Claudine Picardet: chemist, mineralogist, and scientific translator at the chemical revolution

Claudine Picardet, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

For the PrinterSolstice prompt oxygen I made a portrait of a woman who was right there in the thick of things when the element oxygen was becoming understood. This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of Claudine Picardet (née Poullet, later Guyton de Morveau, 1735-1820). She was at the centre of things, making experiments in chemistry, mineralogy, recording meteorologic data and perhaps most importantly, translating the latest science from Swedish, English, German, Italian and possibly Latin to French in the height of the chemical revolution.

Claudine Poullet was the eldest daughter of a royal notary, François Poulet de Champlevey, and she married barrister and member of the Académie royale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Dijon, Claude Picardet in 1755. His membership in the Académie was Claudine’s entry into the high society scientific bourgeoisie. She attended lectures and demonstrations and became involved as a scientist, translator and host of her own salon. When she began her career she signed her translations and annotated textbooks as "Mme P*** de Dijon.” The couple had a son died at 19 in 1776. Her husband died in 1796, and she moved to Paris where she married her longtime scientific collaborator and friend Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, deputy of the Council of five hundred and director and chemistry professor at the École Polytechnic. She continued her work and hosting scientific salons in Paris, where she was known as the Baroness Guyton-Morveau during Napoleon’s reign. 

Her extensive translation work was part of the Bureau de traduction de Dijon headed by Guyton de Morveau, which required her to maintain extensive contacts abroad, be conversant with the latest science, be polylingual and even to perform laboratory experiments and examinations of mineralogical specimens to confirm the results in texts she translated. She produced books, papers and manuscripts circulated amongst French scientists. The other half dozen members were all male academics; none were as prolific, or translated from as many languages nor published in the Annales de Chimie, like her. Established by Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berthollet in 1789, the Annales de Chimie paid translators as authors. She appears to eventually directed the team of translators. Claude-Nicolas Amanton wrote a misogynistic obituary crediting her work to her second husband, but this is contradicted by the evidence. She also was a prominent contributor, including works like her translation of John Hill’s Spatogenesia: the Origin and Nature of Spar; its Qualities and Uses (1772) to Jean-André Mongez’s Journal de physique.

She published the first translated volume of the chemical essays of Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was one of the discoverers of oxygen, from Swedish and German into French, collected as Mémoires de chymie de M. C. W. Scheele; She was the person who brought Scheele’s work to oxygen to the attention of scientists in France. She translated Abraham Gottlob Werner’s 1774 mineralogy textbook into French, expanding and annotating the original to the degree that her Traité des caractères extérieurs des fossiles, traduit de l'allemand de M. A. G. Werner, 1790 is considered a new edition of the book. She likely contributed substantially tho the translation of Torbern Olaf Bergman’s six-volume Opuscula physica et chemica (Latin, 1779–1790), usually attributed to Guyton de Morveau. She also translated Richard Kirwan’s papers and may have contributed to Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier’s 1787 translation of his Essay on Phlogiston. Along with all the works in chemistry and mineralogy, she translated some meteorology and astronomy like "Observationes astron. annis 1781, 82, 83 institutæ in observatorio regio Havniensi" (1784), reporting the astronomical observations of the longitude of the Mars knot, made in December 1783 by Thomas Bugge. She attended Guyton de Morveau’s chemistry lectures and studied the mineral collection of the Dijon Academy. She even invented some French scientific terms to capture Werner’s neologisms. 

From 1786 to 1787, Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Bethollet and Antoine-François Fourcroy met almost daily while they worked to modernize chemical nomenclature, creating the definitive names still used in inorganic chemistry today and writing “Méthode de nomenclature chimique.” This included rules like simple substances should have simple names like hydrogen and oxygen and compounds should have compound names designating their parts, like sodium chloride. A 19th century painting of the authors notably includes both Claudine Picardet, holding a book to indicate her roll as translator and Mme Lavoisier. They were integrated in this work and deserve to be remembered for their roles.

Together with her second husband, Claudine Picardet established Dijon internationally as a scientific centre. Her translation work occurred at a vital moment in the chemical revolution, and she was recognized for the importance of her work during her day; we should remember her today.

