Monday, November 26, 2012

Notable Women in Science: A Few Modern Physicists

by Adrienne M. Roehrich, Chemistry Editor




Vandana Shiva in 2008.

Ingrid Daubechies, 2005.











  1. Vandana Shiva? You have to be kidding. She's going around the world lying about terminator seeds.

    She's like an anti-vaxxer about GMOs.

  2. Vandana Shiva is included in this listing because she was considered a prominent female scientist in India.

    Many scientists travel off the science path. For example, Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He knew his principles. Yet he pushed for vitamin C as a cure-all in a highly pseudo-science maneuver. Whether or not we agree with someone's political stance and whether or not they are still working as a scientist does not negate their scientific career, in my opinion.

  3. Political stance? That's like saying the problem with Jenny McCarthy and vaccines is her political stance. Rather missing the point.

  4. I don't think "political stance" is exactly the right term here, and Jenny McCarthy's certainly not a good analogy, as she's not even a scientist, so her opinions about anything scientific are irrelevant, whether political or not. The point that I think Adrienne was making is that scientists are not all wholesale adherents to the scientific method, nor do they all have pure track records in science. Crick's ideas regarding panspermia come to mind, or Lynn Margulis and the Gaia hypothesis. That doesn't negate their relevance as scientists or the relevance of what they've done as scientists. I don't think we should exclude women scientists from these lists because they appear to have derailed from the scientific straight-and-narrow. That said, we can certainly add an ETA comment to the above entry and note/link to something about the controversy surrounding terminator seeds, something of which I was not aware, as I've never heard of her. Which is, rather, the point of this series.

  5. Well--someone lying about the science, and using lies to spread fear. Sounds like McCarthy to me.

    Shiva's responsible for a significant amount of misinformation on this topic, in exactly the same manner. Like McCarthy she also manages to get a lot of media exposure. It makes those of us trying to bring facts to this topic at a serious disadvantage.

  6. We've added a link from one of her critics in the entry.

  7. Spelling alert: it's "Vrije Universiteit Brussel", not "Vrige".