The indomitable Toshiko Mayeda
Matthew Shindell traces one female scientist’s story from an internment camp to studying the chemistry of the solar system
In 1946, a young Japanese-American woman named Toshiko Mayeda moved from Northern California to Chicago, Illinois. Having spent four years of the war imprisoned by her own government, she was ready for a fresh start. Mayeda was bright and determined, and had continued her studies as far as she could in the camp. In her new home in Chicago, a love of science drew her to chemistry, which she studied first at Wilbur Wright College before moving on to the University of Chicago. With only an undergraduate degree in chemistry, Mayeda nonetheless would go on to make a profound and lasting contribution to our chemical understanding of the Earth and the solar system.
Mayeda worked for Nobel prize-winning chemist Harold Urey, mastering the mass spectrometry methods the small team had developed. Together, they developed an ‘oxygen thermometer’ that meant they could reconstruct past climate history from marine fossils. She later worked with cosmochemist Robert Clayton on oxygen isotope ratios in meteorites and moon rocks.