References

Antonelli, Francesca. Madame Lavoisier and the Others: Women in Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier’s Network (1771-1836). Notes Rec. (2023) 77, 283–302 doi:10.1098/rsnr.2021.0074 Published online 13 July 2022 

Ashworth Jr., William B., Scientist of the Day - Claudine Picardet, Linda Hall Library, August 7, 2018

Claudine Picardet, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025

Kahr, Bart. Gender and the Library of Mineralogy. Crystals 2022, 12(3), 333; https://doi.org/10.3390/cryst12030333

La femme savante de Dijon - Claudine Picardet - Mini bio 42, posted by Sur les épaules de géantes, YouTube video, watched January, 2025

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, chemist, crystallographer, Nobel laureate, mother, arthritis patient, peace and disarmament activist

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, linocut print, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2025

The next prompt for PrinterSolstice is cobalt, an element animals including humans require for their metabolism, in the form of vitamin B12. So I made the portrait of English chemist and x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot, 1910-1994) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her models of biomolecules like penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, which were essential to structural biology.

The eldest of four daughters of English parents who were in the colonial administration of North Africa and the Middle East, and later, archeologists, Dorothy was born in Cairo, Egypt. The family escaped the heat of the summers by returning to England. When Dorothy was 4, her mother left her and her sisters Joan (2) and Elizabeth (7 months) with her Crowfoot grandparents near Worthing and returned to her husband and life in Egypt. The girls grew up with grandparents in England with parental support from afar. Dorothy became interested in chemistry as early as 4 and interested in crystals by age 10; "captured for life by chemistry and crystals," she later wrote. Her mother, a proficient botanist, encouraged her interests. She found a dark rock when visiting her parents in north Africa and asked a family friend, soil scientist A.F. Joseph if she could analyse it; he gave her a surveyor's box of reagents and minerals to encourage her.  She and her sisters would use a portable mineral kit to analyse pebbles they found in the stream.  During WWI, Dorothy lost four uncles on her mother's side influencing her to become an ardent supporter of the League of Nation and later a peace and disarmament activist. Her parents moved to Sudan where her father was in charge of eduction and archeology until 1926. In 1921, she entered Sir John Leman Grammar School, one of two girls allowed to study chemistry rather than domestic science usually assigned to girls.  She had one extended trip to spend time with her parents in Khartoum when she was 13.  A distant cousin who was a chemist, Charles Harrington (later Sir Charles) recommended D.S. Parsons' 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' to her at age 14. She set up a a small lab in her attic, using chemicals she got from the local pharmacist. On her 16th birthday her mother gave her W.H. Bragg's 'Concerning the Nature of Things' about x-ray crystallography, which used the scatter pattern of x-rays through crystals at different angles, recorded on photographic plates to image crystals and use mathematics to then deduce their structure from these patterns. As Latin, required for entry to Oxford, was not on her school curriculum, the headmaster personally tutored her so she was able to pass the entrance exam. 

Post-WWI her parents eventually returned to their habit of summering in England to spend time with their children and escape the heat while working abroad. After retiring from the Sudan Civil Service in 1926, her father took job as Director of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem and her parents lived there until 1935.

Dorothy joined her parents at the archeological site Jerash (present day Jordan) and documented patterns of mosaics of several 5th to 6th century Byzantine era churches, taking a year to finish her drawing just as she entered Oxford to study chemistry. There she also performed chemical analyses of glass tesserae from these sites. Her precise and meticulous drawings are now housed at Yale. She so enjoyed field archeology she considered switching her field of study. Her attention to detail in documenting patterns would later serve her well as a chemist. She graduated Oxford with a first class degree in chemistry in 1932.

She entered the PhD programme at Cambridge later that year studying with John Desmond Bernal and became interested in the use of x-ray crystallography to study the structure of proteins. She worked with Bernal on the first application of the method to image a biomolecule, pepsin. Previously, the method had only been used for inorganic crystals. Bernal believed in equal opportunities for women in chemistry and helped make x-ray crystallography one of the few fields with significant representation from women scientists. He followed in the example of William Bragg himself, who had 11 women amongst his 18 students. In 1933 she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College and returned to Oxford in 1934  to teach with her own lab equipment. She missed the day Bernal made the first photo of an x-ray of a protein crystal for health reasons. She was only 24 when she began experiencing pain in her hand which was diagnosed as chronic rheumatoid arthritis. She went to a clinic in Bruton for thermal baths and gold treatments before returning to work. The disease caused her hands to swell and become distorted; she had to add a special lever to the allow her to continue to use the main switch on the x-ray equipment. The disease is progressive and caused increasingly debilitating pain, problems and deformities in her hands and feet. She was appointed the college's first fellow and tutor in chemistry in 1936, a roll she held until 1977. She earned her PhD in 1937 on the x-ray crystallography and chemistry of sterols. In 1945 with C.H. Carlisle, she published the first structure of a steroid, chloresterol iodide. From 1941 through 45, she worked with colleagues including Barbara Low, on solving the structure of penicillin. She made her calculations manually with a set of specially printed paper strips and with her team plotted 108,00 points in the molecule to make two-dimensional contours of electron densities. With help from her sister, she drew the contour sheets on perspex so these 2D slices could be stacked to visualize the molecule in three dimensions. Only then could she make the traditional ball and stick model (like I have shown in my portrait); she surrounded hers with 2D contour plots of electron density. Country to scientific opinion, they found that penicillin contained a β-lactam ring. She was doing all this intense work while Thomas was teaching in Newcastle; she had to send him a telegram to alert him the arrival of their second child was imminent. The research was characterized as a wartime secret. She sent Thomas a postcard, 'Think we really have found out something for certain about P. Am extremely cheerful.' They completed the work on VE day in 1945. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947. They published their penicillin results in 1949; she bowed to social pressure at this point and added Hodgkin to her name, though she had up to this point published as Dorothy Crowfoot.

In 1948, Merck discovered vitamin B12, one of the most complex vitamins then known, and Hodgkin created some new crystals. Merck only published its refractive indices. When she realized it contained cobalt, she knew the almost completely unknown structure could be established with x-ray crystallography, but its size and largely unidentified atomic components would make it a challenge. Since the crystals were pleochroic, that is, they displayed different colours at different angles, she deduced the presence of a ring structure, confirmed by x-ray crystallography. Her 1954 published study was described by Nobel Laureate Lawrence Bragg as being as significant as "breaking the sound barrier." She published the final structure in 1955 and 56. 

In 1953, she, Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl Oughton (later Rimmer), were the first people to drive from Oxford to Cambridge in two cars to see the model of the double helix of DNA built by James Watson and Francis Crick, informed by x-ray crystallography by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin and their student Gosling. 

In 1957 the Royal Society awarded her the Royal Medal and she became a reader at Oxford, gaining a full, modern laboratory in 1958. She was appointed the Royal Society's Wolfs Research Professor in 1960 through 1970 which provided salary, research expenses and assistance and she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford from 1977 to 1983. 

Insulin, illustrated by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. This drawing was presented to crystallographer Dr. Helen Megan who was organizing the Festival Pattern Group in Britain in 1951. Hodgkin refused a fee or to copyright an image found in nature. Megaw organized an exhibit of the wonders of scientific patterns applied in design as part of the Festival of Britain. I decided life is too short to try and make a relief print of a molecule this complex!

One of her most important and celebrated studies was the longest lasting. She first received a sample of insulin in 1934. The size and complexity of the molecule was too great to explore with x-ray crystallography at that time, but the importance of the hormone captured her imagination. She had paused this research to work on the structure of penicillin, which contains 17 atoms, and vitamin B12, which contains 181 atoms, but returned to it later. By 1969, 35 years later, she was finally able to work with an international team of young scientists to reveal the structure of insulin. Insulin contains 788 atoms! It's hard to overstate the size of the task and the sheer number of calculations involved. This work was instrumental in our ability to mass-produce insulin and treat diabetes and also to allow scientists to alter the structure of the molecule to create even better drug options. She remained active in collaborating on insulin production and drug development to better treat diabetes. 

