Scientist Rosalind Franklin played an instrumental role in early DNA research, yet her work is often overlooked and credit for DNA’s discovery is typically given to Crick and Watson. Her experience is by no means exceptional, and this book is part of a broader project to reclaim stories such as Franklin’s and acquaint the reading public with the “lost” histories of pioneering women in the sciences.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) was one of the first of this new wave of books. Although Lacks was not a scientist, her contributions to modern medicine were invaluable and, for many years, entirely unacknowledged. Lacks was an African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. During a biopsy of her tumor, doctors extracted cells that were then cultured for use in research. The cells, named HeLa after Lacks, were the first human cells to withstand the culturing process and they began to multiply. Scientists found that, given the right conditions, the cells would multiple indefinitely. The HeLa cells have since been used in myriad international research facilities, and they are still being used today. They have played a critical role in numerous scientific advancements, including the polio vaccine. During the era in which Lacks’s cells were harvested, consent was not required for the procedure. Lacks was informed that her cells had been taken during the biopsy, nor was she ever aware of the role that those cells played in subsequent medical research. Until the publication of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Lacks’s name was not widely known, and she was not credited for the role that her biological material played in 20th century medical and scientific advancements.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Northern Irish physicist who, in 1967 discovered the first radio pulsars. (Radio pulsars are rapidly spinning neuron stars that emit beams of light from their magnetic poles.) Bell was a graduate student while she made this discovery, and the credit for it went to her thesis adviser rather than to her. She went on to have an illustrious career in physicals and became the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, the president of the Institute of Physics, and then the chancellor of the University of Dundee. She won various prizes and is known for having donated her prize money to establish a fund to help women, minority, and refugee students study physics. Her story, although still omitted from the scientific record and uncredited within her field, became the basis for the children’s book Listening to the Stars: Jocelyn Bell Burnell Discovers Pulsars (2021).

Lisa Meitner was the first female physics professor in Germany and co-discovered nuclear fission. Like Rosalind Franklin, she played an instrumental role in the discovery process. She worked alongside chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Meitner was the first to correctly interpret the group’s data, and her work led to the development of nuclear energy as a field and the atomic bomb. The Nobel Prize for the discovery, however, went solely to Otto Hahn. Lisa Meitner, a Life in Physics (1996) tells her story.