Women's History Month: Scientific Books by Female Authors

American Women Scientists: 23 Inspiring Biographies, 1900-2000 provides concise biographies aimed at high school students of prominent 20th century women scientists. In addition to Cold S[ring Harbor Laboratory’s own Barbara McClintock, the book also features the likes of computer programmer Grace Hopper (inventor of COBOL), anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar (of neonatal Apgar score fame), and astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (stellar cataloguer extraordinaire).

Moira Davison Reynolds earned her B.A. from Dalhousie University and her M.A. and PhD. from Boston University. Before becoming a freelance writer, she was a medical technologist and a cancer researcher. She has written several other books, including a biography of Louis Pasteur and ranging across such diverse topics as American newspaper comic strip artists and women advocates of reproductive rights.

Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology seeks to find the source of the persistent differences men and women experience in science careers. The book focuses on the social aspects of science and the inherent prejudices of society to illucidate the hidden barriers to women scientists at all aspects of their careers. It relies on hundreds of interviews and personal accounts to support its hypothesis.

Co-Editor Carol Kemelgor is the Director of the Centor for Women in Science at the Science Policy Institute at the State University of New York Purchase. She holds a M.S.W. in Social Work from New York University, and in a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist in private practice

At the Helm: A Laboratory Navigator and its follow-up At the Helm: Leading Your Laboratory, are best-selling primers for new investigators looking to set up their own lab. Nature called them “necessary for everyone considering a scientific academic career” with “solutions that have stood the test of time.” The At the Helm manuals address the critical lack of training most new investigators have in the so-called ‘soft skills’ required to run a lab: communication, management, and organizational skills.

Kathy Barker received her BA, MA, and PhD in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts, and later served as an Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University. She currently advocates for scientists to become political activists, and is currently writing a similar manual to the At the Helm books to help scientists reach the ‘world beyond the bench’ with citizen activism.

Blue Skies and Bench Space is a celebration of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at the height of ‘eukaryotic molecular biology revolution’ of the 1970s. Both entertaining and informative, it “gives a vivid description of that beehive of science” (Harold Varmus) and brings to life the key scientists of the ICRF with tales of dragons, sharks, and very tall postdocs (The Node).

Kathleen (Kathy) Weston got her PhD from the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, and worked as a tenure-track investigator before turning to a career as a freelance science writer. She also maintains a blog on how (not to) be a career scientist.

Terri Grodzicker co-edited the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology Volume LXXX 21st Century Genetics at Work. She came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1972, joining the tumor virus group, and has never left. She started organizing the annual DNA Tumor Virus Meetings in the 1970s and the Laboratory's Molecular Genetics courses. In 1986, she became assistant director for academic affairs. Dr. Grodzicker currently holds the title of Dean of Academic Affairs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which includes the organization of meetings and short postgraduate courses in the spring, summer, and fall. Since 1989, she has also been the editor of Genes & Development

The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science presents short biographies and excerpts of interviews from over two dozen women elected into the National Academy of Sciences. Grouping the women by era of birth, it seeks to present a view of the changing landscape of science for women over the course of 20th century America.

Elga Wasserman earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University and her J.D. from Yale University. She was a scientist, attorney, author, feminist, and political activist. Through her appointment to Yale University as “Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women and Chairman of the Committee on Coeducation,” a Dean of the University in all but name, she almost single-handedly ushered Yale University from a male only to a coeducational institution.

Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life was shortlisted for both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Marsh Biography Award. The Times said it “paints a vivid portrait of a woman passionately concerned to resolve the enigmas of chemical structures,” and The Times Literary Supplement called it a “genuinely illuminating account of Hodgkins’ life, neatly balancing the personal with the scientific.” Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, OM, FRS, was the first British woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize (Chemistry, 1964). She was a pioneer in the field of protein crystallography and uncovered the 3D structures of penicillin, Vitamin B12, and insulin, among others. She also came from a celebrated family of archaeologists, spending over a year recreating as stippled paintings over a dozen tile mosaics uncovered by her parents’ excavations of 5th and 6th century Byzantine churches.

