My Science School

Spintharus  michelleobamaae, a "smiley-faced" spider, is named after the former U.S. First Lady. She became a role model for women and an advocate for healthy families, service members and their families. Michelle Obama’s journey began in the South Side of Chicago, where Fraser and Marian Robinson instilled in their daughter a heartfelt commitment to family, hard work, and education. Michelle earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School. In 1988, she returned to Chicago to join the firm of Sidley Austin. It was there that she met Barack Obama, a summer associate she was assigned to advise. They were married in 1992.

By that time Michelle had turned her energies to public service. She was assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago’s City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares young people for public service. In 1996, she joined the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, where she developed the university’s first community service program. In 2002, she went to work for the University of Chicago Medical Center, where in 2005 she became the vice president of community and external affairs. Worldwide, she championed the education of girls and women. In a commencement address at the City College of New York she told graduates, “Never view your challenges as obstacles.”

Credit : THE WHITE HOUSE

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Margaret Hilda Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister and served three consecutive terms in office. She was born on October 13, 1925 in Grantham, England and trained to be a research chemist at Oxford. She later became a barrister and specialized in tax law.

In 1951 she married businessman Denis Thatcher. She became a Member of Parliament in 1959 and led the Conservatives to a decisive victory in 1979. She became the first woman prime minister of the UK that year!

She introduced many reforms, including the privatization of state-owned industries and enacted measures to curb trade unions in Britain. Her leadership during the Falklands War and the subsequent victory of the UK sealed a second term in office for Thatcher, earning her the sobriquet- ‘The Iron Lady’. Her government introduced huge reforms in all sectors and some of them were quite controversial. Thatcher’s extended tenure as PM was very significant in British history.

She battled memory loss in her later years due to a stroke and died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87. In 2011, Meryl Streep portrayed Thatcher in the biopic ‘The Iron Lady’.

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Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi’s whole life was spent on the forefront of history. Her grandfather Motilal Nehru was a prominent politician of the Indian National Congress. Her father, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was also a prominent leader in the freedom movement, as well as India’s first Prime Minister.

Indira was born on November 19, 1917 and lived her life watching India’s history unfold before her. When she was 5, she burned her ‘made in England’ doll in solidarity with the Swadeshi Movement in 1921. When she was 12 she led the ‘Vanar Sena’ - an army made up of children who helped in the freedom struggle by carrying secret messages, putting up notices, addressing envelopes and making flags.

She became the 3rd and only woman prime minister of India on January 24, 1966. She went on to mark her tenure by strong leadership and a global presence. She launched a war against Pakistan in 1971 to liberate Bangladesh and won. She implemented strong anti-poverty measures, ushered in the green revolution and clamped down a national emergency in June, 1975.

She lost power in the 1977 elections but won a landslide majority in 1980. Her fight against terrorism in Punjab led to her untimely death on October 31, 1984, when her own bodyguards shot and killed her.

At a speech at Bhubaneswar 2 days before she died, she said, “I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people...I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it. “She refused to be intimidated by circumstances and changed history and geography as we know it. She was India’s ‘Iron Lady’!

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Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu or Mother Teresa as she is known was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia into an Albanian family.

Little Agnes knew that she wanted to be a missionary at the age of 12. When she was 18, she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, Ireland to learn English, which was the language used by the Order.

Named Teresa, after St Terese of Lisieux, she journeyed to Calcutta, in 1929, leaving her family behind forever.

She taught for 17 years as a nun but was deeply troubled by the poverty she saw around her. She experienced what she describes as a “call within a call” to leave the comfortable convent and tend to the poor on the streets. She obtained special permission from the Vatican to establish a new order of nuns called ‘The Missionaries of Charity’ in 1950.

The primary task of this Order was to love and care for the people that nobody cared for. She and her fellow missionaries gathered the poor and dying off the streets of Calcutta and cared for them. What started as a small seed community is now a congregation with more than 4,500 nuns and branches in 133 countries.

Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, but declined the ceremonial banquet asking that the $192,000 cost of the banquet be given to the poor. She was honoured with the Bharat Ratna in 1980.

She died on September 5, 1997, aged 87. She once said, “To be able to love the poor, we must be poor ourselves. So we possess nothing, we own nothing, we are the poorest of the poor”.

She had a different understanding of poverty as we know it. She once said that the poverty she found in India was easy to overcome with food and clothing, but the poverty she witnessed in the developed world was a poverty of spirituality and love, which according to her, was much more difficult to overcome.

She liked to repeat, “Do little things with great love”. She was declared a saint of the Catholic Church on October 19, 2003 by Pope John Paul II.

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Long before melting icebergs and raging forest fires made the climate crisis impossible to ignore, a scientist in the USA had already started sounding the warning bells for the environment.

Marine biologist, author and conservationist Rachel Carson was born in 1907 to a farming family in Springdale, Pennsylvania. In 1962, she wrote a book called ‘The Silent Spring’ which documented the irreversible effects that chemical pesticides had on the environment. Carson accused the chemical industry of blatant disregard for environmental concerns and public officials for looking the other way.

