Familiar examples of women whose contributions are not always given their due include Rosalind Franklin and, more recently, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The former's role was famously largely omitted from the account of the discovery of the double helix of DNA in James Watson's notorious book The Double Helix; the latter was overlooked when the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize for the discovery of pulsars to her PhD supervisor Anthony Hewish and group head Martin Ryle.
It remains the case that women in science do not always feature very largely in people's view of the history of science – nor even necessarily of active scientists in the current day. Quite apart from any inherent unfairness in this treatment, the absence of women role models matters when it comes to inspiring the next generation of young female scientists. A lack of visible precedents makes it harder for girls at school to imagine themselves as the scientists of the future. There may have been relatively few female scientists until the 20th century, but in the more recent past there have been many women who remain relatively unknown yet who still made significant contributions to science that deserve recognition and commemoration.
One place that anyone looking for information about such past heroines is likely to turn to is Wikipedia. It does indeed have many articles about women scientists but some of these are incomplete, while there are still many other women scientists without even a "stub" of an entry. In October 2012 Wikipedia UK and the Royal Society held a group "Edit-a-thon" to help improve Wikipedia's coverage of women scientists. The success of that event made one of us (Frank Norman) think he'd like to do something similar. When the Medical Research Council (MRC) had the idea of putting on a series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons as part of its centenary celebrations he readily agreed to host the first one at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR).
The aims of these edit-a-thons are twofold: both to train up new (and female) Wikipedia editors – who can then continue to write entries thereafter – and to work on entries for female scientists. Additionally, the sessions of training and writing are complemented by a panel discussion. When a co-writer of this piece (Athene Donald) was invited to lead the panel discussion at this first event, she enthusiastically accepted. Getting discussions going about why women still remain relatively invisible has to be important if we are ever going to make progress on this front.
Thursday's inaugural event in this series is particularly timely because the date has been chosen to coincide with Rosalind Franklin's birthday. Franklin's initial invisibility has by now been largely overcome and the story of how her crucial x-ray diffraction photograph was shown to Crick and Watson by her laboratory boss (Maurice Wilkins) is well known. Maybe it would have been better known sooner if her life had not been cut tragically short by cancer before the award of the Nobel prize to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.
Writing biography for Wikipedia is not like writing other biography. Wikipedia is not the place to tell an original story about someone's life, but rather to collate the stories that others have already told. Hence, Wikipedia articles must be based on published sources not on archive material. This means that there are some stories that cannot yet be told in Wikipedia – the story of NIMR's first female head technician; the story of a much admired female statistician; the story of a physiologist fascinated by the Arctic peoples. All these will have to wait until articles or a book about their life and work have been published.
Meanwhile there are plenty of stories that we can tell. Here are a few examples of notable women scientists who worked at NIMR and for whom published material exists that will be made available at the edit-a-thon.
Florence Durham (1869-1949) was involved with establishing biological standards for neosalvarsan, an early treatment for syphilis, and conducted a nine-year investigation of the genetics of mice that suggested parental alcoholism was not an inheritable trait.
Janet Niven (1902-1974) was involved in the development of scrub typhus vaccine. She used ultrastructural studies to understand the host response to microbial and virus infections and also worked on the development of fluorescence microscopy to study nucleic acids.
Hilda Bruce (1903-1974) worked on vitamin D and formulated specialised diets for laboratory animals. Later she studied sexual behaviour in rodents and what is now called the Bruce effect: the termination of pregnancy following exposure to the scent of an unfamiliar male.
Rosalind Pitt-Rivers (1907-1990) discovered one of the thyroid hormones, utilising the then-new techniques of paper chromatography and radioactive labelling. She studied how it is synthesised, its metabolism and biological activity, the structure of thyroglobulin and its formation in the thyroid gland, and the preparation and use of immunochemical reagents.
Brigid Balfour (1914-1994) studied cellular morphology and ultrastructure in relation to immune function. She pushed forward the study of dendritic cells, realising that they were derived from Langerhans cells and played an important role in initiating and promoting immune reactions.
Audrey Smith (1915-1981) discovered the cryoprotective effects of glycerol and pioneered techniques for the freezing of sperm, blood, bone marrow, corneas and other tissues. She is also remembered for a classic monograph "The Biological Effects of Freezing and Supercooling".
Ita Askonas (1923-2013) worked in many areas of immunology. Her work on cytotoxic T-cells was crucial in furthering our understanding of the immune response to viruses. She was also renowned as a scientific mentor.
Rosa Beddington (1956-2001) was a developmental biologist and gifted illustrator and writer; another scientist whose career was cut short. She was awarded an FRS in 1999, by which time her ill health meant she was already confined to a wheelchair. Her insights helped our understanding of how anterior-posterior fates were acquired in mammalian embryos.
After today, there will be several more opportunities for interested readers to participate in the remaining edit-a-thons. Readers who want to help improve the visibility of women scientists in this particular way may wish to sign up for one of the further events planned later this year in Cambridge, Harwell, central London and Edinburgh. More information on the whole series can be found on the MRC webpages here. There are many female scientists from the past out there just waiting for their makeover.
Frank Norman manages the Library and Information Service at NIMR and tweets as @franknorman; Athene Donald is professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge and the University's gender equality champion. She tweets as @athenedonald