Posts Tagged ‘Women in Science’

Ruth L. Kirschstein

Posted by amanda on Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Ruth Kirschstein

Most graduate students and postdocs in the biomedical sciences associate the name “Ruth L. Kirchstein” with a group of highly sought after awards offered by the NIH, the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA), responsible for 119 individual fellowships and 115 institutional training grants in Maryland out of over 15,000 nationwide.

Congress named the NRSA after Dr. Ruth Kirschstein in 2002. A resident of Bethesda for over 45 years, Dr. Kirschstein was the first woman director of an NIH institute, National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Before that, she made major contributions in the safe development of the polio vaccine. Among many of her accomplishments in her long career with the NIH, she organized funding for and mobilized a team of NIH scientists to research the emerging AIDS epidemic and to search for treatments.

Kirschstein was an advocate of predoctoral research training and for promoting diversity in the scientific community. Entering medical school in 1947, she faced discrimination for being a woman in a primarily male field and even reported receiving a rejection letter from one medical school stating, “We only take men.” While at the NIH, she made it a priority to recruit women scientists in an equal proportion to men, recommending them for peer review panels, and supporting their membership in the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Kirschstein died in October of 2009, but her name will still usher some promising young scientists onto the path of a research career.

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Carol Greider

Posted by amanda on Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Carol Greider

Recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Carol Greider is the first woman at a Maryland institution to win the award. Along with the work of co-winners Elizabeth Blackburn (her graduate advisor at U.C. Berkeley) and Jack Szostak, Greider’s research at Johns Hopkins has contributed immensely to the understanding of telomeres and their shortening.

Telomeres are sequences of repetitive DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect the chromosome from unintentional annealing and degradation. In each replication of a chromosome, telomeres shorten due to the way they are added on to chromosome ends by the enzyme telomerase, which was discovered by Greider and Blackburn in 1985. Intriguingly, most of what we know about telomeres comes from the study of a protozoan with 40,000 chromosomes per cell (compared to our 46), Tetrahymena. More on Greider’s research can be read at her lab’s website.

In a talk she gave last week at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Greider made a list of what you need to become a successful scientist:

  • Show up.
  • Pay close attention.
  • Work on something you love.
  • Read, read, read…
  • Read critically.
  • Don’t believe everything you read.
  • Make bold hypotheses.
  • Don’t believe the status quo.
  • Critically test your hypotheses.
  • Disprove your own models.
  • Be nice to people.
  • Stand up for yourself.
  • Ignore (perceived) obstacles.
  • Rely on friends and family.
  • Talk to people about your ideas.
  • Have fun (most of the time).

    • Although her talk was mainly on her research with telomeres, this list is the part that I really took to heart. It can now be found above my lab bench.

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    Posted in Global Research | 2 Comments »

    Florence Sabin

    Posted by amanda on Monday, March 8th, 2010

    Today is International Women’s Day, where women are celebrated globally for their economic, social, political, and scientific achievements. This post is in continuation of my own celebration of National Women’s History Month.
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    Florence Sabin

    Florence Rena Sabin’s life was full of firsts. In 1896, after saving up money for 3 years as a schoolteacher, Florence Rena Sabin enrolled in Johns Hopkins Medical School. From a mining town in Colorado, Sabin was the first woman to graduate with an M.D. from Johns Hopkins. After graduation, she joined the Department of Anatomy with the support of a fellowship from the Baltimore Association for the Promotion of University Education of Women. She was the first woman faculty member at Johns Hopkins, the first woman to hold the rank of full professor, the first woman president of the American Association of Anatomists, the first woman elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to be appointed a full member at the Rockefeller Institute. In her obituary in the British Medical Journal, she was referred to as “the greatest living woman scientist and one of the foremost scientists of all time”.

    Her research contributed more than a hundred papers to the literature on the lymphatic system, tuberculosis, blood vessels, cells, and connective tissue. Contrary to popular belief at the time, Sabin demonstrated that the lymphatic system structure was formed from an embryo’s veins rather than from other tissues. Among her other research, she perfected a cell staining technique use to visualize live cells. As a scientist at the Rockefeller Institute, she made major contributions to the understanding of the human immune response to tuberculosis.

    Upon accepting the Pictorial Review achievement award in 1929, Sabin said:

    I hope my studies may be an encouragement to other women, especially to young women, to devote their lives to the larger interests of the mind. It matters little whether men or women have the more brains; all we women need to do to exert our proper influence is just to use all the brains we have.

    Rest assured, Dr. Sabin, you are an encouragement.

    See the National Library of Medicine for a more detailed biography of Sabin.

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    Posted in Baltimore | 2 Comments »

    Henrietta Lacks

    Posted by amanda on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

    March is National Women’s History Month. In celebration, I plan to make one post a week featuring women that contributed significantly to science in Baltimore.

    Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    I want to start with Henrietta Lacks, a woman from Turner Station whose cancerous cells were taken and turned into one of the most powerful scientific tools we have today. The tumorous cells that were removed from Henrietta’s cervix at Johns Hopkins Hospital during her treatment in 1951 were the first immortal human tissue cells to be cultured. First grown in the lab of George and Margaret Gey, Henrietta’s cells can be maintained indefinitely and have been used for countless experiments to study everything from cancer to the effects of atomic radiation on human tissue. Named HeLa, these cells led to advances in human genetics, such as the numbering of chromosomes, as well as to the cell culture, cloning, and in vitro fertilization methods we use today.

    The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is an excellent read on the history of Henrietta and HeLa cells and highlights the moral and legal dilemmas of tissue collection. In her book, Skloot discusses how the Lacks family (who still reside in Baltimore) did not know about the use of HeLa cells until decades after their spread into laboratories around the world, and that while biotechnology companies that produce and sell HeLa continue to profit, the Lacks family has struggled with affording health insurance.

    According to Skloot, there has never been an official effort by Johns Hopkins to honor Henrietta Lacks and her biological contribution to science. With the amazing press Skloot’s book has generated, I have a feeling this may change soon.

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    Posted in Baltimore, Global Research, Local Research | 1 Comment »