Rita Levi-Montalcini, from her clandestine WWII bedroom lab to Nobel Prize winning neuroscience

 

Rita Levi-Montalcini, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025. She leans on the incubator built by her brother, and holds an egg with her prized binocular compound microscope in her WWII secret bedroom lab.

This is a linocut print of Italian neurobiologist and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 – 2012) who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor. Hand-carved and hand-printed on delicate Japanese mulberry paper, each print is 11" x 14". She's long been on my radar as a possible subject for a portrait, being so well-known as a Nobel laureate and for many years, the oldest surviving laureate. Pictures abound online of her apparently living her best life, with a knowing smile and her signature swirled updo, often with a glass of wine

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrating something

in hand, well into her 90s and even past her 100th birthday. So I had imagined a fun portrait of this delightful, elegant and charming, active Jewish senior scientist, continuing to produce good work, mentor younger scientists, establishing (with her twin sister) a foundation to provide scholarships worldwide, especially for African women, acting as Italian senator for life and regularly pissing off right-wing politicians.  But a client commissioned the portrait and specifically requested not her late life, nor the period around her Nobel win or research, but her wartime work, in her secret lab created in her bedroom. This seemed a real challenge as most photos I could find were in later decades, and the lab itself was not photographed. But I eventually found a couple of articles about her early career, which included a photo of her with her family in 1940, when they agreed she could make her lab, and a great article by fellow scientist/printmaker Bob Goldstein specifically about her wartime work. Bob kindly answered all my questions and even got me in contact with the archivists at Zeiss, so I could make sure I depicted her prized microscope accurately (if not the precise but unknown model, at least a plausible model which would have been available in Italy in 1940 and which would have served her goals) as well as an image of the type of observations she was making.

via this paper

The youngest of four, Rita (along with her twin Paola) was born to an Italian Jewish family in Turin. Her mother Adele Montalcini was a talented painter and her father Adamo Levi was an electrical engineer and mathematician. She had planned to be a writer but the death of a beloved nanny to cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. Her father thought university would disrupt his daughters’ lives as wives and mothers but Rita knew she was not cut out for domestic life. Eventually he came to support her aspirations. As an undergraduate she was inspired by neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi (no relation) to study the nervous system and she stayed on after med school graduation in 1936 as his assistant. Her research and Levi’s, both, were cut short by the Italian dictator Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race and the introduction of racist laws baring Jews from academic and professional careers.

In 1939 she left Italy for Brussels, Belgium, where her older sister Nina and her family lived, and she was able to do research which involved using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material. The research environment was challenging and she missed her family terribly. Soon, nowhere in Europe felt safe; she wrote "the whole world was in danger." She opted to return to Turin in December of 1939 to at least be close to her family, living with her mother, painter sister Paola and architect brother Gino in her large childhood home. They were not allowed to take part in the workforce and once Mussolini joined forces with Hitler and declared war on Britain and France, the industrial city of Turin became a target of nighttime aerial bombings. She was disappointed by the forced interruption in her research but that changed after running into a former colleague from the University of Turin, Rodolpho Amprino, by chance. While not Jewish, he too had left the university after the introduction of the racial laws. He was disgusted with the unjust treatment of Giuseppe Levi and the promotion of the new director of the Institute (not for his mediocre scientific sills, but for his closeness to the fascist regime).  Amprino went to work in Chicago but returned to Italy in 1940. When he learned Levi-Montalcini was idle due to being barred from employment he told her "you don't lose courage in the face of the first difficulties." He advised her to set up a small laboratory, reminding her that the famed neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal had managed to do fundamental work in the sleepy city of Valencia, so she could work at home. With her family’s support, Rita transformed her bedroom into a a secret research lab. In the summer of 1940, she read an article by US-based German scientist Victor Hamburger about the development of the nervous system and how nerve cells accurately connect muscles to the brain. Rita called this a “conversion” moment for her research goals. Hamburger described the surgery he did on chick embryos the size and shape of a typed letter ‘f’ with a glass needle, investigating what would occur if he removed the limb bud target of a nerve; would nerve cells still grow towards the limb? Their absence post-surgery lead him to conclude the nerves never formed if he removed the limb bud. Her brother built her an incubator for eggs so she could use egg embryos in her investigations. She had a heater for melting wax in which to embed the embryos, so she could make paper-thin slices she could observe with her microscope. In December 1940, she made a a daring train trip to Milan to purchase a binocular compound microscope from Zeiss. In arguably the most Italian anecdote ever about the history of science, police spotted her with her cake-sized box and demanded to see what was inside, suspecting she had a contraband panettone only available illegally under rationing. Luckily they were uninterested in her microscope and did not suspect that she needed it for her clandestine bedroom research lab, because her heritage barred her from an academic research job in fascist Italy. It became her most precious possession. She lugged it with her, along with glass slides, when she needed to use to the bomb shelter. She ventured out into the bombed out city of Turin to fetch fresh eggs regularly. She repeated Hamburger’s experiments using a sharpened sewing needle for surgery, and expanded on his research, investigating chick embryos not just before and after surgery, but daily, counting thousands of nerves for for 2 to 19 days after surgery. She captured the development through time, rather than a simple snapshot. In August 1941, her former mentor became her assistant, having fled Liege, Belgium where he had been working until the Germans arrived. Levi-Montacini saw something unexpected (contradicting Hamburger’s understanding); Hamburger had thought it was the muscles like those in the limb bulb that told nearby cells to become nerves whereas Levi-Montalcini saw that nerve cells formed regardless of the existence of a limb bulb but would die when deprived of a target. This was a fundamental observation; cell death plays a central role in how our nervous systems form. She published her results in Belgium and in a Vatican science journal in 1942, where Jewish scientists were still able to publish. My portrait represents Levi-Montalcini in her bedroom lab in 1940, leaning on her incubator, holding an egg, next to her precious microscope. Next to her is an image of nerves she photographed through this microscope.

