Sister Miriam Michael Stimson (1913–2002) was a chemist whose precision with infrared spectroscopy resolved one of the twentieth century’s most consequential scientific questions – yet her name remains virtually absent from the histories of molecular biology written in the decades since. Working from a small Catholic women’s college in Michigan over more than three decades, she developed the potassium bromide disk technique that revealed the true structure of DNA whilst the Nobel laureates were, quite literally, getting it inside out. Her story – layered with scientific rigour, religious conviction, institutional marginalisation, and the particular invisibility of women’s methodological work – remains urgent precisely because the technique she pioneered still sits on laboratory benches worldwide, used daily by researchers who will never learn whose insight made it possible.
Sister Miriam Michael, it’s a genuine privilege to speak with you today. I want to begin by asking something that may seem straightforward but rarely is: how did you come to chemistry? What drew a young girl in the early twentieth century toward a discipline that was, to put it mildly, not exactly welcoming to women?
You know, I’m not certain there was a single moment of calling, as people often imagine these things. I grew up in circumstances where curiosity was permitted, even encouraged. My family was educated, reasonably well-situated. I was the sort of child who took things apart – watches, clocks, anything mechanical. My father didn’t discourage it, which was unusual for the era. And then, as I progressed through my schooling, I discovered that chemistry was the language in which the natural world spoke. It offered a way of asking precise questions and receiving clear answers. There was honesty in it, do you see? The universe doesn’t dissemble about its nature.
What drew me particularly was the sense that chemistry was fundamental work. Not derivative. Not applied in some secondary sense. If you understood chemistry, you understood the basis of everything else. The structure of matter. The bonds between atoms. This felt like approaching truth itself.
As for the resistance – yes, there was considerable resistance. I was admitted to university, which itself was a minor victory in those days for a woman. But the tone of scepticism was constant. I remember one professor explaining to the class that women lacked the spatial reasoning necessary for three-dimensional molecular visualisation. This was said with absolute confidence, despite the fact that I was sitting in the room. I spent the next examination drawing the most meticulous three-dimensional molecular structures I could manage, just to prove the point – though not, of course, to his face. The proof had to exist on paper, impersonal and undeniable.
My path to religious life came later, and some people have found this puzzling – the assumption being that one can’t genuinely pursue rigorous science and also pursue contemplative faith. But I never experienced these as incompatible. The Dominican order, particularly, has a vocation of seeking truth. Contemplata aliis tradere – to share with others the fruits of contemplation. I wanted to understand creation, and I wanted to do so in community. The convent offered me both rigour and purpose.
That phrase – contemplata aliis tradere – guides your entire career, doesn’t it? The research, the teaching, the way you’ve structured your work at Siena Heights. Yet I wonder: did entering religious life create additional barriers in the scientific world? Did secular scientists regard you differently once you were a nun?
Oh, considerably more differently. There was already the matter of my sex – that was the primary problem, of course. But add a habit and a veil, and you’ve introduced something that makes many secular scientists genuinely uncomfortable. It challenges a narrative they’ve constructed about what science requires of you. They see faith and empiricism as mutually exclusive, you see. They believe – or at least, they believed in my era, and many do still – that rigorous science requires you to have divested yourself of religious conviction. That it’s a kind of intellectual hygiene.
This caused me difficulties I couldn’t always see clearly at the time. I would present findings at conferences, and there would be this peculiar quality to the response. Not hostility, precisely. More like a kind of polite distance. As though they couldn’t quite categorise me. I wasn’t a real scientist in the way men at Cambridge or Caltech were real scientists, because I wore a veil. And I wasn’t a real nun in the way some of my religious sisters were, because I spent my life in a chemistry laboratory rather than in purely contemplative practice.
The truth is far more interesting than that binary. My faith informed my science. It gave me patience with detail. It gave me a sense that understanding the created world was a form of reverence. These aren’t obstacles to rigorous work – they’re conditions that make rigorous work possible.
Let’s turn to the work itself. The early 1950s – you’re developing what becomes the potassium bromide disk technique. The scientific world is in a kind of fever, isn’t it? Everyone is trying to sort out DNA’s structure. Watson and Crick in Cambridge, Pauling at Caltech, Wilkins and Franklin in London. What was it like to be working on this problem from Michigan, from Siena Heights?
It was both isolating and clarifying. Isolating because one didn’t have direct access to the intellectual ferment happening at those more prestigious institutions. We didn’t have the seminars, the spontaneous conversations in hallways, the sense of being at the absolute centre of the action. But clarifying because that distance meant I had to think very carefully about what the problem actually was, rather than simply following the prevailing assumptions.
The prevailing assumption – and it was deeply entrenched – was that the bases in DNA sat on the outside of the helix, with the sugar-phosphate backbone interior. It seemed logical given what people thought they understood about molecular forces and interactions. Bases are hydrophobic, sugars are hydrophilic. The thinking went that hydrophobic bases would naturally orient outward.
But I was troubled by this. I was working with absorption spectroscopy – infrared spectroscopy particularly – and the spectra weren’t behaving as the model predicted they should. The absorptions, the interference patterns, they suggested something different about how the bases were positioned and interacting.
The difficulty was that the existing methods for infrared analysis of biological samples were quite crude. We were using Nujol oil, essentially immersing samples in mineral oil. This worked adequately for simple compounds, but for something as complex as nucleotide bases, the oil itself would interfere with the spectrum. You’d get absorptions from the oil overlaying absorptions from your sample. You couldn’t cleanly see what you were looking at.
I’d been thinking about this for some time when it occurred to me: what if you used potassium bromide? It’s hygroscopic – it absorbs moisture readily – and it becomes transparent to infrared light when compressed. If you mixed your DNA base sample finely with KBr powder and compressed the mixture into a disk, you’d have a matrix that wouldn’t interfere with the infrared spectrum. The bases would be held in a transparent medium. You could see them clearly.
It sounds obvious now, perhaps. But at the time, it was genuinely innovative. Nobody was using this approach systematically.
Walk me through it technically, as though I’m a chemist working in a contemporary laboratory. What exactly were you doing, step by step?
Right. You begin with your nucleotide base sample – say, adenine or guanine, extracted from DNA. You need only a very small quantity, which was itself an advantage. A few milligrams at most.
You then finely grind this with potassium bromide powder – the KBr must be of high purity, dried thoroughly, because any moisture will cloud the disk and scatter your infrared light. The ratio matters considerably. You want enough KBr to create a matrix, but not so much that you dilute your sample beyond detectability. We worked with ratios roughly around one part sample to two hundred parts KBr, though this varied depending on the sample’s absorption strength.
Once you’ve thoroughly mixed the sample and the KBr, you place this mixture into a small die – a metal press of sorts – and apply significant pressure. We used a hydraulic press, applying pressures around ten thousand pounds per square inch. This compresses the powder into a solid, transparent disk, roughly one millimetre thick and a few millimetres in diameter.
Once formed, this disk becomes your sample holder. You place it in the infrared spectrophotometer, direct an infrared beam through it, and measure the wavelengths at which the sample absorbs light. As different types of molecular bonds vibrate at different frequencies, you get a spectrum – a kind of fingerprint showing which bonds are present and in what configuration.
What we discovered was that the spectrum of DNA bases in KBr disks showed far superior resolution compared to the Nujol oil method. The absence of interfering bands from the matrix itself meant you could see the actual molecular structure. There was far less scattering of light, better definition of absorption peaks, and the ability to prepare quantitative concentrations precisely.
But crucially – and this was what mattered for DNA structure – the spectra revealed that the bases were not free and unconstrained as the prevailing model imagined. They showed evidence of hydrogen bonding, of specific orientations, of interactions with other molecular groups. When you placed these spectral findings alongside the X-ray crystallography data – particularly Rosalind Franklin’s superb work – a different picture of DNA’s structure emerged.
The bases were inside, hydrogen bonded to each other in specific pairs. The sugar-phosphate backbone was on the outside. Not inside out, but right-side in.
There’s something rather striking about this: Watson and Crick were building physical models. They were literally assembling metal plates and wire, trying different configurations, seeing what fit together geometrically. Meanwhile, you were reading the actual chemical language of the molecule. You were seeing, at the atomic level, what the bases were actually doing.
