It's May, and that means Mother's Day is just around the corner. So it's time, once again, to talk about the "mothers" of scientific fields. The "founding mother" or "founding father" of a field is generally considered to have made the first significant contributions to and/or delineation of that field.

In researching last year's post about the mothers of science, I found that out of the dozens or hundreds of acclaimed "founding" scientists, only a handful were women. There are a number of reasons for this: women were historically discouraged from getting or not allowed to get an education (much less a higher education), they were considered the "weaker-minded" sex, and science in particular was considered to be a man's field. Nonetheless, the women included in this post are by no means the only women to make significant contributions to science. (For more on women in science, check out the great posts my colleagues write over at The Female Scientist.)

Jeanne Villepreux-Power, the Mother of Aquaria

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was a French marine biologist best known for creating the first aquarium. In fact, she made three: a glass aquarium for her study, a submersible glass one in a cage, and a cage for larger mollusks that would anchor at sea.

Villepreux-Power, you see, was a malacologist—a scientist who studies mollusks. She needed a container that would let her watch live young Argonauta argo octopuses (a species known as the "paper nautilus") grow into adults to see if they developed their own shells. Some scientists thought that this species must steal its shells from other animals, but Villepreux-Power showed that the paper nautilus actually secretes its own shell material, allowing the creature to add onto its shell as it grows and to repair the shell if it breaks. (Imagine being the first scientist to witness this! The sheer incredulity of the discovery!)

But Villepreux-Power didn't stop there. She also documented tool use in Octopus vulgaris, describing how these animals used stones to wedge open shells.

And then, because groundbreaking scientific discoveries weren't enough, she laid the foundations of aquaculture in Sicily, suggesting that the rivers might be re-populated with fish by feeding young caged fish until they were a suitable size for re-introduction to other, depopulated rivers.

So, y'know. Invented the aquarium, made amazing discoveries about octopuses, started aquaculture in Sicily. No big deal. (Kind of a big deal.)

Jane Cooke Wright, the Mother of Chemotherapy

Jane Cooke Wright was an American cancer researcher and surgeon known for her contributions to chemotherapy. In the 1960s, she became the highest-ranked African-American woman at a major medical institution, the New York Medical College, and in the 1970s she was the first woman to be elected president of the New York Cancer Society.

Wright's early work brought chemotherapy out of the realm of a new, untested experimental treatment and into the realm of tested, proven effective cancer therapeutics when Wright and her team successfully caused a form of skin cancer to regress using chemotherapy rather than radiation therapy. She later pioneered work in chemotherapeutics, focusing on sequential and dosage variations to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy and minimize side effects. In addition, she was one of the first scientists to test anti-cancer drugs on humans rather than solely on mice, discovering the use of the drug methotrexate on solid tumors, and she invented a method of delivering chemotherapy agents directly to an internal cancer site.

During her 40-year career, Wright published over 100 scientific papers on cancer chemotherapy, contributed to nine books, and led delegations of cancer researchers to Africa, China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.

Wright's only flaw is that she's TOO amazing.

Margaret Oakley Dayhoff, the Mother of Bioinformatics

Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff's 1965 book, the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, is considered to be the founding text for bioinformatics. In it, she reported all 65 known protein sequences, organized by gene families. This ultimately led to the creation in 1971 of the Protein Information Resource database of protein sequences, the first publicly available database system.

She also pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to biochemistry, most notably developing the one-letter code used for amino acids in an effort to reduce the size of the data files needed to describe the sequence of amino acids in a protein.

She was the first woman to hold office in the Biophysical Society and the first person to serve as both secretary and president of the Society. She was well aware of the many challenges facing women in science, and she worked hard to encourage and mentor women in scientific careers. The Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award was established in her memory to encourage young women to enter careers in scientific research. And with role models like Dayhoff to look up to, who wouldn't want to become a scientist?

Hilde Mangold, the Mother of Embryology

Hilde Mangold (also pictured at the top of this post) was a German embryologist known for her 1923 dissertation "Induction of Embryonic Primordia by Implantation of Organizers from a Different Species." This being the early 1900s, she couldn't publish a paper by herself, so she published it jointly with her mentor, Hans Spemann. Her research is widely acknowledged to be the foundation for his 1935 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the embryonic organizer.

(Sadly, Mangold herself died just a year after finishing her research and never knew the impact her discoveries had on medicine.)

The general effect Mangold demonstrated is known as embryonic induction: the capacity of some cells to direct the developmental trajectory of other cells. She showed that tissue from the dorsal lip of the blastopore grafted into a host embryo can induce the formation of an extra body axis, creating conjoined twins.

Here's the cool part: by using two species of newt with different skin colors for host and donor, she showed that the amphibian organizer did not form the extra axis by itself, but recruited, or induced, host tissue to form the twin. This was the basis of the discovery of what we now call the "organizer," which is responsible for gastrulation.

Mangold's paper has been called one of "the most significant events in experimental embryology" and "one of the most major landmarks in the history of developmental biology." Induction remains a fundamental concept and area of ongoing research in the field. We'll never know if Mangold herself would have won that Nobel if she'd lived to be there, but the field of embryology certainly would not be what it is today without her leading the way.