27. Nobel Prize-Winning Women

Dear Followers,

If you've been following the news you probably know that a record FIVE women won Nobel Prizes this year (the previous record was three, in 2004).

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The winners include:

Elizabeth Blackburn, 60, (dual U.S.-Austrailian citizenship) and Carol Grieder, 48, (American) who shared the Physiology/Medicine Nobel Prize with Jack Szostak. Greider worked in a research lab in UC Santa Barbara and (Chapter Thirteen: More Than Meets the Eye) was put into remedial classes as a schoolgirl because she had dyslexia.

Ada Yonath, 70, (Israel) who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Steitz and Ramakrishnan (Americans).

Herta Mueller, 56, (Romanian-born German) won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Elinor Ostrom, 76, (American) the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with American Oliver Williamson). Ostrom is a professor at Indiana University and (Chapter Seventeen: Dreaming Your Own Dream) was discouraged from seeking a doctorate when she applied for graduate school.

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie who (with her husband Pierre and Antoine Henri Becquerel) won the Physics Prize in 1903. She is the only woman woman to win two Nobel Prizes, because she also won in 1911, for Chemistry.

Forty Women have won Nobel Prizes, including Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing (Literature) and (Chapter Thirteen) Iranian Shirin Ebadi.

If you (like me) are obsessed with stories about female high-achievers, a book that might interest you is Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries.

Looking forward to your comments...