Birth Locations – Page 92 – The Exasperated Historian

380) Edith Hahn Beer

380: Edith Hahn Beer

Judge, Shoah Survivor, and Author

Born: 24 January 1914, Vienna, Austria

Died: 17 March 2009, London, United Kingdom

Edith’s autobiography is entitled The Nazi Officer’s Wife because she was in fact, just that.

She finished her schooling to become an attorney in Austria but before she could sit for her exams in Germany the Anschluss stopped her and all other Jews from moving into learned professions or attaining higher educations.

Edith spent thirteen months in a ghetto and forced labor camp. Her sisters would escape the horror of the genocide by immigrating to then-Palestine, but her mother and at least a dozen other family members would perish.

After her release she received papers from her friend Christine which helped her escape into Germany where she began work as a seamstress and Red Cross Nurse—marrying the Nazi Officer Werner Vetter.

Before you can even ask, yes, Werner knew she was Jewish. They married after Edith told him the truth (she tried to get him to leave her alone, but he was madly in love with her. Even telling him she was Jewish wouldn’t deter the guy!). When Edith announced she was Jewish, Werner replied he was getting a divorce and had a child with his soon-to-be-former-wife. They never mentioned her Jewish heritage again.

The couple had one daughter and Edith even fought for his release from an SS prison after war’s end; however, the marriage fell apart. Edith worked during this time as a family law judge in Brandenburg, East Germany. After their divorce (partially because Werner couldn’t stand having a professional wife while he was an outcast and former Nazi), Werner returned to his first wife.

In 1948 she moved to England after being asked to become a Stasi spy (she didn’t take the Stasi—the German equivalent of the KGB--up on their offer).

She remarried in 1957.

Edith lived in Israel for a few years before returning to England after other Shoah survivors treated her with contempt for how she survived.

To listen to an oral interview of her life story, I have linked it below and here.

Her autobiography was developed into a documentary in 2003.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Located In My Personal Library:

The Nazi Officer’s Wife by Edith Hahn Beer

Sources:

https://www.thejc.com/obituary-edith-hahn-beer-1.9141

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35103714/edith-hahn_beer

Oral Interview:

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506448

379) Tessy Thomas

"Gender Does Not Matter. You work as a scientist, not as a woman."

379: Tessy Thomas

Missile Engineer

Born: April 1963, Alappuzha, India

Tessy is the Director General of Aeronautical Systems and the former Project Director for Agni-IV and Agni-V in Missile Defense Research and Development Organization (India).

She is the first female scientist to head missile projects in India; giving her the nickname Missile Woman.

In order to be fully transparent, I feel I should include an article from 2018 stating Tessy helped cover up a claim of sexual misconduct concerning her employees. In the Economic Times of India article (linked below), a female staffer reportedly claimed she was being sexually harassed by a male coworker, and Tessy made it all go away.

Sources:

http://nobelprizeseries.in/tbis/tessy-thomas

https://www.drdo.gov.in/dr-ms-tessy-thomas

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/missile-woman-tessy-thomas-hushed-up-sexual-harassment-probe-former-drdo-staffer/articleshow/49264411.cms

378) Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

378: Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Virologist

Born: 30 July 1947, Paris, France

Françoise won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 (she shared it with three others). The citation for the award reads, “For their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus,” otherwise known as HIV.

That’s right, Françoise and her co-worker discovered HIV (in 1983). They were also the first to document HIV and how the progression of the disease, when left untreated, becomes AIDS.

She earned her PhD in 1974.

Her pioneering work on HIV has been carried on in many developing countries.

Françoise works as the Emeritus Professor at the Institut Pasteur and Emeritus Director of Research at the Inserm. She also heads the Regulation of Retroviral Infection Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.

Since July of 2012 she has served as the President of the International AIDS Society.

Badges Earned:

Located In My Personal Library:

Time Magazine's 100 Women of the Year (Francoise appears in the 1983 article, "Francoise Barre-Sinoussi”)

Sources:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2008/barre-sinoussi/facts/

https://www.pasteur.fr/en/institut-pasteur/history/francoise-barre-sinoussi-born-1947

377) Linda B Buck

377: Linda B. Buck

Physiologist and Neurobiologist

Born: 29 January 1947, Seattle, Washington, United States of America

Linda was the receiver of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2004.

She received her PhD in immunology in 1980.

Linda and her co-worker discovered how hundreds of genes in our DNA code for the odorant sensors located in the human olfactory system. It was this work that allowed for her and her coworker to win the Nobel Prize.

Sources:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2004/buck/biographical/

https://www.achievement.org/achiever/linda-buck/

376) Shirley Ann Jackson

376: Shirley Ann Jackson

Pioneering Physicist

Born: 5 August 1946, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America

Shirley was the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from MIT (in Physics). She was also the second African American woman overall to receive a Physics PhD in the United States.

Her research laid the groundwork for others to invent fiber optic cables, portable fax, touch tone telephone, and the technology behind caller ID and call waiting.

Shirley has worked on many boards of famous companies, including: IBM, FedEx, Marathon Oil, the Smithsonian Institution, and many more.

In 1995, Shirley was appointed Chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission by then-President Bill Clinton. She was the first African American woman to serve on the commission, and also the first woman and first African American to run it.

