Chien-Shiung Wu isn’t a household name, but the pioneering physicist’s portrait could be coming soon to a mailbox near you.
Her face is the latest image on a US Postal Service stamp issued on Thursday.
And the timing is no coincidence.
Jada Yuan, Wu’s granddaughter, says issuing the stamp that day sends a powerful message.
“She believed in women and girls being in science, and achieving in any field that they put their minds to,” Yuan says. “And I think it means a lot that because she’s on a stamp, people will learn her story.”
Wu got her Ph.D., became a professor and made landmark discoveries in physics at a time when relatively few women in the United States were even going to college.
The Chinese immigrant’s work garnered her nicknames like “the queen of physics,” and she won numerous accolades. But Wu never won a Nobel prize. And some speculate her gender may have been one reason she was passed over.
Photos: Pioneering women in science
Chien-Shiung Wu – Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) focused her research predominantly on the techniques of experimental physics and radioactivity. Her nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics,” “Chinese Marie Curie” and “Madame Wu.”
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Marie Curie – Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934) discovered polonium and radium. Her work led to the creation of X-rays — a crucial component of modern-day medicine. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win this award in two categories: Physics and Chemistry.
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Alice Hamilton – American Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) was a pioneer in the field of toxicology. She researched the effects of lead poison on factory workers, isolated a typhoid fever outbreak in 1902, and lent her expertise to help crack down on the sale of cocaine to children in Chicago. She was also the first female faculty member of Harvard Medical School.
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Lise Meitner – Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a key member of a small group of scientists who discovered nuclear fission. Notably, one of her colleagues and her long-time collaborator, Otto Hahn, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on nuclear fission. Meitner’s exclusion has since been considered to be an error by the Nobel committee.
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Hilde Mangold – German embryologist Hilde Mangold (1898-1924), along with Hans Spemann, discovered the embryonic organizer. Their work led to further understanding of the pattern of embryo differentiation in all amphibians and formed the foundation for the field of experimental embryology. Mangold died young, but in 1935 Spemann was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery.
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Rachel Carson – American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was also an author. After WWII, she focused on warning the public about the long-term effects of misusing pesticides. Her book Silent Spring and other works challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
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Rita Levi-Montalcini – Italian neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) was known for her work in neurobiology. Along with Stanley Cohen, she won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor, a protein controlling growth and development. Prior to her death in 2012, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate and first ever to reach their 100th birthday.
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Virginia Apgar – American-Armenian pioneer anaesthesiologist Virginia Apgar (1909-1974) developed the APGAR score (Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration), a well-known system to evaluate the health of newborn babies. The Apgar score came into general use throughout the United States and has since been adopted by numerous other countries.
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Gertrude B. Elion – U.S. biochemist Gertrude B. Elion (1918-1999) helped develop many drugs, including ones used to treat malaria, herpes, meningitis and leukemia. In 1988, Elion, together with George Hitchings and Sir James Black, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research and insight into the principles of drug treatments.
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Jane C. Wright – American Jane C. Wright (1910-2013) was a physician who explored the relationship between patient and tissue culture response and developed chemotherapy as a viable treatment for cancer. She developed chemotherapy delivery methods by way of a catheter system and became the director of the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital by age 33.
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Rosalind Franklin – British chemist, crystallographer and biophysicist Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was the first to hypothesize and show, through x-ray diffraction, the double helix structure of DNA. Her discovery laid the ground work for Francis Crick and James Watson’s molecular model of DNA. The Nobel Prize can only be shared by three living scientists and so Franklin was barely acknowledged when it was awarded to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the double-helix in 1962.
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Stephanie Kwolek – American chemist Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) was awarded the DuPont Company’s Lavoisier Medal for outstanding technical achievement in 1995. Her career at the company spanned over forty years. She is best known for inventing Kevlar, an immensely strong plastic that was first used as a replacement for steel reinforcing strips, in 1965.
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Jane Goodall – British primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, 81, is best known for her long-term research on wild chimpanzees in Tanzania. She founded, the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center in Gombe National Park, which is the world’s longest running continuous wildlife research project. She also started Roots & Shoots, the Institute’s global environmental and humanitarian program for young people.
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Margaret Chan – Hong Kong Chinese and Canadian physician Margaret Chan OBE, 68, is Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO). She began her career in public health with the Hong Kong Department of Health where she was appointed Director in 1994. Three years later, while in this role, she handled the first human outbreak of H5N1 Avian Influenza and in 2003 successfully combated severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong.
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France A. Córdova – American astrophysicist France A. Córdova, 68, is Director of the National Science Foundation. She rose to this position after working as a prominent researcher of X-ray and gamma ray sources stemming from her work on pulsars. She was the youngest and first female Chief Scientist at NASA from 1993 to 1996 and later went on to be awarded NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal.
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Fabiola Gianotti – Italian particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti, 53, is the first female Director-General of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and led the institution during the recent discovery of the Higgs boson as part of the ATLAS experiment.
