STOLEN SCIENCE

Schwartz, a female scientist who has experienced discrimination, offers a brief survey of other scientists whose careers were also curtailed by bias.

Brief profiles of 13 scientists—nine women (one African American, one Chinese, and seven White) and four men (two enslaved African Americans, one an Italian immigrant, and one Cuban)—are arranged in chronologic order. The biographies each begin with a clever, complex drawing of the subject (the two slaves, for whom no archival pictures are extant, appear in silhouette) and conclude with a simple summary of the scientific principles that relate to that innovator’s field. In far too many cases, White male co-workers took credit for the subjects’ work, with the critical roles of the latter only recently receiving well-deserved recognition. It’s especially distressing that several of those co-workers even received Nobel Prizes for unattributed work. However, the information offered is very limited, sometimes glosses over critical nuances, and includes errors. For example, although this effort credits Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci with the invention of the telephone, many historians doubt his work was as refined as Alexander Graham Bell’s device, and Schwartz does not muster enough information to make a clear case for Meucci’s role. At other times, the summaries of related science are so simple as to end up inaccurate: An overview of nuclear physics states, “Atoms are also called elements.” An extensive reference list varies in quality.

A breezy, imperfect, but nonetheless thought-provoking exploration of an important topic.