She was also the first African American woman to be elected president and later chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the first African American woman to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Shirley also serves as the President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (unsurprisingly, as the first African American woman to do so). She began her work as President there in 1999.

She is married to a fellow physicist and has one son.

Badges Earned:

Located In My Personal Library:

The Book of Awesome Women: Boundary Breakers, Freedom Fighters, Sheroes, and Female Firsts by Becca Anderson

Sources:

https://www.aps.org/careers/physicists/profiles/sjackson.cfm

https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/shirley-ann-jackson/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jackson-shirley-ann-1946/

375) Ada Yonath

375: Ada Yonath

Biologist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009

Born: 22 June 1939, Geula, Jerusalem, Britain Mandate of Palestine (Present-day Israel)

Ada received her PhD in 1968.

Her work has largely been with ribosomes; beginning in the 1970’s, her hard work became a reality in 2000 with the successful mapping of the structure of a ribosome for the first time.

Her Nobel Prize Citation reads, “For studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”

Ada was also instrumental in the development of cryocrystallography.

She has one daughter.

Sources:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2009/yonath/facts/

https://www.weizmann.ac.il/YonathNobel/

374) Edith M Flanigen

Courtesy of National Science and Technology Medals

374: Edith M. Flanigen

Chemist Who Invented Molecular Sieve Zeolites

Born: 28 January 1929, Buffalo, New York, United States of America

Zeolites are used in everything from converting crude oil into gasoline and producing oxygen for portable medical oxygen units to cleaning up nuclear waste and even in laundry detergents.

Edith started her chemistry career in the early 1950’s working at Union Carbide.

She holds over 100 patents.

Edith earned her bachelor’s degree from Syracuse in 1952.

In 1973 she became the first Corporate Research Fellow at Union Carbide and in 1982 a Senior Research Fellow.

She is the first woman to receive the Perkin Medal and was the recipient of the 2004 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sources:

https://lemelson.mit.edu/winners/edith-flanigen-0

https://www.honeywell.com/en-us/newsroom/news/2019/03/this-chemist-has-109-patents

373) Mary Leakey

373: Mary Leakey

Paleoanthropologist and Archaeologist

Born: 6 February 1913, London, United Kingdom

Died: 9 December 1996, Nairobi, Kenya

Mary was noted for her ability to create beautiful scientific illustrations, and it was this skill that first led to her being in the field.

She and her husband worked together for over thirty years studying prehistoric sites in Kenya and other East-African countries. Mary’s skill lay in the excavations themselves, while Louis (her husband) was good at publicizing their finds. They had three sons together.

Mary discovered the first proconsul skull (dating to around twenty-five million years ago) leading to great strides in the study of human evolution.

In 1978, Mary discovered 3.5-million-year-old hominid footprints that had been fossilized in ash—a discovery that pushed back the date of when science believed human ancestors began to walk upright.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Located In My Personal Library:

The Book of Awesome Women: Boundary Breakers, Freedom Fighters, Sheroes, and Female Firsts by Becca Anderson

Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs: 100 Discoveries That Changed the World edited by Ann R Williams

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Douglas-Leakey

http://www.leakey.com/bios/mary-leakey

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12200118/mary-douglas-leakey

372) Anna J Harrison

372: Anna J Harrison

Chemist and the First Woman Elected President of the American Chemical Society

Born: 23 December 1912, Benton City, Missouri, United States of America

Died: 8 August 1998, Holyoke, Massachusetts, United States of America

Anna was a professor of chemistry at Mount Holyoke College for over thirty years.

As a child, she was tasked by her teacher to go home and ask her parents all about caterpillars—her father being a farmer taught her all about Caterpillar tractors instead. Soon after, Anna’s father died when she was only seven years old. Her mother continued to run the family farm for the next forty years, showing Anna strength in the face of adversity and what it meant to be a career driven woman.

In 1940, Anna earned her PhD in physical chemistry. After retiring from Mount Holyoke, she served as the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1983 to 1984.

She was known more for her teaching ability than her research and is remembered as a gifted teacher who helped make complicated things easy to understand.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Jane-Harrison

https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/anna-jane-harrison

371) Janaki Ammal

371: Janaki Ammal

Botanist

Born: 4 November 1897, Tellichery (Present-day Thalassery), India

Died: 7 February 1984, Maduravoyal, Chennai, India

Born Name: Edavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal

Janaki earned her Doctor of Science degree in botany in 1931, becoming the first Indian woman to earn a PhD in botany.

She was the first “oriental” (the University News’s terminology not mine) barbour fellow at the University of Michigan.

In 1934 she became a geneticist at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute where her work helped transform India’s sugar to the multi-million-dollar business it is today; transforming Indian sugar from a less than appetizing variety to some of the sweetest sugar in the world.

From 1939 to 1951, Janaki worked in England, partly because her work was better served there, and partly because she was being ignored in her native India for being both a woman and a person from a less than suitable caste.

In 1951 she was tasked by the Prime Minister of India to reorganize the Botanical Survey of India.

Beyond her scientific work, Janaki was also a fierce environmentalist.

Janaki passed away while still working in her lab.

She is honored today with a variety of Magnolia that was named in her honor.

Sources:

https://www.thebetterindia.com/75174/janaki-ammal-botanist-sugarcane-magnolia/

https://info.umkc.edu/unews/celebrating-women-in-stem-dr-janaki-ammal/