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Cori Bargmann – American neurobiologist Cornelia “Cori” Bargmann, 55, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her work on the behavior in C.elegans, or roundworms, which she used to characterize genes and neural pathways that allow the nervous system to generate variable behaviors. Her work led to her being elected into the National Academy of Sciences.
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Nina Tandon – American Nina Tandon, 36, is CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, the world’s first company growing living human bones for skeletal reconstruction. She is also Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Cooper Union and former Staff Associate Postdoctoral Researcher, at Columbia University.
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Elizabeth Holmes – American Elizabeth Holmes, 32, is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. She founded revolutionary blood diagnostics company, Theranos, which uses a prick of blood to get the same results as you would from an entire vial.
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‘She radically changed our view of the universe’
The stamp featuring Wu’s portrait is one of three issued by the USPS this year to honor the achievements and culture of Asian Americans.
Postal officials say they selected Wu, who died in 1997, because she was one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century.
“During a career that spanned more than 40 years in a field dominated by men, she established herself as the authority on conducting precise and accurate research to test fundamental theories of physics,” USPS says in its description of the stamp.
The discovery she’s most known for: a 1956 experiment disproving conservation of parity, a law of physics that had become an accepted part of quantum mechanics.
“She radically changed our view of the universe,” says Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University.
Scientists had long assumed the universe was symmetric and didn’t distinguish between left and right. But Wu’s experiment showed that wasn’t the case, he said.
“The achievement opens the way to a whole new set of explanations of the atom, the world and the cosmos,” the New York Herald Tribune reported at the time, comparing its significance to Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity.
“Her work, you now see it integrated into what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. This is our deepest understanding of nature’s ingredients,” Greene says. “And Madame Wu’s result is written all over those equations.”
Wu received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1974. Here she’s pictured at the right of the bottom row, sitting beside the university’s president, Derek Bok, and opera star Beverly Sills, a fellow honorary degree recipient. MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner, novelist Ralph Ellison, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Princeton Institute of Advanced Study faculty member Clifford Geertz and Archbishop Monsignor Rev. Helder Camara also received honorary degrees that year and are pictured in the top row.
An immigrant’s journey
Wu grew up in China and immigrated to the United States in 1936. She completed her Ph.D. studies at the University of California at Berkeley, then went on to teach at Smith College and Princeton University.
She took a job at Columbia University and joined the Manhattan Project in 1944, where her research included “improving Geiger counters for the detection of radiation and the enrichment of uranium in large quantities,” according to a National Park Service profile of her.
She became a full professor at Columbia in 1958 and earned numerous awards for her work, including the Comstock Prize and the Wolf Prize. An asteroid was named after her in 1990.
The stamp featuring her face has been years in the making. Anyone can submit suggestions for “stamp subjects that celebrate the American experience.” And the postal service says it gets about 30,000 nominations every year.
Immigrants have appeared on US stamps a number of times before, though the postal service told CNN it doesn’t consider immigration status when it’s evaluating who to put on a stamp or track how many immigrants have been featured. Fellow physicists like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi have also appeared on stamps, and they were immigrants, too.
For Wu’s granddaughter, a reporter at The Washington Post who’s been promoting the stamp on her social media accounts, highlighting her grandmother’s immigrant experience is an important part of the story.
“When my grandma immigrated, it was on a boat from China. For people of her generation, they got out just before the [Second] Sino-Japanese War, and then more war, and then Maoism. She never saw her parents alive after she left. Their tombs were desecrated when she went back,”Jada Yuan says. “There was a very a small community of Chinese intellectual expats who became really close, and sort of shared that experience of being separated from their homeland.”
Vincent Yuan, a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Wu’s son, says his mother kept a book close at hand throughout her career: “From Immigrant to Inventor.” In the Pulitzer-winning autobiography, Serbian-American physicist Michael Pupin detailed how he came to the United States with 5 cents in his pocket and just one set of clothes.
“She identified with him,” Vincent Yuan says, “in the sense that she was an immigrant, too, and came over without a whole lot of wealth. And he also was concerned about a lot of things she was concerning science education.”
Wu, shown here second from right, was among a group selected as “Young Women of the Year” by Mademoiselle magazine in 1946.
The prize she didn’t get
Missing out on the Nobel prize wasn’t something Wu discussed with her family, according to her son and granddaughter.
But the issue has been a topic of debate in scientific circles for decades, with some speculating that sexism may have been the reason she was passed over even as other scientists studying the same things were honored.
“Chien-Shiung Wu is widely considered one of the most influential scientists in history, but her achievements were not widely acknowledged due to her gender and race,” the American Association of University Women says on its website.
Vincent Yuan says being honored and respected by others in her field meant more to his mother than any prize.
“She wasn’t about personal awards. … She looked towards what things she could do things about, but whatever’s in the past was in the past.”
Among the issues that most concerned her: equity for women in science.
He suspects his mother would be pleased to see how the field has changed. But to really evaluate, she’d take a hard look at the evidence and turn to the statistics, just like she always did.
“I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t think the battle is over,” he says.
Wu’s family hopes her image on the new stamp will help inspire a new generation of would-be scientists to keep fighting.