Yes. That distinction matters more than people generally appreciate. Model-building is valuable – it provides geometric intuition, it helps you understand spatial relationships. But it’s fundamentally a hypothesis until you test it against the actual chemical behaviour of the system. My work was testing. It was asking: what does the molecule actually tell us about its own structure?
There’s something I must say clearly, though, because history has muddied this: Watson and Crick did produce a model of profound insight and correctness. I’m not suggesting they were wrong in their essential understanding. But they arrived at their model through a combination of geometric reasoning, some experimental data from others, and genuine intellectual intuition. They built a model and asked whether it was possible. I was asking whether it was true – whether the chemical reality matched the geometric possibility.
The two approaches work in concert, ideally. The model provides a framework for prediction. The chemical analysis confirms or refutes. Both are indispensable.
What troubles me – and this is something I could only say clearly now, at the end of my life – is that the confirmation work, the validation through rigorous chemical analysis, has been historically devalued. It’s seen as secondary. Supportive. The real achievement, supposedly, lies in proposing the model in the first place.
But consider this: if the chemical evidence had contradicted the Watson-Crick model, it would have been back to the drawing board for everyone. The model only becomes established truth when the chemistry aligns with the geometry. My work provided that alignment. Yet because it came after the model, it’s been classified as validation rather than discovery.
This matters particularly for women in science. So much of the work assigned to women has been categorised as technical support, as validation, as laboratory assistance – even when the intellectual content is identical to work by men that gets classified as theoretical contribution.
This brings us directly to the matter of recognition, or rather, the profound lack of it. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. Rosalind Franklin, whose crystallography data was essential, couldn’t receive it – she’d died in 1958, and the Nobel isn’t awarded posthumously. But you were alive. Your work was published. Why was it never part of that canonical narrative?
Several things converge, I think. First, and this is simple but consequential: my work was published in analytical chemistry journals. Analytical Chemistry, Spectrochimica Acta – excellent journals with rigorous peer review, but journals read primarily by chemists working in analytical techniques. The Watson-Crick model appeared in Nature. A general scientific publication with far broader reach. The audiences were different, and the audiences that matter for historical memory tend to be the broader ones.
Second, there’s the matter of institutional prestige. I was at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. Not Cambridge. Not Caltech. Not even a major research university in a major American city. Catholic women’s colleges, no matter how rigorous their work, simply don’t figure in the canonical histories. The stories written about scientific discovery tend to be written from the perspective of the elite institutions. We were at the margins.
Third, there’s gender, absolutely. I was a woman. Rosalind Franklin was a woman, and she has, over time, received recognition – though far later than justice would have provided. But Rosalind worked in London at King’s College, at a prestigious institution with high-profile collaborators. She also produced the most extraordinary X-ray crystallography images – visual, dramatic evidence. When her story finally began to be recovered, there were photographs, there were images that could be reproduced in textbooks. My work produced spectra. Valuable spectra, but spectral data is more abstract.
But then there’s the fourth thing, which is that I was not only a woman but a nun. A Catholic nun. In the 1950s, in predominantly secular scientific institutions, this created a particular kind of invisibility. I was already suspect as a woman doing serious science. Adding a religious identity made me, in a sense, twice-displaced. The prevailing narrative of scientific progress was a narrative of secularisation, of moving away from religious thinking. My very existence – a rigorous scientist who was also a devout Catholic – challenged that narrative. So I was, perhaps unconsciously, not quite believed in.
And finally – and I say this with some humility – I chose not to push for recognition. This is partly temperament, partly religious formation. The Dominican charism values truth over ego. It values contribution over credit. I was genuinely more interested in the work continuing, in the technique being useful to other scientists, than I was in being famous for it. I mentioned this to colleagues a few times: my sense that the work mattered, but that my name mattering seemed less important than the work itself mattering.
I wonder now whether this was wisdom or accommodation. Whether it was genuine spiritual conviction or internalised marginalisation making me choose invisibility. I’m not certain the answer is simple.
That’s remarkably honest. But I want to push slightly – did you never feel frustrated? Never feel that the record should be set straight?
Oh, I’ve had my moments of frustration, certainly. When Watson’s account of DNA discovery appeared and made no mention of analytical confirmation work, I confess to some irritation. When I saw that I was listed in American Men of Science – the title itself rather amusing, you must admit – I did think: well, at least I’m in somewhere, even if the category is absurd.
And there were times when younger scientists – particularly women – would come to Siena Heights and I’d realise they had no idea that the technique they were learning, the KBr disk method they were being taught as some sort of standard practice, had a history. That someone had figured it out, worked through the difficulties, published it. The technique had become invisible in its very ubiquity.
But frustration and action are different things. I could have pushed harder for recognition. I could have been more aggressive in claiming credit. Some of my colleagues – men and women both – did exactly that, and good for them. It wasn’t my temperament. I’m not claiming it was the right choice. I’m simply describing what was true.
What I did do was make sure the work was thorough, meticulously documented, published in places where other chemists could find it. I trained students in the technique. I ensured that the method became properly established and reproducible. That’s not nothing.
Let’s talk about your educational work at Siena Heights. The research program you established there in 1939 – it predates by decades what became standard American practice. Undergraduate students doing original research, working in your laboratory, contributing to genuine scientific inquiry. That was genuinely unusual.
This was where I felt I could make a real and lasting contribution, actually. The research itself was crucial, but it was also happening in a vacuum if it was only my research. The moment I began involving students, the work transformed into something with genuine depth.
I believed then, and I believe now, that science isn’t something that should be learned purely through lectures and textbooks. It’s something that must be done. You must have your hands in it, your mind fully engaged with problems that don’t have predetermined answers written in a solutions manual. Real science requires you to troubleshoot. To fail repeatedly. To adjust your approach. To discover things about how to think through problems that no lecture can teach.
At Siena, we created a cancer research laboratory. Women’s colleges were not generally expected to have serious research programs – that was supposedly the province of major research universities. But I believed our students deserved access to real work. So we built the laboratory. We secured equipment. We brought in samples and began investigating the biochemistry of cancer cells.
The students would come to me – usually bright young women who’d been told their whole lives that science was for boys, that they might not be capable of real scientific thinking – and over the course of working in that laboratory, they’d discover they could generate hypotheses, design experiments, troubleshoot when things went wrong. They’d experience the genuine thrill of discovering something nobody had known before.
Some of these students went on to graduate school, to further research. Others went into medicine, into public health. Some left science entirely but carried with them the knowledge that they were capable of rigorous thinking, of working with complex problems. That mattered.
What were you actually investigating in the cancer work? What was the research agenda?
We were examining the biochemical changes that occur when cells become cancerous. How does the chemistry of the cell transform? What happens to the molecular structures, the proteins, the nucleic acids? We were using spectroscopic techniques, naturally – infrared spectroscopy, but also ultraviolet spectroscopy and absorption spectroscopy in various forms. We’d examine cancer cells and normal cells and look for chemical differences.
There was also work on wound healing, which led eventually to some involvement with topical formulations – ointments and the like. I shouldn’t overstate my role there; it was collaborative work, and others deserve credit for aspects of it. But yes, my spectroscopic work contributed to understanding how certain compounds might facilitate healing.
I want to be honest here: the cancer research was not going to cure cancer. It wasn’t producing immediate clinical breakthroughs. We were doing fairly basic biochemical investigation – important work, but incremental. What mattered was the principle: that rigorous chemical investigation of disease could contribute, over time, to deeper understanding. That students could participate in that work. That a small Catholic women’s college could produce real scientific contribution.
Later in my career, I became involved in addiction research and counselling – looking at the biochemistry underlying addiction, but also at how to help people recover. That work took me to remarkable places, including the Soviet Union. It was interdisciplinary in a way that felt urgent and meaningful. But all of it followed from the same principle: that chemistry is not an abstract intellectual exercise. It’s a way of understanding and potentially helping to heal the world.
There’s something almost wry about the fact that your most significant technical contribution – the KBr disk technique – has become so standard that it’s almost lost its history. Scientists use it every single day without knowing whose insight made it possible. Does that bother you, or is there something almost satisfying about it?
Both, perhaps. There’s something oddly democratic about it, in a way. The technique serves everyone equally. A researcher in Tokyo and a researcher in São Paulo are using the same method without thinking about its origins. In a sense, that’s what you want from a good technique – for it to become so fundamental that people forget it was ever invented. It just is.
