Rachel Carson, Marine Biologist and Ecologist

Written by Elisabeth Pendergrass

Born: May 27, 1907, Springdale, Pennsylvania
Died: April 14, 1964, Silver Spring Maryland

S.T.E.A.M. Powers

• Marine Biologist
• Ecologist -Writer -Activist
• Mother of the Environmental Movement 

Her Story...

“Human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some irreversibly.” 

Often times, human beings forget that every single action we do has an effect on the world around us. Sometimes that effect is minimal and goes unnoticed, but sometimes those minimal actions build up over time and cause harm.. Rachel Carson was one of the women on the forefront of this notion. She fought for awareness and change in chemical regulations and government practices.

Rachel Carson was a woman with ideas that were far beyond her time . She was an empowered woman whose love for writing and science allowed her to bring awareness to the harmful effects of chemicals in the environment. Not only did she become an advocate for better government practices, she also wrote about the ocean and the magic it holds in such a lyrical and enthralling way.

Rachel Carson conducts research off the Florida Atlantic Coast with Bob Hines, 1952.
Image via U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

And So It Begins…
Rachel Carson was born on May 27 in 1907 on a farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania. At a very young age, her mother supported and pushed her to pursue her love for nature and writing. She was originally published in fourth grade, but her accomplishments were just beginning.

Although women were going to college during this period, it was not exactly a common occurrence. The fact that Rachel Carson attended and graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women in 1929 is a great feat. In between undergraduate school and graduate school, she worked at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab. She was awarded a full time scholarship to get her master’s at John Hopkin’s University in 1932 where she studied Marine Zoology. Regardless of the fact that her education focused on the sciences, Rachel’s love and talent for writing never subsided.

Headlines like this one in the New York Times in 1962 showed Carson's warnings were being taken seriously.
Image via Environment & Society Portal.

She is most well known as a writer for her published works like “The Sea Around Us” published in 1952 and “The Edge of the Sea” (c. 1955). Before these books were released, she was the Editor-in-Chief for the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, but became a full time writer in 1952. She took her talents and loves and combined them to express science, the ocean, and its’ wonders in a lyrical, spiritual and emotional way.

Rachel Carson is a role model; I strive to have her courage and strength. In 1962, she wrote “Silent Spring” challenging the government to change their practices with chemical pesticides. She lived through World War II and was concerned for the health of society due to the massive misuse of chemicals throughout the war. She was often attacked by the chemical companies or disregarded due to her “alarmist” thoughts, but she held her ground. She stood up for what she believed in and brought human awareness to the fact that we are a key factor in a delicate system.

All rights reserved © 1963 Charles Schulz

But All Good Things Must Come to an End
Even during her long fight with breast cancer, she was continuously fighting to bring awareness to the issues of humanity’s effect on the environment. In the end, her hard work began to pay off. Her research, and support from the Science Advisory Committee, lead to state legislature for proper pesticide control and practices. Rachel Carson died on April 14th in 1964, but she continues to live on today in her pledge and in her words.

"I pledge myself to preserve and protect America's fertile soils, her mighty forests and rivers, her wildlife and minerals, for on these her greatness was established and her strength depends." ~Rachel Carson, 1946

In April 2014, Google honored Rachel Carson with her own logo for a day.

Learn More

Online:

• The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
• Rachel Carson Council, Inc.
• From Calm Leadership, Lasting Change (New York Times)
• Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a Book That Changed the World (Virtual exhibition)
• How Rachel Carson Helped Save the Brown Pelican (National Wildlife Federation)

Books by Rachel Carson:

• Under the Sea-Wind, 1941
• The Sea Around Us, 1951
• The Edge of the Sea, 1955
• Silent Spring, 1962
• The Sense of Wonder, 1998 (posthumous publication)

Books About Rachel Carson:

See additional recommended titles here.

• Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature (Linda Lear, 1997)
• On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (William Souder, 2012)
• Girls Who Looked Under Rocks (Atkins/Conner, 2012) - Excellent for young readers

Mary Putnam Jacobi, Physician and Writer

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, via Library of Congress

Written by Jill M. Staake

Born: August 31, 1842, London
Died: June 10, 1906, New York

S.T.E.A.M. Powers

• First female student at the École de Médecine, University of Paris
• Organized the Women's Medical Association of New York City
• Published fiction along with important medical studies and women's suffrage writings

Her Story

In August 2015, Senator Elizabeth Warren stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate to make an impassioned speech in defense of the organization Planned Parenthood. One passage caught the country's attention particularly:“Do you have any idea what year it is?” she demanded scathingly. “Did you fall down, hit your head and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s? Should we call for a doctor?”

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who had died more than 100 years earlier, would doubtless have cheered Warren's speech. Dr. Jacobi certainly would have been thrilled to see a female senator in a position to defend women's health care rights, since she herself spent her later years devoted to demanding the right for women to vote and participate in the political process. But she would have most likely been disappointed to realize that, more than a century later, women's health remained a subject about which so many are still so uninformed. Senator Warren was facing a room of men with the same ignorant ideology that Dr. Jacobi had faced her entire career. But like Senator Warren, Dr. Jacobi was determined to make her voice, and her scientific knowledge, heard.

Literature First
Born in 1842 in London, Mary (called Minnie by her family) Putnam moved with her family back to their home, New York City, when she was quite young. Mary's father, George, was a publisher, founding the company which is known today as G. P. Putnam & Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing. Mary was first educated mainly at home by her mother, whose primary interest was in instilling a love of great literature in her daughter. Mary began writing at a young age, and by the age of 16 had written a piece of short fiction, Found and Lost, which her father considered good enough to be published. She received $80 for the piece when it was published in Atlantic Monthly in 1860.

Mary enjoyed writing, but had a much greater curiosity about the world around her. After spending two years at a new public school for girls and graduating in 1859, she began to study Greek and science with private tutors. But perhaps the most important part of her early education came from time spent studying medicine with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who just ten years earlier was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Mary Putnam as a medical student
The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University, photograph by Bogardus

Liberté, Égalité, and Medical Studies
Medicine and its study became the driving force in Mary's life. She served as a medical aide during the Civil War, and received degrees from the New York College of Pharmacy and the Female (later "Women's") Medical College of Pennsylvania. After a short time of practicing medicine, Dr. Putnam (as she was now entitled to be called) decided she needed more study to be truly effective. She headed to Paris in 1866 to request admittance at the École de Médecine of the University of Paris.

Women in medicine were no more common in France than in the U.S. at the time, and the men of the profession seemed unsure of how to treat her. When Mary asked to be admitted to a dissection room, the professor agreed - if she would dress in men's clothing. Mary, of course, found this to be ridiculous. She refused, and was allowed to attend dressed as she saw fit. The professor was impressed with her, and later supported her application to the École de Médecine itself, making her the first woman admitted. (She would later become the second woman to graduate.)

The Question of Rest
Mary returned from Paris and took an especial interest in the Women's Medical College where she had studied. Mary and others felt standards there were not as high as they should be, and she joined in the effort to make the school a respected place of learning for women interested in medicine. Dr. Emily Blackwell later said:

It was at the time of the greatest difficulty and discouragement for women students and practitioners...It was at this opportune moment that Dr Putnam arrived... She brought as her contribution to the new work an enthusiastic love of the scientific side of medicine and a high standard of medical education...To many of the women students flocking to New York she was an inspiration, and not a few of them owed to her their first conception of the breadth and serious importance of the great field of medicine to which they were seeking entrance...She was an unsparing and outspoken critic of shallow knowledge, slip shod methods, and hollow pretence in any shape.

A reprint of Dr. Clarke's study
Read the full study here.

But as Dr. Putnam was working to win respect for women seeking education in fields like medicine, others were continuing to insist women simply weren't capable of higher education at all. In 1873, Dr. Edward H. Clarke of Harvard published Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Despite the title, there was nothing "fair" about Clarke's conclusions. He claimed that women who didn't rest during menstruation would damage their reproductive organs. Therefore, he argued, women were unable to compete in higher education and professional careers without doing themselves harm.

