This page aims to list inventions and discoveries in which women played a major role.
Medicine Pharmaceuticals Aciclovir Gertrude B. Elion contributed to the development of aciclovir, an antiviral drug used for the treatment of herpes simplex virus infections, chickenpox, and shingles.
Artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, both now standard treatments for malaria. Artemisinin is isolated from the plant Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, a herb employed in Chinese traditional medicine.
Azathioprine Azathioprine is an Immunosuppressive drug used in rheumatoid arthritis, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and in kidney transplants to prevent rejection first synthesized by George H. Hitchings and Gertrude B. Elion in 1957 .
AZT Flossie Wong-Staal was the first scientist to clone HIV and map its genes. Gertrude Elion made foundational contributions to the development of AZT, one of the first antiretroviral medications used in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Chemotherapy Jane C. Wright was the first to identify methotrexate, one of the foundational chemotherapy drugs, as an effective tool against cancerous tumors.
feeding tube Bessie Blount Griffin used plastic, boiling water to mold the material, a file, ice pick, hammer, and some dishes to create the first feeding tube, allowed patients to control how much they would eat without assistance from others.
Mercaptopurine Mercaptopurine is a medication for cancer and autoimmune diseases including acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. It was discovered by Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings.
Pyrimethamine Pyrimethamine, sold under the trade name Daraprim, is an anti-parasitic medication used to treat a variety of conditions including toxoplasmosis and isosporiasis. Pyrimethamine was initially developed by Nobel Prize winning scientist Gertrude Elion as a treatment for malaria.
Vitamin E Katharine Bishop and Herbert McLean Evans co-discovered Vitamin E while studying the reproductive cycle of rats.
Pediatrics
Apgar score Invented in 1952 by Virginia Apgar.
Disposable diapers The first disposable diaper was invented in 1946 by Marion Donovan, a professional-turned-homemaker who wanted to ensure her children's cloth diapers remained dry while they slept. Donovan patented her design (called 'Boaters') in 1951. She also invented the first paper diapers, but executives did not invest in this idea and it was consequently scrapped for over ten years, until Procter & Gamble used Donovan's design ideas to create Pampers.
Another diaper design was created by Valerie Hunter Gordon (née de Ferranti), who patented it in 1948.
Child carriers Snugli and Weego were invented by nurse and peacekeeper Ann Moore first in the 1960s.
Pertussis vaccine A pioneering female American doctor, medical researcher and an outspoken voice in the pediatrics community, the supercentenarian Leila Alice Denmark (1898–2012) is credited as co-developer of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.
Single hand medical syringe Letitia Mumford Geer thought that the syringes being manufactured were difficult to use because they were often imprecise and unsanitary. This influenced her to create a more precise syringe. On February 12, 1896, Geer filed for a patent for the one-handed medical syringe design.US 622848, Geer, Letitia Mumford, "Syringe," published April 11, 1899
The entire discipline of Physical Therapy Mary McMillan, working with Polio patients in the 1920s.
Astronomy and astrophysics Harvard Stellar Classification Scheme The first classification of stars based on their temperature, created by Annie Jump Cannon, used in publications up to 1924.
Horsehead Nebula The Horsehead Nebula was discovered on a telescope-photogrammetry plate by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming in 1888.
Beta Aurigae binary star system
The second spectroscopic binary, Beta Aurigae, was discovered in 1888 by Antonia Maury, who also calculated its orbital period.
Pulsars Rapidly rotating neutron stars discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967.
The galaxy rotation problem A major piece of evidence for the presence of dark matter in the Universe, discovered by Vera Rubin from observations of galactic rotation curves in the 1970s.
Stars luminosity Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars at the beginning of 20th century.
Merieme Chadid is a French and Moroccan astronomer and explorer who discovered hypersonic shock waves in variable stars as well as the first astronomer committed to install a large observatory at the heart of Antarctica towards an understanding of stellar evolution in the Universe by leading scientific polar explorations.
Radio astronomy Ruby Violet Payne-Scott was an Australian pioneer in radiophysics and radio astronomy as well as the first female radio astronomer discovering Type I and Type III solar radio bursts.
Stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin found in her 1925 PhD thesis that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. Thus, her thesis established that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe.
When Payne's dissertation was reviewed, astronomer Henry Norris Russell dissuaded her from concluding that the composition of the Sun was predominantly hydrogen and thus very different from that of the Earth, as it contradicted the accepted wisdom at the time. She consequently described the result in her thesis as "spurious". Russell realized she was correct four years later after having derived the same result by different means and publishing it in 1929. He acknowledged Payne's work and discovery admiringly in his paper but he is often credited for the conclusions they both reached.
