Barbara Kiser, books and arts editor at Nature, talks about her favorite science books of 2016, especially three works about the little-known history of women mathematicians.

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Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on December 31, 2016. I’m Steve Mirsky. On this episode -

Barbara Kiser: Together this is just one of the most extraordinary groups of women scientists that we've never heard of.

Mirsky: That's Barbara Kiser. She's the books and arts editor at the journal Nature. You may not have known, but Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group, and I was a guest at the Nature offices in London for a week earlier this month, during which I sat down with Kiser in the Nature podcast study to talk about some of the most memorable books of 2016. Well, here we are, two Americans in London. And tell the audience who you are, and why you've been here in London for such a long time.

Kiser: Oh, that really is a lengthy story, because it's 30 years. I'm the books and arts editor at Nature. I've been doing the job for five years, which means that I've probably winnowed – well, at about 400 books a year, something like 2,000 books since I've been doing the job. And that has been a really fascinating process.

Mirsky:  And when we met the other day, you told me that you have prepared this collection. Why don't you tell us about that?

Kiser:  Yeah, so every year I – Well, since I've had my online-only platform, A View from the Bridge, I have a top 20. So this is now in its third year, and it is a very difficult process, winnowing 400 books.

Mirsky:  Why A View from the Bridge?

Kiser: A View from the Bridge, because it bridges science and culture.

Mirsky: Ah, very good.

Kiser: Yes, it has nothing to do with –

Mirsky: The play.

Kiser:  Exactly. Or anything dark. So it's a really fascinating process, winnowing that many books during the year for longer reviews and for the column that I do. But for the top 20, what I've tried to do is – Or rather, I end up not just picking the big bestsellers, the really obvious ones, because one thing that I've noticed is that there are so many brilliant history of science books, and not all of them – In fact, one of my colleagues was recently saying to me, "You know, I was just in a bookstore, and I noticed this bin full of books that are going to be pulped, and they're the most amazing books."

So it's kind of – It's evenly divided between, y'know, the books that gain a lot of attention for all those obvious best seller-y reasons, because there's a starry author or whatever, and also books that I've read and just thought, "My God, y'know, I've never heard of this author, but it's amazing." 

Mirsky:  Now, I don't know which books you've chosen, and I don't know how many we'll talk about right now. We won't talk about all 20.

Kiser: No. The only books I'm going to talk about from the list – because obviously I don't want to divulge everything and ruin the big surprise – are linked. It just so happened that four books that came out this year are about women in science, in detail. And that's a really fascinating subject in itself. But the books are just absolutely special.

Mirsky: Is one of them the Dava Sobel book?

Kiser: One of them is the Dava Sobel book. And the interesting thing is that Sobel only wrote one book about female human computers. There were two others this year, which is kind of extraordinary. So Sobel and Margot Lee Shetterly and Nathalia Holt all wrote books about female human computers in history. Sobel obviously dealing with the 19th century, Holt and Shetterly dealing with the postwar period.

And so these three books, from Sobel to Holt to Shetterly, make a kind of arc of influence which is really quite extraordinary and just absolutely fascinating. Because why are these stories only emerging now. These –

Mirsky: And we have a movie coming out.

Kiser: We have a movie coming out which is based on Shetterly's book, and it has the same title. And in fact, I was going to talk about that one first, just a bit. Shetterly is a historical researcher, and her book, which is called Hidden Figures, concentrates of the female human computers at Langley Research Lab, and that was –

Mirsky: Well, explain what "human computers" is.

Kiser: Yeah, sorry. Okay, so before the era of huge mainframe computers doing all this tedious number crunching, or rather as that era was just beginning, when these computers were incredibly expensive, they would hire people to do massive amounts of computing. And this was an incredibly onerous job. They'd be doing it for up to 12 hours a day. So these were all mathematicians with real edge. They had to be very good.

Mirsky: And somewhere historically this became a woman's job.

Kiser: Yes. To talk about that, I'd have to go back to Dava Sobel's book.

Mirsky: And I should say I have an interview scheduled with Sobel. So if that comes through, we'll be hearing more about that book from the horse.

Kiser: Excellent. Yes, so I won't go on too much about that. But her book is called The Glass Universe, and it's about the 19th century women number crunchers at the Harvard College Observatory. Now, they were an extraordinary bunch, as Sobel I'm sure will say, partly because the first ones who arrived, some of whom were not even acknowledged mathematicians – There was a woman called Williamina Fleming, who arrived as a maid and then went on to identify over 300 variable stars. That's pretty extraordinary.

