Science Wednesday

I watched NOVA last night on PBS. It was a rerun, but a pretty good one: the show recounted the discovery in 1938 of an ancient fish thought to be long extinct, the coelacanth:

Three days before Christmas, 1938, in the South African coastal town of East London, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the young, black-eyed curator of the local natural history museum, got a phone call that would turn her world upside down and ultimately make her name known internationally...

The call Courtenay-Latimer received was from the manager of a local trawler fleet whom she knew, saying he had a load of fish for her to examine for possible museum specimens. Courtenay-Latimer and her assistant took a taxi to the wharf, climbed aboard the 115-foot trawler Nerine, and began picking through a mound of fish, mostly sharks. Noticing a blue fin poking out of the pile, she pushed aside layers of fish and slime and saw what she later described as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen.

Watching this reminded me of the work of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt:

Leavitt was not allowed to pursue her own topics of study, but researched what the head of the observatory assigned. Because of the prejudices of the day, she didn't have the opportunity to use her intellect to the fullest, but a colleague remembered her as "possessing the best mind at the Observatory," and a modern astronomer calls her "the most brilliant woman at Harvard." She worked at the Harvard College Observatory until her death from cancer in 1921.

And this is another reason why I'm attending the March for Women this April 25th: the contributions women continue to make to the sciences are astounding, even as women are forced to overcome traditional male bias in these fields. We ALL benefit from their work.