Sure God created man before woman.
But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece
- Author Unknown

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman
- Virginia Woolf


A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon
- Arnold Haultain


Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination
- Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, 1925


Women in Science

A ceremony held last night honoured ten of Britain's most remarkable women. Arifa Akbar reports on a group of trail-blazers who broke the mould

09 June 2005

Dr Gill Samuels, Science

As the director of vascular biology at Pfizer, Ms Samuels, 60, oversaw the discovery of compounds for reducing hypertension and migraines. But perhaps
most famously, she was part of the 1,000-strong team which invented Viagra.

The discovery, she said, came in 1985 after 13 years of intense team work and laboratory experiments. She said: "We were looking at various disorders
in vasular contraction when we came across this new class of compound that could relax blood vessels. I have heard people call it a lifestyle drug but I don't think of it like that. It has caused men to think differently about their health. It has de-stigmatised erectile health and as someone who had to review all the letters of patients, who say 'It has stopped me killing myself' or 'It has stopped me hitting my wife', that I realise what a good medicine it is," she said.

The granddaughter of a Shropshire coalminer, Ms Samuels' early love of science was encouraged by her parents, not least because her own father was a chemist.

"I have always been curious about how things worked. I was one of those children that loved to demolish dolls to see how they were put together and my parents did not distinguish in the educational choices of my brother or myself. They supported us both. Science is a bit like cooking - and my cooking has always been a bit experimental," she said.

After completing a PhD, she began working in industry and joined Pfizer 27 years ago. While she has never felt she has "bumped my head against a glass
ceiling", she stressed that girls needed role models and ambassadors both in the world of business as well as science.

In spite of her many ground-breaking discoveries, she said she has had her fair share of scientific disappointments. "You have to be tenacious as well as a good scientist. You have to be highly motivated and learn to cope with the ups and downs, the disappointments as well as the excitements. Scientists have to be highly motivated to keep working on something that will make a difference," she said.

She said there was a need to retain women in science, who tend to leave in the thirties to raise families. "Whenever you look in science, there are a lot of women who come in at the beginning but around their thirties, numbers of women start to decrease. It is clear we cannot afford to lose good scientists with brains. There must be ways we can keep women in science.

"Pfizer's diversity programme focuses on getting the best people and keeping them, and if they have a period off work so they can have a family, it is about making sure all the options are there on return, such as flexible working hours and shared jobs."

She was praised by the judges for making an extraordinary contribution to science in terms of policy and public awareness. Pfizer colleagues said she always emanated an infectious enthusiasm and remains one of the greatest inspirations to women in science.

Don't know if this piece is genuine (anyone out there with back issues of this magazine who could confirm this?) :
 

And an interesting retort:

Female astronomers connected the dots

By Simon Singh, Globe Correspondent
February 1, 2005

When Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers suggested that there might be ''innate" differences between women and men that affect their success in the sciences, it brought to mind an extraordinary story concerning women scientists at Harvard at the start of the 20th century.

In 1877, Edward Pickering became director of the Harvard College Observatory and initiated a relentless program of photographing the night sky. The observatory would take a half-million photographic plates in the decades to come, so one of Pickering's biggest challenges was to establish an industrial-scale system for analyzing them. Each plate contained hundreds of stars, and each speck would need to have its brightness evaluated and its location measured.

Pickering, who led the observatory for 42 years, recruited a team of young women to act as computers, a term originally used to describe people who manipulated data and performed calculations. It was menial work in a field of research from which women were otherwise excluded. It was then unthinkable that women would be allowed to stay up through the night staring through telescopes in the freezing cold.

Nevertheless, these mostly untrained women (known as "Pickering's harem") were able to make an enormous contribution to astronomy. They had brilliant minds and gained an intimate knowledge of the data, so they were able to make astounding discoveries.

For example, Williamina Fleming was a single mother struggling to survive when she became an employee at the observatory in 1879, but she went on to find 10 of the 24 novas then known.

Annie Jump Cannon made a major contribution to stellar classification, establishing a system that, with only minor modifications, is still in use. She divided stars into seven classes -- O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Today's undergraduates learn these stellar classifications according to the mnemonic ''Oh, Be A Fine Girl -- Kiss Me!"

In 1925, Cannon became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. She also was voted one of the 12 greatest American women in 1931, and the same year became the first woman to receive the prestigious Draper Gold Medal from the American National Academy of Sciences.

Cannon had been struck down by scarlet fever as a child, which left her almost deaf. The most famous member of Pickering's harem, Henrietta Leavitt, was also profoundly deaf. Leavitt was born in 1868 in Lancaster. In 1892, she graduated from Harvard University's Radcliffe College, and later went on to become a volunteer at Harvard College Observatory. She spent several years sifting through the photographic plates searching for variable stars, which she had been asked to catalog. Variable stars, as the name suggests, have the unusual property of growing brighter and then fading over the course of a few nights or a few weeks. Leavitt would discover more than 2,400 variable stars, about half of the total known in her day. Professor Charles Young of Princeton University was so impressed that he called her ''a variable-star fiend."

