Lost Women of Science

After Johnny’s death, Klári becomes the keeper of his legacy. It’s an exhausting, full-time commitment that takes her out of the computing world for good. She marries her fourth husband, a physicist, and moves to a Southern California beach town. She resolves to settle down, and starts writing a memoir. We discuss her legacy in computing and beyond, and the current state of gender and programming.

Note: this episode includes content that could be upsetting. We’ll be talking about depression and self-harm.
Access a transcript of the episode here.

In 1909, the Mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees to Washington, D.C. But the iconic blossoms enjoyed each spring along the Tidal Basin are not from those trees. That’s because Flora Patterson, who was the Mycologist in Charge at the USDA, recognized the original saplings were infected, and the shipment was burned on the National Mall. In this episode, assistant producer Hilda Gitchell explores Flora’s lasting impact on the field of mycology, starting with a blight that killed off the American chestnut trees, and how she helped make the USDA’s National Fungus Collection the largest in the world.

Lisa See’s novel Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is inspired by a medical textbook published in 1511 by an eminent female doctor, Tan Yunxian. In this episode, we talk to See about the origin of her novel, and to Lorraine Wilcox, the scholar who translated the original Chinese text, about what the practice of medicine was like for a female doctor during the Ming Dynasty. Tan Yunxian was almost lost to history, but the chronicle of her cases was reprinted by a great nephew and, amazingly, one copy survived through the centuries. Through serendipitous scholarly connections, Wilcox translated it and See used that translation as the inspiration for her novel.

A reminder that our next episode is scheduled to come out next Thursday!

In the meantime, we’ve hit a slight snag—Katie has COVID—but she’s resting up, and we’re doing our best to get that episode to you on time. Stay tuned for updates. We'll be back very soon.

It’s the summer of 1962 and thalidomide has been off the market in Europe for months. But in the U.S., people are only just beginning to find out about the scandal. The Washington Post breaks the story and puts a picture of Frances Kelsey on the front page. She’s the hero who saved American lives. President John F. Kennedy gives her a medal and her image is splashed across newspapers around the country. At the end of the previous year, Merrell, the company that wanted to sell thalidomide in the U.S., had made a half-hearted attempt to contact some of the doctors who had been given millions of thalidomide samples for so-called clinical trials. Just how many pregnant women might have thalidomide in their medicine cabinets?