Stories by Katie Hafner

We trace the final chapter of Katharine Burr Blodgett’s career, her retirement from GE and her disappearance from public memory

At the height of her career, chemist and physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett faced challenges that not even her closest colleagues suspected

When Katharine Burr Blodgett discovered nonreflecting glass, the General Electric Company’s public relations machine made her a star

From Schenectady, N.Y., to the University of Cambridge, Katharine Burr Blodgett’s brilliance impressed the world’s leading physicists

When a young Katharine Burr Blodgett joined future Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir at the General Electric Company’s industrial research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y, it was the start of her brilliant career

The Lost Women of Science team uncovers Katharine Burr Blodgett’s overlooked brilliance

The story of a woman whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our everyday world but whose legacy was long eclipsed by the famous scientist she worked with at the General Electric Company

After her shocking lung cancer diagnosis, the late Susan Wojcicki dedicated herself to fighting the disease and looking for answers

After studying mice in the 1910s, Maude Slye concluded that vulnerability to cancer was hereditary. She thought she had a solution to eliminate it, but she made some crucial mistakes

Carla Brodley, founding executive director of the Center for Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, explains how to make computer science education more accessible to everyone

How a determined socialite, inspired by true crime, helped professionalize the field of murder investigations

Margarethe Hilferding was the first woman admitted to Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but her radical work on maternal instinct was dismissed and ignored

Despite decades of doubt and dismissal, biochemist Katalin Karikó never gave up on the research that gave us mRNA COVID vaccines in record time

When chemist Dora Richardson’s employer decided to terminate the breast cancer research on the drug Tamoxifen in the early 1970s, she and her colleagues continued the work in secret.

Her name was on the patent for tamoxifen, but Dora Richardson’s story was lost until now

In her book Wonder Drug, Jennifer Vanderbes explores the history of thalidomide’s secret history—and harms—in the U.S.

Decades after FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey stopped thalidomide from going on the market in the U.S., the legacy of the drug persists

 FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey saved American lives by refusing to approve thalidomide. But millions of pills had been sent to doctors in the U.S. for so-called clinical trials

FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham wanted data that would show that thalidomide was safe to use during pregnancy. It wasn’t

In the U.S. in the early 1960s the distributor of a thalidomide drug was impatient to get it on the market. But FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey wanted more information to prove its safety

Starting with her rejection of an FDA application for thalidomide in 1960, physician and pharmacist Frances Oldham Kelsey took a stand against the now infamous drug

Starting in the 1920s female writers pioneered the field of science writing for the mass market, making it their mission to help ordinary people understand everything from astronomy to venereal disease

Helen Edwards was a particle physicist who led the design and construction of the Tevatron, a machine built to probe deeper into the atom than anyone had gone before.

Physicist Jess Wade explains the importance of recognizing female scientists on Wikipedia. She’s created more than 2,000 Wikipedia articles to do just that