Eventually the bombings and damage in Turin became too intense and the family, like most other residents fled the city for the country, making a home in Asti. During occupation she was in continuous contact with the partisan leaders of the Action Party (Partito d'Azione) and after Florence was liberated she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied Health Service, treating the injured and refugees with typhoid and other diseases. 

Hamburger read her article and invited her to the US after the war, to continue her research and collaborate as a research associate at Washington University in St Louis, where she ended up working for 30 years. Her research established fundamental role that cell death plays in the formation of nervous systems. Her ongoing investigation into how target tissues like muscles communicate with nerve cells so only those that find targets survive, ultimately led to her co-discovery with Stanley Cohen of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in 1952. NGF is a molecule taken up by nerves from their targets and it allows them to survive. She transferred bits of tumours to chick embryos and saw a halo of nerves grow around it "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones," unlike anything she had seen before. She hypothesized that the tumour itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves; this was verified with Stanley Cohen's help. Foundational to neurobiology, this research was important to our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.  She became a full professor in 1958 and, missing Italy, opened a second laboratory in Rome in 1962, dividing her time between Rome and St. Louis. 

She was director of the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), from 1961 to 1969 and of the Laboratory of Cellular Biology from 1969 to 1978. She was appointed director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome in 1977 and continued as a guest professor after her "retirement" in 1979. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1986. She wrote several books including her 1988 biography 'In Praise of Imperfection.' During the 1990s, she was amongst the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology and she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as Senator for Life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. She went on to found the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and served as its president. She was active well into her later life, even attending the opening of the senate at age 97 and attending Pope Benoît XVI 's visit to Rome's main synagogue at age 100. She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103 after many years as the longest living Nobel laureate.

References

Goldstein, Bob. A Lab of Her Own, Nautilus magazine, December 1, 2021.

Piccolino, Marco. Rita Levi-Montalcini's first intellectual emigration and her research in her laboratory "à la Robinson Crusoe": The Letters from Brussels and a "Whiggish" recollection. Multidisciplinary Research in Neurosciences. Conf. Cephalal. et Neurol. 2021; Vol. 31. N. 2:e2021016.

Rita Levi-Montalcini (b. 1909), Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis Missouri, 2007.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Wikipedia, accessed May, 2025.

RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Thursday 12 June 2025. 

Stafford, Ned. Rita Levi-Montalcini, February 2013. BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f804 (Published 11 February 2013)

The Future of Pollination - Manufactured Ecosystems

 

Our Fate Is Tied To That Of The Insects, linocut print, 16" x20", Ele Willoughby, 2025

Pollinator Week is a great time to share this print, which expresses the central theme of my work about the Future of Pollination for Manufactured Ecosystems. I have been working on a collection of 15 prints for this show for the last several months. Our food sources and ecosystems around us are dependent on pollinators (mostly bees & other insects, some birds & mammals) but insects populations have lost huge numbers and many species altogether. Our future will be linked to their fate. Each of the bees, moths, butterflies and beetles in my print are native species here. 

Next week our art show will open at Zavitz Art Gallery at the University of Guelph. Each of the visual artists has produced work on various themes in various media about our ecological future looking forward the wake of climate change and habitat loss and at what we can learn from nature. I’m really excited to see what the others have produced! I hope you’ll come see the show if you’re able. 

