Martha Chase was given scant credit in life for her contribution to Alfred Hershey's Nobel Prize, but others took note. In a speech he gave at Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg's Memorial on November 30, 2006, Stanley Falkow said he found “a suggested topic for a term paper to meet the requirements for a passing grade in a bioethics course in Pomona College. Let me read it to you.
’Martha Chase, Daisy Roulland-Dussoix, and Esther Lederberg are women who participated in important discoveries in science. Martha Chase showed that phage genetic material is DNA not protein. Daisy Dussoix discovered restriction enzymes, and Esther Lederberg invented replica plating. Yet each of these discoveries is often credited to the male member of the team (Al Hershey, Werner Arber, and Joshua Lederberg, respectively). Using the resources of the library (at least five sources), write a five page paper that examines how history of science has treated each discovery (generally by Hershey, Arber, and Josh Lederberg, who all received the Nobel prize) and include your own appraisal of how you might have reacted to the reward structure in each case. The unnamed Professor who posed this question noted that ‘(This one is a challenge! Feel free to reflect in your paper on why it might be so hard to find relevant information.)[1]’ [2]
Twenty-first century science historians are beginning to look back on the mid-twentieth century as a time when researchers made great strides in the sciences, but lagged far behind in the area of gender discrimation. For a look at how one web site highlights the accomplishments of Esther Lederberg and other under-credited female scientists, see "Scientific Legacies".
