In Memoriam: Ten Trailblazing Women Scientists of 2016 – Pioneers in 3D Bioprinting and Anemia Therapy
Over the past year, we have lost several beloved cultural icons. David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Harper Lee, Gwen Ifill, and Zaha Hadid all passed away within this period. Yet, at the same time, we also lost a physiologist who developed the first effective therapy for anemia; one of the co-discoverers of dark matter; and the scientist who invented a 3D printer capable of fabricating living cells using “bio-ink.”
The 2016 Annual Commemorative Conference, now in its fourth year, honored ten outstanding women who passed away in the past year. There was a time when the significant contributions of scientists to society were overlooked, and women who achieved remarkable success in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields were particularly underappreciated. In light of this, we look back on the female scientists who left us in the past year; they were stars in the field of science and technology.
Ann Caracristi was a leading figure in the field of American cryptanalysis and codebreaking. She served as Deputy Director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and passed away in January 2016 at the age of 94. In 1942, during the most critical period of World War II, Caracristi became a cryptanalyst. She rapidly developed pattern-recognition techniques to reconstruct enemy codes. Beyond her technical expertise, Caracristi gained widespread recognition for her clandestine and diligent efforts in breaking enemy codes, which helped ensure the safe arrival of Allied forces at their destinations.
As an NSA agent, Caracristi was a pioneer in the early application of computers to cryptanalysis and established a laboratory dedicated to researching covert communications. In 1975, she became the first woman promoted to the GS-18 senior executive position at the NSA. In 1980, she was appointed as the NSA’s first female Deputy Director. That same year, she received the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. Department of Defense upon civilians. She retired from the National Security Agency in 1982.
Suzanne Corkin was a pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, best known for her research on the amnesia patient H.M. (Henry Molaison). She died of cancer on May 24, 2016, at the age of 79.
After undergoing brain surgery to suppress epileptic seizures, Molaison lost the ability to form new memories. Corkin’s engagement with him began during her doctoral research, conducted under the supervision of Brenda Milner, a neuropsychologist at McGill University. Her research on H.M. continued until his death in 2008. She discovered that the hippocampus is a critical brain region for strengthening long-term memory.
As a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Corkin serves as the director of the Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, where she also investigated the long-term outcomes in veterans with head injuries and characterized the biological features of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Throughout her career, she has led or co-led approximately 150 research studies and authored ten books.
Dr. Yvette Fay Francis-McBarnette, renowned for her groundbreaking work in sickle cell anemia, passed away on March 28, 2016, at the age of 89. Born in Jamaica and raised in New York, she was the second Black woman to attend Yale School of Medicine. She enrolled in 1946 and, after earning her medical degree, became a pediatrician specializing in hematology, or blood physiology.
Dr. Francis subsequently directed clinical research on sickle cell disease at a hospital in Jamaica, New York. There, she pioneered the screening for and use of antibiotics to treat children with sickle cell anemia. In this condition, abnormal “sickle-shaped” red blood cells can obstruct blood flow, reduce blood oxygen levels, and lead to a range of severe consequences, from organ damage to death. In 1993, an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine confirmed the efficacy of the antibiotic regimen she had employed over the preceding ten and a half years. Through her institution, the Sickle Cell Disease Research and Education Foundation, she has helped countless patients. She has received numerous honors, including serving as a member of the Sickle Cell Disease Advisory Committee under the Nixon administration.
Ursula Franklin was one of Canada’s most esteemed scholars. She was a physicist, pacifist, feminist, and expert in the social aspects of technology. She passed away on July 22, 2016, at the age of 94. Born in Germany in 1921, she survived the Holocaust and earned a Ph.D. in experimental physics, specializing in metallurgy within materials science and engineering, before immigrating to Canada.
Leveraging her expertise in this field, she became a co-developer of the emerging discipline of archaeology, applying scientific methods to the analysis of archaeological materials. One of her more widely recognized research endeavors was the investigation of infant teeth. Together with her colleagues, she studied how radioactive fallout from nuclear tests affected the levels of radioactive strontium-90 in children’s teeth. As a social activist, Franklin frequently drew upon her scientific background in her advocacy work.
In the late 1960s, she advocated for Canada to increase funding for environmental research and preventive medicine, rather than spending heavily on weapons research. “Peace is not the absence of war, but the absence of fear,” she stated. She also joined several colleagues in successfully winning a class-action lawsuit against the University of Toronto, her employer. As a long-serving faculty member, she alleged that the university paid female professors with equivalent qualifications less than their male counterparts, thereby benefiting from this inequity. Throughout her life, she received numerous awards, including being appointed to the Order of Canada.
Katharine Blodgett Gebbie was a leading physicist in her field, who named herself after her aunt, the pioneering physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett. Her career began in astrophysics, and she later held prominent positions at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). An expert in stellar spectroscopy and helioseismology, Gebbie initially served as a researcher at JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) at the University of Colorado.
In the early 1980s, after becoming a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), she shifted her focus to supporting industries. She joined the National Measurement Laboratory and quickly rose to a management position. Within just a few years, she became the Director of the Quantum Physics Division. When NBS was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gebbie had advanced to senior management and was appointed Director of the Physics Laboratory. Under her leadership and vigorous promotion, the laboratory nurtured four Nobel laureates. In 2011, Gebbie was appointed Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, where she worked until the end of her life. She received numerous awards and demonstrated exceptional leadership in the physics community. She passed away on July 4, 2016, at the age of 84.