Mary, who by now had married pioneering pediatrician Dr. Abraham Jacobi, knew these claims were hogwash. What's more, she set about proving Dr. Clarke wrong, using the best scientific and research methods available to her at the time. She spent more than a year producing a 200-page study, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation, published in 1876. The National Library of Medicine website notes, "Dr. Jacobi provided tables, statistics, and sphygmographic tracings of pulse rate, force, and variations to illustrate the stability of a woman's health, strength, and agility throughout her monthly cycle. Both her paper and her example offered irrefutable proof of the accuracy of her position." Her work won her respect from her peers - and the Boylston Prize from Harvard University.

Jacobi's work; full text available here

Votes for Women
Throughout her busy and varied medical career, Mary remained interested in the betterment of society in general, giving lectures to working women and helping them organize the Working Women's Society. In 1894, that general interest turned to a specific passion for a woman's right to vote, eventually leading to the publishing of another major work, Common Sense Applied to Woman Suffrage. Once again, she applied research and hard facts to make her case. She examined the 15th Amendment in detail and traced the history of women's education, legal status, and marital rights. She concluded toward the end of the book:

The extreme ignorance of the subject shown in the written protests... are natural to the inexperience of people who begin to talk volubly about what they themselves profess to have hardly ever thought. The gist of the opposition lies chiefly in the dread of innovation... an instinct intensified, moreover, by innumerable forces of tradition, training, and environment. Opposition to what is new, necessarily subsides so soon as the new has become the customary... Let the women try their hand! (Common Sense Applied to Woman Suffrage, p. 192)

Mary used more refined words than Senator Elizabeth Warren did over a century later, but the basic ideas remain the same. Let women decide what is best for women - and learn the facts before you open your mouth to speak.

What She Won, She Won Fairly
Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi displayed a true interest in exploring and understanding the world around her throughout her entire life, and that quality was to carry her along right to the end of her years. She died in 1906 of a brain tumor, but rather than spending her final days lamenting her time cut short, she instead continued her work. Her final publication was titled Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum. From Which the Writer Died. Written by Herself.

Her eulogy to herself might have been cold and clinical in nature, but those speaking at her memorial, held in early 1907, were much more eloquent. They spoke of her own education and determination to allow other women the same and better opportunities. They praised her scientific mind and open heart. A fellowship was already planned in her name to continue the fine work she had begun. Dr. Charles L. Dana, one of her colleagues, explained how she had earned respect for herself and for all deserving women in the future:

[I]t was her character and the influence upon the community of such a woman following the profession of medicine that will constitute her greatest memorial. Dr Jacobi was a woman with talents almost amounting to genius, joined to the highest ideals in the practice of her art and in the conduct of life. Therefore that such a woman became a doctor, ennobled the calling and made it an easier and more dignified thing for women later to follow it. This is what we medical men all felt about her, irrespective of her specific scientific accomplishments.

We all liked Dr Jacobi very much as a woman and as a woman physician She had no pettiness or jealousies that we could ever discover. I never heard her speak harshly of any one and I never heard any one speak harshly of her. What she won she won fairly and because her talents commanded it and we recognized it.

Learn More:

• Dr. Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, Changing the Face of Medicine
• In Memory of Mary Putnam Jacobi
• Mary Putnam Jacobi, Women Working 1800 - 1930, Harvard University Open Collections
• Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi (Ruth Putnam, ed.)

Elizabeth Britton, Bryologist

Written by Kristen Gilpin

Born: 1858
Died: 1934

S.T.E.A.M. Powers:

• Botanist
• Bryologist (Study of mosses)
• Preservation of native North American Wildflowers
• Co-Founded the New York Botanical Garden
• Listed as one of the top 1000 scientists, and was one of only 19 women listed in the publication "American Men of Science"
• Honorary Curator of Mosses at the New York Botanical Garden

Her Story...

