Dr Gerda Lerner

Gerda Lerner, the “godmother of women’s history,” fled Nazi-occupied Austria and became an accomplished historian and advocate for female scholars. She established the first graduate programs in women’s history and fought to include and empower women in the study of history.

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Dr Mildred Cohn

Mildred Cohn (1913–2009) was interested in how chemical reactions take place, that is, how the molecules of each reactant come apart and how their atoms reassemble themselves into new molecules, and the role that enzymes play in this process.

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Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Working out of an old janitor’s closet for a laboratory, the team of Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson went on to do groundbreaking research in techniques for the early detection of diseases, including radioimmunoassay, for which Yalow received the Nobel Prize.

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Susan Solomon

In 1986 Susan Solomon provided the most conclusive evidence for the theory proposed 13 years earlier that CFCs could be destroying the protective layer of ozone in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

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Jacqueline Barton

Jacqueline Barton probes DNA by shooting electrons through it. Using custom-built molecules to direct these electrical currents, she can locate genes, see how they are arranged, and scan them for damage.
Barton hopes that these techniques will lead to new ways to diagnose diseases and treat them through DNA repair. To further this end she cofounded GeneOhm Sciences in 2001, which became part of Becton, Dickinson and Company in 2006.

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Rosalind Franklin

Chemist whose x-ray diffraction studies provided crucial clues to the structure of DNA and quantitatively confirmed the Watson-Crick DNA model

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