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Rosalind Franklin

Things We Saw Today

Things We Saw Today: Blizzard Offers In Game Kittens in Hurricane Relief Promotion

by Susana Polo | 5:08 pm, November 8th, 2012

Shortly after Blizzard took the plunge and began offering exclusive in-game pets to World of Warcraft players for real money they started offering them to benefit charity. The Cinder Kitten above goes for $10, and all of those dollars will go to the Red Cross’ Sandy efforts. (Wow Insider)

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she blinded me with science

Women Who Changed Science Now Beautiful Minimalist Posters

by Susana Polo | 10:16 am, September 26th, 2012

Artist, designer, and Tumblrer Hydrogene has put together a series of six minimalist posters featuring the work of women who changed the face of science, and history. For example, the now eighty-five-year-old Rear Admiral Grace Hopper developed the first computer compiler, came up with the idea that we should really create a programming language that would work on more than one individual computer, and popularized the term “bug” and “debugging” in their use in computer programming, after fishing a moth out of the workings of the Mark II supercomputer in 1947.

(Hydrogene Portfolio via Tumblr.)

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she blinded me with science

Rosalind Franklin, In Her Own Words and Letters

by Susana Polo | 3:07 pm, April 20th, 2012

Rosalind Franklin might be officially the first historical lady of the geek world who I talked about on The Mary Sue. Well, there were a bunch of posts we wrote in the two weeks before the site went live, but they don’t count… the site wasn’t live. I talked about Franklin as an example of a person who was denied her proper due because of unreasonable expectations of what women are “naturally” like.

Franklin’s research was directly responsible for giving Watson and Crick, the famed discoverers of the structure of DNA, the final pieces of the DNA puzzle, even by their own admission. Yet her research, collected based on techniques she’d invented independently, was shown to them without her permission or even awareness by a colleague who she worked with regularly, and she was left predominantly uncredited for her unwilling contributions. The reason why they, as rival scientists working on the same discovery, felt it was okay to inspect her work without her permission? Well, it boils down to… “she wasn’t very approachable.” Needless to say, this isn’t a good reason to leave somebody uncredited.

Jenifer Glynn, Franklin’s sister, offers insight into her sibling’s personality in here book of Rosalind’s correspondence, My Sister Rosalind Franklin: A Family Memoir.

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Interview

Interview: Mom’s Special Recipe for Gender Equitable Science Education

by Becky Chambers | 12:33 pm, September 29th, 2011

I’ve been worried about science. I don’t mean in the usual zombie plague or Skynet sort of way. I’ve been worried about science in the real world, which is honestly much scarier. The current US political climate doesn’t do much to make me feel confident about the future of research and exploration. I also read the same articles that you probably do, about how girls still need encouragement that they can do math and science at all, or how women scientists are ever-struggling for the recognition they deserve. It makes me nervous. I may not work in a lab, but I’m a huge science junkie, and I hope to raise a few little geeks of my own one day. I found myself in need of some reassurance that the next generation might yet turn out to be as science-loving as the rest of us.

I could have been a good writer and done some “research,” but instead I took the easy way out and defaulted to nepotism. I called my mom.

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