The Second Woman to Win the Nobel Prize in Physics

Fifty-two years after Marie Curie, society believed women were unsuited for academic or scientific work. Maria Goeppert Mayer pursued her interests, anyway. And she became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Portrait of Maria Goeppert Mayer, the second woman to win the nobel prize in physics

Early Life

Friedrich Goppert, and his wife Maria, lived in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland). Their only child, Maria Goeppert Mayer, was born on June 28, 1906.

They moved from Kattowitz when her father, a sixth-generation university professor, accepted an appointment as the professor of pediatrics at the University of Göttingen in 1910.

She claimed she was closer to her father because being a scientist; he was a more interesting.

Education

Only one school in 1921 Göttingen would prepare girls to take the university entrance exam, the abitur. It closed its doors a year before she would have graduated.

She took the university entrance exam, anyway. And passed the exam at 17 years old, a year earlier than most. Fewer than one in ten German university students were female.

Maria entered the mathematics program at the University of Göttingen. But changed to physics. It interested her more.

Her doctoral thesis explained her theory of two-photon absorption (aka excitation). Though there was no way to prove her theory then, she earned her doctorate in 1930.

Marriage & Career

American Joseph Edward Mayer boarded with her family. They married on January 19, 1930. The couple moved to the United States. Johns Hopkins University had hired him as an associate professor of chemistry.

The university would not hire Maria as a professor because of strict anti-nepotism rules. Similar rules existed at most universities during the depression. They kept her from getting a job consistent with her education level.

The university hired her as an assistant in the Physics Department. She taught some courses and worked with German correspondence. She received a tiny salary, a place to work, and access to the facilities. That was important to her. She worked with Karl Herzfeld. Herzfeld was an Austrian-American physicist. They collaborated on several papers.

During the summers, she returned to Göttingen to work and collaborate with her former examiner, Born.

She and Joe had two children, Mary Ann and Peter.

World War II

The rise of the Nazis ended her trips to Germany. Soon after the war started, her husband, Joe, was fired. They suspected the dean of physical sciences fired him to get Maria out of the laboratory, but it could have been that there were too many German scientists in the department or because of complaints that his chemistry lectures contained too much modern physics.

He accepted a position at Columbia University in 1940. They gave Maria an office but not a paid or official position. She kept working because physics was fun.

Photograph of the second woman to win the nobel prize in physics, Maria Goppert Mayer, who is  seated at a desk, holding a slide rule. Behind her is a chalkboard with equations written on it.

Within nine years, she produced ten papers applying quantum mechanics to chemistry, one of which became a milestone. Also, with her husband, she wrote Statistical Mechanics, a textbook that sold for 44 years.

National Women’s Hall of Fame

A Paid Professional

She got her first paid professional position in December 1941, teaching science part-time at Sarah Lawrence College.

In early 1942, she joined the Manhattan Project. She was part of a project to discover a way to separate the fissile uranium-235 isotope in natural uranium. It was impractical then.

We found nothing, and we were lucky… we escaped the searing guilt felt to this day by those responsible for the bomb.

Maria Goeppert Mayer via www.nobelprize.org

A Nobel Prize Worthy Idea

After the war, she worked another unpaid job at the University of Chicago. Around that time, she received a part-time job offer to work in nuclear physics at Argonne National Laboratory. She protested she knew nothing about nuclear physics, but took the job.

Two years later (1949), she proposed that inside the nucleus, there was a series of layers of protons and neutrons, arranged like the layers of an onion, with neutrons and protons spinning around their axes and orbiting the center of the nucleus at each level.

After she published her theory, she learned that Hans Jensen and his colleagues had simultaneously made the same discovery. She and Jensen published a book together.

A Full Professorship

In 1959, more than thirty years after beginning her career as a scientist, The University of California, San Diego hired Maria as a full professor.

The Nobel Prize

This photo was taken in 1963, as physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972) was being escorted by King Gustav Adolf of Sweden to a gala banquet following the ceremony during which she received the Nobel Prize in physics for development of the model of atomic nuclei in which the orbits of protons and neutrons are arranged in concentric "shells".
Maria Goeppert Mayer escorted by King Gustav Adolf of Sweden to the gala after the Nobel Prize Ceremony

They awarded Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen half the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for their proposal of the shell nuclear model. (Eugene P. Wigner of the United States won the other half for unrelated work.)

She was the second woman who won the Nobel Prize in physics, after Marie Curie. (It was another fifty years before another woman won the prize).

Death and Legacy

Maria suffered a stroke shortly after moving to California, but returned to work for years. In 1971, she had a heart attack and slipped into a coma. She never regained consciousness and died of heart failure on February 20, 1972.

In her honor, the American Physical Society (APS) created the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award for young female physicists at the beginning of their careers. Argonne National Laboratory also presents an annual award in her honor to young women scientists or engineers. On Venus, there is a crater about 35 km in diameter that is named Crater Goeppert Mayer. They inducted Maria into the Women’s Hall of Fame and included her in the third American Scientists collection of US postage stamps.

Her impact on science, on physics, was enormous. She changed our understanding of atoms.

Second Woman Who Won the Nobel Prize

Maria Goeppert Mayer didn’t plan to win the Nobel Prize. Didn’t think about it when she made her discovery. She was just excited to find the last piece of the puzzle she wanted to solve.