The new outer arm of the Milky Way In 2004, astrophysicist and radio astronomer Naomi McClure-Griffiths identified a new spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
Physics Radiation Marie Skłodowska-Curie (born Maria Salomea Skłodowska) was the first woman to receive a Nobel prize for her works on radiations and, up until today, the only woman to receive two Nobel prizes (among them, one Nobel prize in chemistry for discoveries on polonium and radium). She is the sole laureate to be recognized within two distinct scientific areas.
Fanny Gates further investigated the properties of radiation. Together with Ernest Rutherford, she amassed evidence that radioactivity was not the result of any simple chemical or physical processes. In particular, Gates showed that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Chien-Shiung Wu was the first scientist to confirm Enrico Fermi's theory of radioactive beta decay. She also overturned the theory of parity in physics.
Radon In 1901, Harriet Brooks and Ernest Rutherford contributed to the discovery of the element radon by finding evidence that the "emanation" emitted by thorium compounds was likely to be a gas. This follows work in 1899 by Pierre and Marie Curie, who observed that the gas emitted by radium remained radioactive for a month.
Kinetic energy Emilie du Châtelet (born Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil) translated Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica from Latin to French during the 18th century. She carried out physics experiments, popularizing the work of Leibniz. She demonstrated that the kinetic energy of an object was proportional to its mass and the square of its velocity, and postulated a conservation law for the total energy of a system.
Heavy elements in cosmic radiation As a graduate student, Phyllis S. Freier found evidence for the existence of elements heavier than helium in cosmic radiation. Her work was published in Physical Review in 1948 with co-authors Edward J. Lofgren, Edward P. Ney, and Frank Oppenheimer.
Beta particles are electrons. Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber and her husband Maurice Goldhaber showed that beta particles were identical to electrons.
Top quark Melissa Franklin's team at Fermilab found some of the first evidence for the existence of the top quark.
Nuclear shell Maria Goeppert Mayer, a German immigrant to the US who studied at Johns Hopkins during the Great Depression, persisted in her studies even when no university would employ her and became a chemical physicist. Her most-famous contribution to modern physics was discovering the nuclear shell of the atomic nucleus, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1963.
Slow light Lene Hau led a Harvard University team who used a Bose–Einstein condensate to slow down a beam of light to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, was able to stop a beam completely.
Astatine The Austrian physicist Berta Karlik discovered that the element 85 astatine is a product of the natural decay processes.
Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem In her 1919 thesis, Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen explained why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect, a result now referred to as the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem. (Niels Bohr had arrived at the same conclusion a few years earlier.)
Francium In 1939, Marguerite Perey, a student of Marie Curie, discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. Perey first noticed that the actinium she purified was emitting unexpected radiation. After further study she was able to isolate this new element which she named "francium" for France.
Nuclear fission Austrian–Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, together with Otto Hahn and Otto Robert Frisch, led the small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron. The results were published in early 1939. [The experiment for this letter to the editor was conducted on 13 January 1939; see Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb 263 and 268 (Simon and Schuster, 1986).] Meitner, Hahn and Frisch understood that the fission process, which splits the atomic nucleus of uranium into two smaller nuclei, must be accompanied by an enormous release of energy. Nuclear fission is the process exploited by nuclear reactors to generate heat and, subsequently, electricity. This process is also one of the basics of nuclear weapons that were developed in the U.S. during World War II and used against Japan in 1945.
Structure of the Milky Way Heidi Jo Newberg's team found that Milky Way is cannibalizing stars from smaller galaxies and that the Milky Way is larger and has more ripples than was previously understood.
Chirped pulse amplification Donna Strickland received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of chirped pulse amplification, a technique which "paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind."
Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) invented and demonstrated by Ursula Keller in 1992.
Conwell–Weisskopf theory One of the first ionized impurity scattering mobility models proposed by Esther Conwell in 1950.
Chemistry Catalysis The concept of catalysis invented by Scottish chemist Elizabeth Fulhame.
Francium A chemical element; symbol Fr, atomic number 87, extremely radioactive, discovered by Marguerite Perey in France in 1939 by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. Last element first discovered in nature.
Goldberg reaction Irma Goldberg published a paper in 1906 on two newly discovered chemical reactions involving the presence of copper and the creation of a nitrogen-carbon bond to an aromatic halide. These reactions were subsequently named the Goldberg reaction and the Jourdan-Ullman-Goldberg reaction.
Kevlar