Women Whose Inventions Changed Life

Rachel Zimmerman — Blissymbol Printer （1984）

At the age of 12, Zimmerman invented the Blissymbol Printer, which helps people with physical disabilities communicate via symbols that get translated into written language. What began as a project for a school science fair ended up competing at the World Exhibition of Achievement of Young Inventors. Zimmerman now works at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she develops innovations combining space technology and assistive intelligence.

Olga De Gonzalez-Sanabria ——Long Cycle-Life Nickel-Hydrogen Batteries （1987）

Director of the Systems Management Office and the highest-ranking Hispanic at NASA Glenn Research Center, Gonzalez-Sanabria played a critical role in the development of the "Long Cycle-Life Nickel-Hydrogen Batteries" which helped enable the International Space Station power system. She has since won the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.

Ann Tsukamoto — Stem Cell Isolation （1991）

Tsukamoto and her colleagues were the first scientists to identify and isolate （分离） blood-forming stem cells. Patented in 1991 --- the first of 12 patents related to her research --- Tsukamoto has furthered her research and thanks to her, bone marrow transplants （骨髓移植）have saved the lives of thousands of people battling blood cancer

Donna Strickland — Chirped Pulse Amplification （2018）

The third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, Strickland, along with Dr Gerard Mourou of France, has significantly advanced the science of lasers （激光）.They developed a technology for creating short, powerful laser pulses. The technique, called Chirped Pulse Amplification, has been used in corrective eye surgeries.

I accidentally heard a father and daughter in their last moments together at an airport. They had announced her plane's departure Standing near the door, he said to his daughter, "I love you. I wish you enough." She said," Daddy, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Daddy." They kissed good-bye and she left.

He walked over toward the window where I was seated. Standing there, I could see he wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude （干涉）on his privacy, but he welcomed me in by asking, ''Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?" "Yes, I have," I replied.

Saying that brought back memories of expressing my love and appreciation for all my dad had done for me. Recognizing that his days were limited, I took the time to tell him face to face how much he meant to me. So I knew what this man was experiencing. ''Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever good-bye?" I asked.

''I am old and she lives much too far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is, her next trip back will be for my funeral," he said.

"When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, 'I wish you enough.' May I ask what that means?”

He began to smile. "That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone." He paused for a moment and looked up as if he were trying to remember it in detail. He smiled even more. "When we said 'I wish you enough,' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with enough good things," he continued and then turned toward me. He then shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory:

"I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright. I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more. I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive…I wish you enough 'Hellos' to get you through the final 'Good-bye…

He then began to sob and walked away.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone (无人机) into a remote-controlled pollinator (授粉媒介) by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.

Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn't just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.

Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven't figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn’t dried up or degraded at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.

The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen (花粉). He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then controlled the drones over lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.

The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the gel.

Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There’s a lot of work to be done before that's a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.

Come to think of it, the balance between life and work is a strange ambition for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stillness: if our lives were ever in balance — parents happy, kids taken care of, work working - then our primary thought would be to shout "Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.

Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life — just as family is, as are friends and community. All of these aspects of living have their share of uplifting moments and moments that drag us down. The same is true of work. Treat work the same way you do life: by maximizing what you love.

We have interviewed several anesthesiologists (麻醉师) about the thrills they feel in their jobs. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation aiming to calm the panic that affects many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the anesthetic mechanism and has devoted himself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does.

Think of your life's many different activities as threads. Some are black and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you're doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you've done them, you feel energetic. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.

The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love write down exactly what you were doing in the column "Love”. And any time you find yourself feeling the opposite write down what you were doing in the column “Dislike”. By the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your "Love" column, which create in you a positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up.

Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally unbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best.