You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Maddie Sifaya 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 scientist behavior in a mequan. Absolutely. It's weird because I

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 Francis Crick and James Watson who are credited with discerning the structure of DNA.

You have Carl Linnaeus 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 Linnaeus classified organisms but he also classified

people by skin color in really racist ways. And Watson and 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 not really valuable as a human being.

Esther did become a scientist she makes antibodies now and wrote to us with this really powerful

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