Sample of insulin wallpaper design made for the Festival of Britain. This simplified and stylized insulin design inspired the blouse she's wearing in my portrait.

Soft-spoken and gentle but determined and hardworking, Hodgkin inspired her students, whom she encouraged to address her simply as Dorothy. Her most famous student moved on from chemistry to politics; conservative UK PM Margaret Thatcher (née Roberts), hung Hodgkin's portrait in her office, out of respect for her former tutor, the livelong Labour supporter, sometime Communist Party of Britain member and pacifist Hodgkin. Hodgkin's politics were greatly influenced by her mentor Bernal, an open and vocal communist and supporter of the Soviet regime until it invaded Hungary in 1956. She always called him "Sage" and they briefly had a relationship (unconventionally, Bernal had an open marriage) before she met Thomas Hodgkin. Thomas was teaching adult education classes in northern English mining and industrial communities, after resigning from the Colonial Office. Intermittently a member of the Communist Party, he later wrote several works on African politics and history and lectured at Balliol College, Oxford. The two married in 1937 and had three children, Luke (1938-2020), Elizabeth (1941), and Toby (1946). Thomas spent a much time in west Africa, supporting and chronicling emerging postcolonial states. A lifelong advocate for peace, Dorothy campaigned against nuclear arms and the Vietnam war. Because of Dorothy's political activities and her husband's communist party membership she was banned from entering the US in 1953, and subsequently not allowed in without CIA waiver. 

She was in Ghana, where her husband was an advisor to president in 1964 when she learned she had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry her work on the structure of biomolecules. She served as President of the International Union of Crystallography, an organization she helped found, from 1972 to 1975 and worked to foster international collaboration. She worked to include Chinese and Soviet scientists through the Cold War. In 1976 she won the prestigious Copley Medal, the first woman to do so (the second wasn't until Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 2021). Concerned about social inequities and preventing war and in 1976 she became the longest-serving president of the international Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which brings scientists and public figures to work together to reduce the risk of armed conflict and seek solutions to global security threats. She stepped down in 1988 after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ban on short and long-range nuclear weapons. She accepted the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in 1987 for her peace and disarmament work. Fellow chemist, peace activist and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling had recommended her for the award.

In later years she spent a great deal of time in a wheelchair because of the progress of the rheumatoid arthritis, but she was able to remain an active scientist. She skipped the 1987 Congress of the International Union of Crystallography in Australia, but attended the 1993 Congress in Beijing. She died by stroke in 1994 in her husband's village of Ilmington. 

The Royal Society now awards the Dorothy Hodgkin Award in her honour to outstanding early career scientists requiring flexible work due to caring or health reasons. The Council offices in Hackney, university buildings at the universities of York, Bristol and Keele and the science block at her old school Sir John Leman High School are named in her honour. Oxford International Women's Festival presents the annual Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture in her honour.

Her work helped in the rapid production of penicillin, considered a miracle drug at the time, mapping vitamin B12 helped the fight against pernicious anemia and her structure of insulin greatly improved our ability to treat diabetes. She left her mark on science and society both.

References,

All or Nothing,  Back From the Dead exhibit website from The Museum of the History of Science, 2021

Alman, Margaret. Art in the Atoms: Chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, blog post, February 3, 2010.

Cole, Rupert. Happy Birthday Dorothy Hodgkin. Science Museum blog. May 11, 2018

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Nobel Prize website, accessed January, 2025

Dorothy Hodgkin, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2024

Hodgkin, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot, Jennifer Kamper, June Lindsey, Maureen F. Mackay, Jenny Pickworth, John H. Robertson, Clara Brink Shoemaker, J. G. White, R. J. Prosen and Kenneth N. Trueblood. “The structure of vitamin B12. I. An outline of the crystallographic investigation of vitamin B12.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences 242 (1957): 228 - 263.