Photosynthesis
Artist: Yulia Shtern @magical_zoo

Soil Formation
Artist: Lynx @amour.lynx

Cultural Services
Artist: Pablo Rios @the_amazing_world_of_redacted

Biodiversity
Artist: Melanie Barnett
@melanie.barnett.ceramics

Climate Regulation
Artist: Amanda White @thetiniestseed

Master Geng: Chinese Alchemist Geng Xiansheng, 'Refining Snow' or Using Mercury to Extract Silver from Snow

Geng Xiansheng, linocut 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Mercury is the final prompt for #printerSolstice2425, which again made me think of alchemy. It is an element the alchemists favoured and felt was fundamental in their efforts to transmute base metals into precious metals, both in western and Chinese alchemy (from whence the more familiar western alchemy emerged). Chinese alchemy (煉丹術 liàndānshù), a name which literally means a method for refining cinnabar, or mercury sulphide (HgS) focused on longevity (and alignment with Tao) . It can be divided into the esoteric "inner alchemy" and "external alchemy" focused on making elixirs. 

The earliest recorded woman in Chinese alchemy was Fang (Chinese: 方), who lived roughly the first century BCE and is credited with a method for turning mercury into silver. So little is known about her, and what little that is known is so tragic, that I opted for another woman alchemist associated with "turning" mercury into silver, ten centuries later.  

This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of a woman alchemist known as Master Geng who flourished some time before the year 975 (Chinese: 耿先生; pinyin: Gěng Xiānshēng; Wade–Giles: Kêng Hsien-shêng). According to legend, this daughter of a scholar named Geng Qian (sometimes spelled Keng Chhien),  was known from adolescence for her intelligence, curiosity and skill in alchemy. She appears in the writing of alchemist Wu Shu, in his book Chiang Huai I Jen Lu (or Records of Twenty-five Strange Magician-Technicians between the Yangtze and Huai River) written in 975. An expert in what was called "the art of the yellow and the white" (that is, alchemy), she distilled perfumes and was also known as a talented poet and magician. Her fame grew to the point that the Emperor Xuanzong (circa 846-859) invited her to the palace, where rather than being counted amongst the palace women, she was honoured as a scholar and given the title Master, as in teacher. She was eloquent, spoke with confidence and known for wearing green robes and for her skills in performing alchemical transformations in the Imperial Court. In particular, she was known for using mercury for "creating" silver. One story tells that she could even transform snow into silver. The Emperor wished to test her skills and noted that all her transformations employed fire  and enquired whether she could perform a transformation without it. 

"She answered, 'Let me try. It might be.' So the Emperor took some mercury and enveloped it in several layers of beaten bark-cloth, closing it with the [Imperial] seal; this she placed forthwith in her bosom. After a long time there suddenly came a sound like the tearing of a piece of silk. The Teacher [Geng Xiansheng] smiled and said: 'Your Majesty did not believe in my methods, but now you will see for yourself. Ought you not to trust me ever hereafter?' Then she handed the packet back to the Emperor who saw that the seal was unbroken and upon opening it found that the mercury had all turned to silver."

Song Dynasty scroll painting "Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow'"

Modern chemists speculate that she might in fact have been using a legitimate chemical process which uses mercury to extract silver from ore. Likewise, her distilling of perfumes could have employed early prohibitive form of the Soxhlet process to continuously extract camphor into alcohol. Thus while alchemy differs from modern chemistry in aims and understanding, she would have been using some methods which we can recognize as scientific and can be seen as part of history of chemistry.

In her personal life she was known for her love of wine and romantic liaisons. 

My portrait is inspired by Song Dynasty paintings including one scroll painting called 'Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow' and illustrations of alchemists and their tools like the large three-legged ting furnace in which medicines were prepared.

Detail of Song Dynasty scroll painting "Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow'"

References

Chinese alchemy, Wikipedia, accessed March, 2025

Fitzgerald, C.P. The Horizon History of China, American Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1969.

Gordon, Robin L. Chinese Women Alchemists, Women Alchemists 2.0 website, accessed March, 2025.

Master Geng, Wikipedia, accessed March, 2025

Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. (2012-03-01). The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy. A&C Black. p. 13. ISBN 9781441132970.

Rayner-Canham, Marelene F.; Rayner-Canham, Marelene; Rayner-Canham, Geoffrey (2001). Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-twentieth Century. Chemical Heritage Foundation. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780941901277.

Xin, Yang, Barnhart, Richard M., Chongzheng, Nie, Cahill, James, Shaojun, Lang and Hung, Wu. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, Yale University Press, 1997

Florence Bascom geologist

Florence Bascom, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willougby, 2025

As an Earth scientist, the #printerSolstice2425 prompt silicon made me think of the Earth's crust, so I took the opportunity to make a portrait of brilliant trailblazing US geologist and professor Florence Bascom (1862-1945) who championed women’s education, and, amongst other things, pioneered the use of microscopy in petrology (the field of geology describing the structure and minearlogic composition of rocks) and used polarizing microscopes for detailed petrographic analysis to show that rocks previously identified as sedimentary were in fact metamorphosed (that is, changed in composition through heat and pressure over time). She called these volcanic rocks she called aporhyolite (implying a change in rhyolite, a silica rich igneous rock, as in her thin sections like the ones in my print). Though she was the second US woman to complete her doctorate in geology, after paleontologist Mary Emilie Holmes (University of Michigan, 1888), Bascom, the most famous US early woman geologist, is often called the first US woman geologist.

A portrait of Florence Bascom (Public Domain). Smithsonian Institution Archives Collection:
Science Service Records, 1902-1965 (Record Unit 7091)

Unusually for the time, she was encouraged to pursue university education. She was born the youngest of five children in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her father John, Bascom was a teacher, then professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams College and supporter of women's suffrage and coeducation. He became president of University of Wisconsin in 1874 and by 1875 he had opened the school to women. Her mother was a teacher, firebrand suffragette and women’s rights activist Emma Curtiss Bascom. Florence herself, a quiet, self-possessed, brilliant student, entered the University of Wisconsin in 1877 at age 15. Women still had limited access to the library, gymnasium and classes with full male enrolment. If there were not enough seats for men in attendance, women were asked to leave the classroom. Her interest in science was fostered by trips exploring the outdoors with her father, who maintained an observatory and laboratory at home. She completed both a BA (1882) in literature and a BSc (1884) in natural science, at the University of Wisconsin. She taught at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University, 1884-1885), created post-Civil War to educate freed Black formerly enslaved students and Indigenous students. Homesickness brought her back to Madison, Wisconsin. During a drive with her father and family friend, Ohio State University geologist Dr. Edward Orton, discussing the formation of the landscape around them, she became fascinated. With some encouragement and cajoling from her father, she re-enrolled and completed her M.Sc in geology at the University of Wisconsin in 1887. She was frustrated that the field did not allow her to participate as fully as her male peers and was barred from taking part in fieldwork, which was (and often still is) considered a fundamental part of the training of geologists. She taught high school at the Rockford Seminary for Women (later Rockford College) for two years but craved a greater challenge. Her professors encouraged her to pursue her doctorate at John Hopkins University, then the premier geology school.

Florence Bascom holding a Brunton compass1. From: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

Despite her multiple degrees and glowing letters of recommendation from several geologists and her university president father, she still had to argue her case to be allowed as the first woman enter the doctoral program at John Hopkins University. The university's founder and president Daniel C. Gilman vehemently opposed coeducation. One of the trustees called women "the foreign enemy within the walls." She petitioned for admission, arguing that she could not receive an equivalent education elsewhere, and was successful with support of her professors. But even then, she was not an official student, and was ineligible for scholarships or fellowships. She needed her family's financial support to attend. She was unhelpfully limited in her library and classroom access to protect her from the “rougher influences” of the young men. Many sources claim that Bascom was forced to sit behind a screen during lectures to shield her from the men and avoid distracting them, but other scholars point out there is a lack of primary sources to support this story; whether the story is true or apocryphal, she certainly found herself quite isolated and singled out, the subject of sexism and animosity. In 1891, her father wrote to her that "you better put a stone or two in your pocket to throw at those heads that are thrust out of windows," in response to those who would gawk at the lone woman. She was forbidden as a woman to participate in fieldwork through the university, but her supervisor, renown geologist George Williams, who believed strongly in equal education for women, insisted fieldwork was a necessary part of a geologist's training. He also worked for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) so, he took her on his USGS field excursions, bringing his wife along to avoid unwanted rumours about a male professor alone in the woods with his female student. Bascom fell in love with fieldwork. She did all the physical work of field geology, hiking and hauling tools and samples, as her male peers, in a high necked gown. In her isolation at the university she decided to focus on petrology and became expert in crystallography and mineralogy. She worked in these nascent fields, trained by the leaders and earliest pioneers. Her thesis “A Contribution to the Geology of South Mountain, Pennsylvania” is regarded as a major contribution to Appalachian geology and she published part of it in the first volume of the Journal of Geology in 1893. Though other some faculty denounced the very idea of women PhD candidates, Williams supported her research and publication efforts and cited her research in his own publications. Tragically, Williams, then only 38, contracted typhoid fever while in the field in 1894. Knowing Bascom would face barriers to publication as a woman, as his health worsened, he submitted her work to the USGS and succeeded in having it published as USGS Bulletin 136 before he died. She used the very recent geologic technique of petrographic microscopy to correct misconceptions about the formation of rocks at the northernmost tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She furthered understanding of the east coast of the US and redefined the recognized cycles of erosion in Pennsylvania. She published more than 40 papers - still relevant today - about the crystallography and geomorphology of the Appalachian Piedmont, in Maryland and Pennsylvania, including length USGS Bulletins and Folios. After teaching for a couple of years at Ohio State (1893-1895), she was recruited by women's college Bryn Mawr President James Rhoads. She founded the Geology Department at Bryn Mawr in 1895, working out of a small spaced boarded off in the storage area of the biology, chemistry and physics building. After his death, his successor Martha Carey Thomas did not think geology would appeal to women, and discouraged it. Nonetheless, she persisted, working tirelessly to establish their mineral and literature collection for teaching over the course of two years, developing a lab and field-based curriculum. She became a full prof in 1906, and took a year-long sabbatical to the University of Heidelberg to train with renown crystallographer Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt, who had studied alongside Bascom's supervisor Williams. Bascom and Goldschmidt became true friends, and Florence gained a second devoted mentor and confidant with whom she corresponded for many years. She continued to correspond with his wife Leontine after his death.

