Tsuneko Sasamoto (September 1, 1914 - Present)

Tsuneko Sasamoto is a renowned Japanese photographer who is considered to be her country’s first female photojournalist, documenting pre- and post-war Japan since becoming a professional shooter at the age of 25.

Sasamoto also has the distinction of being one of the oldest photographers on Earth: in 2014 she turned 101 years old, and she’s still making photos.

Sasamoto is currently working for Japanese news site NHK Online and is putting together a new collection of photos after a 70-year career as a photojournalist.

After breaking her left hand and both legs in 2014, Sasamoto lost mobility but not her passion to shoot. She reportedly is doing rehab to gain strength while photographing flowers for a project titled “Hana Akari,” or “Flower Glow.” Which is a homage to the friends of the photographer who have passed away.

Sasamoto has photographed a myriad of historical moments and a plethora of personalities, both great and little known. Her subjects have included General Douglas MacArthur and his wife Jean in 1947 during the U.S. Occupation; the Imperial Family; Hitler Youth visiting Japan; and famed Japanese novelists, poets and artists. Among politicians, her 1955 portrait of Socialist Party head Inejiro Asanuma was the last of him alive. He was assassinated the next day.

Much of her work has focused on women and unsung heroines of the Meiji (1868-1912) and early Showa (1926-89) eras. Her exhibition 100 Women at the JCII Photo Salon in Tokyo celebrates their strength and accomplishments in the face of unrelenting gender discrimination.

Sasamoto has published 6 books so far.

Jocelyn Bell Burnel (July 15, 1943 - Present)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Belfast, Northen Island. Her father was an architect for the Armagh Observatory, where Jocelyn spent much time as a child. At a young age she read a number of books on astronomy and her interest in the subject was encouraged by the staff of the Armagh Observatory. She attended Lurgan College and went on to earn a Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland in 1965. In 1969 completed her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where under the supervision of Antony Hewish, she also constructed and operated a 81.5 megahertz radio telescope. She studied interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources.

In 1967 Bell, while analyzing literally miles of print-outs from the telescope, noted a few unusual signals which she termed as “scruff”. These “bits of scruff” seemed to indicate radio signals too fast and regular to come from quasars. Both Jocelyn and Hewish ruled out orbiting satellites, French television signals, radar, finally even “little green men.” Looking back at some papers in theoretical physics, they determined that these signals must have emerged from rapidly spinning, super-dense, collapsed stars. The media named these as collapsed stars pulsars and published the story.

In 1968, soon after her discovery, Bell married Martin Burnell (divorced 1993). Her husband was a government worker, and his career took them to various parts of England. She worked part-time for many years while raising her son, Gavin Burnell. During that period she began studying almost every wave spectrum in astronomy and gained an extraordinary breadth of experience. She held a junior teaching fellowship from 1970 to 1973 at the University of Southampton where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma-ray telescope. She also held research and teaching positions in x-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London, and studied infrared astronomy in Edinburgh.

Jocelyn did not share the Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish for the discovery of pulsars, but has received numerous awards for her professional contributions. She was first chosen as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969 and has served as its Vice President. Among many of her awards she received the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987 and the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989. She also won the Oppenheimer Prize and The Michelson Medal.

She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. Also Jocelyn is the current President of the Institute of Physics.

Gertrude Elion (January 23, 1918 – February 21, 1999)

American biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion helped develop drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection. She won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.

Born to immigrant parents in New York City, Gertrude Elion spent her early youth in Manhattan, where her father had a dental practice. When her brother was born, the family moved to the Bronx. She attended high school and excelled with, in her words, an "insatiable thirst for knowledge."

Motivated by the death of her grandfather, who died of cancer, Elion entered Hunter College, in New York City, at age 15 and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry at age 19. She had difficulty finding employment after graduation, because many laboratories refused to hire women chemists. She found part-time jobs as a lab assistant and went back to school at New York University. Elion worked as a substitute high school teacher for a few years while finishing work on her master's degree, which she earned in 1941. Though she never obtained a doctorate degree, she was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Polytechnic University of New York and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard University.

