Another woman done out of a nobel - Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell - I had no idea it was a woman who discovered Pulsars! **Thread title edited by MNHQ at OP's request**

[NothingOnTellyAgain]

BBC today

She's donating her £2.3 million prize around work she did in the 70s to a fund to help those who are subject to bias (discrimination) in here

In the article she says "I'm in good company" I think she is alluding to rosalind franklin whose work was famously stolen by 2 colleagues.

I also recently was amazed to discover that a woman designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge and she gave the design to Isembard Kingdom Brunel and it's cited of course as a massive engineering feat and a beautiful structure done by him (her input has only recently been mentioned ?known) here

I continue to be boggled at the number of female discovieries / inventions where the inventor is either never mentioned (while comparable male advances always have their name attached / are mentioned more) or men take the credit. How much more is there?

Thinking about it, I think dark matter was discovered by a woman as well... yes it's here

Pulsars and dark matter are surely 2 of the more well known phenomenon in the physics / astronomy world I think. These women should be as well known as their male counterparts. Or at least,the fact that women discovered these should be more widely known even if the names aren't.

I was just coming on here to make this thread :)

Burrell should have been in on the Nobel - it was her who discovered the signal in the first place.

She’s one of my scientific heroines: physicsworld.com/a/look-happy-dear-youve-just-made-a-discovery/

Bell Burnell describes how the attitude for solving this problem is often “Fix the women!” – make them braver, give them special training to address their inability to communicate and so on. However, this assumes the problem is with women, not with the scientific community or society in general.

This is a good article about the way she had to struggle against sex stereotypes.

she has personally done loads for women in science. She set up the Athena SWAN awards.

She’s also spoken of suffering from imposter syndrome...

Also: more recent students HAVE been in on awards. She should have been recognised along with her supervisors.

Great article thank you :)

I've got a degree in physics and had never heard of her or Vera Rubin, I could name men from the subject til the cows come home though.

She sounded lovely on the radio this morning. Said she was grateful to be there at Cambridge, so made sure she worked hard as she was worried they'd made a mistake in admitting her.

She made a great case for diversity this am.

Science tends to have quite strong hierarchies where the senior people get the credit regardless of who did or noticed what.

Having worked in science academia, senior academics always get credit for their student's and post-docs work.
I've been lucky enough to know lots of senior female professors and they "take credit" for their student's work, male or female.
That's how the hierarchy works.
Of course, there are also egos and such, so that some people are more pushy than others.

I read about this today too.

And thought that it was interesting that what made the news was not her winning the prize for her science, but her donating the prize money. Of course it might have made the news in later pages at the time and I just didn't spot it - but it wasn't front page news in the way this was.

Not that I'm not glad that this is big news, and that the issue of unconscious bias is being talked about. But I'd also like more celebration of scientists and the work they do and the prizes they win, particularly women, as making them visible and known for their work (rather than for their fight against discrimination) is also a good way to fight against unconscious bias.

Yes good point

Woman is very kind and generous and wants to help others = headline the supports gendered role

Woman wins massive amount of money in science prize - amazing!
And even more amazing - she's donating it all!
Would be a better way around + I think maybe how a man doing the same would be reported.

"Faffing around...or trying to make sure the science was bulletproof...whereas men could just put it out there with less evidence as less likely to be torn apart than a paper submitted by a woman I wonder?"

She had the essential data at the time when it was needed. Beyond that it's speculation.

"Unlikely. Pauling was still convinced by his inside-out triple helical model, and hampered by poor crystallographic data. He might have beaten Watson and Crick to the right solution if he'd seen Franklin's data.

paulingblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/the-pauling-corey-structure-of-dna/"

I can't blame them for not taking that risk.

TBH the real 'aha' moment in the DNA story was realising that the base pair ratios - in the context of a molecule believed to transmit genetic information - had to be deeply significant. Once Watson and Crick had seen that, and how the hydrogen bonds could work, they must have known they were almost certainly on the right track. The model would have to fit the crystallographic data, but the vital part was the pairing. The data was sufficient because a key to the form could be deduced from function. However, DNA is perhaps a unique case - for other macromolecules (especially proteins) the fine detail is crucial in understanding how form and function are related. So, Franklin was correct to try to get better data, but I'd have to agree Watson and Crick were right to publish when they did.

Franklin may well have got a Nobel prize had she lived long enough, probably for chemistry. She certainly deserved it.

I'm not sure Franklin would have, apart from the DNA work, TBH - her area of macromolecular crystallography was probably too similar to Dorothy Hodgkin's at much the same time, and (regardless of both being women) I'm not sure they often award Nobel prizes in similar fields close together.

"I don't want or need the money myself and it seemed to me that this was perhaps the best use I could put to it"

How wonderful.

Wonder what member of an under-represented group will suddenly find they qualify for a bursary?

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Juells?

Franklin's Nobel was stolen by the Grim Reaper rather than Watson and Crick. I don't think it's fair that it should only be awarded to the living but Fred Hoyle (who discovered nucleosythesis) didn't get one either.

Does anyone know why there's a Nobel for economics? I mean, physics, chemistry, even literature, I can understand - but economics is largely bollocks isn't it? Why isn't their a prize for maths?

There isn't actually a Nobel prize for economics, I've just found out!

In 1968, Sweden's central bank Sveriges Riksbank established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which, although not being a Nobel Prize,[6] has become commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics