Women of Invention: Life-Changing Ideas by Remarkable Women (Volume 21) (Oxford People, 21)

PATRICIA BATH

Patricia Bath is no stranger to being first. Born in Harlem, New York, in 1942, she was the first African American to complete a residency in ophthalmology at New York University and the first African American woman doctor to be granted a medical patent. She is also the founder of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington DC. This institute describes eyesight as “a basic human right.”

In 1981 she began working on her remarkable invention, the Laserphaco Probe. It used laser technology to provide a less painful and more precise treatment for cataracts. The patent for the device was granted in 1988. The laser dissolves the cataract painlessly before irrigating and cleaning the eye and inserting a new lens. This miraculous tool helps restore the eyesight of patients who had been blind for up to thirty years. In 2000 she patented a method of cataract treatment using ultrasound.

MAYA BURHANPURKAR

Canadian researcher, Maya Burhanpurkar was born in 1999 in Orillia, Ontario, and in 2017 enrolled at Harvard University. This precocious young woman is already a scientific star however, having at the age of 12 developed a prototype for an intelligent antibiotic. An intelligent antibiotic is one that selectively kills pathogenic bacteria, such as E. coli but while doing so it leaves other bacteria intact.

At the age of 10 this scientific prodigy built a microbiology laboratory in the basement of her family home. She had already volunteered at a hospital in India and began conducting her own research. At the age of 13, she received the Platinum Award at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for the work she had been doing on the cardiac and gastrointestinal safety of Alzheimer’s drugs. She had a personal interest in this as her grandfather had died of Alzheimer’s.

Maya continued to receive awards and in 2013, she was named one of Canada’s Top Twenty Under Twenty, the highest civilian honor for a young Canadian person. This extraordinary young woman has also been awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and all the signs are she has a great future ahead of her.

CHIEN-SHIUNG WU

Chien-Shiung Wu, “The First Lady of Physics,” was born in Jiangsu province, China, in 1912 and was educated at one of the first schools in China to admit girls. In 1930, she enrolled at Nanjing University where, inspired by the life of Marie Curie, she studied physics.

Graduating with honors at the top of her class in 1934, she taught at the university for a year, before deciding to pursue her studies and research in America. In 1936 at the University of California, Berkeley, she met the pioneering American nuclear scientist, Professor Ernest Lawrence who had built the first cyclotron. He and another Chinese student, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, encouraged her to stay and work at Berkeley.

She completed her PhD in 1940 and in 1942 married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. She also accepted a post at Princeton University, the first woman to join her faculty. In 1944 she joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University where she invented a process of enriching uranium ore to be used as fuel for atomic bombs. After leaving the project in 1945, Wu became the leading expert in beta decay and weak interaction physics at Columbia University. In the mid-1950s, the research of two male theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, into the “law of conservation of parity” persuaded them that parity was conserved for electromagnetic interactions and for strong interaction. But the theory had never been properly tested for weak interactions. To test the theory, they turned to Wu for help in setting up suitable laboratory conditions because of her great expertise in weak interaction physics.

The experiment disproved the hypothetical “law of conservation of parity” for weak nuclear interactions and become known as the Wu Experiment. But controversially, it was the two male scientists who were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for this ground-breaking work, and Wu was excluded. It was a fate suffered by many female scientists at the time.

Chien-Shiung Wu was named Scientist of the Year in 1974 by Industrial Research Magazine and in 1976 was the first woman to serve as president of the prestigious American Physical Society. The First Lady of Physics died at age 84 in 1997 and was posthumously admitted into the American National Women’s Hall of Fame.