The start of World War II created more opportunities for women in industry. Elion was able to obtain a few quality-control jobs in food and consumer-product companies before being hired at Burroughs-Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) in 1944, where she began a 40-year partnership with Dr. George H. Hitchings. Her thirst for knowledge impressed Dr. Hitchings, and he permitted her to take on more responsibility.

Elion and Hitchings set out on an unorthodox course of creating medicines by studying the chemical composition of diseased cells. Rather than relying on trial-and-error methods, they used the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens (disease-causing agents) to design drugs that would block viral infections. Elion and her team developed drugs to combat leukemia, herpes and AIDS. They also discovered treatments to reduce the body's rejection of foreign tissue in kidney transplants between unrelated donors. In all, Elion developed 45 patents in medicine and was awarded 23 honorary degrees.

Elion admitted that her work was her life, but she also enjoyed photography and travel, both products of her curiosity about life. She also enjoyed opera, ballet and theater. Though she never married, she enjoyed being the "favorite aunt" to her brother's children.

Gertrude Elion officially retired in 1983, but she remained active, holding the titles of scientist emeritus and consultant at her old company. She also served as an adviser for the World Health Organization and the American Association for Cancer Research.

In 1988, Elion received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, together with George Hitchings and Sir James Black. She received other awards for her work, including the National Medal of Science in 1991, and that same year, she became the first woman to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1997, she was granted the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award.

Marie-Sophie Germain (April 1, 1776 – June 27, 1831)

Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library including ones by Leonhard Euler and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss. When Germain was 13, the Bastille fell, and the revolutionary atmosphere of the city forced her to stay inside. For entertainment she turned to her father's library. Here she found J. E. Montucla's L'Histoire des Mathématiques, and his story of the death of Archimedes intrigued her.

Germain decided that if geometry, which at that time referred to all of pure mathematics, could hold such fascination for Archimedes, it was a subject worthy of study. So she pored over every book on mathematics in her father's library, even teaching herself Latin and Greek so she could read works like those of Sir Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler. She also enjoyed Traité d'Arithmétique by Étienne Bézout and Le Calcul Différentiel by Jacques Antoine-Joseph Cousin. Later, Cousin visited her in her house, encouraging her in her studies.

In 1794, when Germain was 18, the École Polytechnique opened. As a woman, Germain was barred from attending, but the new system of education made the "lecture notes available to all who asked." The new method also required the students to "submit written observations." Germain obtained the lecture notes and began sending her work to Joseph Louis Lagrange, a faculty member. She used the name of a former student Monsieur Antoine-August Le Blanc, "fearing," as she later explained to Gauss, "the ridicule attached to a female scientist." When Lagrange saw the intelligence of M. LeBlanc, he requested a meeting, and thus Sophie was forced to disclose her true identity. Fortunately, Lagrange did not mind that Germain was a woman, and he became her mentor. He too visited her in her home, giving her moral support.

Germain's parents did not at all approve of her sudden fascination with mathematics, which was then thought inappropriate for a woman. When night came, they would deny her warm clothes and a fire for her bedroom to try to keep her from studying, but after they left she would take out candles, wrap herself in quilts and do mathematics. As Lynn Osen describes, when her parents found Sophie "asleep at her desk in the morning, the ink frozen in the ink horn and her slate covered with calculations," they realized that their daughter was serious and relented. After some time, her mother even secretly supported her.

 One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because of prejudice against her sex, she was unable to make a career out of mathematics, but she worked independently throughout her life. In recognition of her contribution towards advancement of mathematics, an honorary degree was also conferred upon her by the University of Göttingen six years after her death. At the centenary of her life, a street and a girls' school were named after her. The Academy of Sciences established The Sophie Germain Prize in her honor.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 - April 14, 1964)

Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.

She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

PHOTO: Rachel CarsonShe wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing.

She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly. PHOTO: Rachel Carson

Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.

Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (May 12, 1910 – July 29, 1994)

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot, an archaeologist and classical scholar, and Grace Mary Crowfoot née Hood, an archaeologist and expert on Ancient Egyptian textiles. She lived in the English expatriate community in Egypt, returning to England only a few months each year. During one of those stays in England, when Hodgkin was four, World War I began. Her mother lost four brothers in the war. Separated from her parents, who would return to Egypt, she was left under the care of relatives and friends until after the end of the war when her mother came to England for one year, a period that she later described as the happiest in her life.

In 1921, she entered the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles. Only once, when she was thirteen, did she make an extended visit to her parents, who by then had moved to Khartoum, although both parents continued to visit England each summer.

She developed a passion for chemistry from a young age, and her mother fostered her interest in science in general. Her state school education left her without Latin or a further science subject, but she took private tuition in order to enter the University of Oxford entrance examination. At the age of 18 she started studying chemistry at the University of Oxford (Somerville College, Oxford).

She studied for a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of John Desmond Bernal, where she became aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins, working with him on the technique's first application to the analysis of a biological substance, pepsin.

In 1933 she was awarded a research fellowship by Somerville College, and in 1934, she moved back to Oxford. The college appointed her its first fellow and tutor in chemistry in 1936, a post which she held until 1977. In the 1940s, one of her students was Margaret Roberts, the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who installed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing Street in the 1980s.

Together with Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, she was one of the first people in April 1953 to travel from Oxford to Cambridge to see the model of the double helix structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson, based on data acquired by Rosalind Franklin. According to the late Dr. Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all traveled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.

In 1960, she was appointed the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professor, a position she held until 1970. This provided her salary, research expenses and research assistance to continue her work at the University of Oxford.

Hodgkin was particularly noted for discovering three-dimensional biomolecular structures. In 1945, working with C. H. (Harry) Carlisle, she published the first such structure of a steroid, cholesteryl iodide (having worked with cholesteryls since the days of her doctoral studies). In 1945, she and her colleagues solved the structure of penicillin, demonstrating (contrary to scientific opinion at the time) that it contains a β-lactam ring. However, the work was not published until 1949.

In 1948, Hodgkin first encountered vitamin B12, and created new crystals. From these, she deduced the presence of a ring structure because the crystals were pleochroic, a finding which she later confirmed using X-ray crystallography. Scientists from Merck had previously crystallized B12, but had published only refractive indices of the substance. The final structure of B12, for which Hodgkin was later awarded the Nobel Prize, was published in 1955.

Insulin was one of her most extraordinary research projects. It began in 1934 when she was offered a small sample of crystalline insulin by Robert Robinson. The hormone captured her imagination because of the intricate and wide-ranging effect it has in the body. However, at this stage X-ray crystallography had not been developed far enough to cope with the complexity of the insulin molecule. She and others spent many years improving the technique. Larger and more complex molecules were being tackled until in 1969 – 35 years later – the structure of insulin was finally resolved. But her quest was not finished then. She cooperated with other laboratories active in insulin research, gave advice, and traveled the world giving talks about insulin and its importance for diabetes.

Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878 – October 27, 1968)

Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner publishes her discovery that atomic nuclei split during some uranium reactions. Her research will be overlooked by the Nobel committee when it awards a prize for the work.

Meitner is a prominent example of a woman whose gender put her in the back seat when the top prize was given. The political climate in Nazi Germany contributed to her obscurity — as a Jew, she had to flee the country to survive, but leaving cost her the chance to publish with her colleagues. Plain old scientific jealousy also played a part in who got credit for discoveries that led to splitting the atom and, ultimately, the atomic bomb and nuclear power.

Other honors would come late in life to Meitner. Einstein even called her “our Marie Curie.”

Meitner was born in Austria in 1878 to Jewish parents. Women were not allowed to attend institutions of higher learning in those days, so she had to study privately to earn a doctoral degree in physics in 1905 at the University of Vienna. Meitner was only the second woman to do so.

She went to Berlin, where she met Einstein and attended lectures by Max Planck. Planck had previously refused to teach women, but after a year, she became his assistant and teamed up with chemist Otto Hahn. They discovered several new isotopes, and in 1909 she presented two papers on beta radiation.

