In 1941, the Army needed to understand an old enemy well enough to stop it before it tore through mobilizing training camps.

Dr. Sara Branham was the expert they needed. She'd built the framework herself, one isolated strain at a time.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

Anna Wessels Williams spent decades at a bench in the New York City Department of Health's diagnostic laboratory, the first municipal lab of its kind in the country.

She began her career by making diphtheria treatment accessible to everyone, then made rabies diagnosis dramatically faster. Over the nearly forty years that followed, she made significant contributions against many of the deadliest diseases of her era.

She also spent very little time worrying about whose name ended up on the credit.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

In 1953, a government cancer researcher inoculated mice with material from leukemic animals and found something nobody had documented before: tumors growing in a gland that had nothing to do with the experiment.

It took Sarah Stewart three decades, a second graduate degree, and a position she never registered for to get to do the work she really wanted to do. Once there, the virus she isolated produced twenty different kinds of tumors and helped prove, for the first time, that cancer could be infectious.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

In 1918, a government dairy bacteriologist published a paper connecting two organisms that the field had classified as entirely unrelated, and proposed that cow's milk was a vector for a debilitating human disease.

Alice Evans was dismissed for a decade. She spent twenty-three years living inside the illness she had correctly identified while the evidence accumulated, undeniably, in her direction.

image credit: Library of Congress, National Photo Company Collection

In 1893, Johns Hopkins awarded its first doctorate to a woman for proving that rock formations across Pennsylvania and Maryland, long classified as ancient sediment, were actually disguised remains of volcanic stone.

Florence Bascom had to sit behind a screen to attend her classes. She went on to become the first woman hired by the USGS and to build the school that produced the next generation of American women geologists.

image credit: Bryn Mawr College Photo Archives

In 1950, an astronomer at Yerkes Observatory published a paper connecting how stars move to how old they are, and gave us a new way to read the age of the galaxy itself.

Understanding her groundbreaking science explains why the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is hers in more than just name.

image credit: NASA

In 1925, a doctoral student at Harvard submitted a thesis that identified the most abundant elements in the Sun and, by extension, the universe.

The field’s arbiters told her it was almost certainly wrong, and she walked it back. But Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was right. And it took four years for the field to catch up to her.

image credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives