Dale DeBakcsy
Valentina Tereshkova: The First Woman in Space
‘It is I, Sea Gull!’ The words, full of meaning both personal for the speaker and cultural for the country listening below, were the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
She Followed the Sun: Ruby Payne-Scott, the World’s First Woman Radio Astronomer
In March of 1944, a physicist and radar specialist named Ruby Payne-Scott aimed her equipment at the sky and became the world’s first...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Hydrogen Rules the Universe: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Composition of Stars
‘You are young, and wrong. You must retract.’ When fresh-faced zeal confronts experience, it usually loses. Scientists who think they’ve...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Nancy Grace Roman and the Birth of the Hubble Space Telescope.
It is an image to inspire almost primordial awe, taken when a space telescope with a rocky past pointed itself towards a black expanse of...
108 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Margaret Burbridge and the Dawn of Nucleosynthesis Theory
If you had asked a random astronomer in the 1930s how all of the elements in the universe were produced, they would have had a ready and...
229 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
First: The Astrophysics and Astronautics of Sally Ride
Heroes are supposed to be monodimensional, startling and exceptional in one narrow aspect of life and a complex, barely functioning mess...
203 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the Discovery of HIV, and the Fight Against AIDS
Pandemics. Having raised their heads every century or so to spread primal panic and horror on a continental scale, they were something we...
286 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
War, Fame and Surgery: The Amazing Life of Margaret Chung, the First ABC Woman Surgeon
Her mother was raised in a brothel, and her son was Ronald Reagan. Take any section of Dr Margaret Chung’s (1889–1959) life, and lay it...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Too Bright: Dr Anandibai Joshee, India’s First Woman Medical Doctor
At 9 years old, a girl named Yamuna Joshee was married to her tutor, a man twenty years her senior, who thereupon changed her first name...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Killer of Cancer, Slayer of Viruses: The Many Medicines of Nobel Prize Laureate Gertrude Elion
Generally, our experience of a particular medicine is as a great faceless thing the name of which we do not know until we desperately...
207 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Last of the Women Physicians: Dorothea Leporin Erxleben.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the answer to the question, ‘Who was allowed to practise medicine?’ was relatively simple: just about...
298 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Breaking the Shackles Procreative: Margaret Sanger and the Creation of the Pill
In 1912, it was against the law in the United States to publish a book that contained descriptions of birth control methods. It was...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Experimentalist: The Tale of Mary Putnam Jacobi vs. Proper Victorian Medicine
As we have seen, the nineteenth century boasts a rich roster of medical women, any one of whom is the stuff of heroes: the trailblazing...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Lady Mary Montagu and Europe’s First Tool Against Smallpox
In the seventeenth century, smallpox ravaged Europe with a persistent ferocity beyond reckoning. At its height, it killed 400,000...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
The Path of Most Resistance: Sophia Jex-Blake and the Fight for Women’s Medical Education
She had founded first England’s and then Scotland’s first medical school for women, and been instrumental in the passing of the Medical...
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