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska Revealed the Paleobiolgy of Paleozoic Invertebrates, Mongolian Dinosaurs and the Earliest History of Mammals

Zofia Keilen-Jaworowska, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Zofia Keilan-Jaworowksa (née Keilan, 1925-2015) was a Polish paleobiologist, famous for a series of Polish-Mongolian expeditions she lead in between 1963 and 1971 to the Gobi desert, where she discovered dinosaurs including the Deinocheirus, and Gallimimus and where she and her colleagues found the “Fighting Dinosaurs” fossil specimen in 1971 preserving a Protoceratops andrewsi and Velociraptor mongoliensis trapped in combat about 74 million years ago. Her research covered a wide range of palaeontology but her special interest was the origin and evolution of early mammals. She was the first woman to serve on the executive of the International Union of Geological Sciences and was a trailblazer in palaeontology.

Born in Sokołów Podlaski, Poland in 1925, her family, father Franciszek, mother Maria and she and older sister Krystyna ended up in a living borough of Warsaw. In 1939, when she was 14, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and triggered WWII. Germany would occupy Poland until the end of the war in Europe in 1945 and non-Germans were barred from higher education, on pain of death. The Polish resistance organized a clandestine network of instruction, risking their lives to continue teaching Polish students. In 1942 one of her school friends Jana Prot confessed that her family was loosing their apartment and she would have to leave the secret school; Zofia and Krystyna told Jana she should come live with them as they had room in their home. Their parents were fond of Jana and agreed, treated her as a third daughter. A visiting relative let the family know that Jana's father Jan Prot, formerly Berlinerbau,  a well-known chemist, and mother had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and thus housing Jana would dangerous. In Poland, the Nazis imposed the death penalty for helping Jews. Her parents told Zofia that they were so nervous they could not sleep, but opted to protect Jana. Her family found her a place she could stay and work on a farm, but when someone threatened to denounce her, the family took Jana back in, until the three girls completed high school in 1943. Jana moved out but the family often helped her. The family also hid Romana Laks, a 7 year old Jewish girl until she could get false papers which allowed her to hide in a convent. After high school Zofia secretly studied zoology at the University of Warsaw and joined the resistance "Grey Ranks," an underground paramilitary group organized from scouting groups, who trained her to be a medic. Zofia put her medic skills to work, with Jana who became a nursing student, caring for and transporting the wounded during the Warsaw Uprising, the 1944 failed attempt to oust the Germans. She found both shelter and the opportunity for volunteer work in the Zoological Museum which fostered her love for evolution and vertebrate palaeontology. In the wake of the subsequent retaliatory destruction of much of the city by Nazi forces, including the Department of Geology, when the university reopened to Polish students in 1945, she attended lectures offered by renown Polish palaeontologist Roman Kozłowski in his own home, which captured her imagination. 

She completed a masters in zoology and a doctorate in 1953 in paleontology at Warsaw University. Poland is rich in marine invertebrate fossils and her earliest research focused on trilobites, sea worms and Paleozoic (541-242 million years ago) marine fossils. Her innovative methods let her prepare the complex and delicate jaws of sea worm fossils. While at in 1950 graduate school she met her future husband, radiobiologist Zbigniew Jaworowska during a mounting climbing trip.  They married in 1958 and had a son, Mariusz in 1959. After graduate school she followed Kozłowski to work at the Institute of Paleobiology run by the Polish Academy of Science. Zbigniew was a big part of her life and well-known to her colleagues; their research interests intersected when she brought some fossils home, where he had a Geiger counter and noticed they were radioactive.

Now living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska realized that she had an opportunity to explore Mongolia, a Soviet satellite state, and that this was somewhere Western scientists could no longer travel. In the 1920s American Museum of Natural History expeditions had found dinosaurs which were new to science like Velociraptor and Protoceratops. When Kozłowski retired in 1961, Keilan-Jaworowska succeed him as Directory of the Institute of Paleobiology. As the Polish Academy of Science had just signed a cooperative agreement with Mongolia, at Kozłowski's suggestion she wrote a proposal for a series of joint Polish-Mongolian palaeontology expeditions to the Gobi Desert to study Late Cretaceous (80-75 million years ago) fossils. The Polish and Mongolian Academies of Science approved her proposal and she was selected as lead scientist and organizer, the first woman to lead a dinosaur excavation expedition. She lead seven of the total of eight such expeditions. Mounting expeditions to the remote Gobi, with its rash climate, and with limited financial and technological resources available in Cold War Poland was a tremendous challenge, but these expeditions were incredibly successful.

