Mike's Notes
Recently, I read the biography of Katlin Karikó, an incredible woman scientist from Hungary who devoted her entire working life to finding a way to get cells to heal themselves using their cellular machinery (mRNA, etc.).
"Katalin Karikó has had an unlikely journey. The daughter of a butcher in postwar communist Hungary, Karikó grew up in an adobe home that lacked running water, and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the wonders of nature all around her and was determined to become a scientist. That determination eventually brought her to the United States, where she arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in 1985 with $1,200 sewn into her toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine.
Karikó worked in obscurity, battled cockroaches in a windowless lab, and faced outright derision and even deportation threats from her bosses and colleagues. She balked as prestigious research institutions increasingly conflated science and money. Despite setbacks, she never wavered in her belief that an ephemeral and underappreciated molecule called messenger RNA could change the world. Karikó believed that someday mRNA would transform ordinary cells into tiny factories capable of producing their own medicines on demand. She sacrificed nearly everything for this dream, but the obstacles she faced only motivated her, and eventually she succeeded.
Karikó’s three-decade-long investigation into mRNA would lead to a staggering achievement: vaccines that protected millions of people from the most dire consequences of COVID-19. These vaccines are just the beginning of mRNA’s potential. Today, the medical community eagerly awaits more mRNA vaccines—for the flu, HIV, and other emerging infectious diseases.
Breaking Through isn’t just the story of an extraordinary woman. It’s an indictment of closed-minded thinking and a testament to one woman’s commitment to laboring intensely in obscurity—knowing she might never be recognized in a culture that is driven by prestige, power, and privilege—because she believed her work would save lives."
Apart from her heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, what struck me was her description of the lack of decent childcare in the US, compared to Hungry, as a barrier for women in the workforce.
When I get Ajabbi up and humming, one of the first things I will organise is to provide free, unlimited, quality childcare so women with kids can work. All work at Ajabbi needs to be family-friendly.
I am looking for the Katlin's of this world.
The article below is reprinted from Nature and is a book review.
Resources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
- Breaking Through: My Life in Science
- doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00617-y
- https://www.iconbooks.com/ib-title/against-the-odds/
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Handbook > Ajabbi Research > Staff > Childcare
Last Updated
- 05/03/2025
Against the odds: 12 women who beat bias to succeed in science
Nature: 03 March 2025
A book deftly highlights how women have been considered unsuitable as researchers for reasons other than their ability and commitment.
Against the Odds: Women Pioneers of Science John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin Icon Books (2025)
What is it with toilets? In domestic households, men and women use the same ones without a fuss, but at some point in history it became etiquette for toilets in workplaces to be segregated. And in supposedly male environments, it meant that there simply weren’t any for women. It then became absurdly easy to use the lack of appropriate toilets as an excuse to deny women a role in those environments or, if they did take a job there, to make their lives difficult.
Toilets come up in several of the 12 stories selected for John and Mary Gribbin’s gallery of female pioneers in science, Against the Odds. In the opening years of the twentieth century, physicist Lise Meitner, banished to a basement because she wasn’t allowed to work in the chemistry laboratories of what was then the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, had to use the toilets in a neighbouring restaurant. During the 1950s, computer pioneer Lucy Slater, while developing the operating system for an early computer at the University of Cambridge, UK, smashed the sanitary equivalent of a glass ceiling by simply using the men’s toilet (singing loudly to signal her presence). And in 1964, Vera Rubin became the first female astronomer who was officially allowed to use the big telescopes at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories in California, overturning a ban that had been partly, but explicitly, based on the lack of a women’s toilet.
Science trailblazers
Compared with unequal pay for the same work, the reality of men with fewer qualifications being promoted ahead of them and the frank refusal to recognize that a married woman with children might be capable of a career, the toilet issue was probably a trivial annoyance to these women. But it symbolizes how, for centuries, women have been considered unsuitable as scientists for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability or commitment.
The Gribbins’ aim is to “highlight the achievements of women who overcame the odds and achieved scientific success ... as society changed over about 150 years”. They don’t justify their selection, other than to note that the women featured (ordered by year of birth) collectively cover the period. But it is startling that physicist Chien-Shiung Wu is the only scientist who is not white or born in a Western country (and she spent most of her career in the United States). The ‘hidden figures’ — African American women who calculated trajectories for early NASA space missions — remain hidden. Many girls won’t find a role model who looks like them in the book.
