Jewish Women in Science: Pioneers Who Changed the World

The Double Outsiders

They were outsiders twice over — as Jews in societies that often excluded them, and as women in fields that told them they did not belong. Yet the Jewish women who broke into science did not merely participate. They transformed entire disciplines, challenged fundamental assumptions about nature, and changed the way we understand everything from the structure of atoms to the code of life itself.

Their stories share common threads: extraordinary talent, ferocious determination, families that valued education, and a willingness to keep working even when the recognition they deserved was denied. These are not footnotes in the history of science. These are central chapters.

Emmy Noether (1882-1935): The Mother of Abstract Algebra

Albert Einstein called her “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” That alone would be enough to earn Emmy Noether a place in history. But the full scope of her contributions is staggering.

Born in Erlangen, Germany, to a family of mathematicians, Noether was not allowed to formally enroll at the University of Erlangen — women could only audit classes. She did so anyway, earned her doctorate in 1907, and then spent years working without pay because German universities refused to hire female professors.

When David Hilbert, one of the world’s leading mathematicians, tried to get her a position at the University of Gottingen, a faculty member objected: “What will our soldiers think when they return from the war and find that they are expected to learn at the feet of a woman?” Hilbert’s response became legendary: “I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.”

Noether’s theorem, published in 1918, proved that every symmetry in physics corresponds to a conservation law. It is one of the most important results in theoretical physics — foundational to everything from quantum mechanics to general relativity. Her work in abstract algebra essentially created the field as we know it today.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Noether was dismissed from her position — she was both Jewish and a social democrat. She emigrated to the United States and taught at Bryn Mawr College until her sudden death from complications of surgery in 1935, at age fifty-two.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958): The Woman Behind DNA

The story of DNA’s discovery is usually told as a tale of two heroes: James Watson and Francis Crick, who built the famous double helix model in 1953. What is less often told — though increasingly recognized — is that their breakthrough depended critically on the work of Rosalind Franklin.

Franklin, born into a prominent Anglo-Jewish family in London, was a brilliant X-ray crystallographer. Working at King’s College London, she produced Photo 51 — an X-ray diffraction image of DNA that clearly revealed its helical structure. When Watson saw this photograph — shown to him by Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins without her knowledge or permission — he immediately recognized its significance.

Watson and Crick used Franklin’s data, along with other information, to build their model. They won the Nobel Prize in 1962 (shared with Wilkins). Franklin could not share it — she had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age thirty-seven, likely caused by her extensive exposure to X-ray radiation. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Franklin’s story has become a touchstone for discussions about women in science and the ways their contributions are overlooked. In recent years, there has been a significant effort to restore her to her rightful place in the history of one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968): The Mother of Nuclear Fission

Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who provided the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission — the splitting of the atom — in 1939. She should have won the Nobel Prize. She did not.

Born in Vienna to a Jewish family (she later converted to Protestantism, though the Nazis considered her Jewish regardless), Meitner became the first woman to earn a physics doctorate from the University of Vienna. She moved to Berlin, where she worked for decades with the chemist Otto Hahn.

In 1938, after the Anschluss (Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria), Meitner fled to Sweden. That same year, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann conducted experiments that produced barium from uranium — a result that baffled them. It was Meitner, working from exile in Sweden, who explained what had happened: the uranium nucleus had split, releasing enormous energy. She coined the term “nuclear fission.”

Hahn won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. Meitner was not included, despite her crucial theoretical contribution. The omission is now widely regarded as one of the greatest injustices in Nobel history. Element 109, meitnerium, was later named in her honor.

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000): Beauty, Brains, and Bluetooth

Hedy Lamarr is remembered as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood history. She should be equally remembered as one of the most inventive.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna to a Jewish family, she became a film star in Europe before fleeing to America to escape both her controlling arms-dealer husband and the Nazi threat. In Hollywood, she became one of the biggest stars of the 1940s.

But Lamarr had a restless, scientific mind. Disturbed by the Nazis’ ability to jam Allied torpedo guidance systems, she and composer George Antheil developed a “frequency-hopping” system — a method of rapidly switching radio signals among multiple frequencies to prevent interception. They patented the technology in 1942 and offered it to the U.S. Navy, which initially dismissed it.

Decades later, the principles behind their patent became foundational to modern wireless communications. Frequency hopping is a core technology in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, three years before her death.

Gertrude Elion (1918-1999): Nobel Laureate, Life Saver

Gertrude Belle Elion grew up in New York City, the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. When her beloved grandfather died of cancer, she decided to devote her life to finding cures for disease. She could not have known that she would eventually develop drugs that would save millions of lives.

Unable to find a research position because she was a woman (she was told repeatedly that a woman in the lab would be “too distracting”), Elion eventually joined Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company, where she partnered with George Hitchings in a revolutionary approach to drug design.

Rather than testing random compounds, Elion and Hitchings studied the biochemical differences between normal cells, cancer cells, and pathogens, then designed drugs to exploit those differences. This approach — rational drug design — produced treatments for leukemia in children (6-mercaptopurine), drugs to prevent organ transplant rejection (azathioprine), treatments for gout, herpes (acyclovir), and, after her official retirement, the first drug effective against HIV/AIDS (AZT was developed by her team).

Elion won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988. She never earned a PhD — she had been too busy saving lives.

The Thread That Connects Them

What links these remarkable women? Each combined extraordinary intellectual ability with persistence in the face of discrimination. Each worked in fields that actively tried to keep them out. And each made contributions so significant that the world could not ignore them — even when it tried.

There is perhaps a Jewish dimension to their stories as well. Judaism’s emphasis on learning, questioning, and tikkun olam — repairing the world — may have helped create families and communities where intellectual ambition in women was encouraged, or at least not crushed. Several of these women came from families that explicitly valued education for daughters.

Their stories are not just stories of individual genius. They are reminders that talent exists everywhere, and that the barriers we place in its way — whether based on religion, gender, or anything else — cost all of us.

“I never thought of stopping, and I just hated sleeping.” — Gertrude Elion

That relentless drive, that refusal to accept limits, runs through all of these stories. It is a very Jewish quality, and a very human one.