Naomi Livesay, born in 1916 in the northern reaches of Montana, aspired to one career: mathematics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in math, but when she decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, men on the faculty balked. Mathematics, they said, was no place for a woman.

Then fate intervened, and Livesay embarked on a circuitous route to Los Alamos, where she landed in 1944 and started as a supervisor in the computation lab during the Manhattan Project. She played, as episode guest Nichole Dale Lewis describes it, “a unique role at a unique place under unique pressures.”

Livesay was a reluctant recruit, and it wasn’t until the physicist Richard Feynman stepped in to persuade her to take the job of supervising work on the IBM punch card accounting machinery, that she agreed. And then Oppenheimer himself went out of his way to make sure that Livesay had everything she needed to get the job done.

Floy Agnes Lee was a hematologist at Los Alamos. Recruited to the Manhattan Project while still  a student at University of New Mexico, she collected blood samples from many Manhattan Project scientists, including Louis Slotin, following an accident that exposed him to a fatal dose of radiation. Years after the war, she returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory and conducted research on the impact of radiation on chromosomes.

Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only woman hired onto Enrico Fermi's team at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. She was just 23 years old, already had a Ph.D. in molecular spectroscopy and a deep understanding  of vacuum technology. She was also the only woman present at the world’s first successful nuclear chain reaction. Amid all this, she managed to conceal her pregnancy until two days before her baby was born.

During World War II, thousands of scientists and engineers worked on the Manhattan project, the top secret push to develop an atomic bomb that would end the war. Two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did just that, while also killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. The devastating potential of nuclear weapons sparked a moral controversy that continues to this day.

Hundreds of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were women. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you a few of their stories.

Welcome to the first in our From Our Inbox series, in which we give listeners a taste of the mail we get from folks wanting to bring a particular forgotten scientist to our attention. Here’s the story of Alessandra Giliani, brought to us by Barbara Quick, an author and poet in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There’s a persistent myth in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy about Alessandra Giliani, a 14th-century girl who defied the laws of Church and state to attend medical school. The most concrete evidence of her existence comes in the form of illuminated manuscripts depicting an assistant to anatomist Mondino de Liuzzi who appears to be a cross-dressed woman. In this episode, associate producer Mackenzie Tatananni speaks with author Barbara Quick about Alessandra’s discoveries, which were well ahead of their time.

Cecilia Payne was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time. Continuing the legacy of women working at the Harvard Observatory, Cecilia charted the way for a generation of female astronomers to come. This episode of Lost Women of Science: shorts follows Cecilia’s journey of discovery, journals her drive and determination against all odds, and takes you to the Harvard Observatory itself to walk in Cecilia’s footsteps.

In 1992, a Dutch doctor named Josh von Soer Clemm von Hohenberg wrote a letter to Henning Voscherau, the mayor of Hamburg, Germany, requesting that a street be named after Marie Nyswander.

The doctor had never met Marie, but he had founded a clinic for treating people with drug addiction, and he’d seen methadone treatment — co-developed by Marie — save lives. Four years later, doctors gathered on a street in northwest Hamburg to celebrate that street’s new name: Nyswanderweg. We’re investigating how German streets get their names, and why so few of them honor women like Marie, who have made historic achievements.

Marie Nyswander died in 1986. She’d achieved almost everything she set out to, but she wanted more: even better medications than methadone, fewer regulations, and the holy grail—a cure for addiction. Addiction science has come a long way since Marie’s time, and it turns out, a lot of the field’s earlier assumptions were probably wrong. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge explains why wanting something isn’t the same as liking it. But a cure is still out of our reach

A reminder that our next episode is scheduled to come out next Thursday!

In the meantime, we’ve hit a slight snag—Katie has COVID—but she’s resting up, and we’re doing our best to get that episode to you on time. Stay tuned for updates. We'll be back very soon.

Marie Nyswander and her team at Rockefeller unveil their findings at last: methadone has utterly transformed their patients. They’re going back to school, getting jobs, and reconnecting with family and friends. One of the very first patients went onto college and graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering, all while taking methadone. But soon, Marie’s treatment starts getting resistance, from fellow doctors as well as patients, who think what she’s doing is immoral.

See show notes and full transcripts at lostwomenofscience.org