey

In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...

124 views

Breaking Neutral: The Population Genetics of Tomoko Ohta

Dale DeBakcsy

Sep 7, 2023

Biology

Breaking Neutral: The Population Genetics of Tomoko Ohta

We are all mutants, our genes loaded with the steadily acquired variations of three billion years that gradually changed a collection of...

145 views