Dale DeBakcsy
The Ice Woman: Mary Engle Pennington’s Revolutionary World of Refrigeration.
In the early 20th century, buying and consuming food of any sort in an urban center was a fraught proposition, particularly in the days...
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Dale DeBakcsy
- Jun 10
Sex After Sixty: The Geriatric Gynecology of Anna Kleegman Daniels.
Sex after menopause. Drug addiction. Abortion. In the early to mid-twentieth century, to be seen as casting an understanding eye on any...
191 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- May 10
Semi-Social: Biruté Galdikas and the Complicated Simplicity of the Bornean Orangutan.
By 1971, when a 24 year old anthropology student by the name of Biruté Galdikas set foot in the wilds of Borneo to study the largely...
196 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- May 2
Emma Darwin and the Invisible Heroism of the Scientific Caretaker.
The road leading to the creation and publication of The Origin of the Species was one of the most tortuous and personally costly in the...
218 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 21
The Last Woman Who Knew Everything: The Omnivorous Mind of Clémence Royer.
When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...
209 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Mar 18
Jeanne Altmann, Baboon Moms, and the Justice League of Primatology.
It is a long standing saying* that the pantheon of primatology is essentially the Justice League of America, with Jane Goodall as...
87 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Mar 5
The Strangers Within: Lynn Margulis and the Rebirth of Endosymbiosis
In terms of cell count, ninety percent of you isn't you at all. Bacteria, though by mass they only make up about two percent of a human...
141 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Mar 1
Raising Nature Girls: How 18th Century Botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien Created Girls' Science Education.
Pondering the Enlightenment, one's thoughts tend to turn Frenchwards. The verbal barbs of Voltaire, the neuroses of Rousseau, the...
561 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Feb 27
Lead, TNT, and Rayon: Alice Hamilton's Battle Against Industrial Poisons.
The lack of regulation in American industry during the early Twentieth Century is the stuff of horrific legend - from the grotesqueries...
282 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Feb 19
Taking the Wheel: Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the CRISPR-Cas9 Revolution in Gene Editing.
Over the course of the last two decades, humanity has taken its first quiet steps from being the blind victims of genetic-molecular...
155 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Feb 6
The Professor and the Frogs: The Ecology and Herpetology of Margaret Stewart.
Amphibians today are experiencing a population crisis of unprecedented scale. Frogs are going extinct, according to the most...
81 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Jan 25
Anne Innis Dagg, Giraffe, and the Winding Road of the Citizen Scientist.
Before Jane and Dian, Biruté and Jeanne, there was Anne. In 1957 Anne Innis (b. 1933) became the first woman to attempt a solo animal...
54 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Dec 6, 2023
All Creatures Small: Libbie Hyman's Invertebrates.
Science is a creature of lurches and inchings, presided over by two (mostly) mutually exclusive castes. We know the lurchers well,...
65 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Nov 26, 2023
Capping the Chromosome: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Discovery of Telomerase
Telomerase is one of those enzymes which just won’t let you come to a settled opinion. When it runs wild, it promotes cancer. But it...
268 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Nov 23, 2023
Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell.
One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...
47 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Oct 24, 2023
Born Not Taught: Marian Koshland and the Source of Antibody Variation.
The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...
746 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Oct 20, 2023
Making the Gradient: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and the Mysteries of Embryo Development
How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...
48 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Oct 15, 2023
Chronicler of the Path Untread: The 19th Century Journeys of Isabella Bird.
As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...
65 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Sep 10, 2023
A Life in Service to the Birds: America’s Pioneering Woman Ornithologist, Florence Merriam Bailey
In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...
117 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Sep 7, 2023
Breaking Neutral: The Population Genetics of Tomoko Ohta
We are all mutants, our genes loaded with the steadily acquired variations of three billion years that gradually changed a collection of...
128 views
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