I have complicated feelings about "why didn't I know this marginalized person invented this famous amazing technology" and it's going to get me cancelled but, friends, bear with my complaining tone and either leave me alone because I am an old lady shaking my fist at clouds on my own lawn, or just take some food for thought.
Largely, we need to kill the idea that anyone "invents" anything.
The researchers who get their names put on things are almost invariably professors who write grants and, at a great distance, """manage""" the actual labwork and intellectual contributions of an army of graduate student researchers who are more often than not a) working together and b) doing work on a project that was started by former grad students and postdocs from the same group who didn't "finish" the work but made critical headway.
Every PhD dissertation - every new development in science - every new invention - is something that has been gestating for ~ 10 years at minimum, with the hands of at least two if not three researchers deep in it. Professors don't contribute as much as you'd think, given that their names always end up on the contributions.
Many do - many truly advise, and are regularly involved in the daily, regular intellectual direction of their mentees. But many are not. And yet many of those very distant and uninvolved advisors and supervisors are still people who "invented" things, whose names are on things.
The work of the nobel prize winners is almost always done by their grad students. The work of those who develop life saving pharmaceuticals is the work of large teams. The work that is going to revolutionize energy or the environment is done by multinational collaborations funded by multiple governments and conducted by hundreds of researchers all working together.
One person's name ends up on it. One person's legacy. But it is Not. One. Person.
And chances are people do know who they are. Many people! Tons of people!!! You drop that name with someone even tangentially related to the field and they will perk up and go "omg, their lab's work is soooo famous, omg."
But do you know the name of random professors at UCLA or UC San Diego or Columbia University in Molecular Biology or Chemical Engineering or Materials Science? Do you know who works in R&D at ABC Pharmaceutical Company or who's working on solar sails at JPL? Do you know the name of (any of the many) catalysts that revolutionized polymerization, which enabled all of our modern plastics (which, get a bad rap, but modern life would literally not be possible without plastics)?
Why should you??? Why is it a moral failing that you don't? Why would you be taught the names of these people, and when? How is that a structural failure of our society?
I ask, again. Why would any of you know these things?
You should question your assumption that the reason you don't know their names is because those people are not celebrated or given their due in their field.
Because, yes it's absolutely a truth that structurally marginalized community members remain marginalized in their professional fields, in STEM. They have to work extremely hard, often harder than their colleagues, publish more, take more graduate students, take more committee positions, take more teaching positions, win more awards, etc., just to get tenure. They're held to different standards. They are bullied and discriminated against. But they are not alone. They have their research groups. They build mentorship networks. They ask questions of the status quo and introduce developments by introducing diversity of thought and experience in an often homogenous and incestuous academic navel gazing community - questions that rock boats, challenge assumptions, or are dismissed outright, sometimes for years after their careers are over. They experience pressures that end their careers early.
This has to be recognized. And recognizing their contributions is incredibly important and should be accompanied by appropriate compensation that they are often denied. (And they are often acknowledged without the compensation or reward, as if acknowledgment and fame is all that matters.)
But that is changing. It's changing fast. It has improved a LOT. You read obituaries all the time published in the biggest academic journals singing the praises of the people you, my dear outsider blissfully living your life, will never know! Your life has been shaped by researchers so much more than in that One Big Invention. Because that is almost always not actually one singular invention, it's actually probably the summation of about 100 different fields coming together over the course of 15-30 years. The person you, lay person, might attribute The Name To That "Discovery" probably spent their whoooole career working on that and other similar, related topics, that you do not care about but that are just as important and just as vital to the development of that one thing whose buzzwords you understand.
But.
There is no lone genius slaving away in lab, or one lone person sitting at a desk having a eureka moment. It is the community they foster, the collaborations they form, and the work that their teams do. They come to their conclusions at meetings with their teams discussing their results together. And those people remain invisible.
And anyone who's a "lone genius" ... there is usually a reason they are alone.
Even people from marginalized groups who end up heading research programs and stamping their name on things. Can (often) be awful people. Sometimes I hear praise given to people I know who are famous for "their" inventions and contributions to science and I have to hold my tongue because everyone in the field knows how abusive and toxic they are, but we can't say that.
Something related happened very recently which is why I had a rant bubbling.
Now, being so negative and ranting and raining on people's parades aside.
The solution is for lay people to have their special interest narrow subfield like, canine copper hepatopathy, or artificial photosynthesis, or tuberculosis antibiotics, and read the jargon-free public-facing research announcements that come out of university and national laboratory public-relations offices, rather than waiting for some tumblrite to be scrolling through a list of minorities and choosing one person to attribute A Discovery to, or for the Nobel committee to announce in the news that it decided what singular person to gift an award to for work 40 years' worth of grad students did.
You're not going to know who is abusive, who is an asshole, who is just putting their name on the publications of their underlings vs who is in the lab working shoulder to shoulder with the people they manage and genuinely uplifting the people around them and opening doors for the people who come after them. You're not. They don't put that in obituaries and they don't say that stuff out loud even in their own departments, often.
But what you can do, is when you do see those Singular Names... google "[name] research group" and look how many scientists they raised and nurtured, and see what they're doing. I guarantee they need the attention, interest, and someone who will see the merit in their research and choose to call their nation's particular representative government to suggest more funding be put in that area of science for a new generation.
