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the continent by killing between 30% and 60% of its population. It never truly went away, however: the most recent outbreak of the Black Death occurred in San Francisco in 1908. To put this into perspective, people died of bubonic plague the same year as the Tunguska incident and the production of the first Model T. Nevertheless, we have learned from our previous experiences: we now have insecticides, genetics, vaccines, and antibiotics. You can kill most of something, but it is nearly impossible to kill all of something. Western governments need to start re-thinking their approaches, not just to public health, emergency response, and funding, but also to intersectionality and the interlinking of the human experience in the second decade of the new millennium. And in the midst of one of humanity’s most difficult trials in recent memory, it would be good to remember the words of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”
GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH BY WOMEN SCIENTISTS Violeta Hernandez Genomic Biotechnologist & Molecular and Cellular Biologist with focus on Vaccinology
Science-related fields have been dominated mostly by men. According to United Nations data, less than 30% of researchers in the world are women (Nature Cell Biology Editorial, 2018). This may be a consequence of the discouragement women face and/ or of their lack of interest in the area of science, the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math).
have made remarkable contributions to science and shed light unto the unknown that is around us. Across these STEM fields the representation of women varies. Biology, for example, is one of the fields in which women are more represented, in comparison with engineering, computer science, or physics, owing to several probable reasons we shall not discuss in this article (Renken, 2016).
In spite of all the challenges of gender discrimination and the lack of recognition in the scientific community that women have to cope with, there have been many inspiring women in these areas who
In biology, many advances have been achieved by women in different subfields, such as genetics. Among the many women represented in this domain, we may recall Barbara McClintock
