Jul 12, 2026 · 53 min · 11 segments
**In its 120 year history, nearly 1,000 people have won a Nobel Prize. And we're going to ask you a simple question: how many of those Nobel laureates are women? What, half of them maybe? Or perhaps…
Jocelyn Bell BurnellGuest
Oswin BakerHost
Carla O'ShaughnessyHost
Because what we're interested in today are the people who don't get scientific Nobels, or more specifically, the women.
Because it's worthwhile noting that in the 120 plus years of the Nobel Prize, it has been awarded to nearly a thousand people, And of these, 67 are women.
And when we look at just the scientific prizes, then 26 women have received a prize out of 659 awardees.
Starter for 10, Rosalind Franklin, who worked with Francis Crick and James Watson on DNA.
She's famous for Photo 51, that's the X-ray image of DNA, but she died before her work could be recognised.
Then there is the great Lisa Meitner, dubbed the German Marie Curie by Einstein.
Hello, she discovered nuclear fission, but saw her male colleague Otto Hahn collect the 44 Chemistry Prize.
Now, I say collect, but he was actually in an MI6 prison alongside nine other German scientists at the time.
There is Margaret Burbage, lead author of the classic B-squared FH paper on stellar evolution.
I mean, that sounds like a really complicated mathematical occasion, doesn't it? But it's actually just the initials of the authors.
Burbage, her husband, that's the second B, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle.
And there's Qian Xiong Wu, who saw her male colleague nab the 57 prize for her work on particle physics.
And at two in particular, two women whose discoveries change the way we think of the universe and our place in it.
Because what we're interested in today are the people who don't get scientific Nobels, or more specifically, the women.
Because it's worthwhile noting that in the 120 plus years of the Nobel Prize, it has been awarded to nearly a thousand people, And of these, 67 are women.
And when we look at just the scientific prizes, then 26 women have received a prize out of 659 awardees.
Starter for 10, Rosalind Franklin, who worked with Francis Crick and James Watson on DNA.
She's famous for Photo 51, that's the X-ray image of DNA, but she died before her work could be recognised.
Then there is the great Lisa Meitner, dubbed the German Marie Curie by Einstein.
Hello, she discovered nuclear fission, but saw her male colleague Otto Hahn collect the 44 Chemistry Prize.
Now, I say collect, but he was actually in an MI6 prison alongside nine other German scientists at the time.
There is Margaret Burbage, lead author of the classic B-squared FH paper on stellar evolution.
I mean, that sounds like a really complicated mathematical occasion, doesn't it? But it's actually just the initials of the authors.
Burbage, her husband, that's the second B, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle.
And there's Qian Xiong Wu, who saw her male colleague nab the 57 prize for her work on particle physics.
And at two in particular, two women whose discoveries change the way we think of the universe and our place in it.
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