Wandering alone in a gully after rain, unusual for the desert, she wrote "found an unusual skeleton consisting of complete forelimbs and a shoulder girdle of enormous size, along with fragmentary ribs." The strange three-fingered limbs were 2.5 metres long! So, they named the dinosaur Deinocheirus, or terrible hand. Along with this discovery, they found many Tarbosaurus in the tyrannosaur family, the "thick-headed lizard" pachycephalosaurs like Homalocephale, ankylosaurs, sauropods like Nemegtosaurus, horned Cerotopsia, and ostrich-shaped ornithomimids like Gallimimus. During one single expedition in 1965, her team shipped 20 tonnes of fossils back to Poland. During the 1971 expedition, team member Andrzej Sulimski spotted a velociraptor; when the team excavated, they found it was entwined with a second fossil: a protoceratops! Now regarded a national treasure of Mongolia and housed at a museum in Ulanbaatar, this famous find is known as the "Fighting Dinosaurs" and included in my portrait. She also discovered fossils of types of crocodile, lizard, turtle and birds. Nothing could distract her from this work. Once she suffered a ruptured eardrum in the field during a sandstorm; she flew to Warsaw for surgery and then returned immediately to the field.

Despite the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska fostered camaraderie and built networks with leading Western scientists and around the world, disseminating the results of their expeditions as she spent the next quarter century interpreting the results of the expeditions with their unprecedented numbers of a wide variety of very complete fossils.

While making all these exciting dinosaur finds, Keilan-Jaworowska made her largest contributions in study of the early mammals of the Late Cretaceous. Previously, scientists had some fossil jaws and teeth but now much of what we know about the very origins and evolution of mammals can be traced back to her trailblazing research. She found many complete skulls and skeletons of most of the known groups of Late Cretaceous mammals. The final Polish-Mongolian expedition recovered 180 Mesozoic mammal skulls, the largest such collection worldwide, at the time. She changed the ways these animals were conceived. They had been thought rare and undiverse. She also changed our understanding of species, upending decades of thinking by showing that Deltatheridium, for instance, was closer to marsupials than placental mammals. She became an expert in Multituberculates, the early rodent-like forms like the Catopsbaatar in my portrait. She is especially for using laborious serial sections through the minute skulls. She showed these Multituberculates were viviparous, that is they bore live young, she studied their brains and estimated their intelligence and even showed some were venomous. She also made significant contributions to our understanding of the Eutheria clade, whose descendants include living placental mammals.

She really launched a new age of paleontological discovery. She published 230 scientific papers and books. Her first Nature paper in 1969 was very cited; she published 8 papers in Nature in total. Her 1970 book Hunting for Dinosaurs, translated from Polish to English was a scientific best seller. She described yurt hotels, challenges of communicating without being able to speak Mongolian, the lack of water and logistics challenges of providing for a team of 30, vehicle troubles and talented Mongolian drivers, sandstorms which descended like eclipses, darkening the sky, biting insects, venomous snakes and spiders, and rewarding if exhausting working in the heat. She was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1973 to 1974. By 1980, her membership in the Solidarity trade union made it complicated to remain in Poland. She stepped down as Director of the Institute of Paleobiology in 1982 and was a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris for two years.  At 68 she was a consultant on Jurassic Park for Stephen Spielberg. At 70 she took the role of Head of the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Oslo for 8 years. Dedicated to public outreach, she modernized the exhibits there, using what she had learned from setting up the large exhibits of the Gobi fossils. She returned to Poland in 1995, where she was appointed Professor Emerita at the Institute of Paleobiology. She kept working and publishing, long after retirement. She received the Romer-Simpson Medal, the highest honour of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1996, for "sustained and outstanding excellence in scientific research and contributions to vertebrate palaeontology." In 1999, she received the Righteous Among Nations award for her aid to Jews during WWII. Both Jana and Romana survived the war. Zofia and Jana maintained their friendship and Jana was close with her family. Her parents corresponded with the Laks family and visited when in New York in 1976. Zofia published the key reference text Mammals From the Age of Dinosaurs (with Leo and Cifelli) in 2004 at 79. She served as editor of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica where open access was her watchword and where she helped authors from the developing world. Her obituary in Nature reads "Her style was, at times, unapologetically exacting - an apprenticeship with her was akin to martial-arts training with a Buddhist monk - but she pushed the rest of us to reach for better science." Her co-author Zhe-He Leo wrote, "She is the rarest among the rare - she has been a leader in making important scientific contributions, and also a gregarious and charismatic figure, both of which have made palaeontology a better science, and palaeontologists worldwide a better community." Several fossils have been named in her honour including Keilanodon, Keilantherium, Zofiabataar, Zofiagale and Indobaatar zofiae.

