Meet Rosalind Franklin and six other overlooked female scientists

70 years ago, humanity learned that our DNA takes the shape of a double helix. The men who published this discovery, James Watson and Francis Crick, became famous overnight and received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1962, together with Maurice Wilkins. But it was Rosalind Franklin, a colleague of Wilkins at a biophysics lab at London's Kings College, who made the discovery first.

Science was a man's world in the 1950s, and Franklin wasn't respected by her colleagues. She did a lot of research on DNA ― research that Watson spied on when he visited King's College. She also took the first clear photo of a DNA strand, which clearly showed the double helix structure. After Wilkins showed Watson, the men published "their" research. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37.

Much of the US, including NASA, was still segregated when Katherine Johnson, a Black, female mathematician, started her job at the agency in 1958 ― and mathematics was a field dominated by men. Johnson's calculations were critical for the success of the Apollo 11 moon mission, and she helped pioneer the use of computers at NASA. It took decades for Johnson to receive the recognition she deserved.

Scientist and women's rights activist Eunice Foote proved the sun's rays are warmest when shining through CO2. Her conclusion that rising CO2-levels would change atmospheric temperature and could affect climate was published in 1857, but remained mostly overlooked. Scientist John Tyndall, who published similar results three years later, was credited with discovering the greenhouse effect.

Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood star in the 1930s and 1940s. She had, however, also been interested in inventions since childhood. Lamarr came up with a radio guidance system for torpedos that used frequency hopping to avoid jamming by the Nazis in WWII. Technology based on this concept led to the development of Wi-Fi and GPS. But for most of her life, Lamarr was only known as a pretty face.

Oil from the chaulmoogra tree was known to alleviate leprosy symptoms, but couldn’t be injected because it didn’t mix with blood. In 1916, African American chemist Alice Ball discovered how to turn it into fatty acids and ethyl esters, making it injectable. She died shortly after and her superior, Arthur Dean, published the process as "Dean's method." Years later it was renamed "Ball's method."

Nuclear fission, the ability to split atoms, is the basis for nuclear energy. The ideas and suggestions of Jewish physicist Lise Meitner set her chemist colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman on the path to discovering nuclear fission. She couldn't continue her work with them because she had to flee Nazi Berlin in 1938. Hahn won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1944. Meitner wasn't mentioned.

In the 1970s Candace Pert found the opiate receptor in the human brain that is responsive to painkillers like morphine and drugs like opium. It was a groundbreaking discovery ― but Pert was only a grad student at Johns Hopkins University when she made it. Her professor Solomon Snyder and two other male researchers received the Lasker Award for basic medical research for the discovery in 1978.

There is even a name for the phenomenon that women who are significantly involved in scientific findings do not get credit for it, with their work often being attributed to male colleagues: The "Matilda effect." It is named after the women's rights activist Matilda J. Gage, who was the first to describe this phenomenon at the end of the 19th century.