Isabella Karle is a renowned chemist and physicist who has worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In her research, she applied electron and X-ray diffraction to molecular structure problems in chemistry and biology. Along with her husband Jerome Karle, she developed procedures for gathering information about the structure of molecules from diffraction data. For her work, she has received numerous awards such as the Annual Achievement Award of the Society of Women Engineers in 1968, the Federal Woman's Award in 1973, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Science and Engineering in 1986. Her work has been described in the book Women and Success.

Among her many research interests, Karle studied the effect of radiation on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the carrier of genetic information. She demonstrated how the structural formulas of the configurations of amino acids and nucleic acids in DNA may be changed when exposed...