When Meitner and Hahn moved to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1912, she worked unpaid in Hahn’s department of Radiochemistry. She got a paid position at the institute in 1913, only after being offered an assistant professorship in Prague. She was given her own physics section at the prestigious academy in 1917.

She and Hahn were a productive team. They discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium. Meitner isolated the cause of the emission from atomic surfaces of electrons with “signature” energies in 1923, but the French scientist Pierre Auger made the same discovery independently in 1925 and his name was attached to the phenomenon. It’s been known thereafter as the “Auger effect.”

With the discovery of the neutron in the early 1930s, the scientific community began to speculate that it might be possible to create elements heavier than uranium in the lab. A race to confirm this began between Ernest Rutherford in Britain, Irene Joliot-Curie in France, Enrico Fermi in Italy and the Meitner-Hahn team in Berlin. The teams knew the winner would likely be honored with a Nobel Prize.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Meitner was acting director of the Institute for Chemistry. Her Austrian citizenship protected her, but other Jewish scientists — including her nephew Otto Frisch, Fritz Haber, Leó Szilárd and many others — lost their posts and most left Germany.

Meitner buried herself in her work, but when Austria was annexed by the Nazi regime, she had to flee. Dutch physicists helped her escape to Holland in July 1938. She was 59 when she landed in Sweden, where she worked with Niels Bohr and corresponded with Hahn and other German scientists. Later that year, she met Hahn secretly in Copenhagen to plan a new series of experiments.

Now, it gets tricky. Hahn performed the experiments that isolated the evidence for nuclear fission, finding that neutron bombardment produced elements that were lighter than uranium. But he was mystified by those results.

“Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation,” Hahn wrote Meitner. “We knew ourselves that [uranium] can’t actually burst apart into [barium].”

Meitner and Frisch quickly came up with a theory that explained nuclear fission, resolving Hahn’s key problem. “Hahn published the chemical evidence for fission without listing Meitner as a co-author,” writes The Washington Post in a review of a Meitner biography. “[It was] a move she understood, given the tinderbox that was Nazi Germany.”

A letter from Bohr documents her inspiration in December 1938. Although some historians say that Hahn hoped he would be able to add her name later, others report that he maintained the fiction that Meitner functioned as a junior assistant. Whatever his intention, her insights were key to his discoveries — and to the developments in radioactivity and nuclear processes that changed the world.

Meitner and Frisch made other key discoveries. They explained why no stable elements beyond uranium existed naturally. And she was the first to see that Einstein’s E = mc2 explained the source of the tremendous releases of energy in atomic decay, by the conversion of the mass into energy.

The aunt and nephew coined the term “nuclear fission” when they published “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction” in the journal Nature on Feb. 11, 1939. Instrumental as they were in the discovery (.pdf), they were still overlooked when it came to awarding the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It was Hahn alone who received the prize.

Meitner’s realization that nuclear fission made possible a chain reaction of huge explosive power had meanwhile galvanized members of the scientific community to act. Knowing German scientists had the knowledge, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner convinced Albert Einstein to use his celebrity and warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The result was the Manhattan Project.

Meitner was invited to work on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos, but categorically declined: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.”

Refusing to move back to Germany, even when it was safe for her to do so, she worked in Stockholm doing research into her late 80s. She conducted atomic research, including work on R1, Sweden’s first nuclear reactor.

Meitner received many awards later in her lifetime. Element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honor, and her picture appeared on an Austrian stamp. She received many honorary doctorates and lectured at Princeton, Harvard and other U.S. universities. In 1946, she was named “Woman of the Year” by the National Press Club at a dinner with President Harry Truman.

The German Physics Society gave her the Max Planck Medal in 1949. Hahn, Meitner and Fritz Strassmann won the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966.

Meitner died in 1968, a few weeks shy of her 90th birthday. She had mixed feelings about being associated with work that led to the A-bomb, so perhaps the fact that her role in discovering nuclear fission was not widely known is a kind of blessing.