Revisiting the Pathologist in the Basement

May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month and it’s also the birth month of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the pathologist who first identified the disease in 1938.

We’re revisiting our 2021 inaugural Lost Women of Science season in her honor. A few important things have happened since we first aired The Pathologist in the Basement, and it’s safe to say that Dr. Anderson is now a little less lost. In late November 2021, Dr. Scott Baird, a pediatric critical care doctor at Columbia University, Dr. Anderson's own institution, published an exhaustive biography of her.

And in November 2023, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation changed the name of its highest scientific honor to the “Dorothy Andersen and Paul di Sant’Agnese Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award.” This accolade was originally named in honor of just Dr. di Sant’Agnese, one of Dr. Andersen’s mentees. (You can learn more about their work together in Episode 2.) Dr. Andersen now receives equal billing, and we’d like to think we had something to do with that.

Resources

The Matilda Effect

Dr. Dorothy Andersen’s role in groundbreaking cystic fibrosis research fails to get the recognition it deserves. Our associate producer, Sophie McNulty, rummages through boxes in a Connecticut basement, looking for clues to Dorothy Andersen’s life story. Pediatric critical care physician Dr. John Scott Baird, who published a biography of Dorothy Andersen in 2021, suggests we take a second look at the conventional wisdom surrounding the evolution of cystic fibrosis research in the 1950s. And in this updated episode, we interview science historian Margaret Rossiter, who coined the term “Matilda Effect” to describe how credit for work done by female scientists too often goes to their male colleagues, and examine how this affected Dorothy Andersen and her groundbreaking research into cystic fibrosis.

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The Question Mark

We go back to the 1930s, when Dr. Andersen was confronted with a slew of confounding infant deaths. The physicians caring for these babies routinely diagnosed celiac disease, but Dr. Andersen suspected something else was at play. Her medical sleuthing ultimately revealed that the children were suffering from cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects the lungs, the pancreas, and a host of other organs. So, who was Dorothy Andersen, and how did she come to make this seminal medical contribution?

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