But there’s also something melancholic about it. Not for my own sake, but as a matter of historical truth. Future chemists won’t understand where this technique came from. They won’t know that someone had to solve the problem of how to analyse solid samples in infrared spectroscopy. They’ll think it was always available, always obvious. There’s a loss of intellectual history there.
What gives me some peace about this is the work itself has proven valuable far beyond what I initially imagined. When we developed the KBr disk method, we were thinking about DNA bases. But the technique turned out to be more generally useful – for examining all sorts of solid-state materials, for quality control in pharmaceutical manufacturing, for forensic analysis, for materials science. The method became more important than the problem that created it.
If you’re looking for immortality through scientific work, that’s perhaps not the worst form it could take.
I want to ask about your experience lecturing at the Sorbonne in 1953. You gave presentations there on your spectroscopic work at the precise moment Watson and Crick were publishing their DNA model. You were recognised as an international expert in your field. How did that international recognition feel, and what happened to it?
The Sorbonne was extraordinary. I was aware, of course, of the historical significance – being the second woman to lecture there, following Marie Curie. That weight was present. But the experience itself was primarily about science. I was presenting spectroscopic data to an audience of rigorous European chemists. They understood the work. They asked difficult questions. It was intellectually vibrant.
I remember the satisfaction of presenting findings, of having them taken seriously by scientists who were themselves serious. There were no caveats about my sex or my religious status. We were simply discussing chemistry at the level of detail it deserved.
But what strikes me now is how that recognition – genuine and international though it was – didn’t ultimately translate into broader historical narrative. I was known in certain circles. Analytical chemists knew my work. Other researchers building on my methods acknowledged the origin of the technique. But I never became, as it were, a public intellectual about DNA or molecular biology. I was a specialist whose work enabled other people’s more prominent work.
This is partly because I remained at Siena Heights rather than moving to a more prestigious institution. It’s partly because my work was technical and methodological rather than theoretical. But it’s also, I suspect, because the narrative around DNA discovery was already becoming fixed by then. Watson, Crick, Wilkins – those names were becoming synonymous with the discovery. And once a historical narrative becomes fixed, it’s remarkably difficult to alter it, even with evidence.
You were invited to lecture at Notre Dame when it was still an all-male institution – the first woman invited to do so. That seems like another extraordinary moment of recognition.
It was remarkable in its way, yes. Though I want to be careful not to overstate it. I was invited because they wanted someone to speak about spectroscopy. I happened to be available and respected in that field. The fact that I was a woman and a nun was not the reason for the invitation; it was simply the context in which the invitation took place.
What was genuinely interesting about that occasion was the response from some of the students and younger faculty. There seemed to be real curiosity – not just about the spectroscopy, but about the contradiction I seemed to embody. A woman. A Catholic nun. Doing serious scientific work. For some people, it opened up a possibility they hadn’t previously entertained. For others, it apparently confirmed suspicions that something was odd about my vocation or my intelligence.
I was invited to Notre Dame to talk about infrared spectroscopy and ended up, in some people’s minds, making a statement about gender and religion and intellectual life. I hadn’t set out to do that, but I wasn’t unhappy about it either.
I’m curious whether there were moments – as the field moved forward, as new techniques emerged – when you questioned your own work. Times when you wondered whether you’d gotten something wrong, or whether the KBr disk technique had limitations you hadn’t fully reckoned with.
Absolutely. Science, if it’s honest, always includes doubt. There was a period in the late 1950s when some researchers were experimenting with alternative matrix materials. Caesium iodide, potassium chloride, various other compounds. Some people argued they got superior results in certain applications. I had moments of real uncertainty: had I chosen KBr somewhat arbitrarily? Would another material prove fundamentally superior? Had I missed something?
Working through that required going back to first principles. Why had I chosen KBr in the first place? It had to do with its refractive index, its hygroscopicity, its transparency to infrared light, its chemical inertness – it wouldn’t react with the sample. When I examined alternatives against these criteria, KBr actually held up quite well. It wasn’t perfect for every application – nothing is – but it was remarkably versatile.
There were also times when I wondered whether the spectra I was interpreting were actually showing me what I thought they were showing. Spectral interpretation is not completely objective. You’re reading patterns of absorption, and patterns can be ambiguous. Sometimes I’d return to old spectra months later and think: did I interpret that correctly? Would another researcher reading the same spectrum reach a different conclusion?
This is where the collaboration with others mattered enormously. Having my findings confirmed by other researchers using the technique, seeing it replicated in different laboratories – that provided a kind of validation that I couldn’t produce on my own.
But I want to be honest about something else: there were probably techniques, approaches, or variations I didn’t explore because I didn’t have the resources or the time. Working at a small college with limited funding meant I couldn’t pursue every interesting avenue. Other researchers with access to more sophisticated equipment might have discovered valuable extensions or refinements to the basic technique. That’s the reality of research conducted at non-elite institutions.
Let’s talk about the parallel with Rosalind Franklin. You both were women whose chemical and physical insight was essential to understanding DNA structure. You both were largely excluded from the Nobel Prize recognition. Yet her story has become much more prominent in recent decades. Why do you think her recognition finally happened, and where does that leave you?
Rosalind’s story is remarkable in its way. She had advocates. People who cared enough about historical accuracy to keep telling her story, to insist on her recognition. Over time, that narrative shifted. She became the hero of a story about a brilliant woman whose work was appropriated by men. That story is true, by the way – it’s not a retelling. But it’s a particular kind of story that resonates with contemporary values around gender equity.
My story is less dramatic, perhaps. I wasn’t appropriated in the way Rosalind was. My work wasn’t stolen and claimed by men. It simply… disappeared. It was overlooked rather than taken. That’s a different sort of injustice, but I think it’s harder to recover narratively because it’s less clear who the villain is.
Rosalind also worked in a more visible context. Her crystallography images were extraordinary – visual, reproducible, striking. They could become iconic in a way that spectral data can’t quite manage. And she worked in a field – X-ray crystallography – that remained central to molecular biology. My field, analytical chemistry, methodological chemistry, became invisible in its very usefulness.
What I wonder is whether my story can be recovered at all now. Rosalind’s recovery happened because people cared enough to keep insisting on it. Who will insist on mine? The religious communities know something of my work. Regional historians. Specialists in analytical chemistry. But the general narrative of science? The textbooks? I’m not sure.
I don’t say this bitterly. It’s simply realistic. Historical recognition depends not just on what you did, but on whether anyone cares enough to keep telling that story. I did my work. I did it carefully. It’s still being used. That may have to be enough.
Yet you received the Siena Medal just weeks before your death. That’s your institution’s highest honour, bestowed finally in full recognition of your contributions. How did that feel?
That was deeply moving. Not because I suddenly cared about recognition – I was seventy-nine years old; I wasn’t about to start craving fame. But because it meant that the place I’d given my entire professional life to understood what I’d done. The students I’d trained, the colleagues I’d worked with, the institution itself – they knew the value of the work.
That recognition, coming from home, from people I’d worked with for decades, felt more genuine than any external honour could have. The Siena Medal came from people who’d seen me in the laboratory at two in the morning, troubleshooting an experiment. Who’d watched students grow in their capacity to think scientifically. Who’d understood that the KBr disk work was important not because it made me famous but because it enabled important science.
There’s something to be said for that kind of recognition – recognition from people who know your work intimately, who’ve seen your commitment over time. It’s more solid than applause from strangers.
What would you want scientists today – particularly women entering fields where they’re underrepresented, or working at small institutions, or navigating identities that don’t fit neatly into the scientific establishment – what would you want them to know?
First: do the work carefully. Do it rigorously. Let that be your constant. The work will speak, even if the history doesn’t always record your name clearly. There’s integrity in that – in knowing you’ve done something well, something true, whether or not it becomes famous.
Second: the institutional prestige matters less than you might think. Working at Siena Heights meant I didn’t have access to some resources, some networks, some of the privilege that came with elite institutions. But it also meant I developed independence. I had to think problems through for myself rather than following established protocols. That produced originality.
Third: don’t let marginality paralyse you. Yes, you’ll face prejudice – based on your sex, your faith, your institution, your accent, your background. That’s real. But you can still produce work that matters. The fact that the system is unjust doesn’t mean you can’t contribute something true within it.
