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The Secret History of The Rape Kit

Pagan Kennedy, author of Inventology, the 2016 book on inventions that bring about social change, and the people behind them, became fascinated by what she describes as a “a piece of technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women.” So, who invented the standardized...

Elements of Marie Curie

When pressed to write a memoir, Marie Curie—two-time Nobel Prize winner and the only person to win for two different fields of science— said that her life could be summed up in three sentences: “I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I...

Just Keeping Swimming

When a senior male scientist claimed the data from sawfish she’d tagged, Jasmin Graham –an early career shark researcher in Florida– felt powerless. It was not one individual’s behavior but the failure of the larger scientific community to take appropriate action was frustrating. Dejected, Graham...

The mRNA Nobelist

One day in 1997, University of Pennsylvania molecular biologist Katalin (Kati) Karikó met a new hire at the photocopier who would change the trajectory of her research forever. At 42, the scientist had made little headway with her big idea that mRNA—the ephemeral molecule that...

Science at Sundance 2023

Illustration by Islenia Mil for Science This year I had a chance two science-related films screened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah — two vastly different films, but both struck a chord. Poacher A gunshot pierces the skull of an adult male elephant, a tusker,...

Queen of Carbon

Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, of Lincoln Laboratory, who has achieved prominence as a solid-state physicist has been appointed Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read a small news item in the Boston Globe on 8 October, 1967. The appointment was...