Industrial research chemist Bettye Washington Greene was an early African American pioneer in science. She was the first African American female Ph.D. chemist to work in a professional position at the Dow Chemical Company, where she researched latex and polymers.
Elsa Beatrice Kidson became a world leader in the research into magnesium deficiency in apples, and did extensive work on the vitamin C content of fruits, the relationship between calcium deficiency and the disease bitter pit in apples, and the link between mineral constituents and nutritional diseases in tomatoes. Her research was of fundamental significance to horticulture and, especially, to the fruit-growing Nelson region.
In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first woman from the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. The pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist discovered artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù 青蒿素) and dihydroartemisinin, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine. The resulting malaria treatment saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. While studying traditional Chinese and herbal medicines, she found a reference in ancient medical texts to using sweet wormwood to treat intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. Tu and her research team were able to extract artemisinin (qinghaosu) from wormwood in the 1970s. She even volunteered to be the first human subject to test the substance. Tu later became chief scientist at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, earning her position without a medical degree, a PhD, or research training abroad. In 2011, she became the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for her discovery, which was called “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century” by the Lasker Foundation. Tu’s work in the 1960s and 70s coincided with China’s Cultural Revolution, when scientists were denigrated as one of the nine black categories (or “Stinking Old Ninth”) in society according to Maoist theory (or possibly that of the Gang of Four).
Chemist, and later social worker, Virginia Spivey Coleman is most noted for her contributions to the United States’ atomic weapons program during World War II. She provided the scientific support needed to separate uranium, so that it could be used to create the first nuclear bomb dropped on Japan.
Gertrud Johanna Woker was a Swiss suffragist, biochemist, toxicologist and peace activist.
South African chemist and professor Tebello Nyokong is helping to pioneer a safer method of cancer detection and photodynamic therapy, a treatment without the harmful side effects of chemotherapy.
Ada E Yonath is a biochemist and structural chemist, who earned her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of collagen.