In her research she was detail-oriented and driven by the data. Her writing was clear and incisive if sometimes terse, forceful and unapologetic. For instance, in correcting a poorly-determined age for certain igneous rocks previously published in the literature she wrote, "this determination was made on the basis of some rather dubious fossils submitted... by Persifor Frazer and cannot, therefore, be considered perfectly trustworthy." She proceeded to make her own case with clear and detailed illustrations, like those I included in my portrait. She also defended her turf fiercely, on occasion feuding with colleagues who published on her area of expertise but neglected to seek her review.

Florence Bascom (second from front, flat rather than pointy hat) on a field trip,
possibly to the Grand Canyon, with students in 1906. Sophia Smith Collection (Smith College)

Having benefited from great mentorship, Bascom followed suit and was an extraordinary mentor. A tough but innovative in teaching and a devoted mentor, she trained the next generation of women in geology, making one of the best geology departments in the country. She invited world-famous geologists to come lecture her students. She emphasized both lab and fieldwork for students. She argued fieldwork should count towards their physical education credit, clashing with university president Thomas who demanded that women wear appropriate apparel. The usual "athletic skirt" was not to be worn off-campus, and students would require walking skirts before being allowed in the field.  In 1932, she wrote, "I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by women, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students... these are all notable young women who will be a credit to the science of geology." In 1937, of the women who had been made Fellows of the Society of America, 8 of 11 had been her students at Bryn Mawr. Hired to do fieldwork by the USGS in the summers, she returned to Bryn Mawr in to teach after her field seasons and write up her research. Working at the USGS gave her access to more books, labs and colleagues. The university president used her passion for fieldwork and her USGS work to argue that the geology program should be dissolved, but Bascom won that battle too. The strain of her double career and teaching load made things difficult and put a strain on her mental health. But she loved her work and wrote, "one finds a joy that is beyond expression in 'sounding the abyss of science' and the secrets of the infinite mind.

Photo of Bascom teaching in the field around 1915. Bryn Mawr College Archives (Public Domain)

She was the first woman: hired by the USGS in 1896; to present a paper at the Geological Society of Washington in 1901; and she was the second women elected to the Geological Society of America in 1924; and elected VP of the GSA in 1930. She was associate editor of the American Geologist, 1896-1905. In 1906 she the only woman added to the list of 100 most influential geologists by the American publication Men in Science; she was recognized by her colleagues as one of the leading figures in the field. Though future editions included many of the women students she trained, it remained "Men" in Science until 1971. A lover of animals as well as the outdoors, she was known for hiding her horse Fantasy around campuses, and bicycling to work when wearing divided skirts to do so was still rather scandalous. She never married, commenting that women were too often lost to science due to marriage and domestic duties - an issue we still see today. She cut her hair short and often did not bother styling it, having other priorities and working from dawn to dusk in the field. She wrote, "This is the life, to plunge into the welcome isolation of the field, to return to the stimulating association of Bryn Mawr, to observe and in part to clear up geologic phenomena, to return to the exposition and interpretation of geologic phenomena." She retired in 1928 from Bryn Mawr to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts but kept working at the USGS until age 74 in 1936. She died June 18, 1945, in Williamstown, where she was born. The USGS Florence Bascom Geoscience Center, and several geological features including a glacial lake, Venusian crater and an asteroid are named in her honour. She left behind a tremendous record of important geological research and excellent mentorship and training of future geologists.

References 

Ball, Jessica. Dr Florence Bascom: Sounding the abyss of science. Finding Ada. April 1, 2021.

Bascom, F. and G. W. Stose. Description of the Coatesville and West Chester Quadrangles. US Geological Survey Atlas of the United States, Folio, 223. 1938.

Bascom, F. and G. W. Stose. Geology and Mineral Resources of the Honeybrook and Phoenixville Quadrangles, Pennsylvania. USGS Bulletin 891, 1938.

Florence Bascom (1862-1945), Geological Digressions, September 26, 2024. 

Florence Bascom Wikipedia, accessed March, 2025.

Florence Bascom, Trailblazer of the U.S. Geological Survey, Communications and Publishing, USGS, March 1, 2023.

Hurler, Kevin. Florence Bascom, a geologic juggernaut. Advanced Science News, January 27, 2022.