Elizabeth Gertrude Knight was born in 1858 to James and Sophie Anne Knight in New York City. As a child, she spent her time between New York City and her family's sugar plantation and furniture factory in Matanzas, Cuba. Elizabeth graduated from Normal (later Hunter) College at the Early age of just 17 and then joined the staff of the college as a critic teacher and tutor.

In 1879 Elizabeth joined the Torrey Botanical Society which studied the flora of New York City and it's surrounding lands. As a member, she began publishing papers in the Society's Bulletin. By 1883, she was a known bryologist, a scientist specializing in mosses. During these years with the Torrey Botanical society, Elizabeth met and later married Nathaniel Lord Britton, a fellow botanist and taxonomist.

Nathaniel Lord Britton was a professor of Geology at Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York City. Elizabeth became acquainted with the Botany department and was soon given charge of the department's collection of mosses. Through physically collecting mosses and purchasing collections from other bryologists, Elizabeth was able to establish an impressive collection.

Working together, the Brittons helped to gather support for an lead the charge on the creation of the New York Botanical Garden, of which Nathaniel served as the first director. Elizabeth was presented with the title Honorary Curator of Mosses and oversaw the move of the botanical collection of Columbia College to the New York Botanical Garden, including the mosses she had been carefully collecting.

In addition to the study of mosses, Elizabeth Britton was also a devotee of native plants and helped to found the Wild Flower Preservation Society of America. This society was one of the first of its kind, working to preserve endangered wildflowers. She was also one of the founders and later president ofthe Sullivent Moss society, which later became the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, which is still active today.

In their later years, the couple was studying the flora of Puerto Rico. Both Elizabeth and Nathaniel died in 1934, within months of each other and the pair were interred at the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, Staten. The moss genus Bryobrittonia was named in honor of the "Mother of American Bryology", as were 15 other species.

Photo credit: Lisa Vargues via the Plant Talk Blog

Publications

Elizabeth Britton published 346 papers and articles, and 170 of those were about her favored topic, mosses. The standard botanical author abbreviation for her words is "E. Britton"

• West Indian Mosses
• Contributions to American Bryology
• American Fossil Mosses, with Description of a New Species from Florissant, Colorado

Vintage postcard showing the greenhouse at the
New York Botanical Garden

Learn More:

• Her collected papers can be viewed at the New York Botanical Garden Mertz Library
• American Bryological and Lichenological Society

Alice Ball, Chemist

Written by Jill M. Staake

Alice Augusta Ball, 1915

Born: July 24, 1892, Seattle, Washington
Died: December 31, 1916, Seattle, Washington

S.T.E.A.M. Powers

• Developed the chemistry behind the first modern treatment for leprosy
• First woman and African-American to receive a Master's Degree from the University of Hawaii

Her Story

You've most likely heard of leprosy, the chronic infection also called Hansen's Disease that causes skin lesions and more. You've probably even heard of Moloka'i, the Hawaiian island where lepers were isolated to die a miserable death. But chances are good you've never heard of chaulmoogra oil, and chances are even better you didn't know that a woman named Alice Ball was responsible for the chemistry involved in making this oil the first effective treatment for leprosy,

A Born Chemist
Alice Ball was born in 1892, into a family in which chemistry already had its importance. Her father and particularly her grandfather (James Bell, Sr.) were photographers, and young Alice likely spent time in their darkrooms watching as chemical baths brought forth pictures seemingly from nowhere. It was probably no surprise to her family when 18-year-old Alice graduated Seattle High School with high grades in the sciences, and chose to attend the University of Washington to study chemistry. By the time she graduated four years later, Alice had Bachelor's Degrees in both pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy. With scholarship offers from both UC Berkeley and the University of Hawaii, Alice chose to continue her studies in Honolulu.

Hawaii wasn't entirely new for Alice. She and her family had lived there for a year when she was younger, in the hopes of helping her grandfather's painful rheumatoid arthritis. He died only a year later, though, and the family returned to Washington. Alice must have remembered that year in Hawaii with affection, and now embarked on her continuing education there. While receiving her Master's Degree in chemistry, she was also quietly breaking down barriers - she became the first woman and and the first African-American to receive this advanced degree from the University of Hawaii.

