Nettie Stevens

Nettie Maria Stevens was born on July 7, 1861, in Cavendish, Vermont, to Julia (née Adams) and Ephraim Stevens. In 1863, after the death of her mother, her father remarried and the family moved to Westford, Massachusetts. Her father worked as a carpenter and earned enough money to provide Nettie and her sister, Emma, with a strong education through high school. ==Education==

During her education, Stevens was near the top of her class. She and her sister Emma were two of the three women to graduate from Westford Academy between 1872 and 1880. After graduating in 1880, Stevens moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire to teach high school zoology, physiology, mathematics, English, and Latin. After three years, she returned to Vermont to continue her studies. Stevens continued her education at Westfield Normal School (now Westfield State University). She completed the four-year course in two years and graduated with the highest scores in her class. won Stevens an award of $1,000 which highlighted her increasingly promising focus of sex-determination studies and chromosomal inheritance. During that fellowship year, Stevens again conducted research at the Naples Zoological Station and the University of Würzburg, in addition to visiting laboratories throughout Europe. == Career ==

Stevens was one of the first American women to be recognized for her contribution to science. Most of her research was completed at Bryn Mawr College. The highest rank she attained was Associate in Experimental Morphology (1905–1912). Edmund Wilson worked on spermatogenesis preparations simultaneously with Stevens's studies. He performed cytological examination only on the testes, that is he did not examine the female germ cells (eggs) but only the male germ cells (sperm) in his studies. His paper stated that eggs were too fatty for his staining procedures. After reading the papers describing Stevens's discoveries, Wilson reissued his original paper and in a footnote acknowledged Stevens for the finding of sex chromosomes. ==Sex determination==

Although Stevens and Wilson both worked on chromosomal sex determination, many authors have credited Wilson alone for the discovery. In that article, Morgan said she had "a share in a discovery of importance." He described sex linkage of the white gene in the chapter immediately before the one in which he described Stevens's results without mentioning her name, implying that his own laboratory's sex linkage analysis was the basis on which one should understand sex determination. In an earlier letter of recommendation he wrote, "Of the graduate students that I have had during the last twelve years I have had no-one that was as capable and independent in research as Miss Stevens." ==Death==

At 50 years old, and only 9 years after completing her Ph.D., Stevens died of breast cancer on May 4, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her career span was short, but she published approximately 40 papers. She was buried in the Westford, Massachusetts cemetery alongside the graves of her father, Ephraim, and her sister, Emma. == Quotes ==

In 1994, Stevens was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. To celebrate her 155th birthday, on July 7, 2016, Google created a doodle showing Stevens peering through a microscope at XY chromosomes. On May 5, 2017, Westfield State University honored Stevens through the naming ceremony of the Dr. Nettie Maria Stevens Science and Innovation Center. The center is where the university's STEM-related degree programs in Nursing and Allied Health, Chemical and Physical Sciences, Biology, Environmental Science and the then soon-to-be launched master's degree program in Physician Assistant Studies are all based. ==See also==