Women’s History Month 2023
Join us in celebrating Women's History Month as we honor the achievements of trailblazers past and present who have shaped our society!
Feature #1: Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai (1997- ), is an advocate for the equal right to education for girls and all children around the world and an international symbol of courage, resilience and freedom in the face of tyranny. At the young age of 11 Malala began speaking out publicly against the Pakistani Taliban's ban on girls' education and destruction of girls’ schools in her home Swat Valley region. After threats against her life, in 2012, when she was 15, a Taliban gunman shot her in the head on a school bus. She survived and fled to England to live inexile after a fatwa was issued against her.
In 2013 TIME magazine named her one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” and she coauthored a memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, translated into over 40 languages. On her 16th birthday she spoke at the UN, which awarded her the United Nations Human Rights Prize. When awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17, she became the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Malala currently serves as founder of her Extracurricular Productions company and co-founder of the Malala Fund to support free, safe and quality education for all girls around the world.
Feature #2: Dr. Rosalind Franklin Text
Rosalind Elsie Franklin, PhD (1920-1958), was an English chemist, biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer at London’s King’s College who, at age 30, was a recognized authority whose little-known x-ray diffraction studies of DNA led to the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure credited worldwide to Francis Crick and James Watson. Crick and Watson never told Franklin they had consulted, without her approval or knowledge, her now famous Photograph 51 – the first demonstration of DNA’s double-helix structure – and a summary of her unpublished research material. Nor did they directly acknowledge their debt to her vital information in the building of their DNA model published in their historic 1953 announcement.
Franklin died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer, four years before Crick and Watson shared, with biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on DNA structure. None of them gave Franklin any credit for her contribution to the discovery. Crick later admitted that in 1953 Franklin had been two steps away from realizing the correct structure of DNA, and her data was key to formulation of their DNA model. A few years after her DNA studies Franklin led pioneering work on the structure of viruses, such as the polio virus, which helped lay the foundation for the field of structural virology. Her landmark scientific contributions led to two Nobel Prizes, neither of which she received or witnessed, but her achievements are more important now than during her lifetime.
