Lost Women of Science

“The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal…there was a human arm in the refrigerator,” said J. Peter Willard about his aunt, Mary Louisa Willard. Otherwise, he insisted, she was “very normal.” But Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1920s, left a strong impression on most people, to say the least. Her hometown of State College, Pennsylvania, knew her for stopping traffic in her pink Cadillac to chat with friends, and for throwing birthday bashes for her beloved cocker spaniels. Police around the world knew her for her side hustle: using chemistry to help solve crimes.

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“La única vez que vi algo que me pareció anormal… había un brazo humano en el refrigerador”, dijo J. Peter Willard sobre su tía, Mary Louisa Willard. Por lo demás, insistió, era “muy normal.” Pero Mary Louisa Willard, profesora de química en la Universidad Estatal de Pensilvania a finales de la década de 1920, dejó una fuerte impresión en la mayoría de las personas. Su ciudad natal, State College (Pensilvania), la conocía por detener el tráfico en su Cadillac rosa para saludar a sus amistades, y por organizar fiestas de cumpleaños para sus queridos perritos cocker spaniels. La policía la conocía por su oficio secundario: usar la química para resolver crímenes.

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Elizabeth Roboz Einstein’s life was shaped by the forces of history. She studied bioorganic chemistry at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and then left her home country of Hungary during World War II, before German troops invaded — practically a miracle for a single, Jewish woman. In the U.S., she blazed a trail in the brand new field of neurochemistry; her seminal research into multiple sclerosis (MS) unlocked key findings that would make effective medical treatments for MS possible. 

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In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, host Carol Sutton Lewis speaks with science writer Hanne Strager about her biography of Inge Lehmann, the pioneering Danish seismologist who discovered that Earth has a solid inner core.. 
Largely unknown outside scientific circles, Lehmann fundamentally transformed our understanding of what lies at the heart of our planet. She did this in 1936 by identifying anomalies in earthquake waves that others had overlooked. At the time, scientists believed Earth’s core was entirely liquid. Lehmann proposed instead that a solid inner core lay hidden within it — a groundbreaking insight that reshaped geophysics.
In revisiting Lehmann’s story, Strager highlights that Lehmann’s legacy is one of resilience and perseverance — proof that early setbacks do not define a life, and that brilliance can flourish, even later in life.

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This bonus episode is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Science History Institute.
Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world. 
But the way we talk about Agnes’s life and work often falls back on familiar tropes about women’s domestic roles, assumptions about how science gets done, and what it looked like to do science as a woman in the 19th century. 
 Agnes's story invites us to rethink how we define success for scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what might we gain if we crack it open a bit wider? 

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