In memory of Eleanor—a woman ____
[1] Eleanor Lowenthal - my grandmother - om desperate need of income to put her husband through graduate school, walked into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There, she convinced the scientists that she was the perfect person to mount（安放）and catalog their growing ant collection.
[2] At the time, a promising graduate student named E. O. Wilson was coming up in the department. Wilson, who passed away in December 2021, was called the "father of biodiversity". When Eleanor joined the department, researchers were racing to collect and catalog specimens（标本） . As Wilson shifted research towards smaller, less glamorous species that nonetheless held ecological significance, he set the stage for conservation biology. Behind the scenes, technicians like my grandmother preserved the specimen that furthered Wilson's work and continue to provide new insights and opportunities for researchers across the globe.
[3] At the time, hiring a 21-year-old woman who had dropped out of art school was a significant gamble. It paid off. Eleanor's job as a technician required the same manual flexibility and coordination that art school had demanded. The job required her to work quickly, yet precisely. Rushing could risk ruining a rare specimen, but Eleanor could process ants as quickly as Wilson could mail them back from his expeditions to Australia and Papua New Guinea. She sometimes mounted as many as 200 a day.
[4] It wasn't a coincidence that Eleanor found work in entomology. Wilson's high-profile research on ants cracked an opening for women in previously male-dominated field of conservation, which was centered around studying big game in the first half of the 20th century.
[5] Even when women's early work has been credited, the language used to describe their contributions often minimized their role in the team, not mentioning them by name. A recently discovered department report includes lines such as, "A large amount of spreading and setting insects was done by the lady assistant," and "The collection has been remarkably free from pests ... due to the continuous care of the lady assistant."
[6] The department now functions like a library (specimen can be borrowed for study or examined on site), and serves as a training center for the next generation of scientists who use the collection in ways Wilson and my grandmother probably never imagined.
[7] Eleanor didn't realize the impact of her contribution at the time - the technician role was just a job that paid $38 a week. But she's come to appreciate the significance of her work on a project that spans centuries. "You can see how it goes from one era to another," says Eleanor, "It's so important to have this library for people to make connections and new discoveries."