Oglivie, Ida H. Florence Bascom 1862-1945. Science. Vol. 102, Issue 2648, pp. 320-321, September 28, 1945, DOI: 10.1126/science.102.2648.320

Schueth, Jon. The Stone Lady: Florence Bascom (Part 1). Bias in the Fossil Record. April 2, 2021.

Schueth, Jon. A "Woman's Sphere" - Florence Bascom (Part 2). Bias in the Fossil Record. April 12, 2021.

Schueth, Jon. On the Shoulders of Giants: Florence Bascom (Part 3). Bias in the Fossil Record. April 20, 2021.

Schueth, Jon. The Bascom-Goldschmidt Letters: Florence Bascom (Part IV). Bias in the Fossil Record. May 6, 2021.

Shillito, Lisa-Marie. Florence Bascom. Trowelblazers. July 14, 2014.

Sneiderman, Jill S. Rock Stars: A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom. GSA Today, July 1997.

The Stone Lady Florence Bascom, Acadia National Park, National Park Service, last edited February 5, 2021.

Marie Meudrac, where the transition from alchemy to chemistry meets medicine, cooking and cosmetics: chemistry by a woman for women

Marie Meurdrac, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of Marie Meurdrac (c. 1610-1680), one of the first chemistry textbook authors and the first woman to publish a book on early chemistry. Working right at the transition between alchemy and chemistry, in 1666 she published 'La Chymie charitable & facile, en faveur des dames' (Charitable and easy chemistry for ladies). I selected her for the #printerSolstice2425 prompt sodium, as for her, salt, "the father of generation" was the first of the 3 elements, salt, sulphur and mercury, from which all materials were made. 

We do not know a great deal about her life for certain. Born to a land-owning family, in Mandres-les-Roses, now a suburb of Paris, to Vincent Meurdrac or Meurdrat, a notary, and Elisabeth Dove.  Her younger sister Catherine, became the author and memoirist with the nom de plume Madame de la Guette.  She married a military man. Her sister recorded his name as Monsieur de Vibrac, captain du château de Grosbois, where she moved after her marriage. He was commander of Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême (illegitimate son of Charles IX of France)'s guard unit. However the Abbot Sanson recorded that she married Guillaume de Brisset; but this discrepancy might be explained if Guillaume de Brisset succeeded his father Monsieur de Vibrac to both the fiefdom of Vibrac and the captaincy.  In any account, living there, she became good friends with Countess de Guiche. She taught herself chemistry following the works and experiments of her contemporaries and reading books on chemistry and alchemy. She had her own lab where she tested all her remedies and recipes. She dared to write a handbook of practical chemistry, which helped popularize the subject throughout Europe, at a time when the very idea of scholarly women was ridiculed in France. The  woman question ("la querelle des femmes")- or rather the question of whether women should be educated at all was widely debated. The book is dedicated to the countess; Meurdrac had access to a high temperature furnace which required permission of the king which she might have got thanks to the countess. 

Chemistry had long been practiced by women in cooking in the kitchen, in making household remedies and cosmetics, but as sciences became formalized it became a man's world. Meurdrac had been keeping notes of all her experiments so as not to forget her results when she realized she had enough for a book as complete or more so than other available chemistry handbooks. The word “chymie” comes from 16th century Swiss doctor Paracelsus, and following in his tradition, she believed that matter is made of various quantities of 3 elements: salt, mercury, and sulphur, but unlike previous alchemist authors (including those she cites like Raymond Lull and Basil Valentine) her writing is clear and unpretentious rather than obscure. She wants to expose what alchemists would keep a secret for the select few. She omits the astrological conditions so come in alchemical recipes. 

The Preface from Marie Meurdrac's  'La Chymie charitable & facile, en faveur des dames' complete with her argument "les Esprits n'ont point de sexe"

She wrote about her uncertainty in daring to publish as a woman, concerned that it might be above her station and knowing that men scorn the products of women's minds but concludes that but minds "have no sex and that if the minds of women were cultivated like those of men, and that if as much time and energy were used to instruct the minds of the former, they would equal those of the latter.” Her words, "les Esprits n'ont point de sexe" appear in my print, as in her book. Knowing that bourgeois or even aristocratic women were denied formal scientific education in universities, she wanted to provide accessible chemistry, botany, pharmacology, medicine, as well as in cosmetics knowledge and hands-on training to women. As women could not legally practice medicine, providing free healing services and lessons was a sort of loophole for her, hence the word "charitable" in her title.  She covered items such as lab techniques, properties of medicines, and cosmetics. She also had a table of weights and 106 alchemical symbols that were used in medicine at the time. The jars behind are marked with these symbols. She presents ingredients as "principles" rather than materials, in the manor of the alchemists and describes methods used both by alchemists and early chemists such as distillation, sublimation, rectification, calcination, cohobation and so forth, with specific vessels and fires to be used. She includes recipes which could be found in contemporary chemistry texts such as for Flowers of Bezoin, or Salt of Saturn. Following Paracelsus she writes about plants in medicine, as they believed them superior to other matter, created prior to animals according to Genesis and having survived the great flood. She was wary of using metals in medicine, viewing such treatment as more aggressive. She brought her knowledge to a wide audience, empowering women to make their own remedies and cosmetics safely, for instance, correctly warning of the dangers of using poisonous mercury sublimate to whiten skin as was done at the time. 