Fourth: be generous with your knowledge. Share your techniques, mentor your students, publish your findings clearly. If you’re motivated by advancing human understanding rather than by personal glory, you can afford to be generous. The work will continue after you, and that’s enough.
And finally – this may sound odd coming from someone who spent her life in a laboratory – but don’t let the pursuit of recognition distort your values. I chose not to fight for prominence because I believed the work itself was the point. I may have been naive. I may have accommodated injustice too readily. But I also lived a life that felt genuine and purposeful. That matters too.
Women entering science now have something I didn’t: they have witnesses. People who are insisting, deliberately, that women’s contributions be recognised. You have documentation, public conversations, institutional mandates toward equity. That’s not nothing. Use it. But also do the work itself. The recognition without the work is empty. The work without the recognition is incomplete justice – but it’s still work.
Sister Miriam Michael, thank you. This has been extraordinary.
Thank you for asking the questions. It’s been rather lovely to tell the story – the whole story, not just the neat parts. Life is messier than most histories acknowledge. I’m glad to have spoken it aloud.
Letters and emails
The interview with Sister Miriam Michael Stimson has prompted considerable reflection amongst readers, researchers, and practitioners across multiple disciplines and continents. In the weeks following our conversation, we received a growing stream of correspondence – letters and emails from chemists, historians, educators, and scientists working at the intersection of technical innovation and institutional margins.
We’ve selected five of these inquiries, each raising questions that the initial interview touched upon lightly or left deliberately open. These letters come from individuals whose own work and perspectives have been shaped, in various ways, by the tensions Sister Miriam Michael illuminated: between rigorous methodology and historical recognition, between technical constraint and creative insight, between personal conviction and institutional visibility.
What emerges is not a simple follow-up but rather a kind of continuation – a widening circle of conversation that extends beyond the original exchange. These correspondents ask Sister Miriam Michael to clarify her thinking on matters ranging from the technical implications of her era’s limitations to the ethical dimensions of mentorship; from hypothetical choices she might have made differently to advice she would offer to those beginning their own journeys in fields where recognition remains unevenly distributed.
Her responses below reflect the same measured thoughtfulness, intellectual honesty, and quiet conviction that characterised our initial conversation.
Keiko Tanaka, 58, Materials Scientist, Tokyo
You developed the KBr disk method when infrared spectrophotometers were relatively simple instruments compared to today’s Fourier-transform systems. Looking back, were there aspects of your original technique that actually benefited from that technical simplicity – things that more sophisticated instruments might obscure or make unnecessarily complicated? In other words, did the limitations of your era actually lead you toward something more elegant than we might design today?
What a perceptive question. Yes, absolutely – there were considerable advantages to working with simpler instrumentation, though I wouldn’t have articulated it quite that way at the time. When you’re in the midst of the work, you’re primarily aware of what you lack rather than what you possess. But looking back now, I can see how the constraints shaped the method in ways that proved surprisingly durable.
The infrared spectrophotometers we used in the early 1950s were dispersive instruments – they used prisms or gratings to separate infrared light into its component wavelengths, scanning through the spectrum sequentially. This was slow work. A single spectrum might take twenty minutes to an hour to record, depending on the resolution you wanted and the range you were examining. You couldn’t simply press a button and receive instantaneous data. You had to wait. You had to watch the pen recorder trace out the absorption bands across the chart paper in real time.
This enforced slowness meant you developed an intimate relationship with the spectrum as it emerged. You could see immediately if something was wrong – if the baseline was drifting, if there was excessive noise, if an absorption peak was appearing where it shouldn’t. You could adjust on the spot, troubleshoot in the moment. There was a kind of conversation happening between you and the instrument and the sample. You learned to read spectral quality as it was being generated, not just after the fact.
The KBr disk technique emerged partly from that intimacy with the process. Because each spectrum took considerable time and effort to produce, you became deeply invested in sample preparation. You couldn’t afford to waste time running poor-quality samples. So you thought very carefully about how to prepare the sample in a way that would give you the cleanest, most interpretable spectrum on the first attempt.
The simplicity of the KBr method – mixing powder with powder, compressing it into a disk – was partly born from that necessity. It had to be reproducible. It had to work reliably. You couldn’t have a preparation technique that only worked intermittently, because you didn’t have the luxury of running fifty samples to find the three good ones. Each sample had to count.
What’s interesting to me now is that modern Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy – FTIR, as I understand it – can generate spectra in seconds rather than minutes. The speed is extraordinary, and the sensitivity is far superior to what we could achieve. But I wonder whether that speed sometimes encourages a certain casualness about sample preparation. If you can run twenty samples in the time it used to take me to run one, there’s less incentive to get the preparation exactly right the first time. You can always run another.
The elegance of the KBr disk method lies partly in its discipline. The technique forces you to think carefully about concentration, about homogeneity, about moisture content, about the physical state of your sample. You must grind the materials finely. You must dry the KBr thoroughly. You must apply consistent pressure. These aren’t optional refinements – they’re necessary for producing a useful disk. And because the method is manual, you develop a physical sense of what “right” feels like. You can tell by the appearance of the powder mixture whether it’s been ground sufficiently. You can tell by the transparency of the disk whether the compression was adequate.
Modern instruments, with their computational power and automated sample handling, can sometimes compensate for poor sample preparation through mathematical correction – baseline adjustments, spectral smoothing, various algorithms. This is genuinely useful, particularly for complex or difficult samples. But I do wonder whether it occasionally masks underlying problems rather than addressing them. The spectrum looks acceptable, but you’ve lost some information in the process of making it look acceptable.
There’s also something to be said for the physical presence of the KBr disk itself. Once prepared, it’s a stable, solid object. You can store it. You can return to it months or years later and re-examine it. You can share it with colleagues. It has materiality. Modern techniques that examine samples in solution or as thin films don’t always preserve the sample in quite the same way. The disk is both the preparation method and the archival record.
I’m not suggesting we should abandon modern instrumentation – that would be absurd. The advances in sensitivity, speed, and computational analysis have opened up research possibilities I could only have imagined. But I do think there’s value in understanding why the simpler methods worked, what principles guided their development. The KBr disk technique succeeded not despite our limited instrumentation but partly because of it. We had to think clearly about the fundamental problem: how do you present a solid sample to infrared light in a way that’s transparent, reproducible, and chemically inert? The solution we arrived at was simple because simplicity was all we could reliably achieve. And simplicity, it turns out, often endures precisely because it’s robust.
If I were advising a young chemist today, I’d say: learn to use the sophisticated instruments, absolutely. But also learn to prepare samples as though each one matters individually. Develop that physical intuition, that sense of what good preparation feels like. Don’t rely entirely on the instrument to correct for carelessness. The elegance in chemistry often lies not in computational power but in thoughtful preparation – in understanding your materials well enough to treat them properly from the start.
Janis Ozols, 42, Historian of Science, Riga
What if you had published your DNA base spectroscopy findings in Nature or Science instead of in analytical chemistry journals? Do you believe the content of your work would have shifted – that you would have framed your findings differently, emphasised different interpretations – simply to fit the expectations of a more prestigious venue? Or would you have fundamentally compromised something about your approach?
This is a difficult question to answer honestly, because it requires me to admit things about scientific publishing that I didn’t fully understand at the time – or perhaps understood but didn’t want to acknowledge.
The truth is, I never seriously considered submitting to Nature or Science. That wasn’t a conscious decision based on careful evaluation of the options. It was more fundamental than that. Those journals simply didn’t feel like places where my work belonged. They published grand discoveries, theoretical breakthroughs, findings that reshaped entire fields. My work was methodological. Technical. It was about how to examine DNA bases using infrared spectroscopy, not about the structure of DNA itself in some comprehensive sense.
But your question asks me to imagine: what if I had submitted there? Would the work have changed to fit?
I think – and this troubles me to say – yes, it would have changed. Not the data itself, obviously. The spectra would have been the same. The experimental procedures would have been identical. But the framing, the interpretation, the way I positioned the findings within the larger narrative of DNA research – that would have shifted considerably.
