BBC News School Report @ LCS

It isn’t just men who’ve discovered our world today…

Women are a very important part of science and have made many significant scientific discoveries, such as Marie Curie discovering radioactivity and Rosalind Franklin finding out about our DNA. These discoveries were the building blocks of science-they were the platform to start off a new range of discovery. Without these women, our life and world today would be very different.

Gail Martin, Biologist.

For over a decade, stem cell research has been a hot topic of discussion among the medical science community. In 1974 as a post-doc fellow, Martin discovered how to keep stem cells alive in a petri dish, which enabled them to be studied in greater detail. Then, less than 10 years later, she made her greatest discovery. She figured out how to isolate stem cells that split into 3, which expanded to many new discoveries on this topic.

Marie Curie, Physicist & Chemist.

She was a pioneer in the study of radiation. She and her husband, Pierre, discovered the elements polonium and radium. Together, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, and she received another one, for Chemistry, in 1911. Her work with radioactive materials doomed her, however. She died of a blood disease in 1934.

Lise Meitner, Physicist.

Lise Meitner (7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. She’s won the Enrico Fermi award in 1966, The Max Planck medal in 1949, The Lieben Prize in 1925 and The Otto-Hahn Prize in 1955. She’s an extremely famous scientist whose work has been commemorated many times.Mr Green, a science teacher at Littleover Community School said: “More recently more documentaries are coming out…they highlight the fact that women have made a big contribution. Before 1900, women weren’t pushed to do this and pursue a scientific career-it was seen as absurd. Actual scientific pursuit began in 1910 in America when women worked as professors with men, but women made quite a lot of discoveries that men took credit for.” Women in Science is something that people support even today! Society has changed since the 1900’s, so you can be anything you want to be.