Lisa CoeSophomore Microbiology Major & Pitt Diver Look, don't get me wrong. Rosalind Franklin, Jane Goodall, and Florence Nightingale are all great and made tremendous contributions to their respective fields. Truly. But, for this blog posting, I want to shed the light on some biologists who are likely mentioned in your textbook (that you probably don't read all that closely) but seem to be skipped over in lecture.
1. If you're a biology major of any flavor at Pitt, I'm sure you know that phage research is a huge part of our department. We've come a long way, thanks to people like Graham Hatfull, but who pioneered that research? Esther Lederberg is one person. She discovered the lambda bacteriophage, and along with it, the process of the lysogenic cycle. Additionally, she and her husband developed the replica plating technique. It was her husband who won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the year the award was split in half with Beadle and Tatum, but it’s safe to say that the award should have also been shared with her. 2. Many of you are also probably pre-med, pre-PA, or have some other plan that involves being in a clinical setting. More likely than not, you've already spent or plan on spending a decent amount of time volunteering in such a setting. That means you’ll have to be tested for tuberculosis. The reason we are able to test for the deadly infection is because of Florence Seibert, who purified tuberculin. The isolation of this protein allowed for the standardization of TB testing. So next time you get a TB test, you can thank Florence Seibert. 3. I’m sure you’re aware of a neat little tool called CRISPR/Cas9; but, what you may not know is that it was discovered by a woman named Jennifer Doudna, and mechanistically characterized by another woman, Emmanuelle Charpentier. Because of the discovery these two women and their research teams made, we can now very specifically edit genomes. They’ve opened up a whole new world of genetics, and we should give them the recognition they deserve. 4. Of course you know about the work of Mendel, and you probably learned that there are a few significant exceptions to Mendel’s Postulates. Processes such as crossing-over, which isn’t all that rare of an occurrence, produce results that don’t follow Mendel’s rules. In the field of genetics, before Jennifer Doudna, came Barbara McClintock, who began to unravel (ha) genetic recombination by crossing-over. She also uncovered the roles of telomeres and centromeres. Oh, and, one more thing—she discovered transposition in maize. She was rightfully awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1983, and—bonus—it was unshared. 5. To bring this back to viruses, it’s pretty common knowledge that Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes AIDS (even your non-bio friends know that). But that knowledge was not always there, and it was only somewhat recently determined by French biologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi in 1983. Stemming from that initial discovery came many more studies involving HIV, ranging from the immune response to the virus to transmission from parent to child. She’s contributed to over 240 scientific papers and is the co-winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. So with that, happy Women’s History Month. And to the women who are biology majors, keep it up. We may eventually find your names in textbooks.
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January 2022
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