The Nobel prize, women scientists and collaboration

The 2009 Nobel Laureates have just been announced and how wonderful that Elinar Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel  for Economics –  the first for a woman (she won along with her two male collaborators). The chemistry prize also went to a woman this year,  Ada E. Yonath,  who won the award along with her male collaborators.  Since the Nobels were established in 1900, 40 women have been recipients (including Marie Curie who won two). Despite Curie’s success, women are far less well represented in the sciences.  Two women have won the physics prize (Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963); four have won the chemistry prize (Curie in 1911, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie in 1935, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964 and Yonath this year).

There has been  plenty of controversy  in the history of science about women who have not been honoured. These are typically female collaborators who were overlooked when the prizes were given out  - only to fellow team members  who happened to be men.  Throughout the 20^th century it seems that all-male scientific collaborations were viewed in a different way to those comprised of both sexes. In the latter, women were invariably assumed to be the junior partner or assistant. A leading historian of science, Margaret Rossiter, has called this the ‘Matthew-Matilda effect’, describing the process by which Matthew always gets the credit in such scientific collaborations, at Matilda’s expense.

It’s interesting to note that Marie Curie’s name was not originally mentioned in connection to the 1903 Nobel prize for physics. The Swedish Academy were considering just her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel. This caused a fellow scientist (mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler) to write to Pierre to urge him to make Marie’s equal contribution known, which he did. At the award ceremony, the president of the Swedish Academy quoted from Genesis that ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’.  To modern ears this is not a ringing endorsement of an equal partnership, but laced with assumptions about Marie’s womanly status as ‘helper’ to her man….

One woman who it is widely acknowledged should have got a Nobel in 1945 but didn’t is Lise Meitner. She was overlooked, despite her key contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission, and the prize went to her collaborator Otto Hahn. She was the physicist in the team, Hahn the chemist, and it was she who gave the first theoretical explanation of the fission process. The injustice was generally acknowledged in the scientific community then, as now. One of the reasons why Meitner was ignored was that she was  Jewish and had to leave Germany, where  she and  Hahn were working together, in 1938 due to the Nazi threat. They continued their collaboration by mail however, and archive letters show that Meitner guided Hahn through his later experiments.

Rosalind Franklin missed out on the Nobel for her contribution to the structure of DNA. It is questionable whether she really qualified though, as she was not working centrally on the problem. What is certain is that she was treated very shoddily by Crick and Watson (who won the 1962 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, with Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins, who is acknowledged to have played a very minimal part). They used her x-ray photographs of crystal structures without her knowledge, and without crediting her. These photos proved key to them piecing the puzzle together. Had Franklin not died young, four years before the award, the story may have been very different.

In 1974, another woman was left out of the Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of pulsars. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell was a research student at Cambridge when she first detected the pulsars, and then published her results jointly with her supervisor, Anthony Hewish . As a result they both shared a prestigious scientific prize. But when it came to the Nobel it was a different story  - Bell-Burnell was not included. There were complaints from top astronomers – but that was that.

Let’s hope with two prizes going to women this year, and given how important collaboration now is in science, that women scientists  of the 21^st century will no longer be ‘Matildas’ but will get the credit for their work.