Being second isn’t losing when you’re the second woman who won the Nobel Prize in physics. But is her name as common as Marie Curie? I didn’t study physics, and I never heard of her before. Did you know Maria discovered the “layers” of protons and neutrons around an atom’s nucleus?

If you liked this post, you might like to read about the woman men wanted to ignore.

Image Credits

Top portrait: Nobel foundation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Middle portrait: ENERGY.GOV, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bottom photograph: Smithsonian Institution from United States, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

A Team of Awesome Women & the Nobel Prize

Strong women come in all sizes, colors, religions, and abilities. Today we celebrate two women who discovered one of the greatest breakthroughs in the biological sciences. Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry this week for their development of a groundbreaking method for editing DNA. They discovered the genetic scissors called CRISPR/Cas9. It’s a tool that allows scientists to “snip” the DNA of organisms, “allowing for easy and precise genetic modifications.” They are the sixth and seventh women in history to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the first pair of women to win the chemistry prize. This team of awesome women teamed up for a common goal, and the results are world changing.

Image of the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, where photos of this Team of Awesome Women will appear
The Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm, by Liridon, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives—choice, not chance, and determines your destiny.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Charpentier was born on December 11, 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, a commune in northern France, 18km south-east of Paris. 

Charpentier studied biochemistry, microbiology and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. She received a research doctorate from the Institut Pasteur in 1995. She moved to the United States in 1997.

As a postdoctoral fellow at New York’s Rockefeller University, she helped show how Streptococcus pneumoniae develop vancomycin resistance. (Read more about S pneumonia a leading cause of bacterial pneumonia and meningitis and other infections in the United States.)

Charpentier also worked at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine during her five-year stay in the U.S.

In 2002 her work took her to Vienna, then to Sweden, and to the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.

Charpentier approached Jennifer Doudna at a research conference in 2011. And a team of awesome women formed.

Dr. Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna was born in Washington, D.C. in 1964. She moved to Hawaii when she was seven years old. There, her educator parents encouraged her love of the biological sciences. 

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry and earned a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard Medical School in 1989.

From early in her career, Doudna studied RNA. At Yale in her group crystallized and solved the three-dimensional structure of the catalytic RNA. Her experiments with high powered x-ray diffraction at Berkley gained her further recognition. 

The list of awards and honors she has received is long.

In 2011, she met Charpentier at a research conference. After that, she cancelled all her other obligations to focus on researching CRISPR. 

CRISPR

Both Doudna and Charpentier studied Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Also known as Strep A, the DNA of this bacteria has segments that repeat. 

Other scientists had discovered fragments of genetic material from viruses attacking Strep A between the bacteria’s repeating DNA segments. They named these fragments ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’ or CRISPR. CRISPR prevented those viruses from attacking the Strep A for a second time. But nobody was sure how the bacteria’s immune response worked.

Charpentier and her team discovered that the bacteria made a previously unknown form of RNA that recognized the genes of viruses if they attempted to attack the bacteria again.

Charpentier needed to collaborate with an expert on RNA. Doudna was her choice.

Two Awesome Women Team Up

They discovered that Strep A used an enzyme called Cas9 to slice up viral genetic material and incorporate it into its own DNA. They wondered if they could create a piece of RNA to target a specific point on any gene, not just a viral one.

In one year’s time, they successfully created a modified RNA segment. They called this segment CRISPR RNA. This segment “known as CRISPR RNA or crRNA, that guides the segment to the right place and then uses Cas9 to snip out a piece of DNA with extreme precision, in some cases as small as a single genetic letter.”

The Impact

Scientists around the world already use their discovery. Scientists are using CRISPR/Cas9 to develop cancer-fighting drugs, to create crops that can better withstand drought, to treat genetic diseases, and in many other applications. You may remember the article, Hope of a Cure for Sickle Cell, posted on this blog in July.

Typically, acceptance and common usage of breakthrough scientific discoveries takes a decade or more. And it’s at least a decade, often longer, before the discovering scientists get considered for a Nobel Prize.  

This technology has utterly transformed the way we do research in basic science,” asserts Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I am thrilled to see Crispr-Cas getting the recognition we have all been waiting for and seeing two women being recognized as Nobel Laureates.”

Ethical Questions

Both Doudna and Charpentier are aware of the potential for ethical issues related to their discovery.

In 2019, Chinese scientist He Jiankui said he had used CRISPR on two human embryos. His announcement caused a raging scientific scandal.

Doudna’s recent book A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, explores the ethic issues related to CRISPR. She cautions, “we as a community need to make sure we recognize we are taking charge of a very powerful technology.”

Congratulations and Cautions

In eight short years, Doudna’s and Charpentier’s discovery has changed scientific research. The world is teetering on the edge of breakthrough treatments and cures for many diseases. Their shared Nobel Prize is extraordinary and well deserved.

But their discovery also has the world balanced on the edge of a slippery slope. Genetically altered embryos to cure disease could end up with genetically designer babies. How far will we go? Many science fiction books explore what might happen when we can alter the genes of animals and humans. In my Fellowship Dystopia series, primitive genetic manipulation creates an army of assassins and a war.

So far, scientists are self-regulating. Will we someday need a global board for ethical review? And how some misuse that power? 

These two awesome women teamed up for a common goal, and the results are world changing. Who knows what the next team of women will achieve. Anything is possible.