Chien-Shiung Wu was one of the few women scientists to work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb.
Born in Liuhe, China, she attended Mingde Women's Vocational Continuing School, founded by her father, a strong proponent of gender equality. She left her hometown at age 11 and attended Suzhou Women's Normal School. At first she did not know what she wanted to study, but settled on physics after she found the textbooks on physics and chemistry challenging. Her father encouraged her interest and bought her advanced books on physics, chemistry and mathematics. If he had not done so Wu said that she would have become a school teacher in China, as it was the only option then. She decided that she wanted to understand the subjects throughly and taught herself by reading. She attended National Central University, later called Nanjing University, graduating in 1934. As per official Chinese policy she served as a teacher in Shanghai public school.
She moved to the United States in 1936 to pursue studies in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving her Ph.D. there in 1940. It was fortunate that she did move to the U.S. as she was soon cut off from her family by the Japanese conquest of China. After obtaining her degree she married Luke Yuan, another physicist, and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, were she split her teaching between Princeton and Smith College. As World War II continued she was asked to take part in the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, where she developed a Uranium enrichment program that allowed for the production of the bomb. She remained at Columbia after the war. Along with her associates at Columbia, Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen Ning Yang, she pursued work that overthrew the then scientific dogma called the principle of conservation of parity, showing instead that there is a preferred direction of emission in the physical world instead of absolute symmetry. However her part in the research was not recorded and Lee and Yang shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957 without her.
Despite this glaring injustice, she was named full professor at Columbia in 1958 and was presented with many awards over her lifetime, in fact all possible awards in her field except for the Nobel. She became the first woman to be elected to the American Physical Society and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Princeton, the first woman to be so honored. She did breakthrough work on beta decay and published a book on the subject. In essence she became the "first lady of physics" in the United States. She retired in 1981 and died in New York in 1997.
Although her work was instrumental in developing atomic weapons, most of it was basic to the development our modern understanding of the physical world. We owe much to this modest and intelligent woman.
Internet References:
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, 1912-1997 http://www.nwhm.org/...
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu http://www.csupomona.edu/...
Chien-Shiung Wu http://c250.columbia.edu/...
Chien-Shiung Wu http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Women of the Manhattan Project http://www.mphpa.org/...