2023-10-03 22:12:00
Anne L’Huillier (Physics) and Katalin Karikó (Medicine) are the two women who recently won a Nobel Prize in some branch of science.
Photo: Nobel Prize
This week the Nobel Prizes are being awarded, which each year recognize those people or organizations that have made outstanding contributions in five fields. The first two awards granted in this edition (Medicine and Physics) surprised everyone because, as rarely in the history of these awards, the winners in both fields were women. (You can see: These are some of the most “top” scientists in the country)
Although today we celebrate that the representation of women in science has been increasing, it is still too low a percentage. It is well known that those women who want to dedicate themselves to some science, be it biomedical, physics or neuroscience, among others, face a series of barriers and obstacles.
Among these barriers, according to a study published in the Nature magazine, is in the presence of women as evaluators of the work of their peers. Being part of this process is essential for scientific journals to evaluate the quality of articles. Additionally, it helps establish and strengthen ties with other researchers in the field.
Just to cite one example, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), known for being the largest publishing society of scientific information in the field of geophysics, indicated that women of all ages were less likely to participate in this process of evaluating their parents’ work. “Between 2012 and 2015, the female presence among reviewers was 20%,” Nature reports.
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How many women have won a Nobel Prize?
These awards, which had their first edition in 1901, recognized for the first time the work of a scientist in 1903, when Marie Curie received the Physics award, together with her husband Pierre Curie, for the discovery of radioactive elements.
Curie, a graduate in physics and mathematics, also became the first and only woman to receive this award twice and did so in two different categories. The second was chemistry in 1911, where she was recognized for her constant research on radium and its compounds. The Frenchwoman, of Polish origin, is considered the mother of modern physics.
Throughout the more than 100 editions, 895 awards have been awarded in the five categories (there is also Literature and Peace), of which only 61 were for women. But, if we look in detail at the scientific branches (Medicine, Physics and Chemistry) the panorama is bleak.
During these 122 years, only 25 women have been recognized by these awards. The Medicine category, for example, has been the one that has shown the greatest progress, since of the 231 winners, 13 are women. Gerty Theresa Cori was the first woman to receive it. She happened in 1947.
Together with her husband, the American doctor Carl Cori, they discovered the mechanism of transformation of glycogen into lactic acid in muscle tissue. This acid is then resynthesized in the body to finally be stored as a source of energy. They called this metabolic cycle the Cori cycle. (You may be interested: Women researchers are cited less than men, why?)
Only 30 years later, in 1977, another woman received the recognition. This is the American biophysicist Rosalyn Yalow, who developed, together with Solomon Berson, a doctor and scientist, the radioimmunoassay technique, which helped identify insulin levels in the blood. “This finding provided an enormous advance for endocrinological studies. In addition, he was one of the most relevant in 20th century medicine,” the Nobel organization noted on its website.
Other women who have achieved this award are Bárbara McClintock (1983), for the phenomenon of “mobile genetic elements”; Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986), with her work on so-called growth factors, in which she discovered that cells only begin to reproduce when they receive the order to do so; or Gertrude B. Elio (1988), together with James W. Black, thanks to their discoveries of essential pharmacological principles, such as a drug for leukemia or drugs to combat malaria.
Also on the list are Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1995); Linda Buck (2004); Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (2008); Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth H. Blackburn (2009); May-Britt Moser (2014) and Your Youyou (2015).
In the most recent edition, the work of the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó was recognized. Her research, along with that of immunologist Drew Weissman, was crucial to the development of messenger RNA vaccines for Covid-19, which saved millions of lives.
Physics, the pending field of science for women in the Nobel Prizes
In the medicine category, more and more women are recognized for their work and contribution to research, and in chemistry, with eight awards, the representation of female scientists is gradually increasing. But in physics, where it was the first field of science in which the Nobel Prize awarded a woman, the same does not happen. In fact, only five women, in the 122 years of the Nobel Prize, have won this award.
After French physicist Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, 60 years passed before another woman was once more awarded this prize. In 1963, theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer gained recognition for demonstrating the nuclear shell model of atoms.
The Physics prize, once once more, was deserted to women for 55 years. Only until 2018 did a woman receive a Nobel Prize once more. The physical engineer Donna Strickland, a pioneer in research in the field of lasers, was recognized, along with the American Arthur Ashkin and the Frenchman Gérard Mourou, for her research that allowed her to develop tools used in industry and medicine.
Two years later, in 2020, Andrea M. Ghez was awarded, along with Reinhard Genzel, for the discovery of the supermassive hole in the center of our galaxy. The American, for just over 30 years, has led a team of astronomers that has mapped the galaxy. (Also read: Paola Pinilla, the Colombian who studies the first steps of planet formation)
In the 2023 edition, the Nobel Prize once more recognized a woman. French physicist Anne L’Huillier received recognition, along with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz, in the words of the committee, for her “experimental methods that generate attosecond light pulses for the study of the dynamics of electrons in matter.” In simpler words, for opening a window to explore phenomena that were previously impossible to observe.
And Chemistry?
In chemistry, although the outlook is a little better than that of Physics, it is still quite precarious for women. In this branch of science, only eight (including physicist Marie Curie) have been recognized for their work. The first to receive it was Curie, in 1911, “in recognition of her services to the advancement of Chemistry by discovering the elements radium and polonium, through the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and components of this surprising element.” , according to the Nobel organization.
Then, her eldest daughter, Irene Joliot Curie, achieved this recognition in 1935, together with her husband Jean Frédéric Joliot, for their work in the synthesis of new radioactive elements. Her studies on natural and artificial radioactivity, saving us the technical parts, contributed to the discovery of the neutron.
The British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, 30 years later, in 1964 became the third woman to obtain a Nobel Prize in this field. According to the organization, she was recognized for the determination of structures of substances of biochemical interest using X-rays. (You can also read: Andrea Gálvez, the Colombian who works so that people with paralysis can walk once more)
In this field of science, other women have been recognized such as Ada Yonath (2009); Frances Arnold (2018); Emmanuelle Charpentier (2020); Jennifer Doudna (2020) and Carolyn Bertozzi (2022).
This is without counting those women who have contributed to science with their research and were never recognized by the Nobel Prize. As is the case of Rosalind Franklin, who began working on what would become one of the most important scientific investigations of the 20th century and which led to a transformation of modern medicine: the structure of DNA.
It is said that the data collected by the scientist, and especially the famous photograph 51—an X-ray diffraction image—were key pieces in developing the first correct model of the structure of DNA, with a double helix. This historic discovery was published in 1953 in the journal Nature, by scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962.
In one book, Watson wrote that he and Crick used “Rosy’s” data (as he referred to Franklin) without her knowledge. Franklin died at the age of 37 and for years her story has been one of the examples of the invisibility of the contributions of women scientists.
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