Gender bias and Ida Noddack.

Discussion of gender as it affects science and other contemporary affairs rightly provokes sensitivities and concerns regarding past and present biases. Naomi Oreskes emphasizes and references these well in comments (“Stepping forward too far?,” Books et al. , 16 May, p. [1094][1]) on an essay of mine on Ida Noddack, a chemist active in the 1920s and 1930s ([1][2]). In 1934, Noddack suggested that nuclear splitting (later termed “nuclear fission”) explained observations reported that year by Enrico Fermi's group that they interpreted as evidence for creation of transuranium elements. Later work by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and others in 1938–39 led to the realization that Noddack had been correct and the Rome group incorrect. Commentators since have sought an explanation for the lack of attention to Noddack's hypothesis between 1934 and 1939. Some have suggested gender as an explanation. In my essay, I dismissed this as unlikely, a point with which Oreskes disagrees. She quotes me as having written, “I find it difficult to believe that a reasonable individual would have been foolish enough to reject or ignore any hypothesis because it emanated from a woman.” Oreskes criticizes correctly the view she quotes; indeed, it would be unreasonable at any time. But I did not write this naive claim to explain the lack of attention to Noddack's hypothesis, and the original context made clear that I was referring to likely reactions from those working in the fields in question. The quotation omits my interspersed qualifying phrase “in nuclear chemistry or physics at the time.” The justifications for my qualification in 1934–39 include the following: the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Irene Joliot-Curie the Nobel prize in 1935; those in the nuclear physics community gave high respect to Lise Meitner; those in the professional community well remembered the work of Marie Curie; neither Meitner nor Joliot-Curie themselves took Noddack's hypothesis seriously; and perhaps most importantly, Walter Nernst had nominated Noddack herself for the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1932 and subsequent years. One could object that the women cited, with the exception of Meitner, had either inherited professional stature or acquired it conjugally so to speak, leading to more respectful reception of their work and hypotheses than other women, lacking these advantages, would have had. But Noddack herself had a conjugal advantage, evidenced by the fact that Nernst had nominated her husband as well as herself for the Nobel prize. Noddack, as well as many other women, encountered great difficulties in finding a satisfactory professional position. But the best explanation of the inattention to Noddack's hypothesis in 1934–39 remains what Gunther Stent has termed “prematurity”: the inability of the scientific community to connect the implications of a claim or hypothesis to contemporary canonical or generally accepted knowledge by a simple series of logical steps ([1][2], [2][3]). (Noddack, an analytic chemist, was unaware of problems perceived by nuclear chemists and physicists in the 1930s regarding nuclear fission.) It was not until 1939 that the work of Meitner, among others, made such a connection of Noddack's hypothesis possible. 1. 1.[↵][4] 1. E. B. Hook 1. E. B. Hook , in Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect, E. B. Hook, Ed. (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 2002), pp. 124-148. 2. 2.[↵][5] 1. G. S. Stent , Sci. Am. 227, 84 (December 1972). Stent defined prematurity as a quality of past discoveries, leading to claims by several critics that this was a form of misleading retroactive historical judgment termed Whiggism. Stent's discussion makes clear, however, that he intended prematurity to apply to claims, hypotheses, proposals, etc., at the time originally proposed, whatever their subsequent fate, i.e., irrespective of whether or not they anticipated or led to a “discovery” later. # Response {#article-title-2} Hook is right that editorial pressures required me to distill his quotation about Ida Noddack and that the Curies—both Marie and Irene—received ample recognition for their scientific work. But the fact remains that gender has consistently affected women in science, including physicists in the 1930s. The most obvious example is the very one that Hook cites: Lise Meitner, who should have shared the Nobel prize with Otto Hahn for her contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission. After all, it was Meitner, not Hahn, who recognized the meaning of the experiments and who, together with her nephew Otto Frisch, developed the first theoretical account of nuclear fission by means of Bohr's liquid drop mode of the atom ([1][6]). Was gender or antisemitism more important in this case? Clearly, both played a role. If Meitner had been a Christian man, she would not have had to flee Nazi Germany, and history would have taken a different course. And what of Herthe Sponer, wife of James Franck and eminent physicist in her own right? Franck easily found work in the United States; Sponer did not. One might suppose that Franck was the better physicist, but historian Margaret Rossiter has documented how the great U.S. physicist Robert Millikan actively intervened to prevent Sponer being hired in America, on the exclusive grounds of gender ([2][7]). What about Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who won a Nobel Prize for work on the structure of the nucleus? Her husband, a chemist of lesser rank, had little trouble finding remunerative work, but she spent most of her career in unpaid positions until she was finally hired in the 1960s at the new University of California at San Diego. My point was not to beat the drums of gender discrimination, but rather to point out that Hook's analysis—and the prematurity theme that drives it—is simplistic and unduly reductionist. Many factors affect the reception of new scientific claims. Gender happens to be one of them. This is not an either/or choice. My point was—and is—that his own prematurity drumbeat in the book has drowned out consideration of other important themes. 1. 1.[↵][8] 1. R. Sime , Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1996). 2. 2.[↵][9] 1. M. Rossiter , Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, MD, 1982). [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1082338 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #ref-2 [4]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1. in text" [5]: #xref-ref-2-1 "View reference 2. in text" [6]: #ref-3 [7]: #ref-4 [8]: #xref-ref-3-1 "View reference 1. in text" [9]: #xref-ref-4-1 "View reference 2. in text"