She was one of the first scientists to draw attention to environmental causes. Her seminal work created public awareness, forced the US Government to reverse its national pesticide policy, resulted in a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural use and led to the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Her book was a game changer. It challenged industrial capitalism and triggered the first wave of environmental activism. Silent Spring was named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by Discover Magazine and Rachel Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom 16 years after her death, in 1980.

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Maria Salomea Sklodowski Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person and only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice.

She was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland to teachers - Bronislawa and Wladyslaw Sklodowski. Both her parents acted as catalysts in Maria’s life, encouraging her to pursue her higher education.

Maria moved to France and changed her name to Marie. She enrolled as a student at the Sorbonne University, Paris in 1891. Here she met and married Pierre Curie, who encouraged her to do research. With Pierre as her advisor, Maria spent several years purifying uranium ore, often under deplorable laboratory conditions.

She discovered two new elements which were named radium after ‘radiation’ and polonium after Poland, Marie’s home country. In 1903, the Curies and Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in physics for their combined research and discoveries on radioactivity.

Marie’s daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband, Frederic Joliot, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, for their work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements.

Marie Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia (bone marrow damage caused by exposure to radiation).

Just like some radioactive substances can cause a glow around them, so also Madame Curie was able to illuminate the paths of science by her work. She is one of the most celebrated and respected scientists in history and is a remarkable role model indeed.

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Anandibai Gopalrao Joshi was the first female physician of India. She was also the first Indian woman to receive an education abroad.

Anandibai was born on March 31 1865 in Kalyan, Mumbai to a Marathi Brahmin family. She was married when she was 9 to Gopalrao Joshi, a progressive thinker who supported women’s education. Anandibai bore her first child at 14, but the child did not survive long due to lack of medical attention.

Anandibai developed a wish to study medicine after this incident which was supported by her husband. He arranged for her to study in America and she travelled to New York from Kolkata by sea in June, 1883. She graduated with an MD from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in March 1886 at the age of 21. She returned to India and was appointed as the physician-in-charge of the female ward of the Albert Edward Hospital in Kolhapur. Unfortunately she died of tuberculosis 11 months later on February 26, 1887 in Pune.

Kadambini Ganguly was born on July 18, 1861 in Bhagalpur, Bihar into the family of Brahmo reformer Braja Kishore Basu. She became one of first two female graduates in India along with Chandramukhi Bose when she graduated from Bethune College in 1882.

She married Dwarakanath Ganguly on June 12 1883, 11 days before joining Calcutta Medical College.

Although they faced a severe backlash from the community, Dwarakanath encouraged her to study medicine. She graduated with a ‘Graduate of Bengal Medical College’ degree in 1886 and became one of the first Indian women physicians eligible to practice western medicine alongside Anandibai Gopal Joshi.

She was the mother of 8 children and practiced medicine for 37 years, even conducting an operation the day she died, October 3, 1923.

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Emmeline Pankhurst was a key member of the British Suffragette Movement, which fought for the right of women to vote in public elections. Emmeline’s husband Richard and daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela were also strong supporters of women’s rights.

Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, which fought to allow married women to vote in local elections. In October 1903, she helped found the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union or WSPU. Among the WSPU’s tactics were demonstrations, window smashing, arson and hunger strikes. The women activists were called ‘suffragettes’.

They shook up the British politicians, press and the public with their violent techniques and were arrested in large numbers. In prison these women, including Emmeline, went on hunger strikes and were sometimes force-fed through nasal tubes to prevent death by starvation.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Emmeline channelled her resources to supporting the war effort. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave voting rights to women over 30.

After the war, Emmeline was chosen as the Conservative candidate for an East London seat, but her health failed before she could be elected. She died on June 14, 1928 in London, a few weeks after the Representation of the People Act establishing voting equality for men and women was passed.

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Today, with the help of Google maps and advanced satellite technology it is easy to explore any part of the earth, but not so long ago, many remote areas were shrouded in mystery - such as the Nile River. For over 3,000 years explorers had been attempting to discover the source of the Nile.

One such explorer was a young woman named Alexandrine Tinne. She was born on October 17, 1835 to Philip Frederik Tinne and Henriette van Capellen in The Hague, Netherlands. By the time she was 10, Tinne’s father died leaving her enormously wealthy.

At the age of 26, Tinne and her mother embarked on an ambitious journey up the Nile in search of its source. Unfortunately her mother Henriette died of malaria during the journey. Tinne returned to Cairo with her mother’s body but refused to leave Egypt to go home. A few years later Tinne made a second attempt to travel up the Nile in a caravan. Tragically, she was murdered, along with two Dutch sailors in her party, while attempting to cross the Sahara desert.

Although her expedition ended badly, she will always be remembered as one of the first women to dare to defy the conventions of her time and follow her heart in search of adventure.

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Emily Dickinson is widely regarded as one the finest poets that America has produced.

