Women in Science with Dale DeBakcsy

Sophia Jex-Blake was a tireless campaigner for the cause of British women's medical education in the nineteenth century, the leader of the Edinburgh Seven and the driving force behind the Parliamentary Act that ultimately allowed women to obtain medical degrees, yet by the end of her life the women's medical community had almost completely forgotten about her. What happened?

Women's bodies in the medieval era were victim of a whole host of metaphysical assumptions that translated into medical practices at best misguided and at worst positively barbarous, until a 12th century woman physician, Trota, wrote a book that advocated practical knowledge over theory, and paved the way for a new approach to women's medicine. This is her story!

2009 Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn turned biochemistry on its head in the late 1970s and 1980s with her work on the curiously behaving end sections of chromosomes, and the enzyme responsible for carefully maintaining them, telomerase, all while creating a modern model for laboratory culture.

Lady Margaret Huggins was a pioneer in the field of using photographic methods to capture stellar spectra, and in the pursuance of her craft with her husband, William Huggins, she showed us new ways of grasping the scale and motion of the cosmos, but her story remained untold for nearly a century.

Ellen Swallow founded at least a dozen different scientific disciplines as she carried out the world's first systematic studies of air, water, and food quality in the nineteenth century, founding modern ecology in the process. This is her story.