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Here's a question for all the ScienceBloggers in the house:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
- Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
- Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?
I'd love answers to either or both. I think in the long run (i.e., posthumously), mathematicians get the shortest end of the (multi-dimensional) stick. Gauss should probably be a household name, but who hears of the man before high school E&M? Lise Meitner might be my pick for "most shafted in her lifetime," for getting no Nobel love for her discovery of nuclear fission, while her collaborators basked in glory, but then again, there have been tons of should-be-Nobelists.
I'm sure there are plenty of others, but who are they? Who are these giants, shadowed by the men on their shoulders (oooh)? Does anyone think Hooke's name should be plastered on more than a spring law? Does anyone know of a research assistant who's adviser got all the credit? Who are the unsung heroes of science?
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Comments
Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics certainly summarizes the case for Robert Hooke getting more credit.
There's Rosalind Franklin whose experimental results were indispensable to the discovery of the structure of DNA--might she have gotten the Nobel too if she hadn't died of cancer first?
Then there's Jocelyn Bell Burnell who discovered quasars but was not awarded the Nobel Prize that her advisor won. Some called it the "No-Bell" prize as a result.
Posted by: Kristin![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/seed/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 21, 2006 03:31 PM
Chien-Shiung Wu is famous for not being included in Yang and Lee's Nobel for parity violation, even though she was PI for the actual experiment. But she's hardly obscure.
Posted by: Matt McIrvin![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/seed/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 21, 2006 07:40 PM
J. Harlan Bretz for geomorphology. He recognized that the channeled scablands in eastern Washington were made by catastrophic outburst floods from glacial lake Missoula. Other geomorphologists were unwilling to accept such large floods at that time (1950'S and 1960's). His ideas were accepted in the last ten years or so before he died, however.
Posted by: gamoonbat![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/seed/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 21, 2006 08:27 PM
James J. Gibson, perception psychologist. Back in the 50s and 60s he conducted brilliant research demonstrating, among other things, that perception is not a passive process on the part of the organism and that the senses should be thought of not as separate channels, but as "perceptual systems." These ideas have gained a lot of momentum lately (rarely with Gibson's name mentioned), though back when Gibson was alive it was the cognitive movement that won out.
I'm of course a little biased. Gibson was my mentor's mentor.
Posted by: Jonathan Dobres![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/seed/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 24, 2006 12:23 PM