Meet Julia Barlow Platt (1857-1935), who in her 70s was elected as the first female mayor of Pacific Grove, California. She spent her late years galvanizing efforts to create a nature preserve on Monterey Bay, which is still one of the most lovely areas on California’s northern coast. Behind these achievements, however, is a story of overlooked talent and missed contributions to science.
Platt was one of the world’s leading embryologists of her day: she earned her undergraduate degree in biology in three years at the University of Vermont, and then studied at Harvard. The field was not welcoming to women, so she became a sort of wandering scholar, working in Germany, Massachusetts, and Chicago. Eventually, after knocking at Stanford University’s doors, she wrote “without work, life isn’t worth living. If I cannot obtain the work I wish. Then I must take up the next best.” That’s when she got into Northern California politics.
Platt’s gender was not the only thing to hamper her career: her research flew in the face of established ideas about the development of embryos. But she was highly meticulous in her work– she figured out how to examine the development of skulls in salamanders, sharks, and chicks and concluded that the embryonic cells that form some of the structures special to vertebrates — like the myelin sheaths of the nerves — originated in a totally different place than what had been expected. In fact, she had discovered a whole new type of cell that vertebrates possess. Over four decades later, her research finally was proven correct by other scientists.
Source(s): _Some Assembly Required_, Neil Schuban, pp 54-59. 2020, Pantheon Books.
