Atomic Radio

X-ray crystallography has long had a reputation for being a scientific field with a significant number of female practitioners, especially in the first half of the twentieth century when it was rare to find women in any scientific discipline. This episode looks at how ideas of ‘women’s work’ did – and did not – affect the lives of crystallography’s pioneering female scientists, with the help of our guest this week, science writer Georgina Ferry, whose writing is re-framing the issue of women in crystallography. We take a peak into the life of X-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, who in 1964 became the only British woman ever to win a science Nobel Prize. Then we spotlight the work, across science and design, of a lesser-known X-ray crystallographer named Helen Megaw who spearheaded the Festival Pattern Group, which created spectacular patterns for household goods based on crystal diagrams all the way back in the 1950s. Find out more about this episode at http://atomicradio.org.