Of the different types of variable stars, Leavitt developed a particular passion for so-called Cepheid variables. After months spent measuring Cepheid variables, she realized that it would be possible to work out the actual brightness of a Cepheid variable star based on how quickly it went from bright to dim and back to bright again. Astronomers previously did not know if a star was dim and close up or bright and far away, but Leavitt could answer this question with respect to Cepheids.

This was an incredible breakthrough because, once Leavitt had shown astronomers how they could measure the actual brightness of Cepheid variables, it enabled them to measure the distances to these stars and to effectively measure the distances across the cosmos.

Leavitt's discovery transformed astronomy and ultimately laid the foundations for men like Edwin Hubble to find the first evidence in favor of the big-bang model of the universe.

While Hubble and other successful male astronomers gained great fame, Leavitt and her colleagues largely have been forgotten.

Simon Singh is the author of ''Big Bang," a history of cosmology.

Sex, Time and Power
BIG BRAIN, NARROW PELVIS
By Leonard Shlain

Since our genetic makeup has changed very little in the last 150,000 years, I will make the key assumption that the main features of modern men's and women's reproductive life histories do not differ substantially from those present at the outset of our species. There can be no doubt that culture can affect sexual behaviors, but the features I will be referring to are more basic. For example, I assume that the average length of a contemporary woman's menstrual cycle and that of a current man's obsession with sex are both innate traits that ancestral humans exhibited. (To engage in these speculations, I will make a series of generalizations about men and women. Describing only the crest of the bell-shaped distribution curve of both male and female human behavior, I will not list the many, many exceptions that exist. As a place to begin, let us suspend judgment temporarily and assume these premises are reasonable).

I will hypothesize that the male's behavior evolved soon afterward in response to the female's lead. In fact, I will argue that the history of our species could be written from the perspective that males have spent the last 150,000 years trying to regain the power they so emphatically lost to females when we differentiated away from Homo erectus. By examining the habits of modern human males and females, we can infer the many changes that emerged when the new, improved Homo sapiens female debuted in Nature's garden.

The catalogue begins with the absence in Eve's daughters of some sort of signal that would inform a male that they were ovulating. Unlike the vast majority of other females, the one belonging to the human line does not advertise her ovulatory burst. With very few exceptions, other species' females have a distinct period of sexual receptivity during which they experience a powerful instinctual drive to mate. To the males of her species, a female emanates a distinctive "green light," whether olfactory, visual, auditory, gestural, or some combination thereof. These episodic heights of female sexual desire are exquisitely timed to coincide with her ovulation. Previously uninterested males are alerted by her attention-grabbing signals.

Estrus, as this upsurge is called in female primates, promotes harmony between the sexes. When both male and female are equally excited about mating, it is likely that they will have an amicable and mutually rewarding encounter. Obviously, a considerable benefit accrues to the species if mating occurs in synchrony with ovulation. Sperm meets ovum, and conception occurs. Eve's daughters, however, lack this most basic sexual semaphore, having replaced it with concealed ovulation. Human ovulation is so cryptic that most women remain unaware when, precisely, their eggs have departed from their ovaries.

Further obscuring the timing of her ovulation, the human female acquired the potential to engage in sex, if she desired, 365 days of the year, during pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, and even after menopause. [Bonobos, a kind of chimpanzee, also engage in sex nearly continually. Nevertheless, females signal through smell and visual displays when they are in estrus, even if that estrus lasts two weeks of their six-week cycle. Ninety percent of bonobo sexual penetrations take place within their estrual period.]

An alternative way to state this unusual condition would be to say that the human female does not experience a distinct period of estrus because she is in a state of constant estrus. Precious few other species' females could hold a candle to the human female in this department. No other species has so definitively uncoupled sex and reproduction as the human line. Since sex is so intricately intertwined with reproduction in the other three million sexually active species, what would have been the reason that Natural Selection abandoned this successful strategy in humans?

Another innovation: Some human females experienced a prolonged orgasm capable of multiple sustained repeats. Orgasms, both male and female, are intensely subjective, and we cannot measure with confidence the degree of other female species' orgasms. And yet no nonhuman female, in her observable behavior, comes anywhere near to attaining the heights of sexual pleasure manifested by a woman in the throes of her orgasm.

The male's orgasm, in human and other species, is a necessary component of his ejaculation. It is followed by his rapid withdrawal and prompt disengagement. Only in the human can the female notify the male through vocal or body language, after the completion of his delivery call, that she is not finished, and that she expects him to continue until further notice.

Moreover, the variety of sexual positions used in human intercourse exceeds that of virtually all other species. Women became the first land females to habitually copulate face to face with their partners, and they became the first females to increasingly take advantage of an alternative position: mounting a supine male. [Stump-tailed monkeys and bonobos also use these positions on occasion, but a male mounting from the rear of the female remains their preference.]