For Nature or Science, I would have needed to make the work seem more dramatic, more definitive. The journals at that time – and perhaps still now – favoured papers that made bold claims, that positioned themselves as resolving major questions. I would have had to write as though my spectroscopic findings proved the Watson-Crick model, rather than what I actually believed: that they provided confirmatory chemical evidence consistent with that model.
The distinction might seem subtle, but it’s philosophically significant. Proof implies finality, certainty. Consistency with a model simply means the chemical evidence doesn’t contradict the geometric hypothesis. One is conclusive; the other is corroborative. In analytical chemistry journals, that distinction was understood and valued. Careful, measured claims were seen as rigorous. But in the high-profile general science journals, measured claims could appear timid, insufficiently confident.
I also would have needed to foreground the DNA structure story and background the methodological innovation. The KBr disk technique would have become merely the means by which I examined DNA bases, rather than being itself a significant contribution. The narrative arc would have been: “We now understand DNA base positioning better because of these spectroscopic findings,” rather than: “Here is an improved technique for infrared analysis that, among other applications, clarifies DNA base chemistry.”
This matters because the second framing – the one I actually used – positioned my work as contributing to analytical chemistry as a discipline. The technique had value beyond the particular DNA question. It could be applied to other solid samples, other molecular structure problems. But Nature and Science readers in the 1950s weren’t particularly interested in techniques for their own sake. They wanted results, discoveries, answers to big questions.
There’s also the matter of authorship and collaboration. My work on the KBr technique was genuinely mine – I developed it, refined it, validated it. But to make the DNA findings seem sufficiently important for a high-profile journal, I suspect I would have needed to position the work as part of a larger collaborative effort, to reference and incorporate findings from the major DNA research groups. This isn’t dishonest, exactly – science is collaborative – but it would have diffused the clarity about what I had actually contributed.
And then there’s something more uncomfortable: I’m not certain I would have been taken seriously if I had submitted to those journals. A nun from a small Catholic women’s college in Michigan submitting findings about DNA structure? The gatekeepers at Nature – the editors, the peer reviewers – might well have dismissed it out of hand. Not because the work was poor, but because I didn’t fit their mental image of who produces important science.
Rosalind Franklin could submit to Nature because she was at King’s College London, working in an established crystallography laboratory, part of a recognised research programme. Maurice Wilkins was there. John Randall was the laboratory director. She had institutional credibility, even if she personally faced considerable prejudice. I had none of that. Siena Heights had no reputation in molecular biology. I had no famous collaborators to lend credibility. My primary expertise was in analytical instrumentation, not in genetics or molecular structure.
So I made a choice – though again, not a fully conscious one – to publish where I knew I would be taken seriously. In analytical chemistry journals, my institutional affiliation mattered less than the quality of the spectral data and the reproducibility of the method. The reviewers would be chemists who understood infrared spectroscopy, who could evaluate the technical merit without needing me to be from Cambridge or Caltech.
Would this have been compromise? Yes, in a sense. I compromised visibility for intellectual honesty. I compromised potential fame for professional respect within a narrower community. And I may have compromised historical recognition – because by not publishing in the high-profile venues, I ensured that my work wouldn’t be part of the grand narrative that those journals help construct.
But here’s what I didn’t compromise: the integrity of the findings themselves. In Analytical Chemistry and Spectrochimica Acta, I could present the work exactly as I understood it, with appropriate caution about interpretations, with full methodological detail, with honest discussion of limitations. I didn’t have to exaggerate. I didn’t have to claim more certainty than the data warranted. I could be a careful, rigorous chemist rather than a promoter of dramatic discoveries.
Whether that was wisdom or merely rationalisation, I honestly cannot say. Perhaps I was being intellectually scrupulous. Perhaps I was simply accommodating my own marginality, making virtue out of necessity. Your question forces me to consider that I might have underestimated my own work’s importance, or overestimated the likelihood of rejection, or simply lacked the confidence to claim the prominence that might have been warranted.
What I know is this: the work got published, it was reproducible, other chemists adopted the technique, and it proved useful far beyond the initial DNA application. That’s not nothing. But it’s also not a place in the canonical history of molecular biology. You’re asking me to reckon with the cost of that choice, and I confess I’m not entirely comfortable with what the reckoning reveals.
Laura Benítez, 51, Pharmaceutical Quality Control Manager, São Paulo
In contemporary drug manufacturing, the KBr disk method remains standard for verifying solid pharmaceutical samples. Yet the operators using it daily receive training manuals with no historical context – the technique appears as if it’s always existed. Have you thought about what information is lost when a method becomes so routine that its invention disappears? Is there anything crucial about why you developed it – the problems you were trying to solve – that modern chemists should understand to use the technique most thoughtfully?
This question touches something I’ve thought about considerably, particularly in recent years. There’s a paradox in having one’s work become so useful that it becomes invisible. In one sense, it’s the highest compliment – the technique is so reliable, so elegant, that it’s simply become the way to do things. Nobody questions it anymore. It’s just how you prepare solid samples for infrared analysis.
But you’re right that something is lost in that invisibility. When a method becomes automatic, routine, incorporated into training manuals as though it emerged fully formed from the ether, the reasoning behind it disappears. And the reasoning – the why of a technique – can be as important as the how.
Let me explain the problem I was actually trying to solve, because I think this matters for how the technique should be used today.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I was developing alternative approaches to infrared sample preparation, the primary method for solid samples was the Nujol mull – suspending your sample in mineral oil and applying it to a plate. It worked adequately for many purposes, but for samples like nucleotide bases, it was deeply problematic. The mineral oil itself had strong infrared absorptions, particularly in certain regions of the spectrum. These absorptions would obscure the actual absorptions from your sample. You’d get interference patterns, background noise, regions where you simply couldn’t see what you were looking at.
But the deeper problem was about understanding. When I examined DNA bases suspended in Nujol oil, I was never entirely certain whether the spectrum I was seeing reflected the actual molecular behaviour of the bases or whether it was an artifact of the oil suspension. Were the bases aggregating in the oil? Were they interacting with the oil molecules? Was the spectrum showing me the free base or the base-in-oil complex?
This uncertainty was maddening from a scientific perspective. I wanted to know what the bases were actually doing, not what they appeared to do when suspended in an oily medium.
The KBr disk method solved this by changing the entire conceptual approach. Instead of suspending the sample in something foreign to it, you were embedding it in an inert matrix. The KBr itself doesn’t interact chemically with your sample. It’s transparent to infrared light. It provides a stable, defined environment. You’re not asking the sample to dissolve or suspend – you’re asking it to be finely dispersed throughout a solid medium that will hold it in place, maintain known concentrations, preserve the sample in a stable state.
But here’s what I think is crucial for modern operators to understand: the KBr method only works reliably if you pay attention to the details that seem tedious. The drying of the KBr powder. The fine grinding of the sample. The thorough mixing. The appropriate pressure application. The moisture control during disk formation.
These aren’t optional niceties. They’re not just “good practice.” They’re the foundation of why the method works. If your KBr powder contains water, the disk will scatter light and your spectrum will be degraded. If your sample isn’t finely ground, you’ll get uneven dispersion and poor reproducibility. If your mixing is inadequate, different aliquots of the same disk will give you different spectra. If your pressure is insufficient, the disk will be cloudy and fragile.
I worry – and this is perhaps me being an anxious elderly chemist – that modern pharmaceutical quality control operators sometimes treat KBr disk preparation as a perfunctory step. You weigh your sample, you mix it with KBr, you press it into a disk, you run it through the spectrometer. The equipment is sophisticated. The spectrometer is sensitive. Surely the particular care I thought was important is less relevant now?
But no. The fundamentals haven’t changed. If anything, they matter more now. When your spectrometer is incredibly sensitive and your standards are incredibly tight – when you’re verifying pharmaceutical purity to several decimal places – any artefact introduced through careless sample preparation becomes magnified. A poorly prepared disk might give you a spectrum that looks acceptable but is subtly distorted. The absorption peaks might be slightly shifted. The baseline might be noisy. You might make a false judgment about sample quality.
The reason I developed this technique – the reason I cared so intensely about every detail – was that I believed infrared spectroscopy could provide true information about molecular structure. I believed that if you prepared your sample correctly, the spectrum would tell you what was actually there. This wasn’t just technical preference. It was philosophical. I wanted to see truth, not artifacts.
