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1. Marie Sklodowska Curie (Physics, 1903; Chemistry, 1911)
Marie Curie was born in Warsaw in 1867. At the age of 24, she traveled to Paris to study mathematics and physics. She graduated at the head of her class, and her doctoral committee proclaimed her dissertation to be the most original work submitted by a graduate student. Having matriculated, she began the research and experimentation for which she is now famous. In 1903, she was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, for their study of the radiation phenomenon. In 1908, she was the first woman ever to be appointed a professor at the Sorbonne, and in 1911, she received her second Nobel Prize - this time in chemistry - for her discovery of radium and polonium.
2. Irène Joliot-Curie (Chemistry, 1935)
Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, was born in 1897. She graduated from the University of Paris. In 1918, she began assisting her mother at the Institute of Radium. There she met her future husband, with whom she was to be awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on radioactivity. In 1933, they had discovered that radioactive elements could be prepared from stable elements by bombarding the stable element with alpha particles. Their investigations opened the way for new research into the nucleus of the atom. In 1936, she was appointed to the French cabinet as undersecretary of state for scientific research. In 1939, she was inducted into the Legion of Honor, and from 1946-51, she served at the French Atomic Energy Commission. She died of leukemia in 1956.
3. Gerty Radnitz Cori (Physiology and Medicine, 1947)
Gerty Cori was born in Prague in 1896. She attended the University of Prague, and in 1920 she received her medical degree. In 1931, she and her husband, Carl Cori, joined the Washington University School of Medicine. In 1947, they were co-awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on the regulation of glucose in the bloodstream.
4. Maria Goeppert-Mayer (Physics, 1963)
Maria Goeppert-Mayer was born in 1906 in Kattowitz, then a part of Germany. In 1924, she enrolled at the University of Gottingen and began her work in theoretical physics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Windaus. There, she met her husband, an American-born postdoctoral fellow in physical chemistry, and after her graduation moved with him to the United States. After a brief time at John Hopkins University, they went to Columbia University where she worked at the Strategic Alloy Metals Laboratory researching the separation of uranium isotopes. She coauthored the text Statistical Mechanics (1940) with her husband and later accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago's Institute of Nuclear Studies. In 1948, she embarked upon her studies of the nuclear shell structure and the significance of "magic numbers" (nuclei with a special number of protons). Her book Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Theory was published in 1955. In 1963, she was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in physics with Hans Jensen for their work on the shell model.
5. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry, 1964)
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was born in England in 1910. She graduated from Somerville College at Oxford with a degree in chemistry and her early work extends the science of X-ray crystallography first pioneered by W.L. Bragg. She employed X-rays to determine the structural arrangement of atoms in a wide range of substances. At first, she concentrated on crystals, a lifelong passion of hers. By bombarding a crystalline structure with X-rays and determining the diffraction patterns, she was able to predict the exact arrangement of molecules in the given structure. Soon thereafter, however, she turned her technique toward more complex substances. Her work with J.D. Bemal, her doctoral advisor, turned her attention to molecular biology. By employing the same techniques, the two were able to determine the structure of complex peptide chains. Eventually their work would be utilized in the study of hemoglobin, insulin, penicillin, vitamins, and viruses. In 1964, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her research on the structure of vitamin B12.
6. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (Physiology and Medicine, 1977)
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was born in 1921 in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Hunter College with degrees in physics and chemistry. She had wanted to go to medical school, but was rejected from Purdue University's physics program on the grounds of being a woman and being Jewish, so she was forced to enroll in secretarial school. However, when the United States entered WWII she received a spot in the University of Illinois' College of Engineering. In 1945, she obtained her Ph.D. in nuclear physics and returned to teach at Hunter College. During this time, she also worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx, where research was being conducted into the use of radioisotopes for medical purposes. In 1950, she joined the hospital permanently and formed a lifelong partnership with Solomon Berson. There they conducted their pioneering work in radioimmunoassay, or RIA, a technique for quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body that allows doctors to diagnose conditions caused by miniscule changes in hormone levels. In 1977, she received the Nobel Prize in medicine for her development of RIA.
7. Barbara McClintock (Physiology and Medicine, 1983)
Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 and studied as an undergraduate at the College of Agriculture at Cornell University. She continued her stay at Cornell as a graduate student, where she studied both cytology and genetics. It was during this time that she made her first significant discovery: she identified the chromosomal structure of maize. She also offered the first cytological proof of genetic crossover. Later, as an assistant at the University of Missouri, she began her work on chromosomes that had been broken by radiation exposure. The fruit of these experiments was the development of a method for utilizing these broken chromosomes to create new mutations. In 1983, she was awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of transposable elements - a discovery she had made 35 years earlier.
8. Rita Levi-Montalcini (Physiology and Medicine, 1986)
Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909 in Turin, Italy. She was educated at the University of Turin Medical School and she moved to the United States in 1946, becoming a permanent citizen 13 years later. She conducted extensive research into the growth factors of the human body and, in 1986, she was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine with her student, American biochemist Stanley Cohen, for their discovery of various growth factors. Levi-Montalcini was specifically cited for her work on the growth of cells in the peripheral nervous system while Cohen was cited for his work on epidermal growth factors.
9. Gertrude Elion (Physiology and Medicine, 1988)
Gertrude Belle Elion was born in New York City and attended Hunter College as an undergraduate. She went on to receive her Master's degree in chemistry from NYU and has since received 10 honorary degrees. In 1944, she began work at Burroughs Wellcome where she was instrumental in the manufacture of the drugs 6-mercaptopurine and 6-thioguanine (anti-leukemia agents). Further work produced a derivative of 6-mercaptopurine, which neutralizes the body's rejection of foreign tissue. All told, her name is included in over 45 patents. In 1988, she shared the Nobel Prize in medicine with her colleague, George Hitchings, and researcher James Black. She died on February 21, 1999, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she lived. She was 81.
10. Christiane Nusslein Volhard (Physiology and Medicine, 1995)
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard was born in Magdeburg, Germany in 1942. She currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. In 1995, she was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus for their work on the genetic makeup of the fruit fly, a geneticist's best friend. "Mutations Affecting Segment Number and Polarity in Drosophila," published in 1980 by Volhard and Wieschaus, revolutionized the field of developmental genetics. Volhard and Wieschaus inbred over 40,000 families of fruit flies in their experiments, and for the first time identified the genes responsible for specific biological characteristics in an organism. This research has helped lead to the explosion of genetic research now taking place.
Nikheel Dhekne holds a masters in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is currently a freelance Web publisher and developer.
Andrzej Krauze is an illustrator, poster maker, cartoonist, and painter who illustrates regularly for HMS Beagle, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Bookseller, and New Statesman.