Ruth Hubbard was a senior biologist at Harvard University and a renowned feminist critic of science. She passed away on September 1, 2016, at the age of 92. As a scientist, Hubbard was best known for her biochemical research on vision. Under the joint efforts of Hubbard and her doctoral advisor, George Wald—who later became her husband—she elucidated how the eye converts light into information.
Notably, Hubbard played a pivotal role in identifying how the eye pigment rhodopsin contributes to light absorption. (Hubbard later received the Nobel Prize for her research on the mechanisms of vision.) After completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Radcliffe College, Hubbard became a full-time researcher at Harvard. However, by the late 1960s, she shifted her focus to the process of scientific inquiry, beginning to study inequalities within science and launching courses that uniquely addressed the impact of women’s absence from the scientific and medical communities. In 1973, under pressure from women’s groups at Harvard University, Hubbard was finally promoted: she became the first woman to achieve tenure in the field of biology. Thereafter, Hubbard emerged as an outstanding advocate for women and people of color in STEM fields.
In the early 1980s, she pointed out that these competitive arenas were essentially “a self-perpetuating, self-scrutinizing group: selected to be chosen by others.” In subsequent years, Hubbard published several books on the role of women in science, and she remained a feminist activist until the end of her life.
Deborah Jin, a quantum physicist and innovator who pushed the boundaries of matter, died of cancer on September 15, 2016, at the age of 47. Jin was a longtime fellow at JILA and NIST, as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, and she participated in early research on Bose-Einstein condensates.
Bose-Einstein condensates are a state of gaseous matter that can exist only at temperatures slightly above absolute zero, exhibiting quantum phenomena not observable under ordinary conditions. The study of the first Bose-Einstein condensate using bosonic atoms enabled Jin’s colleagues, Eric Cornell and Carl Weiman, along with Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT, to receive the 2001 Nobel Prize.
Two years later, Jin achieved a major breakthrough: she and her team created the first fermionic condensate, a novel state of matter involving fermions, which are another primary class of matter particles. Although her research had no direct practical applications, it heralded the future direction of materials science, such as the development of room-temperature superconductors. Jin has been highly prolific and has received numerous awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, the Comstock Prize in Physics, and the Institute of Physics’ Isaac Newton Medal.
Susan Lindquist, a titan in the field of genetics and a world-leading expert on protein folding, passed away on October 27, 2016, at the age of 67. Lindquist specialized in research on the genetics of proteins: “It is often said that one cannot understand biology without understanding evolution. In my view, however, one cannot understand evolution or biology without understanding proteins,” she stated in an interview.
Lindquist is renowned for her research on prions and misfolded proteins. Her work focuses on mammalian prion diseases, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She has also made significant contributions in other areas; her findings demonstrate that alterations in protein conformation can profoundly affect individual organisms. Yeast serves as a model system for studying protein folding and its implications for neurodegenerative diseases, revealing that the misfolding of certain proteins can confer valuable evolutionary traits.
In 2001, Lindquist became a professor of biology at MIT. That same year, upon assuming the directorship of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, she became the first woman to lead an independent biomedical research institution. Regarded by her students as an invaluable mentor, she has achieved remarkable research accomplishments and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama in 2010.
38-year-old Jemma Redmond is an Irish biotechnology expert who has made significant advances in the field of 3D bioprinting. This is a field with future development potential, where functional tissues such as cell clusters can be manufactured using specialized 3D printers. SheYuDied on August 16, 2016. Redmond’s vision for the future has enabled many companies to fabricate complex biological tissues using “bioinks.”
She holds five patents for manufacturing these tissues, the most significant of which is a bioprinter that keeps cells alive during the printing process. She also designed a method capable of printing up to 10 different materials simultaneously, marking a major leap forward in 3D printer performance. Additionally, she has helped laboratories reduce the cost of bioprinting. Last January, Redmond co-founded Ourobotics to commercialize her research findings. She has been active in Ireland’s tech startup scene and recently won the prestigious Silicon Valley Open Doors Europe competition.
She is an iconic figure in astronomy, whose insights have prompted us to rethink our place in the universe. Her research revealed the existence of dark matter, and she has long been a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. An outspoken feminist, she tirelessly worked to advance the status of women in science, particularly in the field of astronomy. On December 25, 2016, Vera Rubin, an astronomer and cosmologist, passed away at the age of 88. It was she who provided a revolutionary annotation to our understanding of the universe. Early observations of galaxies by renowned physicists of the same school—Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, George Gamow, and Rubin—suggested that these galaxies might be rotating around invisible centers, a view that was unpopular at the time.
Later, her calculations of galactic motion gave rise to the so-called galaxy rotation problem: Rubin inferred that galaxies must contain ten times more unseen matter than the visible stars observed. This perspective directly gave birth to the now widely accepted theory of dark matter. The theory posits that invisible matter accounts for 25% of the total mass-energy content of the universe, whereas the matter we can see (the matter we know, love, and can detect) constitutes only 5%. (The remaining 70% appears to consist of a force known as dark energy.)
In light of her revolutionary insights, she received every major award and honor bestowed upon astronomers, including the National Medal of Science, with the sole exception of the Nobel Prize. Rubin achieved work of Nobel caliber yet never garnered favor from Stockholm, making her a prominent example of women in science—a topic that tech enthusiasts debate every October. With her passing, her name has formally disappeared from the controversy, but as a pioneer in the discovery of dark matter, history will always remember her.
This article is based on the Scientific American report “Gone in 2016: 10 Notable Women in Science and Technology,” compiled and translated by VCBeat.