This week, our episode starts with me in my first month of grad school. I was a young 25, Thrilled to be living in NYC, a place I have dreamed of living my whole life. Still rockin my CA tan. So eager to please. It dripped off of me.
And believe it or not, shy. I had yet to find my voice. Always internally questioning if my input and ideas were worthy of discussion. It would take me a year and a half to find the courage to ask a question in a group larger than 8 people.
Anyways, so here I am, in a crash course in bioinformatics, and I learn for the first time about Rosalind Franklin. The chemist, the woman, who’s foundational work lead to the discovery of the DNA double helix structure.
As a biology student, I have learned 1000 times the story of how Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA. Every textbook shows them as the heroes of molecular biology. I knew that they won a noble prize for it. That they went off to be pioneers and leaders in the field of molecular biology for the rest of their lives. To this day Watson still rules supreme at Cold Spring Harbor.
Yet, In all my biology classes, I had never heard of Rosalind Franklin. I had seen her famous image before, But until this moment, she was never reflected to me as a hero of science.
And it is not lost on me, that I didn’t learn about her in a biology class, I learned about her in graduate school, from a 3rd year PhD candidate, Amanda, teaching me coding.
She recommended me check out Rosalind, a bioinformatics website. It lead me to asking, Who is Rosalind?
It was in this moment that I realized Science has such shadows, places were unsung heroes remain invisible.
Now, flash forward 7 years. I have a PhD in immunology. And I am just beginning to build my career in climate solutions. I am reading everything I can. I learn about the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel laureate. Interestingly, he estimated that the world was going to get warmer due to carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
I also learned about the Irish Scientist, John Tyndall, who is considered the godfather of the greenhouse gas effect.
In all of my reading, In all the publications that are put out about climate change and the history of the science. Do you know the name you never read?
Eunice Foote.
Yeah, who the fuck is Eunice Foote?
I first found out about Eunice, not from my studies, but from a Story on Instagram. From this Fem Science account I follow. Just scrolling one day. Just by happen stance.
And similar to Rosalind Franklin, her work pioneers the field of climate changes science.
She showed Svante and John what to think about.
There is not much out there about her. But to the best of my ability, Here she is. Eunice was born in 1819. She is American. She is considered an amateur scientist.
You know what, no. I really balk at that word amateur. Nobody gets to call her amateur when she wasn’t allowed to get a degree, she had to get men to present her work for her because she wasn’t allowed to speak at scientific conferences,
she couldn’t vote…No.
Darwin too was an amateur, yet that is not how history remembers him.
And in the 1850’s, she demonstrated, that water vapor in the air (what we would call humidity), gets warmer and warmer, from the sun, the more carbon dioxide is mixed in with it.
She said, and I quote “carbon dioxide creates an atmosphere of gas that would give to our earth a high temperature”.
Her work was presented at the 1856 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
She had to get her male colleague, Joseph Henry, to present her findings. Her work was presented 3 years before John Tyndall’s experiments. And 3 years before Svante was even born.
Now, I imagine Eunice to be a fucking badass. She attended the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. Her name is 5th on the list on the declaration of sentiments.
200 years after her birth, in July of 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, did the brave and difficult work of acknowledging Eunice’s contribution to climate science.
This story teases about a woman of
Resilience
A critical thinker
A fighter
May every person learning science hear of her.