Janice Kaplan is the author of The Genius of Women: From Overlooked to Changing the World.From her Q&A with Rebekah Denn for the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How do you define genius?--Marshal Zeringue
How we define a genius changes over time and in how a story gets told. I interviewed one professor at Cambridge who described genius as where extraordinary ability meets celebrity – celebrity in the sense of being recognized and having your work noticed. Over the centuries, women have had the extraordinary talent over and over again, but their work has not been noticed or recognized. I tell the story of the amazing Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission in the 1930s. It was a huge breakthrough and it won the Nobel Prize. I said “it” won the Nobel Prize, because Lise Meitner did not win the Nobel Prize; her lab partner, Otto Hahn, did.
Q: Is the situation improving?
I tell the story of two women who were key in the CRISPR study [a groundbreaking gene-editing technique]. They have won some big awards, but...[read on]