She is surrounded with books, tools, supplies and plants she would have used including scales, glassware, tongs, and a furnace, inspired by the frontispiece in one of the several editions of her book. The plants are rosemary, which she describes as a universal antidote to all sorts of illnesses, and tansy, used to facilitate childbirth. The book was popular for more than 50 years, with five editions in France, six in Germany, and one in Italy. She encouraged her readers to follow her lead and use their skills to freely treat the poor. Recognizing the cost of materials and tools she offers her readers some more accessible alternative suggestions and offers advice on finding the more rare ingredients. She even offers to answer readers' questions or even make demonstrations in person. Writing about chemistry for women, when it was claimed by men for men, was transgressive, and she defends her ability to do so with her strong feminist argument. She made hands-on training in chemistry, botany, pharmacology, and medicine, as well as in cosmetics accessible to generations of women. 

References

Bulletin du bibliophile, Volume 24, Techner, 1859. pp. 252-253

Fiendstein, Sandy. Experience, Authority and Alchemy of Language: Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac Respond to the Art. Early Modern Women, Volume 15, Number 2, Spring 2021, pp. 133-142 (Article) Published by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2021.0028

Fiendstein, Sandy. La Chymie for Women: Engaging Chemistry's Bodies. Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol 4, 2009, pp. 223-234.

Findlay, Sam. 'Mind has no sex': The story of Marie Meurdrac, First Lady of Chemistry, ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, March 10, 2015.

Gordon, Robin L. 2015. Marie Meurdrac. Women Alchemists: Stories and  Reflections on their Place in History, Psyche and Science. accessed, February, 2025

Marie Meudrac - La chymie pour les femmes, YouTube video by Sur les épaules des géantes, February 3, 2021

Marie Meudrac, Wikipedia, accessed February 2025 (both English and French versions)

Meurdrac, Marie.  La chymie charitable & facile, en faveur des dames : 1666, Paris, CNRS, 1999 octobre 1999(réimpr. présentée et annotée par Jean Jacques) (1^re éd. 1666), 249 p. (ISBN 2-271-05726-4).

Rayner-Canham, Marelene F.; Rayner-Canham, Marelene; Rayner-Canham, Geoffrey (2001). Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-twentieth Century. Chemical Heritage Foundation. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780941901277.

Neon, as in Nixie tubes and Copper as in blue-blooded horseshoe crabs

 

Nixie Tubes, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2025

I wasn't sure what to make for the #PrinterSolstice2425 prompts neon because it's a famously un-reactive noble gas. It does play a role in stellar nucleosynthesis, but that was the subject of my last print. Copper on the other hand has such a long history and huge role in art and science that I didn't know where to begin. I opted for Nixie tubes and horseshoe crabs.

Nixie tubes, also known as or cold cathode display, are electronic devices used for displaying letters or numerals or other information using glow discharge. Introduced in 1955, they are prized today for their vintage aesthetics. Inside a glass tube, there's a wire-mesh honeycomb-shaped anode, and if you look carefully you can make out the multiple cathodes shaped like alphanumeric characters (here printed in silver). When a cathode is powered it becomes surrounded with an orange glow discharge. The tube is filled with a gas at low pressure, usually neon with a small amount of argon.

Horshoe crab, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2025

My hand-printed horseshoe crab (Tachypeus gigas) is hand-printed in grey, blue-bronze and dark brown on 8" x 8" cream-coloured Japanese paper with bark inclusions. They get their name from their horseshoe like shape but they are not crabs; they are chelicerates, more closely related to arachnids and they are "living fossils" which have changed very little since they first appeared in the Triassic. The textured sandy paper is meant to look like sand on a beach. They actually swim with their underside up, but prefer to stay on the sea bottom.

There are four species of horseshoe crab which are still living. T. gigas is a species from the Indo-Pacific. The blood of horseshoe crabs (like most mollusks) contains the copper-containing protein hemocyanin rather than hemoglobin (the iron-containing protein), which is the basis of oxygen transport in vertebrates. Colourless when deoxygenated hemocyanin turns dark blue when oxygenated. In circulation, the horseshoe crab's blue is grey-white to pale yellow,  but if exposed to air when they bleed, it turns dark blue. Hemocyanin carries oxygen in extracellular fluid, unlike the oxygen transport in vertebrates by hemoglobin in red blood cells. 

