Hello!

We’re hard at work wrapping up the first season of Lost Women of Science, “The Pathologist in the Basement.” It’s about Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the physician who first identified cystic fibrosis in 1938. 

Because information about Dr. Andersen is scarce, reconstructing her life has taken us on a quest into archives and basements. 

We wanted to give you a peek at some of the materials we found before the season premieres tomorrow, on November 4th.

We hope you enjoy.

Nora Mathison

Editor

FROM THE FILES OF DR. DOROTHY ANDERSEN

“Tough” and “kind”

The two most common words we heard used to describe Dr. Andersen.

“A credit to the human race”

A close friend and mentee of Dr. Andersen’s was asked to memorialize her after her death. My favorite insight? That she “wrote many limericks especially when angered.”

“A pleasant evening”



A friend of Dorothy Andersen’s sent her this photo along with a note, in which he reminds her that one of the men shown is loosening his belt after the large meal, and another just swallowed a chicken bone.
 
In the picture, Dr. Andersen is seated second from the right.  

“Woman in White”





















A rare headline about Dr. Andersen from 1940.

EXTRAS

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040795026/patricia-bath-marian-croak-national-inventors-hall-of-fame-first-black-women
Drs. Patricia Bath and Marian Croak will become the first two Black women inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 40 years after the nonprofit’s founding. Dr. Croak is an engineer who is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Google. Dr. Bath was an ophthalmologist who invented a device used for cataract removal, and the first Black woman to obtain a medical patent.
 
http://maintenancephase.com/
LWOS explains the little-known truth about women in science. Meanwhile, Maintenance Phase debunks widely-known lies about the “science” of health fads. The episode “The Great Protein Fiasco” questions how we’ve come to accept a certain dietary recommendation as fact, and spotlights a morally ambiguous female scientist, Cicely Williams.
 
https://speakingwhilefemale.co/
The "Speaking While Female Speech Bank" is the world’s largest collection of women’s speeches, and includes many talks by path-breaking women in science, such as Eunice Newton Foote’s historic 1856 paper on the planetary warming effects of sunlight (attributed to her husband), and biochemist Gertrud Woker’s 1929 talk on the dangers of poison gas after World War I.
 
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-the-lack-of-diversity-in-climate-science-research
Those most impacted by climate change, women and people from the Global South, are not the ones researching it. Carbon Brief examined 100 highly cited climate papers, and found that nearly three quarters of the authors live in Europe or the United States, fewer than 1% live in Africa, and fewer than 25% are women. There are no lead researchers from Africa or South America on any of the papers.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/myriam-sarachik-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare
Myriam Sarachik, a physicist, died on October 7th at 88. Despite sexism and a life filled with tragedy, she made important breakthroughs in the study of electricity and magnetism.


Myriam Sarachik from the New York Times