by Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Taicang, Jiangsu, China, a small town near Shanghai. Her father was a progressive man who believed that girls should be educated. He even started a school which Wu attended. She then went on to study physics at the National Center University and after graduation she became a research assistant. Here her supervisor pushed her to pursue a degree in America, which he had also done. Wu was accepted into the University of Michigan and was financially backed by her uncle. She arrived in San Francisco California and decided to study at the University of California, Berkeley instead of the University of Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. in 1940 and married Luke Yuan, also a physicist in 1942. She was unable to secure a research position at UC Berkeley and became a physics instructor at Princeton University and Smith College. During this time World War II was going on and so was the Manhattan project. In 1944 Wu joined the Manhattan Project at the Substitute Alloy Materials Lab at Columbia University which focused on radiation detectors. Here she contributed much to the project and helped identify the poisoning of xenon-135.
After the war was over Wu was offered a position at Columbia where she focused on data decay. She contributed lots to the field, notable being the first confirmation of Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay. In 1956 Wu was known for her expertise in beta decay and was approached by two theoretical physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang. They asked her to concoct and execute an experiment to prove that their theory of law of conservation of parity was not true during beta decay. Wu suceedeed in this task and her experiment proved that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike. Her experiment led to a Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded however not to her nor was her work credited at all. In 1957 Lee and Yang won the Nobel Prize for their theory and Wu was not mentioned at all. This unfortunately is not the first time and won’t be the last that women’s crucial contributions in science are overlooked.
Wu continued to be a big name in her field winning several awards and honors. She was the first woman to serve as the president of the American Physical Society, won the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize and had many more accolades. She was also awarded the first honorary doctorate degree ever given to a woman at Princeton University. Her book published in 1965, Beta Decay, is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists. Her work is well renowned and one of her nicknames is the “Queen of Nuclear Research.” Despite not winning the Nobel Prize Wu was able to make a large impact on her field and be remembered as an important figure in science.
Sources:
https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/chien-shiung-wu
https://www.nps.gov/people/dr-chien-shiung-wu-the-first-lady-of-physics.htm