Mary Shelley

As long as we are talking about great women in science, I just want to give big ups to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  To say she was precocious is an understatement.  At age 19, she wrote a dark and thrilling novel that questioned the blind optimism of the Enlightenment, and forsaw what fearful implications the new “natural philosphy”  would come to have.  We still look to Frankenstein to frame our debates about genetic experimentation, nuclear energy, and pretty much everything related to scary, cutting edge science.