Tachypleus gigas inhabits seagrass meadows, sandy and muddy shores at depths to 40 m (130 ft) and is the only horseshoe crab to have been observed swimming at the surface of the ocean. It lives in both marine and brackish waters in tropical South and Southeast Asia.

Katsuko Saruhashi, marine geochemist who measured CO2 in the oceans and showed how radioactivity spread from nuclear testing

Katsuko Saruhashi, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

This is my hand-carved and hand printed linocut portrait of Japanese geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi (1920-2007) who created tools that allowed her to make the first measurements of CO2 in seawater, raised the alarm about nuclear fallout, tracing it in the oceans, and researched peaceful uses of nuclear power. A supporter of women in science, she established the Society of Japanese Women Scientists and the Saruhashi Prize for Japanese women researchers for excellence in science and mentoring women scientists. Each print is 9.25” x 12.5” on Japanese kozo, or mulberry paper. I made this print for the #printerSolstice2425 prompt carbon.

Born in 1920, the story goes that her interest was sparked in science watching raindrops in primary school, wondering about the source of rain. Her parents believed in education, but she had to make a case to leave a secure insurance job at 21 to study chemistry. Her family witnessed how women struggled to support themselves without husbands or fathers in wartime. So her mother thought science might be a good way to ensure financial independence. She studied chemistry at the Imperial Women's College of Science (now Toho University). After completing her undergrad degree in 1943 she worked at the Geochemical Laboratory at the Meteorological Research Institute (now the Japan Meteorological Agency) with her mentor, marine chemist and lab director Miyake Yasuo, who had a strict policy against gender discrimination. She developed the first tool to measure CO2 in the oceans using pH and chlorinity, called Saruhashi's Table. She enrolled in the PhD program at the renowned University of Tokyo in 1957, where she was the first woman to earn a science doctorate. Her dissertation was on "The Behaviour of Carbonic Matter in Natural Water". With Miyake, she showed that oxidation of organic material increased CO2 in the ocean; prior to this, oceanic CO2 levels were attributed to dissolved calcium carbonate (for instance from in sea shells) and that global warming could be mitigated by seawater's supposed ability to absorb CO2. She not only showed this was untenable, she found the Pacific Ocean emits more CO2 than it absorbs! This has dire consequences for climate change. 

With Teruko Kanzawa from 1973 to 1978, she recorded the pH of every rainfall, documenting acid rain over the five-year period at the Meteorological Research Institute in Tokyo. 

 

After WW2 the US persisted in testing nuclear weapons at the Bikini Atoll, roughly 4000 km southwest of Japan, and in 1954 several Japanese fishermen became ill after trawling downwind of the testing site. The Japanese government asked the Geochemical Laboratory to investigate. Measuring small concentrations of radioactive elements dispersed in the ocean is quite a difficult technical challenge. Saruhashi and her colleagues used radionuclides to trace ocean circulation about found dispersion was uneven, circulation went clockwise and radiation-contaminated waters went northeast towards Japan, arriving in just 18 months and at much higher concentrations than on the US Pacific coast. Continued testing could contaminate the entire ocean, even if done in such an isolated place. The U.S. Atomic Energy Force was skeptical and sponsored a lab swap, bringing Saruhashi to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD so her methods could be compared with those of US oceanographer Theodore Folsom. The two methods gave very similar results and the precision of her methods were undeniable. Her research provided critical evidence to support the end of above ground nuclear testing during the cold war. 

After her positive experience working with Miyake, Saruhashi noticed how differently she was treated as a woman researcher at the University of Tokyo, where she had to prove her abilities, and at Scripps, where her US counterpart Folsom told her not to bother coming in every day and assigned her a wooden hut to work in. Saruhashi believed firmly science and society were linked and that scientists bear social responsibility and should be engaged with the public. She was the first woman elected to the Science Council of Japan, to win Japan’s Miyake Prize for geochemistry. She won the Avon Special Prize for Women for promoting the peaceful use of nuclear power, and the Tanaka Prize from the Society of Sea Water Sciences. She said, “I would like to see the day when women can contribute to science and technology on an equal footing with men.”  She founded the Society of Japanese Women Scientists to recognize women in science and create a venue for discussion of issues faced by women in science as early as 1958. In 1981, she established the yearly Saruhashi Prize, awarded to a woman scientist who serves as a role model for younger women scientists.

She made a lasting impact on our understanding of human impacts on the ocean, climate, and radioactive contamination, blazed a trail for women scientists in Japan and helped foster the next generation of researchers. 

References

Katsuko Saruhashi, Wikipedia, accessed January 2025

Mast, Laura, Meet Katsuko Saruhashi, a resilient geochemist, who detected nuclear fallout in the Pacific, Massive Science, March 22, 2019