Ever wondered about the great scientists? Ever wondered why there are few women? Some time ago I saw a poll of 'great movie scientists" and was sad but not surprised to see that the top ten included nine men and one woman. I started to think about the women who had made contributions to science and could only name Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin. I asked around my scientist friends, both male and female. I asked my friends on Facebook. There was no advance on Curie and Franklin. The response by many friends was "Rosalind Franklin? What did she do?"

I am therefore indebted to Smithsonian.com for publishing a list of "Ten Historic Femal Scientists You Should Know" in their online Science and Nature Smithsonian Magazine. It was fascinating to learn how many of the early women in science were behind the scenes propping up the men.

Did you know that it was Emilie du Chatelet, the mistress of the French philosopher Voltaire, who translated Isaac Newton's work 'Principia" into French in the 18th Century?

Did you know that William Herschel brought his sister Caroline to England from their native Germany to run his house? Caroline took an interest in William's work as an astronomer and went on to be the first woman to discover a comet, and to be the first woman in Britain to have her work published by the Royal Society.

Inspired by William Rontgen and Henri Becquerel, Lise Meitner studied maths and physics and developed an interest in radioactivity. Turned down by Marie Curie, she went to Berlin and collaborated with Otto Hahn, but was excluded from the main laboratories and so worked in the basement. Hahn and Meitner worked on the uranium atom, and Meitner calculated the energy released when the atom was bombarded with neutrons. This led to nuclear fission and finally the atomic bomb. Hahn won the Nobel Prize in 1944, but there was no mention of Meitner.

And finally Rosalind Franklin. Even teenage children know that the names Crick and Watson are synonymous with the structure of DNA. It was Franklin, working in London with Maurice Wilkins who did the grunt work. She was the one who had taken the X-ray crystallography micrographs and had so nearly mapped the structure when one of her images was shown to James Watson. It was the interpretation of the image by Watson with his coworker Francis Crick that revealed the mysteries of DNA, and it was Watson and Crick who published first and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Franklin died in 1958 and so no one fought her corner.

It would be interesting to know how many of the great men of science would have become household names without the help of the women in the background. Perhaps The Smithsonian will tell us more.