So apparently Britain only has one female scientist
British female scientists who aren't Rosalind Franklin. A Thread.
Dorothy Hodgkin. Her work underpinned multiple biomedical advances: she discovered the structure of vitamin b12 and insulin and confirmed the structure of penicillin. She is one of only five women to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry
Jocelyn Bell Burnell. As an astrophysics post-grad was the first to observe radio pulsars, but was famously excluded from receiving the Nobel Prize for it. This year she was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for it and donated it to fund women, BAME and refugee physics students
Mary Leaky. A paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, a extinct ape species that is ancestral to humans. She also uncovered fossils of ancient ape and gorillas, discovered 15 new species and named a new genus. What a total BADASS
Helen Sharman. A chemist who became the first British astronaut and first woman to visit the Mir space station. Enough said.
Elizabeth Garret Anderson. The first Englishwoman to qualify as a doctor. She established a dispensary for women in London and founded the New Hospital for Women, staffed entirely by women. He work led to the 1876 Medical Act, allowing women to enter the medical professions
Elsie Widdowson. A food scientist who revolutionised the way we assess nutritional value. She studied the effects of diet on development and consulted on dietary policy to remedy the effects of gross starvation suffered by Nazi concentration camp victims
Anne Maclaren. A geneticist whose work in conception and embryo transfer paved the way for human IVF. She also advanced discussions of the legal and ethical implications of genetic and championed open engagement with the public in order to gain trust
Mary Anning. Another female scientist who wasn't recognised for her contributions. She discovered the first icthyosaur skeleton and the first two pleisiosaur skeletons, as well as the first pterosaur outside of Germany. She also found that bezoar stones were fossilised poo
There's also Margaret Thatcher, who helped develop Mr Whippy ice cream
Karen Spärek Jones. A computer scientist who developed the concept of inverse document frequency, a statistic that determines how important a keyword is to a document, which underlies most search engines. She also campaigned for more women to enter computer sciences
