by Gaytha Langlois
Considering the very active role that women play on today’s protistological stage, it may be surprising to learn that it was not always this way. As John Corliss suggested in his 1978-79 treatise, “A Salute to Fifty-Four Great Protozoologists,” often women researchers were relegated to being technical assistants in the laboratories of famous scholars, or at best being junior authors on publications from those labs. His summary included only two women.
Libbie H. Hyman (1888-1969), known as a rugged individualist, was a microscopist who loved the protozoa and the lower invertebrates and spent her professional lifetime in research and writing on them. She produced excellent textbooks on comparative invertebrate anatomy. She toured the great laboratories of Europe and then decided to devote the remainder of her life–with meager space and facilities provided by the American Museum of Natural History, New York City–to a great and much-needed project: production of an original monographic series on the invertebrates in English. Endowed with a photographic memory, a facility for translation, a familiarity with European languages, an ability to process and integrate a prodigious amount of information in her head, she sat at her typewriter and wrote the text, without a secretary, an assistant, or a technician. The texts were completed through volume six (Mollusca I) just before her death; the protozoa were treated in the first volume, with an “updating” in the fifth (Hyman, 1940, 1959). The Invertebrates, widely used for many decades, were treasured by their readers. Hyman was awarded an Honorary Membership to the Society of Protozoologists
Muriel Robertson (1883-1973) completed extensive studies on trypanosomes and is perhaps best known for her work on the life cycle and transmission of the African trypanosome, Trypanosoma brucei, which she carried out in Uganda at the height of a major Sleeping Sickness epidemic. This outspoken and independent woman was a major worker in the study of the causative organisms of the trypanosomiases and conducted fieldwork in Ceylon, Uganda, and other endemic tropical areas when she was in her twenties. A keen microscopist of Irish-Scottish descent, Muriel was unimpressed by the prestige of senior male colleagues in her country or abroad. She was fluent in several languages, and “stood up to” anyone spiritedly if her findings or views were questioned in a deprecating manner. While associated with the Lister Institute in London, she carried out work (much never published) on immunological responses and related phenomena in a number of protozoa, including ciliates. She was an admirer of the great cytologist and ciliatologist E. Faure-Fremiet, whom she outlived by two years. She also explored the bacteria Clostridium associated with war wounds and her work on the immunology of Trichomonas foetus infections in cattle, carried out in collaboration with the veterinarian W. R. Kerr, resulted in changes in farming practices that very quickly eradicated trichomoniasis from cattle herds in Northern Ireland. She helped in the training of numerous young protozoologists in the London area (including distinguished researchers such as J.R. Baker, Elizabeth Canning, F.E.G. Cox, and Keith Vickerman). Highly respected, Muriel Robertson was the first woman elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Law in 1948 from the University of Glasgow. She was also awarded an early honorary membership in the international Society of Protozoologists.
Corliss went on to note that “virtually no woman appears to have been recognized for direct (i.e., published under her own name with or without other authors) contributions to protozoology before the 1900s,” but shortly thereafter women were beginning to take graduate degrees in biology in considerable numbers, with protozoology an attractive field in which to work. Corliss did emphasize that by 1953, the international Society of Protozoology, which had been founded in 1947, already had 58 women out of 412 active members. By 1990-91, there were 200 women of a total of 1030 (20%). This seemed to be a trend that continues, with women protistologists valuing their professional connections.
In a later publication, “The Contributions of Women to the Science of Protozoology” (1993), John Corliss summarized the roles of notable women protistologists in the period of 1900-1950.
Clara Hamburger (1873-1945) was highly praised for her co-authorship of monographs (1911-1913) on planktonic protozoa, including tintinnids. Later, as an assistant in Otto Butschli’s laboratory, she compiled his writings (I24 items).
Nettie Maria Stevens (1861-1912) initially focused her research on the study of protozoa, particularly the morphology and taxonomy of ciliate protozoa, with her first published paper in 1901 detailing new species of ciliates she discovered while studying at Stanford University. She began doctoral studies in biology at Bryn Mawr College, which included a year of study (1901–02) at the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy, and at the Zoological Institute of the University of Würzburg, Germany, receiving the Ph.D. in 1903. By 1905 she had redirected her focus on experimental morphology focusing on cytology and the regenerative process. One of her major papers in that field was written in 1904 with zoologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, who in 1933 would win the Nobel Prize for his work. In 1905, after experiments with the yellow mealworm (Tenebrio molitor), she published a paper in which she announced her finding that a particular combination of the chromosomes known as X and Y was responsible for the determination of the sex of an individual.
Rhoda Erdmann (1870-1935), at the Institute of Biology, Humboldt University in Berlin was known for her studies of reproduction of protozoa, with a particular interest in tissue culture. Today, a new Research Building at the Institute of Biology has been named after Erdmann, and is fondly called the “green amoeba” based on its appearance.
Next time there will be more interesting researchers who fought not only to share their scientific findings but also to have their voices heard.
References:
Corliss, John O. 1978. A salute to fifty-four great microscopists of the past: a pictorial footnote to the history of protozoology. Part I. Trans. Amer. Microsc. Soc. 97(4):419-458.
Corliss, John O. 1979a. A salute to fifty-four great microscopists of the past: a pictorial footnote to the history of protozoology. Part II. Trans. Amer. Microsc. Soc. 98:26-58.
Corliss, John O. 1993. The contributions of women to the science of protozoology – Acta Protozool. 32 (3): 129 – 134.
Sylph, Ann. 2025. Women in Zoology: moving into the 20th century. Accessed at https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1469-7998.women_in_zoology
