Women and Minorities in Science: A Historical Perspective
In December 1938, Lise Meitner had just moved to Stockholm, while her nephew, Otto Frisch, worked in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. The proximity of the Swedish coast to Kungälv, in southern Sweden, allowed the escape of many Jews and Danes fleeing during the war, among them Bohr himself in 1943.
Women in the World of Physics
Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in the Laboratory of the Institute of Berlin. Lise was able to work in this institute from 1912 to 1938 because it was a private institution, but was never fully recognized at a scientific level. Although the picture might suggest she was a simple aide awaiting orders from her mentor, the truth is that she was the founder of the research team on transuranic elements. Meitner’s specialty was physics, while Hahn was a chemist.
Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Working in Their Laboratory. Marie was a pioneer in the study of radioactivity and the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes: in Physics in 1903 with her husband, and in Chemistry in 1911. Their daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, also won this award in 1935. Radioactivity is a phenomenon discovered by Becquerel in 1896 that fascinated the scientific world at the beginning of the century: some elements, such as uranium, have the property of emitting energy as radiation. They are able to impress photographic plates through opaque materials and ionize gases. The Curies were pioneers in the study of several radioactive elements, such as thorium, radium, and polonium.
Max Planck and the Quantum Revolution
Max Planck discovered that energy in nature does not vary continuously, but in indivisible packets, that is, discretely. It is as if, for a given flow rate, we did not have a continuous stream but only water in bottles. We could get any amount by multiplying the volume of the bottle by an integer, but no intermediate amounts. He called the minimum amount of energy quanta and empirically estimated a constant used to determine it: the Planck constant.
The Fight for Women’s Suffrage
The struggle for women’s suffrage was slow and difficult, as it faced social prejudices and pseudo-scientific theories postulating the inferiority of women. After the First World War, women’s suffrage was no longer a rarity, and women obtained the right to vote in Germany and Austria. The winners were more stingy. At first, British women could only vote if they possessed certain properties and were over 30 years old, the age they were supposed to reach intellectual maturity equivalent to that of a 21-year-old man. French women were excluded from the vote.
The dress that looks awkward in the photograph of Lise Meitner on arrival in Berlin in 1907 contrasts with the model from a fashion publication two decades later (The Spirella Magazine, 1928). The cartoon compares the elegance and comfort of the modern woman with the bulky and antiquated costumes of the past, which seemed intended to conceal and distort the female body while restricting mobility.
The Scientific Method and the Rejection of Misogyny
Raphael’s fresco of The School of Athens, decorating the rooms in the Vatican, reflects the respect that the thought of the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, enjoyed in the Renaissance. A century later, Galileo would criticize in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems the principle of authority, that is, the idea that a scientist must pay more attention to the views of the ancients, or the Bible, than to what experience demonstrates. This was the starting point of the scientific method.
Misogynistic ideas about reproduction dominated science for long periods. The idea that the seed of man came only from the male, for example, remained in force until 1827, when the biologist Karl Ernst von Baer showed that female mammals have eggs and, therefore, are involved in the process of fertilization just as males are. The egg is the female gamete, as the sperm is the male gamete. Both contribute their genetic information to the zygote at the moment of conception.
Challenging Discriminatory Pseudoscience
Broca considered women inferior. He was convinced of anthropometry, the science of human body measurements. He measured different parts of human anatomy, particularly the heads, which gave rise to a subdiscipline, craniology.
- Sex is a biological concept: The human species, like others, is divided into two groups with different reproductive roles (masculine and feminine).
- Gender is a sociocultural construction. Each civilization attributes to each gender a number of different social roles, defining all aspects of their lives.
Alchemy and the Precursors of Chemistry
The alchemists tried to transmute matter. Thanks to a philosopher’s stone—a sort of elixir, powder, or rock—it would be possible to convert base metals into gold.
But in the workshops of alchemists, experiments were also made, discovering new materials and potions that were pharmacological. Alchemical experiments are now considered the prehistory of chemistry.
Mendeleev and the Periodic Table
Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, published a table of all previously known elements, based on the assumption that the properties of elements are a periodic function of their atomic numbers, that is, they repeat at regular intervals. This allowed him to predict certain properties of elements not yet discovered.
Today, the periodic table of elements is organized in vertical columns called families, which bring together elements of similar properties. In horizontal rows, or periods, elements are placed following the order of increasing atomic number.
The Rise of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
November 9, 1938, Nazi hordes took to the streets to punish the Jews. Synagogues and shops were burned, and many homes were violated. Thousands were arrested, and murders instigated by the Reich authorities followed. The remains of windows were used to name that sad night, that of the Broken Glass. Newspapers were filled with pictures of people with frightened faces, carrying placards denouncing the crime of being born Jewish. The Third Reich publicly began its road to the extermination of European Jewry.
Sometimes, because of social epidemics or conflict, the hatred of the mob was directed against the Jews, as happened in the Iberian Peninsula from 1391, forcing many Jews to be baptized to save their lives. But conversion only aggravated the problem. Many “Old Christians” accused converts, rightly or wrongly, of preserving their faith in secret. This led to a concept born in Spain that approximated what from the nineteenth century would clearly be called anti-Semitism, that is, anti-Jewish racism. It was the idea that converted Jews carried their “sin” in their blood. Thus, there was talk of “purity of blood”—many universities and public offices were closed to the descendants of Jews and “New Christians,” or “Marranos,” as they were disparagingly called. The Spanish Inquisition was established to pursue them.
The Pseudo-Scientific Roots of Nazi Ideology
The work of a German-born British writer, H. S. Chamberlain, helped popularize anti-Semitism through the pseudo-scientific varnish he used. Well known in Germany through his marriage to a daughter of Wagner, Chamberlain was a decisive influence on the ideology of Hitler. According to Chamberlain, history was summarized in a death struggle between a superior race, the Aryan creative—represented in its pure form by the Germans—and another parasitic and destructive race, the Semitic race, the Jews. Nothing original came from a Jewish source. Even Christianity had been stolen by the Jews from the Persian Aryans. Chamberlain reassured many racist Christians who were troubled by the indelible character of the Jewish race. According to him, Jesus himself had Aryan blood because his real father was a Roman legionary!