Georgina Ferry is an Oxford educated science writer, who The Guardian said “…is rapidly turning into the most interesting science writer going.” She is the author of the Perutz biography Max Perutz and the Secret of Life, and co-author, along with John Sulston, of “a riveting account of what was going on behind the scenes” (Financial Times) of the Human Genome Project, The Common Thread: Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome, among other works.

Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment (1910) was written by Ellen H. Swallow Richards (1842-1911). Richards was a pioneering 19th century environmental engineer, sanitary engineer, the first woman admitted to MIT, and an ecofeminist. She is credited with laying the foundation for the science of home economics and was the first to apply the science of chemistry to the study of nutrition. After extensive home testing of various scientific ways to improve quality of life in the home, she wrote this volume. She developed the term ‘Euthenics’ from the Greek verb Eutheneo (“to be in a flourishing state”)

In Galileo’s Daughter, author Dava Sobel has translated (from their original Italian) the 124 surviving letters from Galileo Galilei’s illegitimate daughter Virginia, a cloistered nun who took the name Maria Celeste, to her father. Sobel’s translations provide “a leitmotif to illuminate their deep mutual love, religious faith, and devotion to science.” (Kirkus Reviews) It provides a fascinating look at the life of an eminent historical figure in 17th century Italy against a backdrop of war, plague, discovery, scientific discussion, and the upheaval of humanity’s place in the universe.

Dava Sobel is a science writer and former science reporter who “makes hard science palatable for the general audience.” (NPR) She found unexpected success in 1995 with her first book, Longitude, a study of an 18th century clockmaker. Her most recent work, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, exposes the efforts of the often under-appreciated Harvard women astronomers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—And the World (2015) is author Swaby’s attempt to present preeminent women in STEM fields “not as anomalies or wives who moonlight in the lab,” but as powerful, driving scientific forces in their own right. It has been called a “much-needed corrective to the record” (William Souder), and an “eye-opening, much-needed exploration of the names history would do well to remember” (Maria Konnikova).

Rachel Swaby is a freelance journalist and senior editor for Longshot Magazine based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in several magazines, including Runner’s World, Wired, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Headstrong is her first book.

In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work (1988) tells the remarkable tale of Rita Levi-Montalcini’s life, from a Jew in WWII Italy, through anti-semitism that cost her her job, a research lab set up in her apartment, and later success isolating Nerve Growth Factor from studies transplanting cancer cells into check embryos. Kirkus Reviews calls it “warmly detailed.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1090-2012) OMRI, OMCA, was an Italian neurobiologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for isolating Nerve Growth Factor (NGF).

Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science and Love (2016) tells the story of Hope Jahren’s path from her childhood with distant parents, through her struggles and triumphs as a scientist, constantly intermixing personal stories with biological ones. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “gratifying and often moving chronicle of the scientist’s life.”

Hope Jahren received her PhD in 1996 from the University of California, Berkeley in Soil Science. She has held positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Hawai’I at Manoa, and is currently a Wilson Professor aat the University of Oslo Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics. She has received three Fulbright Awards.

Magnificent Minds: 16 Pioneering Women in Science & Medicine and its follow-up, Remarkable Minds: 17 More Pioneering Women in Science & Medicine, highlight the achievements of women who all made ground-breaking contributions to various areas of science. In addition to well-known names such as Barbara McClintock, Florence Nightingale, and Ada Lovelace, it also describes the lives and scientific accomplishments of Marie Meurdrac, Louise Bourgeois Boursier, and Sophie Kovalevskaya. The “extremely readable, clearly written, and occasionally provocative” book “should spark further interest in any one of these scientists, in their fields, and in their cultural circumstances.” (VOYA magazine)

Pendred E. (Penny) Noyce is a physician, educator, and advocate for science education, in addition to authoring eleven children’s books. Her books have won the Mom’s Choice Award for Juvenile Books, IBPA Ben Franklin Award Silver medal, and the National Science Teachers Foundation /Children’s Book Council Outstanding Science Trade Book Award. She is also the Chair of the board of Tumblehome Learning, a publisher founded by STEM activists, writers, and curriculum developers as a place for children to imagine themselves as young scientists or engineers.

