When the Yorkshire Evening News reported on an address delivered by 25-year-old physicist Florence Bell at a scientific conference held in Leeds in 1939, it wasn’t her science that made the headlines, but simply the fact that she was a woman doing science.
What neither the writers who came up with the headline “Woman Scientist Explains”, nor their readers could have known was that, in the course of her PhD research, this particular woman scientist had quietly laid the foundations for one of the biggest landmarks in 20th century science: the discovery of the structure of DNA.
