Stories by Katie Hafner

Hundreds of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were women. They were physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians. Today we bring you the story of one of them.

Was a teenager named Alessandra Giliani the Western world’s first female anatomist? In 14th-century Italy, women were strictly barred from medical research. One flouted that rule—disguised as a man.

Nearly 100 years ago a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne changed the way we see the stars in the sky because she was able to look into their burning heart and see something no one else ever had

Nyswanderweg, a tiny residential street in Hamburg, Germany, is easy to miss. Yet it’s a rare and significant monument to Marie Nyswander

Medication treatment for heroin addiction has come a long way since its pioneer died. But what would she think of the field today?

In the 1970s Marie Nyswander thought that she had finally found a long-term treatment for heroin addiction, but not everyone agreed—including some of the people she was trying to help

In the early 1960s a trio at the Rockefeller Institute started a bold experiment to change the way heroin addiction was treated, and they did so using a drug originally created by “the devil’s chemist”

A young psychoanalyst specializing in sexual issues starts getting calls for help—about something else entirely

In the first episode of Season Five of the Lost Women of Science podcast, we meet a young doctor who, in 1946, was posted to Kentucky’s Narcotic Farm

Mycologist Flora Patterson helped make the USDA fungus collection into the world’s largest. She also made a mean mushroom “catsup”

In the first Lost Women of Science Shorts podcast, host Katie Hafner dives into the life and work of Leona Zacharias—a brilliant researcher who, before reporting this story, Hafner only knew as her grandmother

There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner test

Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y., had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements. In the final episode of this season’s Lost Women of Science podcast, we see how Y.Y.’s more than five decades of teaching educated a new generation of mechanical engineers, who credit her with helping to change the industry

Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y. throughout her career, had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. In the third episode of the third season of the Lost Women of Science podcast, we see how Y.Y.’s brilliance helped make Project Apollo a success

Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y. throughout her career, had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. In the second episode of the newest season of the Lost Women of Science podcast, we see Y.Y.’s true grit as she fights for recognition and a place at the science table

Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y. throughout her career, had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. The third season of the Lost Women of Science podcast begins at the start of her story, during her unconventional childhood in the segregated South

When we first started researching Klára Dán von Neumann, we thought she was “the computer scientist you should thank for your smartphone’s weather app.” It turns out that’s not true

Klára Dán von Neumann encounters a new home, a new husband and a new project

In the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.

Klára Dán von Neumann enters the netherworld of computer simulations and the postwar Los Alamos National Laboratory

ENIAC, an early electronic computer, gets a makeover

In the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.

Klára Dán von Neumann arrives in Princeton, N.J., just as war breaks out in Europe

Before she entered a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons, who was Klára Dán von Neumann?