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from our Microbial Ancestors (1986) was co-written by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) with her son by Carl Sagan, science-writer Dorion Sagan. “A comprehensive, popularized treatment of evolutionary microbiology spelling out a dimension that Darwin possibly never imagined…” (Publishers Weekly) Microcosmos details the evolutionary history of life from the earliest origins of animated matter to the origins of complex multicellular life, with a heavy focus on the role of symbiosis in evolution.

Lynn Margulis received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 1965 while already working as a research associate and lecturer at Brandeis University. She is perhaps best known for initially putting forth the radical and revolutionary evolutionary hypothesis that cellular organelles such as the mitochondria and chloroplast were the result of endosymbiosis of bacteria into eukaryotic organisms. “Lynn Margulis’ name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin’s is with evolution.” She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and the Linnean Society of London awarded her the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999

Mutation: An Introduction to Research on Mutagenesis, Part I: Methods (1962) is a compact primer on mutagenesis methods in different organisms, written by the foremost mutagenesis expert of the day. That it is 55 years old makes it no less insightful or informative today.

Charlotte Auerbach, FRS, FRSE (1899-1994) was a geneticist best known for her work on mutagenesis. She received her PhD in 1935 at the Institute of Animal Genetics in the University of Edinburgh after fleeing the Nazis in her native Germany. Dr. Auerbach’s work showing the mustard gas was a mutagen was classified by the government for several years. In addition to her ground-breaking scientific research, she also wrote a book of fairy stories, Adventures with Rosalind, under the pseudonym Charlotte Austen.

Nobel Prize Women in Science highlights the scientific accomplishments of 15 Nobel laureate women, or women who made significant contributions to Nobel Prize winning work, as well as the obstacles they faced in the male dominated scientific world. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, “A first-rate compendium of bios of women who got the Big One—and a few who came close.”

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne wrote and edited about physics for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and is a prize-winning journalist. She now focuses on writing books about scientific discoveries and the scientists who make them. Her other books include Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World and The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.

Plant Anatomy is a foundational textbook written by Katherine Esau, and has been the standard of the field for over forty years.

Katherin Esau (1898 - 1997), a German-American botanist born in present-day Ukraine, received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, where she eventually was made full professor and remained until her retirement. Even after retirement, she continued her botanical research for close to thirty more years. She was only the sixth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She has made such an impact on botanical research in America that the Botanical Society of America presents an annual award in her name at their annual meeting to the best graduate student presentation.

In Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, Brenda Maddox provides a detailed biography of Rosalind Franklin that Kirkus Reviews calls “at once a scientific exploration and a personal history” and “inviting and ultimately satisfying.” Franklin, best known for taking the x-ray crystallographic photographs instrumental in James Watson and Francis Crick’s elucidation of the structure of DNA, also determined the structure of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus with “unprecedented detail and clarity.”

Brenda Maddox, Lady Maddox, FRSL is a journalist and biographer living in Wales. In addition to Rosalind Franklin, she has also written biographies of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Taylor, and Nora Joyce.

A Résumé of Cytological Investigations of the Cereals with Particular Reference to Wheat is Barbara McClintock’s 1925 Masters Thesis from Cornell University

The Science of Genetics (1964) is a primer in the science of genetics. Written at a time when enormous strides in genetic science were shaking the public landscape in the face of a clueless populace, it aims to bring a clear and easily understood explanation of the field for lay people. The book begins with a delightful chapter reminiscent of Galileo’s Dialogues, in which four people, a geneticist, a physician, a farmer, and a schoolboy discourse on the nature of genetics. It proceeds from there through a logical, yet ever more complex series of genetic topics, covering a broad array of subject matter. A wonderful primer.

