The untold story of Chien-Shiung Wu - "the first lady of physics"

Chien-Shiung Wu, known as the "First Lady of Physics," once missed out on the Nobel Prize, for a shocking reason.

Chien-Shiung Wu (Ngô Kiện Hùng) is a Chinese-American nuclear physicist. She is known as the "First Lady of Physics," the "Queen of Nuclear Research," and the "Marie Curie of China." Photo: @Wikipedia.

Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in the small town of Liu He near Shanghai, China. Her father was Zhong-Yi and her mother was Fanhua Fan. Chien-Shiung Wu was the only daughter and the middle of three children. Photo: @Biography.

Education was very important to Chien-Shiung Wu's family. Her mother was a teacher, and her father was an engineer; both encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to pursue her passion for science and mathematics from a young age. Photo: @ThoughtCo.

Chien-Shiung Wu attended Mingde Vocational High School, which her father founded, before leaving to attend Soochow Girls' Boarding School. Photo: @ San Diego Squared.

Next, she attended the Shanghai Gong Xue public school for a year. In 1930, Chien-Shiung Wu enrolled at Nanjing University, China's oldest and most prestigious higher education institution. There, she initially pursued mathematics but quickly switched to physics, inspired by the renowned female scientist Marie Curie. (Image: @American Institute of Physics)

Chien-Shiung Wu graduated with honors, first in her class, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1934. After graduation, Chien-Shiung Wu taught for a year at Zhejiang National University in Hangzhou, working at the Academia Sinica physics laboratory. At Academia Sinica, she conducted the first experimental research on X-ray crystallography (1935-1936) under the guidance of Professor Jing-Wei Gu. Photo: @Hackaday.

Professor Jing-Wei Gu encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to pursue graduate studies in the United States, and in 1936, she visited the University of California, Berkeley. There, she met Professor Ernest Lawrence, who was responsible for building the first cyclotron accelerator. Photo: @Hackaday.

Even a Chinese physics student named Luke Chia Yuan inspired Chien-Shiung Wu, advising her to stay at Berkeley and earn a PhD. Chien-Shiung Wu's graduate research focused on one topic: "Uranium fission products." Photo: @The New Inquiry.

After completing her PhD in 1940, Chien-Shiung Wu married another former PhD student, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, on May 30, 1942. The couple moved to the East Coast of the United States, where Luke Chia-Liu Yuan worked at Princeton University, while Chien-Shiung Wu worked at Smith College. Photo: @New Scientist.

After a few years, she accepted an offer from Princeton University as the first female faculty member hired to teach in the department. Photo: @JoySauce.

In 1944, she joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University to help solve a problem that physicist Enrico Fermi couldn't figure out. She also discovered a way to "enrich uranium ore for use as fuel in bombs." Photo: @Advanced Science News.

In 1947, the couple welcomed a son, Vincent Wei-Cheng Yuan. Growing up, Vincent Wei-Cheng Yuan followed in his mother's footsteps and also became a nuclear scientist. Photo: @The Matilda Project.

After leaving the Manhattan Project, Chien-Shiung Wu spent the rest of his career at the Department of Physics at Columbia, as a leading experimentalist in beta decay and interaction physics. Photo: @Columbia Physics.

With the support of two male theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, Chien-Shiung Wu used experiments involving cobalt-60 (a radioactive form of the metal cobalt) to refute the "parity law," proposing that parity is not conserved for weak nuclear interactions. Photo: @Lady Science.

Ultimately, this work earned Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang the Nobel Prize in 1957, but Chien-Shiung Wu was disqualified, as were many other female scientists during this period. Photo: @ Self-Rescuing Princess Society.

Chien-Shiung Wu was aware of gender-based injustice, so at an MIT conference in October 1964, she declared: "I wonder if tiny atoms and nuclei, or mathematical symbols, or DNA molecules, have any preferential treatment between male and female sexes?" (Image: @Grandma Got STEM)

Chien-Shiung Wu was honored with numerous awards throughout her career. In 1958, she was the first woman to receive the American Research Corporation Award, and the seventh woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Photo: @ScienceSourcePrints.

She also received the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute (1962), the Cyrus B. Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences (1964), the Bonner Prize (1975), the National Medal of Science (1975), and the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), among many other honorary degrees. Photo: @Feminist Book Club.

In 1974, she was honored as Scientist of the Year by the American Journal of Industrial Research. In 1976, she became the first woman to hold the presidency of the American Physical Society. In 1990, the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Asteroid 2752 after Chien-Shiung Wu. Photo: @Cosmos Magazine.

Chien-Shiung Wu died from complications of a stroke on February 16, 1997, in New York City at the age of 85. Her cremated remains are interred on the grounds of Mingde Vocational High School. Photo: @MovingScience.

In 1998, Chien-Shiung Wu was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame a year after her death. On June 1, 2002, a bronze statue of Chien-Shiung Wu was placed in the courtyard of Mingde Vocational High School in her memory. Photo: @in her genius.

She is remembered as a pioneer in the scientific community and an inspiring role model. Her granddaughter, Jada Wu Hanjie, commented: "From a young age, her beauty, her passion for research, her humility, and her strictness have been deeply ingrained in my mind. My grandmother emphasized so much enthusiasm for the development of science and national education, which I truly admired." Photo: @Forbes.

We invite our readers to watch the video: 7 of the Most Brilliant and Greatest Scientists in Human History. Video source: @TACA CHANNEL NEW.

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