And there were plenty of others who made a huge mark, including Annie Jump Cannon's stellar classification system, which is still in use. So this is a kind of dual story. It's about human stars and women who parsed the heavens, basically. So that was in the 19th century, and that story is interwoven to a degree with the extraordinary rise of women's colleges in the United States. This was unprecedented.

So there was Vassar and Smith, the so-called Seven Sisters schools. And of course, Maria Mitchell was a kind of presiding figure over this, although she was not involved with the Harvard Observatory because she had her own observatory at Vassar. But she was an early astronomer and a huge influence and inspiration to any mathematically-inclined young woman in the US for quite a long time. So that's Sobel's story. And then Shetterly's is really fascinating, because her group of women are African Americans.

So these women, in addition to forging on through all the hurdles that women faced at that time if they wanted a career – Women were called "girls" up to the age of about 50, this sort of thing. These women also had to deal with really virulent, multilayered racism, just in their quotidian lives. So, y'know, a lot of them found it very difficult to find a place to rent while they were working at the Langley Research Lab, this sort of thing. And despite all this, a number of them went on to become movers and shakers in the field and have long and really distinguished careers.

So Shetterly follows the stories of a handful of them. One was Katherine Johnson, who was the person that calculated Apollo 11's trajectory on its flight to the moon. Just amazing stories about women that – whose names are not household names, but will become so. And as I think you mentioned, there will be a film coming out in early January on general release about this very thing. Now, Holt's story intertwines with this because the women that she follows, one of whom was African American – her name was Janez Lawson – were recruited around the same time, give or take a decade.

But they worked at the JPL. They, again, had absolutely stellar careers. They did the groundwork that launched the first US satellite, missiles, bombers, and more latterly, Mars Rovers. So together, this is just one of the most extraordinary groups of women scientists that we've never heard of. So to those three books, which kind of tell a three-part history, if you like, I'd just like to sort of jump to now.

And there was another book that really stood out for me this year, which is Hope Jahren's Lab Girl. And she's a paleobiologist, so in a totally different field. And this is a book that not only sort of unpeels the strangeness of academic research but also unpeels the casual sexism that she encounters from male peers on an almost daily basis. It really pulls no punches. And I think that it got a lot of attention because people were shocked.

Everyone wants to know what goes on in the lab who's not in the lab. And my reviewer, who is Jenny Rawn, who herself is a lab researcher, noticed that Jahren defines sexisms as "the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are." And I was just thinking – in a way, there's nothing grimmer than that. It's like an assault on identity.

But these four books are just wonderful in revealing how scores of women have overcome that with grace, and through science.

Mirsky: And that last one is Lab Girl, by – ?

Kiser: It's called Lab Girl, and it's by Hope Jahren.

Mirsky: And is that out already, or we have to wait?

Kiser: It's out. It was out in April, yeah.

Mirsky: All of the books on the list are already out.

Kiser: All the books are out.

Mirsky: It's the movie that hasn't come out. Okay.

Kiser: It's the movie. Right, yeah.

Mirsky: Very good. Anything – Any other books on – that you wanna reveal, or – ?

Kiser: Yeah. So this'll be in A View from the Bridge, the online-only hub. I can hint at the sorts of trends that I cover. I mean, there were a lot of big genetics books, inevitably.

Mirsky: Microbiome books – I saw at least four.

Kiser: Yes. And there were some very heavy physics books that came out this year which were great. But that is all I'll divulge.

Mirsky: Okay. And again, it's not the Scientific American website that we're gonna be looking at; it's the Nature website –

Kiser: Yes.

Mirsky: – in order to find A View from the Bridge.

Kiser: Yes. It's actually on a separate platform, but it's easily accessible.

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Mirsky: Okay. So look for it, and read the books! Thanks, Barb.

Kiser: Thank you.

Mirsky: To find Kiser's top 20 science books of the year, go to blogs.Nature.com/AViewfromtheBridge, all one word. Then scroll down to the December 16th entry, "Top 20 Books:  A Year that Made Waves." That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our website, www.ScientificAmerican.com where, speaking of women in science, you can read Pauline Gagnon's article, "The Forgotten Life of Einstein's First Wife," physicist Mileva Einstein, and all about the great astrophysicist Vera Rubin, who did groundbreaking work on dark matter, among other things. Rubin died December 25th. She was 88.

And follow us on Twitter. You’ll get a new tweet whenever a new item hits the website. Our Twitter name is @SciAm. For Scientific American Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.

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