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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...
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 15, 2023
67 views


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...
Dale DeBakcsy
Sep 10, 2023
126 views


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...
Dale DeBakcsy
Sep 7, 2023
146 views


The Enemy is Ignorance: Marine Biologist Sylvia Earle Speaks for the Oceans.
One of the most consistently frustrating things about humanity is our blithe willingness to allow all manner of industrially organized...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 30, 2023
95 views


Fighting Penicillin's Monster: Elizabeth Hazen and Rachel Brown.
Who (besides, obviously, bacteria) doesn't love penicillin? It's on everybody's shortlist of the most important things we've discovered...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 24, 2023
316 views


Beyond Nature Vs. Nurture: Marian Cleeves Diamond and Leda Cosmides
In 1964, two publications announced the beginning of two roads out of the centuries-long quagmire represented by the Nature Versus...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 21, 2023
195 views


Summing the Natural Order: The Taxonomy and Ornithology of Graceanna Lewis, Quaker.
In the mid 19th century, American biological science was tentatively feeling its way forward along a half dozen different and...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 3, 2023
72 views


Insights from the Forest Canopy, Bruises from the Glass Ceiling: Meg Lowman, Arbornaut.
One of the first things that we teach high school students about statistics is the relative worthlessness of convenience-type surveying -...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 2, 2023
812 views


Mushrooms, Fossils, and a Pen to Draw Them With: Beatrix Potter, Naturalist.
"I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 28, 2023
451 views


More than a Prize Unwon: The Manifold Legacies of Rosalind Franklin
When Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-seven, she left behind monumental contributions to three...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 26, 2023
322 views


Edith Graef McGeer, the Great Neurotransmitter Race, and a Glimpse towards the End of Alzheimer’s.
The brain can be its own worst enemy. In a host of those diseases, the merest whisper of which is enough to send a streak of black dread...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 11, 2023
253 views


Fighting "Unexpectation": Mary Bunting's Journey From Microbiologist to College President.
There is a lot of life left to live after one's children are out of the house. It might seem an obvious statement, but it was a fact that...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 10, 2023
175 views


Where Sex Begins: The Chromosomal Investigations of Nettie Stevens.
If you were to ask an ancient Greek how it is determined that a baby is born a boy or a girl, they would have had some interesting and...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 8, 2023
258 views


Adventures in Chimpland: The Revolutionary Primatology of Jane Goodall.
After a life spent studying our closest relatives, and arguing passionately for their protection and that of the wider planet of which...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 14, 2023
243 views


Knowing When to Flower: The Classical Botany of Agnes Arber
Evolution is great. As an explanatory idea, as a process governing biology, from just about any aspect you care to consider it,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 8, 2023
276 views


Gerty Radnitz Cori: Glycogen to Glucose, and Back Again
For a science teacher, perhaps the most dreaded question is "What Is Energy?" Sure, we have a standard answer - "The ability to do work"...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 7, 2023
249 views


Dame Daphne Sheldrick and the Half Century Struggle to Save the Elephants of Kenya.
A mother elephant staggers forward, arrows protruding from her flank and legs, poison coursing through her blood that is attacking her...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 5, 2023
429 views


Eugenie “The Shark Lady” Clark and the Grim Truths of Early Marine Biology.
To the uninitiated, there seems a dizzying amount of carnage wrapped up in advancing biological knowledge. Every scrap of information...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 2, 2023
212 views


Guns N Taxonomy: The Vertebrate Biology of Annie Alexander
As a rule, our favorite flavors of scientist are the theoretical and experimental – we tend to like them either sitting in a chair...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 26, 2023
936 views


Unearthing the World Jurassic: Mary Anning
As the tide rolls out, a woman in a hardened bonnet and loose fitting clothes scrambles across the crumbling cliffs of Lyme Regis, a...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 22, 2023
177 views
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