With that caveat, the Gribbins tell the stories with an adroit mix of anecdote and exposition. There is a bias towards physical sciences, perhaps reflecting John Gribbin’s background in astrophysics. Some of those featured (such as crystallographer Rosalind Franklin) are close to being household names, others (geophysicists Eunice Newton Foote and Inge Lehmann) are much less familiar. Three of the women (chemists Irène Joliot-Curie and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin and geneticist Barbara McClintock) won Nobel prizes; two (Meitner and Wu) should have done.
Some of the women were less celebrated during their lifetimes. It took 100 years for historians to uncover the work done by Foote, as a wealthy ‘lady amateur’ working in her home lab in New York state. She demonstrated that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorbed energy from sunlight and so could increase global temperatures. Her 1856 paper included the statement that if “the air had mixed with it a larger proportion [of CO2] than at present, an increased temperature ... would have necessarily resulted”. Three years later, John Tyndall, unaware of Foote’s work, performed the experiments that are generally credited with establishing the nature of the ‘greenhouse effect’.
Equal partners?
Foote was a suffragist and abolitionist who married an equally enlightened husband, working together at the lab bench. Men have an important role in these women’s accounts, as enablers or obstructors — sometimes both. Meitner’s work on radiation involved a decades-long collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn. The relationship seems to have been fruitful and harmonious, and Meitner gradually overcame institutional prejudice to achieve professional recognition. But the advent of Nazism led her to flee to Stockholm, where she came up with the idea of nuclear fission in conversation with her nephew Otto Frisch. After correspondence with Meitner, Hahn confirmed its existence experimentally and he alone was awarded the chemistry Nobel prize in 1944. Far from insisting — as Pierre Curie had done for his wife and co-worker Marie — that the prize should be shared with Meitner, he allowed a narrative to develop that she had been his assistant, when the opposite was nearer the truth.
As a biographer myself (disclosure — the Gribbins’ chapter on Crowfoot Hodgkin draws on my book, with attribution), I can’t stress too strongly the importance of the formative years in determining whether women pursue scientific careers. German mathematician Emmy Noether was typical of this group in having highly academic parents — her father was also a distinguished mathematician — who paid for her to have private tuition in the subject at the beginning of the twentieth century, when German universities were not open to women. A rearguard attempt to stop her from gaining a university position made the extraordinary claim that “a woman ‘is unsuitable for regular instruction of our students because of the phenomena connected with the female organism’”. Growing up in a family that says ‘yes you can’ in a society that is still saying ‘no you can’t’ makes all the difference in imparting the sense of agency that fuels a determination to continue against the odds.
Motherhood might be seen as one of the biggest obstacles, once institutional sexism has been excluded, although the two cannot be disentangled completely. In 1923, Leslie Comrie wrote a letter in support of fellow astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who was a student at the University of Cambridge, UK, at the time. Payne-Gaposchkin wanted to work at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in his letter, Comrie assured the observatory’s director that “she would not want to run away after a few years training to get married”. She didn’t run away but, some ten years later, did marry émigré Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin, and they had three children with no noticeable effect on her prodigious research output on stellar evolution and the composition of stars. Payne-Gaposchkin and Crowfoot Hodgkin share the distinction of having given prestigious public lectures while pregnant (and in Crowfoot Hodgkin’s case, under her maiden name of Crowfoot).
Half of those featured in the book became mothers; others, such as Lehmann and McClintock, made a nun-like commitment to science above all else. Yet they all had a passion for discovering more about the natural world, and a joy in doing so, that enabled them to overcome all obstacles. Historians might frown on collections, such as Against the Odds, that put a spotlight on individuals. But they serve to remind young women who find it hard to have a scientific career that this has often been the case, and that hanging on to that quest for joy is worth it in the end.
As noted in Against the Odds, Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman’s sister Joan decided to become an astrophysicist after he gave her an astronomy textbook containing a graph credited to Payne-Gaposchkin. It gave her the ammunition she needed to defy her mother and insist that girls could do physics. The need for such ammunition is less today than it was in 1941, but it hasn’t disappeared.
