The best students, including women, were encouraged to do traineeships at Western European universities. Maria Manasseina spent her period abroad in Vienna, at the polytechnic. Here she studied the processes of alcoholic fermentation and her results confirmed the “chemical” hypothesis of fermentation, proposed by Claude Bernard and Justus Liebig, rather than Louis Pasteur’s “physiological” hypothesis. It took about 25 years to replicate her results, confirmed by Eduard Buchner and, although he was aware of Manasseina’s work, he did not even mention her in his publications. Manasseina tried in vain to defend the authorship of the discovery, but was completely ignored. Buchner received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907 for this discovery, but Manasseina’s name was completely forgotten.
The only luck was that Manasseina had died in 1903, sparing herself further humiliation.