When you use the KBr disk method today, particularly in pharmaceutical quality control where accuracy matters tremendously, I’d ask you to remember that. Remember that someone spent months working out how to prepare samples in a way that would give reliable, reproducible, truthful spectra. Remember that each step in the preparation has a reason. Remember that the elegance of the method lies in its simplicity, but that simplicity requires genuine care.
The training manuals that don’t explain the history – that simply say “prepare a KBr disk according to the following procedure” – they’re not wrong. They’re practical. But they’ve lost something important. They’ve lost the sense that this technique was developed because the previous methods were failing, because clarity was needed, because someone was asking: how can I see the truth about this sample?
Modern operators don’t need to know my name. They don’t need to know that I was a nun at a small college in Michigan. But they might benefit from knowing why every detail matters. That the technique itself embodies a kind of truth-seeking. That careful preparation isn’t about being fussy or perfectionist – it’s about ensuring that the data you generate actually reflects the sample you’re examining.
If pharmaceutical chemists in Brazil and everywhere else are using this method daily to verify drug quality, to ensure that medications are what they’re claimed to be, then I’m grateful. That’s the work continuing in the most meaningful way. But I’d ask that the work be done with the same care and attention to detail that motivated its development. That’s how integrity in science gets maintained – not through famous names, but through practitioners who understand that accuracy requires thoughtfulness at every step.
Ryan Cooper, 46, Biochemist studying nucleic acids, Boston
You mentioned that spectral interpretation isn’t completely objective – that ambiguity exists in how you read patterns of absorption. Given that modern spectroscopy produces enormous quantities of data, much of it analysed by algorithms and machine learning, I’m curious: do you worry that we’ve solved the problem of interpretation without understanding it? That we might be losing the kind of intimate, questioning relationship with data that you cultivated when you had to think through what the spectrum was telling you?
Yes. I worry about this considerably, though I want to be careful not to sound like someone simply lamenting that the old ways were better. They weren’t, in many respects. Modern computational analysis can do things I could never have imagined – identifying compounds from enormous spectral libraries, detecting trace components, resolving overlapping signals. These are genuine advances.
But there is something being lost, and it’s more than just nostalgia for the era when you sat with a chart recorder and watched the spectrum emerge line by line.
When I examined infrared spectra in the 1950s and 60s, the process was inherently contemplative. You couldn’t simply press a button and receive an answer. You had to read the spectrum. You’d look at the absorption peaks – their position, their intensity, their shape – and you’d ask: what molecular structure could produce this pattern? What bonds are vibrating at these frequencies? Why is this peak so broad, while that one is sharp? What does the baseline tell me about sample quality or instrumental drift?
This wasn’t a matter of matching peaks to a reference table, though we did use reference data. It was more like a conversation. The spectrum was speaking in a particular language, and you were learning to understand that language through practice, through repeated exposure, through failures and corrections. You’d see an unexpected peak and you’d have to reason: is this a genuine feature of my sample, or is it contamination? Is it a fundamental vibration or an overtone? Does it suggest the presence of a particular functional group I hadn’t anticipated?
This process required patience, but it also required doubt. You couldn’t be entirely certain of your interpretation. You’d look at a particularly complex spectrum – especially for something like DNA bases with their multiple functional groups – and you’d entertain several possible interpretations. You’d test them mentally against what you knew about the chemistry. You’d go back to the laboratory and prepare a derivative, run a comparison, see if your hypothesis held up.
The doubt was productive. It kept you honest. It prevented you from seeing only what you expected to see.
Now, from what I understand about modern computational methods – and I admit my understanding is limited, given that these developments came largely after my active research years – the approach is quite different. You feed your spectral data into an algorithm. The algorithm compares it against thousands or millions of reference spectra. It produces a match, often with a confidence level attached. The compound is identified.
This is extraordinarily useful for routine analysis, for quality control, for situations where you need rapid, reliable identification. But I wonder whether it changes the nature of the relationship between the chemist and the data.
When the computer tells you with ninety-eight per cent confidence that your sample is compound X, what incentive exists to question that interpretation? To wonder whether the spectrum might actually reflect a mixture, or a degradation product, or an isomer that the algorithm hasn’t been trained to distinguish? The answer is provided before the question is fully formed.
I’m particularly concerned about this for young chemists – people training now in spectroscopy and related techniques. If their primary experience of spectral interpretation is feeding data into software and receiving answers, what happens to their capacity to reason through ambiguous cases? What happens when they encounter a spectrum that doesn’t match anything in the library? Will they have developed the interpretive skills – the ability to look at peak positions and intensities and shapes and reason from first principles about what molecular structure could produce such a pattern?
There’s an analogy here, perhaps, to what happened with calculation. When I was young, we calculated by hand or with mechanical calculators. You understood the mathematics because you performed it step by step. When electronic calculators became common, some people worried – rightly, I think – that students would lose mathematical intuition. They’d know how to get answers but not understand why those answers were correct or whether they made sense.
Something similar may be happening with spectral interpretation. The algorithms are powerful, but they’re also opaque. You put data in; you get answers out. The reasoning – the “why this interpretation rather than that one” – is hidden inside the computational process. You can’t see it, can’t examine it, can’t learn from it in the same way you learned from wrestling with a difficult spectrum yourself.
I also wonder about errors – not random errors, but errors of assumption built into the algorithms themselves. If a machine learning system is trained primarily on spectra from pure compounds, what happens when it encounters natural products with unusual structural features? Or when it examines samples that contain unexpected impurities? Will it flag the ambiguity, or will it simply provide its best match and move on?
When I worked with spectra, my doubt acted as a safeguard. If something looked odd, if a peak appeared where I didn’t expect it or had an unusual shape, I would investigate. I couldn’t simply trust the data without questioning it. That questioning was part of the discipline of science – the recognition that instruments and methods and even your own perceptions can mislead you if you’re not careful.
I’m not suggesting we abandon computational methods. That would be absurd and regressive. But I am suggesting that we need to train chemists to understand what the algorithms are doing, to recognise their limitations, to maintain a capacity for skeptical interpretation even when the software provides confident answers.
Perhaps what I’m advocating for is a kind of scientific humility that computational power can sometimes undermine. The recognition that data interpretation requires judgment, not just processing. That ambiguity isn’t a problem to be solved through more sophisticated algorithms – sometimes ambiguity is real, reflecting genuine complexity or uncertainty in the sample itself.
When I looked at a spectrum of DNA bases and saw absorption patterns that were somewhat ambiguous – that could be interpreted in multiple ways depending on your assumptions about hydrogen bonding and base stacking – that ambiguity told me something important. It told me the system was more complex than I’d initially thought. It prompted further investigation. The doubt led to discovery.
If modern computational methods eliminate that productive doubt – if they provide answers too quickly, too confidently, without requiring the chemist to sit with the uncertainty and reason through it – then we may be losing something essential about how science actually works. Not just in spectroscopy, but in any discipline where interpretation requires judgment alongside measurement.
So yes, I worry. I worry that we’re creating a generation of scientists who are very good at operating sophisticated instruments and processing enormous datasets but who may have lost the capacity to think deeply about what the data actually means. Who may have lost the patience to sit with ambiguity and let it teach them something. That worries me considerably.
Asha Moyo, 35, Education Researcher specialising in STEM access, Nairobi
Your undergraduate research programme at Siena Heights preceded contemporary undergraduate research initiatives by decades. But you were also working within constraints – limited funding, smaller cohorts, less institutional prestige. Do you think those constraints actually shaped something valuable in how you approached student education that might be lost now in well-funded, high-profile undergraduate research programmes? What did scarcity teach you about mentoring that abundance might obscure?
This is perhaps the most important question anyone has asked me, because it gets at what I consider my most lasting contribution – not the KBr disk technique, valuable as that proved to be, but the approach to education that emerged from working with students in circumstances that were far from ideal.
You’re quite right that we operated under considerable constraint at Siena Heights. Our budget for laboratory equipment was modest. We couldn’t afford the newest instrumentation. We had to write careful, detailed proposals for even small expenditures. When I established the cancer research laboratory in 1939, we built it piece by piece, acquiring equipment gradually, sometimes making do with instruments that more prestigious institutions would have discarded as outdated.
But here’s what that scarcity taught me: when you can’t simply purchase the latest apparatus or hire additional technicians to handle routine tasks, you must train your students to do everything themselves. They couldn’t be passive observers of research conducted by others. They had to be fully engaged participants, because there was no one else to do the work.
This meant students at Siena Heights learned skills that I suspect students at wealthier institutions might not have encountered until graduate school, if at all. They learned to maintain equipment, to troubleshoot when instruments malfunctioned, to improvise solutions when proper supplies weren’t available. They learned to be resourceful.
I remember one student – a bright young woman who’d come from a farming family with very little money – who needed to prepare a series of samples for spectroscopic analysis, but we’d run short of one of the reagents and ordering more would take weeks. She sat with the problem for an afternoon, consulting various chemistry handbooks, and eventually figured out that she could synthesise what she needed from other chemicals we had in stock. It took her two days of careful work, but she did it. And what she learned from that – not just the specific synthetic procedure, but the capacity to think through a problem creatively when the straightforward solution isn’t available – that was more valuable than anything I could have taught her through lectures.
At well-funded institutions, I imagine that if a reagent runs out, someone simply orders more and it arrives the next day. The research continues smoothly. That’s efficient, certainly. But the student doesn’t learn what my student learned about self-sufficiency and creative problem-solving.
Scarcity also meant we couldn’t pursue every interesting research direction that emerged. We had to choose carefully. This forced students to think critically about what questions were most important, most tractable, most likely to yield meaningful results given our limitations. They learned to prioritise, to distinguish between what was merely interesting and what was genuinely significant.
In abundantly funded programmes, there’s sometimes a tendency to pursue multiple lines of inquiry simultaneously, to try everything and see what works. That’s not wrong – it can be quite productive. But it doesn’t teach the discipline of focused inquiry in quite the same way. When resources are unlimited, or nearly so, you don’t learn to make difficult choices about what deserves your limited time and materials.
The smaller cohorts also mattered considerably. At Siena Heights, I typically worked with perhaps six to ten students at any given time in the research laboratory. This meant I knew each student intimately. I understood their strengths, their struggles, their particular ways of thinking. I could tailor the work to their individual capacities and interests. When a student was struggling with a concept or a technique, I could sit with her – and they were nearly all young women – and work through it together, patiently, until she understood.
In larger programmes, with dozens or hundreds of undergraduate researchers, I imagine the mentoring must necessarily be more diffuse. Graduate students or postdoctoral fellows supervise the undergraduates. The principal investigator oversees the whole enterprise but may not know each student personally. This can still be valuable education, but it’s a different kind of relationship. Less intimate, more organisational.
What the smaller scale permitted was genuine apprenticeship. The students weren’t just working on my research projects – they were learning to think like research scientists, and that required close, sustained interaction. They’d watch me reason through a problem. They’d see me fail, adjust my approach, try again. They’d observe the entire process of scientific thinking, not just the successful outcomes.
One thing scarcity absolutely forced was careful documentation. When you’ve spent three weeks preparing a set of samples and they represent a significant portion of your annual research budget, you document everything meticulously. Every step of the preparation, every measurement, every observation. Students learned to keep laboratory notebooks with extraordinary care, because those notebooks might be the only record of work that couldn’t easily be repeated.
In well-funded laboratories where experiments can be readily repeated, where materials are abundant, I wonder whether that same discipline of documentation is always maintained. If you can always run the experiment again next week, there’s less immediate pressure to record everything perfectly the first time.
But perhaps the most important thing scarcity taught us was humility. We knew we weren’t at the center of the scientific world. We knew that the major breakthroughs would likely come from Cambridge or Caltech or the big research universities. We weren’t competing with them directly. Our goal was more modest: to do careful, honest work that contributed something meaningful, even if small, to scientific understanding. And to train students who would carry forward that commitment to careful, honest inquiry wherever they went next.
This created a particular atmosphere in the laboratory. There wasn’t the pressure to produce dramatic results, to publish in the highest-profile journals, to compete for glory. We were simply trying to understand things clearly. To answer questions rigorously. To develop techniques that worked reliably. That freedom – the freedom that came from knowing we weren’t trying to win Nobel Prizes – allowed for a kind of intellectual honesty that I valued deeply.
Students educated in that environment learned that science isn’t primarily about fame or competition. It’s about truth-seeking. About understanding the natural world more fully. About contributing your small piece to a much larger enterprise. Those are values that I think can sometimes be overwhelmed in high-profile, high-pressure research programmes where the emphasis is on breakthrough discoveries and prestigious publications.
I’m not romanticising poverty or suggesting that limited resources are somehow preferable to adequate funding. They’re not. It would have been wonderful to have better equipment, more supplies, adequate space. The constraints were real and they limited what we could accomplish.
But I do think those constraints shaped an approach to education that emphasised student agency, resourcefulness, intimate mentoring, and intellectual humility. Those are qualities that might indeed be obscured in situations of abundance, where the emphasis shifts toward productivity, prestige, and competitive success.
If I were advising someone establishing an undergraduate research programme today – particularly in contexts where resources are limited, which describes most of the world’s institutions – I’d say: don’t try to imitate what the wealthy universities do. You can’t, and you’ll only frustrate yourself trying. Instead, embrace what your constraints allow you to do well. Teach students to be resourceful. Give them real responsibility. Know them individually. Let them struggle productively with problems. Document carefully. Value contribution over glory. Those are the conditions under which genuine education happens, and they don’t require enormous budgets. They require commitment, patience, and a conviction that every student deserves serious intellectual engagement, regardless of institutional prestige.
That’s what scarcity taught me, and I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for anything.
Reflection
Sister Miriam Michael Stimson died on 17th June 2002, just weeks after receiving the Siena Medal – her institution’s highest honour – at the age of eighty-nine. She passed away in the same Michigan community where she had spent her entire professional life, having never left Siena Heights University for the more prestigious institutions that might have amplified her voice within the scientific establishment. Her death was noted in local obituaries and religious publications, but it passed largely unrecorded in the major scientific journals whose pages had once carried her methodological innovations.
What emerges from this conversation – both the initial interview and the thoughtful questions from readers across continents – is a portrait far more complex than the tidy narratives of overlooked genius that sometimes characterise retrospective accounts of women in science. Sister Miriam Michael was neither a martyr to systemic injustice nor a serene figure untouched by the erasures that shaped her career. She was something more interesting: a rigorous scientist who understood precisely what was happening to her work and her reputation, who made deliberate choices about how to respond, and who remained uncertain, even at the end of her life, whether those choices represented wisdom or accommodation.
Her reflections reveal tensions that biographical accounts often smooth over. She acknowledged that her religious identity and her institutional location created genuine barriers to recognition, yet she also insisted that her Dominican vocation – the contemplative search for truth – provided intellectual and spiritual resources that sustained her work. She recognised that publishing in analytical chemistry journals rather than in Nature or Science likely cost her historical visibility, yet she maintained that those specialist publications allowed her to present findings with a precision and honesty that higher-profile venues might have distorted. She admitted frustration at being excluded from the DNA discovery narrative whilst simultaneously questioning whether she had adequately advocated for her own contributions.
These are not contradictions so much as they are the lived reality of navigating scientific institutions as a woman religious working far from elite centres of power. The historical record tends to present scientists as either triumphant heroes or tragic victims; Sister Miriam Michael’s account resists both categories. She did important work. She was systematically overlooked. She chose not to fight aggressively for recognition. She regretted aspects of that choice. She believed the work itself mattered more than fame. She wondered whether that belief was genuine conviction or internalised marginalisation. All of these things were simultaneously true.
What becomes clear across the conversation is that the KBr disk technique – her most enduring contribution – succeeded precisely because it embodied principles she valued: simplicity, reproducibility, transparency, truth-telling. The method worked not through computational sophistication or expensive instrumentation but through careful attention to fundamentals. It required the chemist to prepare samples thoughtfully, to understand why each step mattered, to cultivate an intimate relationship with data. These were not incidental features but expressions of a particular scientific philosophy: that understanding requires patience, that clarity demands care, that truth emerges through disciplined inquiry rather than through dramatic gestures.