While working on her Master's thesis about the "Chemical Constituents of Piper Methysticum" (kava), Alice received a request from Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, an assistant surgeon at Kalihi Hospital in Hawaii. Hollmann was working with chaulmoogra oil, long used as a traditional remedy for treating leprosy in China and India. Although it showed some promise, there were many barriers to making this treatment practical, and Hollman hoped Alice could help him figure out the chemistry involved.

Leprosy sufferers in Hawaii. Photo via NPS Archives.

Hope For The Hopeless
Leprosy and Hawaii might seem like an odd mix, but Hawaii was just one of many places at the time that mandated that infected persons be isolated from the rest of the population. Though it might not seem like a hardship to be left marooned on a Hawaiian island, the leper colony at Kalaupapa was no paradise. The spit of land was surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean, and divided from the rest of the island by towering and impenetrable cliffs. Infected people were left there to die, and for many years they had no shelters other than what they could build themselves, and food provided every week or so by boat from the mainland. It was a miserable existence for people already suffering from a miserable disease, and it was widely accepted that colonies like these were not an acceptable way of treating the ill.

Hydnocarpus wrightianus
Photo by Anoopmail via Wikipedia

So doctors were excited to learn of chaulmoogra oil, which came from the nut of the Hydnocarpus wightianus tree and seemed to have real potential for helping relieve the suffering of those with leprosy. The problem was, they had no good way to administer the oil effectively. Applying it topically didn't seem to do much good. Giving it by mouth general resulted in intense nausea and burning in the stomach. And injecting it under the skin only created large abscesses. The oils were so dense that they were unable to mix with the water in the body, and instead merely stayed under the surface, often causing the patient more pain rather than helping.

Dr. Hollman knew if he could find a way to make the injectable version more water-soluble, chaulmoogra oil had real potential to help patients. Other chemists had tried, to no avail. So Alice set to work, attempting to isolate the ethyl esters of the fatty acids in the oil. At age 23, Alice developed the "Ball Method", which would allow chaulmoogra oil to be injected and absorbed by the body. In the following years, pharmaceutical companies processed using the Ball Method and created excellent injectable medications that returned many leprosy patience to such good health they were allowed to leave their isolation colonies and return home to their families.

It was an astounding achievement, for a chemist of any gender or race - but as often happened to female scientists, it was to be many years before her contributions would be acknowledged.

A Life Cut Short

Medical professionals prepare
chaulmoogra oil for injection in 1928
LeprosyHistory.org

By 1916, Alice was beginning to show signs of illness. Eventually, these were severe enough that she resigned her position at the University of Hawaii (where she had become the first African-American chemistry professor), and returned to Seattle. History seems uncertain what illness ailed her; her death certificate lists "tuberculosis", but oddly, it was altered. A newspaper at the time indicated she might have accidentally inhaled chlorine gas while performing experiments in her classroom, which could also have led to her death. No matter the cause, a very promising young scientist was dead at age 24.

This tragedy was compounded by the way her research was treated after her death. Her mentor, University of Hawaii President Dr. Arthur Lyman Dean, published her research under his own name, even calling the process Alice invented the "Dean Method". It was 90 years before Alice's work was recognized. In 2000, the University of Hawaii placed a plaque to honor her on the school's chaulmoogra tree, and her contributions were finally brought to the attention of the wider world.

Today, leprosy is curable with a regular drug regimen, and leper colonies are no longer in use in most of the world. We also know that leprosy isn't nearly as contagious as once feared, though in some parts of the world it continues to pose a problem. In remote areas where drugs aren't readily available, some doctors still use the Ball Method to prepare chaulmoogra oil to help their leprosy patients. The work of a brilliant young chemist, cut short in her prime, still has the ability to improve lives one hundred years later - a legacy worth admiring.

Learn More:

• Meet Alice Ball - Women Rock Science
• Alice Ball - ChemHistory (PDF)
• Leprosy - Wikipedia
• Chaulmoogra Oil and the Treatment of Leprosy