Natural Science

Brazil, Contemporary

Brazil is home to the second largest Jewish community in South America. Jewish women played important roles in the absorption of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and also made important contributions to Brazilian intellectual and artistic life.

Batsheva Bonne-Tamir

Batsheva Bonne-Tamir (1932-2020) was one of the first human population geneticists in Israel. She is mostly known for her studies on genetic markers and genetic diseases among the Samaritans.

Yehudith Birk

In 1977, biochemist Yehudith Birk became the first woman to serve as a dean at the Hebrew University. An internationally renowned scientist for her studies of legume seed proteins and proteinase inhibitors, she won the 1998 Israel Prize for agricultural research.

Raissa L’vovna Berg

Raissa Berg worked was an eminent geneticist until Soviet Russian policies forced her out of her job. Nevertheless, she continued her research at home, eventually discovering “correlative Pleiades” in plants, and later contributed significantly to the reestablishment of the scientific field of genetics in Russia during her brief reinstatement. After emigrating to the United States, Berg remained active until her death in 2006.

Sarah Bavly

Dutch-born Sarah Bavly was a pioneer nutritionist in the Yishuv who laid the groundwork for Israel's nutritional infrastructure and educational programming, directing Hadassah's hospital nutrition departments and school lunch programs and establishing the State's first College of Nutrition.

Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin

After earning her law degree in 1977, Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin quickly advanced through several positions before becoming a judge in the National Labor Court of Israel in 1995. Her rulings had a critical influence on the development of labor law and labor relations in Israel.

Charlotte Auerbach

After leaving Nazi Germany in 1933, Charlotte Auerbach settled at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a beloved professor and a groundbreaking researcher. Her discovery about the effect of mustard gas on gene mutation received worldwide acclaim and she became renowned for her profound knowledge of classical genetics, especially of mutation.

Ruth Arnon

Immunologist Ruth Arnon and her team made unprecedented breakthroughs when they developed the first synthetic antigen and the first drug approved for treating multiple sclerosis, Copaxone. Arnon also invented a synthetic, nasally administered flu vaccine and has published over four hundred articles, chapters, and books on immunology and biochemistry.

Tikvah Alper

South African radiobiologist Tikvah Alper, who spent a lifetime questioning accepted theories and the established order, discovered that diseases like scrapie and mad cow replicated without DNA, challenging our modern understanding of disease. Along with her tremendous scientific contributions, Alper overcame rampant sexism in her field and stood by her opposition to apartheid at a professional cost.

July 22, 2008

Mars, Venus, and the Jews

Judith Rosenbaum

I just came across a fascinating series in Slate, challenging the science of sex differences. (It happens to be written and edited by two brilliant Jewesses - Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon - whom I am privileged to know.) Schaffer and Bazelon take on what they call the new "sex difference evangelists" and offer powerful, data-driven rebuttals to their arguments on sex differences in the brain.

Topics: Children, Natural Science

October 10, 2007

Gertrude Elion: In a Class of Her Own

Jordan Namerow

The 2007 Nobel Prize laureates in Physics were announced this week—Albert Fert from France and Peter Gruenberg from Germany, both credited for the first successful applications of “nanotechnology” to radically reduce the size while radically increasing the storage of computer hard-drives. With their impressive credentials, Fert and Gruenberg seem to fit the mold for this award in a profession in which male + Ph.D is a likely pairing. But following the announcement, I was pleasantly reminded of chemist Gertrude Elion, a 1988 Nobel Prize recipient, who most certainly did not fit this mold, and who didn’t think much of it: “Women in chemistry and physics? There’s nothing strange about that.”

Topics: Medicine, Natural Science

June 27, 2007

Mt. Everest, Healthy Jammies, Safe Sofas