Dale DeBakcsy
Genius Overcome: The Destruction of Catherine de Parthenay.
The life of Catherine de Parthenay (1554–1631) was dominated by national religious conflict and her decision to take a pivotal role of...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 16, 2023
A Shadow Falls: Barbara McClintock and the Twisting Tale of Jumping Genes
In 1983, Evelyn Fox Keller published her biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism. At the time, biographies of women...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 14, 2023
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...
243 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 13, 2023
Making Continents Move: The Ocean Cartography of Marie Tharp
If you're a scientist, and you've lived long enough, there's a good chance that you'll see your life's work overwritten and forgotten in...
222 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 8, 2023
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,...
246 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 7, 2023
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"...
246 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 6, 2023
New WIS Book Release: The Edinburgh Seven by Janey Jones
There are few stories in the history of Women in Science with as much innate and compelling drama as that of the Edinburgh Seven, which...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 2, 2023
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...
212 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 1, 2023
Corralling the Light Elements: The Nuclear Spectroscopy of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by...
696 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 31, 2023
Biplanes, Airships, and Submarines: A Talk with Dr. Nina Baker About the Legacy of Hilda Lyon.
One of the great things about writing this column is the fact that, from time to time, I get to talk with remarkable people about other...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 26, 2023
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...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 19, 2023
Lady of Iron: The Life of Victorian Industrialist Lady Charlotte Guest.
There was a time, during the Golden Age of Railroads, when the name of the small Welsh town of Dowlais was stamped on iron rails that ran...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 17, 2023
Belle Benchley and the Creation of the Modern Zoo
Think back to your last zoo trip. More likely than not, most of the larger animals were contained in open air facilities, with features...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 16, 2023
Of Artificial Radiation and Natural Genius: The Chemistry of Irène Joliot-Curie
Radioactivity is a great thing. Terrible, as they say, but great. The medical applications of radioactively tagged molecules, as Rosalyn...
220 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 14, 2023
Has the Curse Been Broken? Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer by Beverley Adams
If you’ve been reading my Women in Science column here and there over the last decade, you’ll have been subjected to my intermittent...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 11, 2023
More than the Sum of their Parts: Eleanor Maccoby’s Studies of Child Group Dynamics.
When Eleanor Emmons left home to matriculate at Reed College in 1934, she had life pretty well figured out. Her family’s Theosophy gave...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 10, 2023
Margaret Floy Washburn and the Motion of Thought.
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) was the first American woman to receive a PhD in psychology (though not, as we learned from our time...
24 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 9, 2023
Theano of Croton and the Pythagorean Women of Ancient Greece
In a small but soon-to-be-revered town in Southern Italy, 2,500 years ago, a group of men and women gathered, united by the proposition...
162 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 8, 2023
ATLAS Soared: Fabiola Gianotti and the Discovery of a Higgs Particle
In a corner of a room, tucked unostentatiously away from the notice of the raving hordes of just barely contained school children using...
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Dale DeBakcsy
May 4, 2023
Margaret Mead and the Anthropology of Cultural Relativism.
There is hardly a name in science more encrusted with bad faith generalizations and well-meaning but ahistorical hagiography than that of...
469 views
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