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts to Edward Dickinson, an American politician and lawyer and Emily Norcross Dickinson, a homemaker.

Emily was an intensely private person and never wanted her poetry to be read. It was after her death in May 1886, that her sister Lavinia found her work and decided to get it published. In all she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, most of which were found sewn together in little booklets in her room. Emily used her poetry to express her feelings and make sense of the world around her. She had an unconventional style and made use of the extended metaphor to expand on a particular theme, such as in the poem, “Hope is the thing with Feathers” where the poet portrays hope as a bird that lives in the human soul.

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We all know that Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the nursing field but did you know that she was also a pioneer in the field of statistics?

She developed a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram, which is also called the Nightingale Rose Diagram. This diagram is still used in data visualization today.

Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy into a wealthy family. Her father, William Edward Nightingale and her mother Frances Nightingale encouraged Florence to pursue an education, which was unusual at that time.

Florence was intent on a career in nursing and after her graduation; she returned to London and joined the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen on August 22, 1853.

When the Crimean War broke out in October 1853, Nightingale was put in charge of nursing. She went to the battlefield with 38 nurses and got to work cleaning up an old hospital building and arranging for urgently needed supplies. Through her skill and leadership, thousands of soldiers were saved. At night, she would visit the sick and the injured carrying a lamp and became known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’.

In 1907, she was conferred the Order of Merit by King Edward VII and received the Freedom of the City of London the following year, becoming the first woman to receive the honour. She died on August 13, 1910 in her home in London.

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Did you know that Susan B Anthony was the first woman to have her face on a US dollar coin and that there is a Barbie doll dedicated to her memory?

Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts into a Quaker family. During that time black people were taken from the continent of Africa to be enslaved as servants and labourers in the USA and Western Europe. This was also a time when women were not allowed to vote, own property or participate in the public arena.

Susan grew up in a family that was passionate about social reform. Her sister became a school principal and a women’s rights activist.

Susan also felt herself being drawn to speak out and act against what she felt was wrong. She organized the women’s movement and rallied forces against many archaic laws. She was instrumental in the passage of the Married Women’s Property Bill in New York which stated that a woman had the right to hold property, carry on a trade, and collect and use her own earnings.

Susan started petitions to outlaw slavery and obtained 400,000 signatures towards this cause. In April 1864, the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery was passed by the Senate. This Amendment was followed by the 19th Amendment (in 1920) to the Constitution giving women the right to vote. This Amendment was known as the Susan B Anthony Amendment in honour of her work for women.

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Augusta Ada Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815 in London, England. She is the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, an English mathematician.

Her mother encouraged Ada’s education and she was tutored intensively from a young age. She showed early signs of becoming a promising mathematician and by the age of 18 began a lifelong association and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as the ‘Father of Computers’.

She was in particular interested in Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented in the mid-1800s. She wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine.

She wrote a scientific paper in 1843 that anticipated the development of computer software, artificial intelligence and computer music. She was the first person to realize that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers. For this reason Ada has been called the ‘first computer programmer’ in history.

In 1835, Lovelace married William King, who became the Earl of Lovelace three years later. She then took the title of Countess of Lovelace. She died of cancer, aged 36, on 27th November 1852.

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Jane Austen wrote only about 6 books in her lifetime but her work has left an indelible mark on literature. Her first novel, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, was published in 1811 and her second novel, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was published in 1813. Both were successes and have been the subject of countless adaptations in film and television. Her writing is generally held to be the gold standard of literature.

Austen was born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire into the family of a clergyman. Her books, set among the English gentry, are remarkable for their wit, candour and insight into life in the early 19th century.

Two of her other novels are ‘Mansfield Park’ published in 1814 and ‘Emma’ which came out in 1816. By 1816, Jane began to suffer from ill-health and died a year later on July 18, 1817 at the age of 41. Two more of her novels, ‘Persuasion’ and ‘North-anger Abbey’ were published after her death, and a final novel was left incomplete.

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Payyoli Tevaraparampil Usha was arguably India’s first sports icon. Nicknamed ‘Payyoli Express’ in her home town of Kozhikode, Kerala, this superfast sprinter notched up 23 medals, of which 14 were gold, at various international events in a career spanning 24 years.

Usha was born on June 27, 1964 in Kuttali, Kerala. She was first spotted in 1977 by athletics coach OM Nambiar, at a sports prize-distribution ceremony. He began coaching her and within a year she had won 4 gold medals at the inter-state meet for juniors, as well as silver and a bronze.

At the age of 16, she won 4 gold medals at her first international event - the Pakistan Open National Meet held in 1980 in Karachi. She went on to win several medals at many Asian championships in the following years, including 5 gold medals and 1 bronze medal at the 1985 Jakarta Asian Championships. Between 1983 and 1989, Usha won a total of 13 gold medals at Asian Track and Field (ATF) events.

Usha received the Padma Shri in 1985 and runs the Usha School of Athletics at Koyilandy, near Kozhikode, Kerala.

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