Science Archives - Page 107 of 117

Gertrude Abbott

Using an inheritance from Woods, she established St Margaret’s, a non-denominational maternity home in 1893, and for the next 30 years was involved in its management, initially as president and later as matron.

Ann Moyal

Science historian Ann Moyal’s leading work included Clear across Australia: a history of telecommunications (1984); A bright & savage land: scientists in colonial Australia (1986; second edition 1993); and above all Platypus (2001; published in the US under the title Platypus: the extraordinary story of how a curious creature baffled the world), which was a great success and remains in print.

Bettye Washington Greene

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.

Louise Crossley

Scientist and environmentalist Louise Crossley (1942 – 30 July 2015) was closely involved in the establishment of the Tasmanian Greens and the Global Greens.

Elsa Beatrice Kidson

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.

Ruth Mason

Over approximately two decades she devised various handling and drying techniques and collected and documented some 13,500 specimens, including a number from Australia in 1955 and from Nepal in 1972. She constantly strove to clarify the taxonomy of the plants she studied, and this became an essential component of her water-plant field work.

Jessie Bicknell

Jessie Bicknell helped establish postgraduate and specialist training for nurses in New Zealand.

Joan Wiffen

Joan Wiffen was a self-taught palaeontologist who greatly advanced knowledge of fossil reptiles in New Zealand. Wiffen, who described herself as ‘a rank amateur, a Hawkes Bay housewife in fact, with no scientific training, just … a great deal of curiosity’, made some of New Zealand’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Despite a lack of formal education or specialised equipment, Joan’s excavations of fossil remains in a remote Hawke’s Bay valley produced the first evidence that dinosaurs had once lived on the New Zealand landmass.

Kathleen Maisey Curtis

Kathleen Maisey Curtis, who later became Lady Rigg, was an exemplary scientist who specialised in mycology and botany and was a founder of plant pathology in New Zealand.

Dr Muriel Emma Bell

From the 1940s to the 1960s she advised the public to eat more fruit and vegetables and to cut down on sugar, fat and meat, while continuing her practical efforts to improve food quality. One of her successes was to produce better quality bread. Working with scientists, she educated bakers into using flour made by improved methods of extraction to increase its vitamin B1 content.