In celebration of Women’s History Month, we are illuminating the scientific achievements of women. Though their names have been hidden in history books or overshadowed by their male colleagues, women have made key contributions to medicine and biotechnology. 

Read on to learn more about the lives and work of five female scientific pioneers. 

Angelina Fanny Hesse 

1850-1934 

Angelina Fanny Hesse had no formal scientific background, but she made a game-changing contribution to microbiology. She worked in the lab of Robert Koch, who was studying infectious diseases. At the time, bacteriologists were cultivating microorganisms on an assortment of food, from egg whites to meat. Hesse suggested agar as a medium to cultivate microbes in the lab. Today, many microbiologists use agar medium every day, which was only possible through Hesse’s enduring idea. 

Margaret Dayhoff 

1925-1983 

Margaret Dayhoff earned a PhD in quantum chemistry from Columbia University. She later became a professor of physiology and physics at Georgetown University Medical Center. In 1965, she published the Atlas of Protein Sequences and Structure. This book provided a collection of all known protein sequences and is considered the founding text for bioinformatics. Dayhoff died before bioinformatics was recognized as a field, but her methods are vital to the design of many modern databases. 

Esther Lederberg 

1922-2006 

Esther Lederberg’s discoveries were central to the rise of microbial genetics. She earned a master’s degree in genetics from Stanford University. While working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lederberg uncovered lambda phage from cultures of E. coli. This phage, a virus that infects bacteria, contributed to our understanding of how bacterial genes are regulated and exchanged.  

Rita Levi-Montalcini 

1909-2012 

Rita Levi-Montalcini graduated with the highest distinction from the University of Turin, where she studied medicine and surgery. As a Jewish woman living in Fascist Italy, Levi-Montalcini was forbidden from returning to the university, so she built a laboratory in her bedroom. From her research, she created a theory about embryonic nerve cells — that they started to grow, proliferated and then died — which was counter the existing model of the time. This laid the foundation for the modern concept of nerve cell death. She was awarded the 1986 Novel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

Rosalind Franklin 

1920-1958 

Rosalind Franklin earned her undergraduate degree in physical chemistry from Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She built her career working as an x-ray crystallographer in Paris and London. Franklin’s work was instrumental to the discovery that there are two forms of DNA, an A form and a B form. In 1951, Franklin took a photograph that was the first proof of the double helix structure of DNA. 

Through their determination and ingenuity, these trailblazers made discoveries in medicine and biotechnology that are still used today. Interested in learning skills to make tomorrow’s advances to medicine? Learn more about the Computational Biomedicine and Biotechnology MS Program.