Charlotte Auerbach, FRS, FRSE (1899-1994) was a geneticist best known for her work on mutagenesis. She received her PhD in 1935 at the Institute of Animal Genetics in the University of Edinburgh after fleeing the Nazis in her native Germany. Dr. Auerbach’s work showing the mustard gas was a mutagen was classified by the government for several years. In addition to her ground-breaking scientific research, she also wrote a book of fairy stories, Adventures with Rosalind, under the pseudonym Charlotte Austen.

Silent Spring (1962) is Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking and controversial conservation book on the health risks associated with pesticide use, exposing disinformation campaigns by the chemical industry. It sparked a national outcry, set into motion a sea change in the nature of government environmental regulation, brought environmentalism into the public consciousness for the first time, and has been named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by Discover Magazine. Carson was first inspired to research the book’s subject matter when a friend complained of all the dead birds following an aerial DDT pesticide spraying for mosquitos.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist, and earned her Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. After leaving graduate school before completing her doctorate to take care of ailing family, she took a position at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote copy for radio programs put out by the Bureau promoting public interest in aquatic wildlife and the bureau’s work. While she is best remembered for Silent Spring, Carson was also the author of several books and numerous government publications about the ocean and marine life, including the books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea.

Studies in Spermatogenesis with Especial Reference to the “Accessory Chromosome” (1905) is the paper in which Stevens first observes, “Since the male somatic cells have 19 large and 1 small chromosome, while the female somatic cells have 20 large ones, it seems certain that an egg fertilized by a spermatozoon which contains the small chromosome must produce a male, while one fertilized by a spermatozoon containing 10 chromosomes of equal size must produce a female,” the finding qhich led to the XY model of sexual heredity.

N.M. (Nettie Maria) Stevens (1861-1912) was a high school teacher and a librarian before receiving her BA (1899) and MA (1900) from Stanford University, and her PhD in 1903 from Bryn Mawr College under Edmund Beecher Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan. It was with their help, writing her letters of recommendation, that Stevens first came to the Carnegie Institute of Washington to study sex determination, where she stayed from 1904-1905. While at the CIW, her work on aphids and mealworms allowed her to first identify the Y chromosome, leading to her propose not only that the sex of offspring was determined by factors internal to the egg (as opposed to external factors like temperature or nutrition), but that those factors were in fact the chromosomes. This was the XY model of heredity. During her time at CIW, she also won the $1,000 Ellen Richards prize for the best scientific paper written by a woman for her work on aphid germ cells. After her time at CIW, Nettie returned to a research assistantship at Bryn Mawr. She died of breast cancer at Johns Hopkins in 1912 before she could start the full professorship awaiting her. Nettie published 38 research papers during her brief academic career. Although today Stevens and even Morgan receive much of the credit for her work, Morgan garnered her with high praise in an obituary he wrote of her in Science.

Success Strategies from Women in STEM: A Portable Mentor, a comprehensive manual geared toward female scientists in STEM fields, is loaded with career advice, mentoring support, and professional development strategies gathered from 16 different successful woman scientists. In addition to advice, it is full of anecdotes and vignettes demonstrating how to put the advice into action.

Peggy A. Pritchard is an Associate Librarian at the University of Guelph and works in a collaborative team of educators and academic support specialists to develop innovative curricula. Christine S. Grant is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and North Carolina State University, and one of only 4 African American women chemical engineering full professors in the United States.

Zebrafish: A Practical Approach is part of a series of laboratory manuals from Oxford University Press containing clear step-by-step protocols for managing Zebrafish in a laboratory setting, including rudimentary fish care, and up to complicated multi-step experiments such as genetic screens and mutagenesis.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Eric Weischaus and Edward B. Lewis, for her revolutionary studies of the genetics of Drosophila development.