It Took The World 100 Years To Give Her The Due Credit For A Path Breaking Discovery
- JWB Post
- July 12, 2016
Ever wondered that why most of the scientific discoveries have been made by men? Here’s a hint.
It has nothing to do with women not being as smart as men and has everything to do with female scientists not getting their credits. Otherwise, why is the name of Nettie Stevens hasn’t found its place in the biology books?
Now, if you haven’t heard the name of this woman who was born in the 19th century, I really won’t blame you, but if you are a science student (or even more a scientist) then it is surely ironical that you won’t know the name of the woman who discovered that chromosomes determine your sex.
What factors determine that whether a fetus will be male and female? Studying at Stanford University in the early 1900s, Nettie Stevens was intrigued by this question. So much so, that she would spend a substantial chunk of her time in the university thinking about the answer. Btw, Stevens had to face a lot of hardships to enroll in Stanford because initially she didn’t have the money and had pooled up her savings for some years.
It was while looking at the chromosomes of a mealworm beetle through a microscope that she discovered that the female mealworm had 20 large chromosomes and the male worm had 19 large ones and one small chromosome.
She connected this discovery to the sperm of a mealworm and reached the conclusion that the male spermatozoa containing the small chromosome determine the male sex and the ones that contain ten chromosomes of equal size determine the female sex.
But don you know, that even after making such a path-breaking discovery, Stevens is not credited with the same and instead it is one Edmund Beecher who is credited as the person who made this discovery.
Experts say that Beecher was studying around the same time as Stevens and was also researching on chromosomes. But most of his findings came out after Stevens had made her discovery and in some areas, it is obvious that her findings helped Beecher in reaching to his own conclusions about chromosomes. Finally, after hundred years have passed since Stevens made her discovery, the scientific community has acknowledged her contribution.
So much for giving the due credit for her work, eh?
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