The first
She is standing at the top of Mount Rysy; it seems to her that she has the whole world under her feet. Her breathing, accelerated after the hardships of the climb, slowly calms down. It is 1899 and she is 34 years old. Somewhere out there, in a reality so different from that of the Tatras, await her husband Pierre, her two-year-old daughter Irène and her beloved laboratory, where she spends long hours. Does she dream in her wildest dreams of success in the world of science? Is she striving for it? She does not have to wait long for confirmation of her achievements.

The research into radioactivity that Marie Skłodowska-Curie conducted with her husband and physicist Henri Becquerel would earn them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Eight years later the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences would honour the researcher again; she would receive the Nobel Prize for the discovery of polonium and radium. She is the first female Nobel Prize winner in these fields, and the first person to receive as many as two awards.

Being a pioneer does not stop there. She becomes the first female professor at the Sorbonne, and is also one of the first women in France to obtain a licence to drive a truck – Marie could be seen during the First World War at the wheel of an ambulance. Her personal life? She loved flowers, she skied and skated, she was fluent in several languages but counted only in Polish, she gifted her friends with pieces of tree roots and seashells, and with the money from her first Nobel Prize… she furnished a bathroom. Several decades after her death, her and her husband’s ashes were transferred to the Paris Pantheon. Even then, she was the first – no woman before her and no foreigner had been so honoured for their services.

Prominent
How many nominations for the Nobel Prize were there? Who would have counted… And again, nothing! It didn’t even help that she was nominated by Niels Bohr himself. Lise Meitner sighs meaningfully, taking her thoughts back to the past. She recalls a girl for whom Maria Skłodowska-Curie was a role model. Is it an orchestration of fate that they were born on the same day and were both stubborn Scorpios? Her dream as a newly minted PhD student was to work with a famous scientist, without success.

The beginnings were difficult. She was the first woman to become a physics student at the University of Vienna. Then there was the move to Berlin – there, through a back entrance, she made her way to the Institute of Chemistry; the front entrance was for men only. She did not give up, even though she was not even allowed to use the toilet there. After a few years, she was the first woman to be given a position and a salary at this facility. She was relentless in her efforts to play a role in science. She was extraordinarily gifted, as evidenced by Einstein’s words that she was “our Madame Curie, and more gifted”.

She worked for nearly 30 years with German physicochemist Otto Hahn, and together they discovered the nuclear recoil, as well as the stable isotope protactinium. She was the first to correctly interpret nuclear fission and played a significant role in quantum physics. Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. That this award is also due to Meitner was somehow not mentioned. Unlike Pierre Curie, who did not allow his wife's candidature to be overlooked.

Stubborn
She persistently applies to medical schools. The rejections come down one by one, no one wants a woman on the school bench. A woman doctor? Funny. It only succeeds at the 30th time, and only because the rector leaves the decision to accept her to the students, who, as a joke, vote unanimously in favour. Elizabeth Blackwell will graduate with the best result of the year.

She is hungry for knowledge and wants to complete her qualifications at the Sorbonne in Paris. A female doctor? No one takes her seriously there, another wall, she can study elsewhere to be a midwife instead. What remains is to roll up the sleeves and get on with delivering babies. As a result of an unfortunate accident, she loses one eye, which derailed her career in surgery. However, this does not take away her drive and ambition, and as no hospital wants to hire her, she opens an office in New York’s Manhattan, later a clinic for poor women.

Her mission is to teach others about hygiene. She is joined by her sister, Emily, who has embarked on the same career path as Elizabeth. They are also helped by Maria Zakrzewska, a doctor from Poland. The Blackwell sisters will soon open a medical college together – just for women. The facility will operate for nearly 30 years, and Elizabeth is adamant that female doctors are in no way inferior to their male colleagues. With this message, he will travel to England for lectures. Among others, Elizabeth Garrett, in the near future the first British woman with a medical degree, will be listening to her words.

Devoted
She is passionate about natural sciences, speaks Polish, Russian, French, German, English, Italian and Serbian, and wants to heal people, she is sure of it. And she is even more certain that no one in Poland cares about it. She is a woman and she can forget about studying. However, she has no intention of stepping down, she is too ambitious. She goes to Paris for her diploma, continues her studies in Berlin and takes two doctorates. Even war does not stop her. During the First World War, she works in a field hospital. Always on duty.

Her return to Warsaw in 1919 is no different. As a paediatrician, Hanna Hirszfeldowa focuses on working with the youngest children, has a private practice and is also a volunteer at the Children’s Clinic at 16 Litewska Street. She becomes the head of the Warsaw branch of the Polish Paediatric Society. Always serious, modest, with an impeccable bun. Apparently, only in a few photos are her big hazel eyes smiling – when she is looking at the children.

The research she conducted with her husband Ludwig would go down in history. Together, they analysed the prevalence of blood types in people from different geographical areas. Their work marked the beginning of a new field – seroanthropology. Hanna took a keen interest in paediatric haematology, the consequences of serological conflict, congenital malformations, allergology in the youngest, as well as famine disease, which she encountered during her heroic work in the ghetto during the Second World War. She was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1957 for her services.

Insightful
She sits gazing at her father’s hands polishing the stones they found together. He concentrated, she hardly breathing due to eagerness. She already knows she wants to search for fossils as he does. The dream will become a chore for Mary Anning when, following the death of her father, selling his findings will be the way to shore up the modest family budget. When her brother Joe finds a skull more than a metre long, the girl starts looking further and deeper…

Here it is! It took a few months, but it’s finally here! A crocodile? A lizard? It is not known, but the specimen is huge, the skeleton is over five metres long! The family won't go hungry for a while. For Mary, the finding will be the impetus for further difficult work – she climbs landslides and under overhanging cliffs, patiently chisels fossils out of rocks, and walks many miles of nearby beaches. Patient, stubborn, effective.

She finds more skeletons – ichthyosaurs, plesiosaur, pterosaur. Scientists have drawn on her achievements, using her passion and talent. She was self-taught, read books on animal anatomy, was engrossed in geology and avidly copied drawings from various publications, but few took her seriously at the time. She would probably be touched to learn that in 2010 she will become one of the 10 most important female scientists in the UK, her findings part of an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London and, in addition, a species of ichthyosaur will be named after her. What’s more, she will be played by Kate Winslet herself in the film “Ammonite”?

Intrepid
She has five tiny tablets on her hand. Stares at them, then swallows with a determined motion. All that remains is to wait for the mercuric chloride to take effect. She doesn’t want to live anymore, everything has lost its meaning. An unawarded scholarship still stirs her blood. After all, she wanted to go to Siberia again, to investigate, to explore the unknown. Again to see in the press the headline “Intrepid traveller: three thousand miles by sleigh through Siberia”. Now she has no more desires… There is a void in front of her.

When Maria Antonina Czaplicka takes her life, she is a lecturer at Bristol University, previously the only lecturer at Oxford and one of the first European women with a PhD in anthropology. In 1914, she and her team set off along the Yenisei to document and explore the culture of the Evenks. She wrote a well-selling book about the expedition, “My Year in Siberia”. She received awards, gave lectures, but no one offered her a permanent job; it was mostly men who could count on that.

Receiving a scholarship sounds like a ticket to a world where she feels important, appreciated, respected. This is an opportunity for further research, achievements, exhibits. If she had her own funds, she would have set off immediately, even though she still remembers the pain, hardship and hunger that accompanied her last trip. Refusal is like a punch in the stomach. Again, someone else gets what she dreamed of. She’s only 37, but she doesn’t want to carry another disappointment. It’s too much…

________
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