There is only one Marie Curie, which is to say that 86 years after the pioneer of radioactivity research and the first woman to win a Nobel prize died, there is still only one female scientist every schoolboy can name. The legends of others live on, it is true, but perhaps in the minds of more schoolgirls than schoolboys, and often as icons of man-inflicted injustice.
Rosalind Franklin, who died aged 37, was for decades the forgotten third DNA researcher behind “Crick and Watson’s” discovery of the double helix. One night in 1967, astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell became the first person to detect a pulsar – and went on to observe her supervisor and another male colleague collect a Nobel prize for its discovery. When