Deborah Unger covered technology for Business Week magazine in New York and San Francisco. More recently she worked for Transparency International, the anti-corruption organization, and strategy+business magazine.
Margarethe Hilferding, Sigmund Freud and the Conspiracy of Silence
Margarethe Hilferding was the first woman admitted to Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but her radical work on maternal instinct was dismissed and ignored
Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize–Winning Work on mRNA Was Long Ignored—And Led to COVID Vaccines
Despite decades of doubt and dismissal, biochemist Katalin Karikó never gave up on the research that gave us mRNA COVID vaccines in record time
Sixty Years Later, and Thalidomide Is Still With Us
Decades after FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey stopped thalidomide from going on the market in the U.S., the legacy of the drug persists
Where Did All the Thalidomide Pills Distributed in the U.S. Go?
FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey saved American lives by refusing to approve thalidomide. But millions of pills had been sent to doctors in the U.S. for so-called clinical trials
Medical Sleuthing Identified the Dangers of Thalidomide
FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham wanted data that would show that thalidomide was safe to use during pregnancy. It wasn’t
In Early Science Journalism, These Women Were Writing for Their Lives
Starting in the 1920s female writers pioneered the field of science writing for the mass market, making it their mission to help ordinary people understand everything from astronomy to venereal disease
The Theoretical Physicist Who Worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
Melba Phillips co-authored a paper with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1935 that proved important in the development of nuclear physics. Later she became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons