You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Maddie Sifai here with Shortwave reporter Emily Kwong. Hey Kwong.

Hey Maddie. So a couple of months ago we got an email from scientist Esther Atacunle in London,

who from the time she was a kid was fascinated by snails. So I tended to just try and find them in

my playground in school and just observe them, observe how they moved. I was super fascinated

like the slime that they left behind when they were moving. So that was kind of... I mean,

observing small and slimy things sounds like classic scientists behavior in a mequan.

Absolutely. It's weird because I... So I felt like I belonged in science pretty early on actually as a kid.

But when I realized the lack of diverse representation in science as I was progressing in education,

I actually became less confident that I belonged in science.

In part because science has been dominated by white men and as a black woman,

Esther saw few people who looked like her in her textbooks. You have Frances Crick and James Watson.

Who are credited with discerning the structure of DNA. You have Carl Leneas, the father of

modern taxonomy, and this is how science is traditionally taught, right? You could call this the

great men of science approach to education. Yeah. I mean, you kind of just memorized what these

scientists did, but not so much who they were or what they believed. Exactly. And in college,

she started digging into the personal histories of these scientists and was really disturbed by what

she found. Carl Leneas classified organisms, but he also classified people by skin color in really

racist ways. Yeah. And what's it in Crick? They've espoused racist and eugenicist views.

And reading all of this, it was such a betrayal to her. Your heart just drops completely.

And it's just that realization that someone that you looked up to for their brilliance would have

thought that you were essentially, you know, not not really valuable as a human being.

...