References 

Cifelli, Richard L., Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska (1925-2015), Nature, 520, 158 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520158a
Cifelli, Richard L., Jørn Hurum, Magdelena Borsuk-Białynicka, Zhe-He Luo, and Andrzej Kaim, In Memorium: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Acta Palaeontol. Pol. 60 (2): 287–290, 2015
Crumpton, Nick. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. Trowelblazers. August 27, 2014.
Delset, Lene Liebe. Legends of Rock: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. The Paleontological Society. Newsletter No. 97. March, 2018.
Fighting Dinosaurs, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025
Mancini, Mark, She's the Most Famous Paleobiologist You May Not Know, How Stuff Works blog, accessed January, 2025.
Rytlowa, Jadwiga. The Keilan Family. Stories of Rescue, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, November 2016.
Scott, Michon. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, StrangeScience.Net blog, December 21, 2024.
The Legend of the Gobi Desert: Professor Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Research in Poland, 20 December 2024.
Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025

Sophie Brahe, Horticulturalist, Astronomer, Chemist, Genealogist and Sister to Tycho

Sophie Brahe, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Born in either 1556 or 1559,  the 12th child (9 survived infancy) of Otte Brahe, advisor to the Danish king Frederick II, and Beate Bille Brahe, leader of Queen Sophie’s royal household, in Knudstrup Castle, Sophie Brahe was a horticulturalist, astronomer, chemist, and genealogist. At least a decade her senior and adopted and raised by his uncle Jørgen Thygesen Brahe, Sophie did not grow up with brother, the famous astronomer Tycho but the two became close when she reached adolescence. They found they were alike, sharing a determination to pursue science despite their family’s attitude this was an unsuitable activity for an aristocrat. Eventually they also shared a determination to each marry for love without regard for financial concerns or familial approval. They married a commoner and penniless noble respectively. 

Sophie married Otto Thott in 1579 and they two had a son, Tage Thott in 1580, but Otto died in 1588. As a widow, Sophie was responsible for maintaining and running the estate (now known as Trolleholm Castle in Eriksholme) until her son came of age. She studied chemistry, medicine and horticulture, growing medicinal plants and an exceptional garden. Following the theories of Paracelsus, she produced medicines to treat the poor, but as a woman, she could not formally study medicine.  

She became a regular visitor to her brother’s astronomical and alchemical laboratory, first at Herrevad Abbey and then later at Uranienborg, on the island of Hven. Tycho trained her in horticulture and chemistry but initially discouraged astronomy, but she pursued it on her own. She taught herself with textbooks in German and texts she had translated at her own expense from Latin. Even if he initially thought she might have the skills and education to pursue astronomy, he realized she could help him with his observations. With time he realized she had the skills she needed, to the point that he eventually, when he was often absent from 1588 to 1597, he started to delegate his duties to her, getting her to calculate the astrological charts which were the bread and butter of Renaissance astronomers. 

Specifically she made observations for Tycho on 11 November 1572, which led to the discovery of the supernova that is now called SN 1572, as well as a lunar eclipse in 1573 while still a girl. Tycho published De nova stella, or On the New Star about the supernova; the stars in my portrait are based on De nova stella and SN 1572 is the large star above Sophie’s head. The discovery of supernova was important to the ongoing revolution in astronomy as an observable change in the sky seemed counter to the prevailing geocentric model of the universe. Sophie was instrumental to Tycho’s meticulous observations of planetary orbits. Tycho developed instrumentation that allowed the most precision observations ever made prior to the invention of the telescope; Sophie, along with some other assistants, used these to make measurements. The incredible dataset proved invaluable to Kepler and lead to his laws of planetary motion, an important precursor to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. 