Her responses to contemporary questions reveal someone deeply engaged with how science has changed in the decades since her active research years. She expressed genuine concern about what might be lost when computational analysis replaces contemplative interpretation, when abundance obscures the discipline that scarcity enforces, when methods become so routine that their underlying reasoning disappears. Yet she resisted simple nostalgia. She recognised that modern instrumentation and algorithms enable research she could never have imagined. Her worry was not that science has advanced but that certain forms of scientific thinking – particularly the capacity to sit with ambiguity, to question confident answers, to reason from first principles – might be eroding in the process.
The afterlife of her work presents its own paradox. The KBr disk technique remains standard practice in infrared spectroscopy laboratories worldwide, appearing in contemporary analytical chemistry textbooks, pharmaceutical quality control protocols, materials science research, and forensic analysis. Thousands of scientists use the method daily, yet most have no idea who developed it or why. The technique has been cited in tens of thousands of scientific papers over seven decades, but Sister Miriam Michael’s name rarely appears in those citations – the method is simply “the KBr disk method,” a technique that seems to have always existed.
This invisibility-through-ubiquity represents a particular form of scientific immortality, though not the kind that brings fame or shapes canonical histories. Her contribution persists as infrastructure rather than as discovery, as method rather than as theory. It enables other people’s research without drawing attention to itself. In this sense, the fate of her technique mirrors the fate of much of women’s scientific work in the twentieth century: essential, uncredited, foundational yet invisible.
The modest recovery of her story has come primarily through religious and regional channels. Jun Tsuji’s 2011 biography The Soul of DNA brought her contributions to a wider audience, though the book itself remains somewhat obscure outside Catholic academic circles. Scholarly work on “sister scientists” – women religious who pursued careers in STEM fields – has begun documenting the distinctive challenges and contributions of this population. Siena Heights University maintains institutional memory of her work, and former students have occasionally published remembrances. But she has not experienced the kind of dramatic rehabilitation that Rosalind Franklin has undergone, nor does she feature in popular histories of molecular biology or DNA research.
This raises uncomfortable questions about whose erasures get corrected and why. Franklin’s recovery was enabled by several factors: her work occurred at a prestigious institution; her X-ray crystallography images were visually striking and could become iconic; her story fit a compelling narrative about scientific appropriation and gender injustice; and crucially, she had advocates – scientists, historians, and writers – who insisted on telling her story repeatedly until it entered mainstream consciousness. Sister Miriam Michael had few of these advantages. Her institutional location was marginal, her contributions were methodological rather than theoretical, her erasure was through neglect rather than appropriation, and she lacked sustained advocacy from those with access to mainstream platforms.
Yet her story offers something Franklin’s cannot quite provide: an example of scientific contribution that persisted despite – perhaps even because of – remaining outside elite networks. She established a research programme and mentored students at a small Catholic women’s college, demonstrating that rigorous science need not require prestigious institutional affiliation. She developed a technique that proved more enduring than many discoveries from wealthier, more famous laboratories. She lived a life that integrated scientific inquiry with religious contemplation, challenging the narrative that these commitments must conflict. And she did all of this whilst navigating not just gender discrimination but also religious prejudice and institutional marginalisation – a compound exclusion that few histories of women in science adequately address.
For young women entering STEM fields today, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds or working at under-resourced institutions, Sister Miriam Michael’s story offers both encouragement and caution. The encouragement: rigorous work persists. Methodological innovation matters. Contribution outlasts fame. Education and mentorship create lasting impact. You need not be at Cambridge or Caltech to do work that changes how science is practised. The caution: do not expect justice. Recognition is distributed inequitably, shaped by factors far beyond the quality of your work. You will likely need to choose between fighting for credit and focusing on contribution, and neither choice is wholly satisfactory.
Her advice to contemporary scientists was characteristically measured: do careful work, share knowledge generously, mentor thoughtfully, maintain intellectual humility, and recognise that the work itself – the honest pursuit of truth – matters whether or not history records your name. But she also acknowledged uncertainty about whether this advice represents wisdom or rationalisation, whether it offers a path forward or simply makes accommodation to injustice more palatable.
What remains unresolved – what Sister Miriam Michael herself could not fully resolve – is whether her relative invisibility represents a failure of the scientific community to recognise valuable work or whether it reflects her own choices about what kind of scientific life she wanted to lead. The answer is almost certainly both, which makes the moral of her story less clear than we might wish. She was genuinely overlooked. She also chose not to demand attention. Scientific institutions devalued methodological work by women at small colleges. She also prioritised contribution over credit in ways that facilitated that devaluation. Both things are true, and holding them in tension reveals something important about how scientific recognition actually operates.
The KBr disks sit on laboratory benches in São Paulo, Tokyo, Boston, Nairobi, and a thousand other locations, compressed pellets of potassium bromide and sample material, transparent to infrared light, ready to reveal molecular structure. Each disk prepared today follows the protocol Sister Miriam Michael worked out in the early 1950s, solving a problem that had frustrated analytical chemists for years. Each spectrum obtained through that method carries forward her insight: that truth about molecular structure emerges through careful preparation, thoughtful interpretation, and disciplined inquiry.
The technique persists. The woman who developed it remains largely unknown. This is the paradox at the heart of her legacy, and perhaps of many women’s scientific legacies: the work endures whilst the worker fades from memory. Whether that represents an acceptable form of immortality or an ongoing injustice demanding correction remains an open question – one that each generation of scientists, historians, and advocates must answer for themselves.
What we can say with certainty is this: Sister Miriam Michael Stimson saw DNA correctly when others saw it inside out. She developed a method that enabled precise observation when previous methods obscured truth. She taught students to think rigorously when institutions assumed women couldn’t. She pursued science as a form of truth-seeking when prevailing narratives suggested faith and inquiry were incompatible. And she did all of this quietly, persistently, without fanfare or expectation of fame, trusting that careful work would matter even if her name was forgotten.
Perhaps that trust was warranted. The work continues. The method endures. And now, through conversations like this one, the story begins – however belatedly – to be told. Not as triumphant vindication, not as tragic martyrdom, but as something closer to what it actually was: a life of rigorous inquiry, thoughtful mentorship, and disciplined contribution, lived fully despite being rendered largely invisible by the histories that followed.
The KBr disks remember, even if we forgot. And now, perhaps, we can begin to remember too.
Who have we missed?
This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.
Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.
Editorial Note
This interview transcript is a fictional dramatisation based on historical sources, biographical research, and documented information about Sister Miriam Michael Stimson‘s life, scientific work, and contributions to analytical chemistry. It is not a record of an actual conversation.
The factual elements – Sister Miriam Michael Stimson’s biographical details, her development of the potassium bromide disk technique in the early 1950s, her role in validating DNA structure understanding, her work at Siena Heights University, her lectures at the Sorbonne and Notre Dame, her establishment of an undergraduate research programme, and the recognition she received late in life – are grounded in available historical documentation, scholarly accounts, and records maintained by Siena Heights University and religious communities.
However, the voice, personality, specific anecdotes, and detailed reasoning attributed to Sister Miriam Michael Stimson in this interview are imaginative constructions. They represent a plausible interpretation of how someone with her background, education, and documented perspectives might have reflected on her life and work, but they are not her actual words or confirmed personal recollections. The conversation explores themes that emerge from historical records – her experience of gender and religious discrimination, the methodological focus of her work, the institutional marginalisation she faced, and her apparent prioritisation of contribution over credit – but it does dramatise and interpret these themes through invented dialogue.
The supplementary questions attributed to Keiko Tanaka, Janis Ozols, Laura Benítez, Asha Moyo, and Ryan Cooper, along with Sister Miriam Michael’s responses to them, are entirely fictional. These exchanges are created to explore themes relevant to contemporary conversations about women in STEM, the history of scientific methodology, institutional prestige and recognition, and the relationship between scientific work and institutional support.
This dramatised format allows for exploration of ideas, tensions, and perspectives in a more vivid and accessible manner than a purely factual account might permit. However, readers should understand that they are engaging with imaginative interpretation rather than documented fact. For accurate biographical information about Sister Miriam Michael Stimson, readers are directed to Jun Tsuji’s biography The Soul of DNA (2011) and to scholarly work on women religious in science by researchers such as Dr. Peggy Delmas.
The purpose of this reconstruction is to honour a significant but overlooked scientific contribution whilst raising important questions about recognition, gender, institutional power, and the nature of scientific work itself. It is offered in the spirit of historical imagination in service of greater understanding, not as a substitute for rigorous historical documentation.
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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