Another feature of human sexuality is the prolonged period of sexual foreplay that occurs prior to penetration. Many other species engage in elaborate mating and courting rituals. However, when they finally get down to business, sexual foreplay is virtually nonexistent. The human male, in contrast, seems to have grasped the key fact somewhere along the line that it was in his best interests to expend considerable time and effort preparing his partner so that she, too, could experience pleasure. Concern for the pleasure of the female he is preparing to penetrate is not a motive that one would impute to the amatory repertoires of any other species' males. [Again, male bonobos also exhibit this behavior to a limited degree, and chimpanzee males will groom a female who is pregnant or lactating in the expectation that when she comes into estrus again she will be more receptive to him.]

Biologists estimate that there are between ten million and thirty million different species of life-forms on earth today. Of these, four thousand are mammals. Only one among the four thousand experiences significant blood loss on a regular basis. If conception does not occur, a fertile human female sheds the lining of her uterus along with approximately forty to eighty milliliters (several tablespoons) of blood every four weeks. A few other mammals--for example, hedgehogs, bats, shrews and elephants--show signs of menses, but for all of them it is a relative nonevent. Primatologist Alison Jolly estimates that there are approximately 270 different species of primates. Only thirty-one species of primates menstruate. All of these but one, a human, lose an insignificant quantity of blood.

Blood is an essential fluid. What conceivable benefit could female blood loss have conferred on the survival of our species? Something as dramatic as monthly menstrual bleeding must somehow be accounted for in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Although it is possible that menses is an incidental spandrel related to some other adaptation, it looms so large as a constant in the life of every woman that it is unlikely to be a mere accident of nature. (Some anthropologists have raised the point that ancestral women rarely menstruated because they were either pregnant, lactating or menopausal.)

Adding to the enigma of human menses is the human females' propensity to coordinate their menses with other women, a feature rarely observed in nonhuman primate females. Like the tines of disparate tuning forks all resonating to the same note, women involuntarily tend to synchronize their periods when they live or work together in offices, convents, dormitories and large families. Ancestral women lived in tight-knit clans numbering around twenty to thirty fecund women. It is likely that these women, too, synchronized their periods. One suspects it is a very old adaptation that once served an important function in our species' development.

An unexpected component of human females' synchronized menses is that the conductor orchestrating this harmony is an inert 81,000,000,000,000,000,000- (eighty-one-quintillion) ton object located 250,000 miles out in space. The moon is the metronome that sets the tempo for cycles that begin to vibrate in unison in the dark interiors of billions of women's pelvises each month. It is likely that ancestral women, too, entrained their menses with the lunar orbit.

During the past century, technology has flooded our lives with artificial light. Fluorescent and electric lightbulbs have illuminated what had previously been darkness. Moonlight is no longer the critical illumination it once was. Most people are unaware of the current status of the moon's phases. Yet most women continue to coordinate their menstrual cycles with the lunar ones.

Another anomaly of the human female's sexual life cycle is her menopause. A woman stops ovulating at an earlier point in her life than any other female mammal, while coincidentally acquiring the distinction of becoming the longest-lived terrestrial mammal. [Some bowhead whales have been estimated to live to 150 years.]

If she avoids maternal mortality and other female causes of an early demise, a woman can on rare occasions achieve a life span exceeding a hundred years. The human female was clearly built to last. At present in the United States, she outlives her male counterpart by an average of six years, while attaining an average life span of eighty-three years.

A postmenopausal woman possesses a longer period of life during which she is incapable of conceiving a new life than any other female mammals, even though she remains quite vigorous for most of these years. With very few exceptions, other mammalian females ovulate right up to the day they die. And a woman stands in stark contrast to a man, who, despite advanced age and many infirmities, usually can generate viable sperm far into his dotage. Another baffling feature of human menopause: Despite the early cutoff in their reproductive faculty, some menopausal women report an increased libido. If the purpose of sex is the continuation of the species through reproduction, why, only in the human line, did early cessation of ovarian function combine with longevity and increased libidinous desire?

The innovations distinguishing the human female from other mammalian females mentioned thus far pale when compared with her most spectacular new feature. She became the first species who possessed the willpower to refuse consistently to engage in sex around the time she was ovulating. For that matter, she was the first animal of either sex, of any species, capable of deciding to remain celibate if she so desired.

This resolve is the heart of Response W. This is the gift Natural Selection bestowed upon her for having to endure Factor X, high maternal mortality and painful childbirth. It is something that had heretofore never existed in the animal kingdom. Philosophers call it Free Will. And herein lies the crux of relations between the sexes. African Eve and her daughters developed the determination to choose consciously a course of action that overrode the instinctual circuits that drive every other species' females to copulate when they ovulate. Females of some other species may be able to choose which male among multiple suitors upon which they wish to confer their favors; an occasional female of any species may decide not to mate with anyone or at any time. But the human species was the first in which all the females evolved the capacity to decide consciously to refuse to mate during any one ovulation or all the time.

-------------------------

Leonard Shlain is the Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF. He is also the author of "Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light" (HarperCollins, 1991) and "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image" (Viking, 1998). The essay above is from his most recent book, "Sex, Time and Power " (Viking, 2003), which explores how women's sexuality shaped human evolution. Dr. Shlain lectures widely both in the United States and throughout Europe. He lives and writes in Mill Valley, California.