While at Uranienborg, she met Tycho’s friend, the alchemist Erik Lange. Lange's sister was married to another Brahe brother, so they had a family connection as well. Tycho trusted Erik to the extent that he made him the executor of his children's estate. Sophie returned to visit Erik over a dozen times and the two became engaged in 1590. Lange’s passion for alchemy had bankrupted him; he was obsessed with trying to produce gold from base metals. Sophie stood by him and financially supported his efforts after he used up his own fortune. Their wedding was delayed for years when Lange had to flee to Germany to avoid his creditors. The 600-line epic poem “Urani Titani” was published in 1594, as the love letters between Sophie as Urania, the muse of astronomy and Erik as a titan, studying alchemy abroad, written from Sophie’s point of view. The printer thought she was the author, but Tycho later claimed it. It seems likely he was either author, or at minimum translator and interpreter of Sophie’s thoughts, as Sophie was not fluent in Latin and Tycho was more likely to have known of its unusual poetic form. The poem denounces the futile search for the philosophers’ stone and promotes instead allegiance to Phoebus, god of healing. This shows the closeness of the two siblings, his respect for her as an astronomer, and that they likely both doubted that alchemy could produce gold. Nonetheless, Sophie was devoted to Erik and supported his research. 

She was able to visit Lange in Hamburg in 1599 but the two were not able to wed until 1602 in Eckernförde, where the couple lived in extreme poverty. Sophie complained to her sister that she had to wear stockings with holes in them to her own wedding and the groom needed to return his wedding clothes to the pawn broker after the wedding. She also complained of the family’s objections to her pursuit of science and their failure to pay money she was owed. She was often allow as he fled due to his debts. Even jewellery and clothes her sisters gave her out of pity were hawked to support his alchemical research. Erik had moved to Prague by 1608, where he died in 1613.

After Erik’s death, she regained enough wealth to fund repairs to the church at Ivetofta near where Frederick II had previously granted her the nearby manor of Årup. She nonetheless moved to Zealand and settled in Helsingør in 1616 where he son Tyge Thott had become a State Councillor. There she pursued her studies of horticulture and healing plants, teaching her servant all she knew of botany and healing. Despite any disdain she felt about the social norms of the aristocracy, she produced a genealogy of the Brahe family in 1600 and by 1626 she published a 900 page genealogy of 60 Danish noble families, still considered a major source for the history Danish nobility. Even in her 80s she was receiving visitors who came to see her famous gardens. She died in 1643 and is buried in the village of Torrlösa in the Thott family chapel, which is now part of Sweden.

References

Alenius, Marianne, The Honey-Sweet Delicacies of the Muses,  The History of Nordic Women's Literature,  July 27, 2011

Murray, Caroline, Sister of the more famous Tycho, Professor Hedgehog’s Journal,  September 10, 2018

Neill, Crystal, Sophie Brahe: Tycho’s Urania, on Before Newton: Explorations of pre-modern science, medicine and technology blog, accessed January, 2025

Sophie Brahe, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025.

Tycho Brahe, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025.

Wentrup, Curt. Chemistry, Medicine and Gold-Making: Tycho Brahe, Helwig Dieterich, Otto Tachenius, and Johan Glauber, Chem Plus Chem, Volume 88, Issue 1, 24 November 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/cplu.202200289

Sophie Ottesdatter Brahe, www.skbl.se/sv/artikel/SophieBrahe, Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon (article by Sara Griberg), retrieved 2025-01-07.

Hoyrup, Else. Sophie Brahe, on Grandma Got STEM blog, July 22, 2013, accessed January, 2025.

Rönneus, Maria Yrsa, Urania Titani: Sofie Brahe, guest post on Samantha Wilcoxson Blog, March 29, 2024, accessed January 2025.