Here's a bittersweet story from a few days ago
www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5157205?cmp=newsletter-Second%2BOpinion%2B-%2BJune%2B1%2B2019&__twitter_impression=true
June Broomhead is easy to spot in a 1948 black-and-white photo of scientists working at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. In a group of more than 100 men in suits and ties, she is one of just a few women.
A handful of the men pictured have won Nobel Prizes. Two of them, James Watson and Francis Crick, became household names after their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.
Broomhead's contributions to modern science, on the other hand, have largely been forgotten.
Broomhead, who took her husband George Lindsey's name, is now 96 and living in an Ottawa seniors' home. In the early 1950s, she married and quit her brief career as a top-notch physicist, beginning a new life as a stay-at-home mother to two children.
But Ottawa physician and molecular geneticist Alex MacKenzie says she played a crucial role in advancing our understanding of DNA. It was through reading her PhD thesis that Watson and Crick first realized how DNA is structured.
MacKenzie was astonished to discover Lindsey's role, and he wants her work to be recognized while she is still alive.
"It's like discovering the fifth Beatle is living next to you," he told The Sunday Edition's documentary producer David Gutnick.