The Scientist: NewsBlog:
Pioneering protein chemist dies
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 3rd November 2009 04:07 PM GMT]
Mildred Cohn, a renowned chemist who battled sexual discrimination for much of her career, died last month (October 12) at age 96, succumbing to pneumonia at a hospital in Philadelphia. Combining chemistry, biology, and physics, Cohn opened up new avenues for interdisciplinary biology and helped found the emerging fields of biochemistry and biophysics.
Cohn's research spanned from isotopes to ATP to oxidative phosphorylation. She was one of the first to take meaningful pictures of proteins using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Wand said, and applied this technique to a variety of biochemical problems, such as the mechanisms of enzymes. Cohn's work identifying the structure of ATP was a particularly exciting time for her, she shared with The Scientist during an interview in 2003. "In 1958, using nuclear magnetic resonance, I saw the first three peaks of ATP. That was exciting," she recalled. "[I could] distinguish the three phosphorous atoms of ATP with a spectroscopic method, which had never been done before." Her findings about ATP's structure were published in two papers in 1960 and 1962 that together accrued over 600 citations, according to ISI. Over her career, Cohn published more than 160 papers, including several that she co-authored with six different Nobel Laureates. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City at age 17, Cohn enrolled in a chemistry doctoral program at Columbia. When she found she couldn't get a teaching assistantship because she was a woman, she turned to babysitting to support herself until she received her master's in physical chemistry the next year. Out of money, Cohn accepted a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA. She was the only woman among 70 men and was banned from working in the lab for that reason. She worked there for two years until she saved up enough money to return to Columbia to work with future Nobel Laureate Harold Urey and complete her PhD. After graduate school, Cohn took a postdoc at George Washington University Medical School with another future Nobel winner, Vincent duVigneaud. There, she met physicist Henry Primakoff, whom she married in 1938. The duo eventually settled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until she retired in 1982. Even after her official retirement, she maintained her office and still kept in touch with the scientific community. "At the age of 95, she was still coming to departmental seminars, still asking those deeply penetrating questions and generally keeping the department on its toes," Wand recalled. Over the course of her career, Cohn was honored with a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science and election to the National Academy of Sciences. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the day before she died. Related stories: [6th October 2003] [1st November 1993] [12th October 1992] |
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An anecdote (but is this an anecdote?) about women in science
by Antoine Danchin
[Comment posted 2009-11-04 03:11:31]
[Comment posted 2009-11-04 03:11:31]
Mildred Cohn was the supervisor of my PhD thesis during the time she went to France at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris in 1967-1968. At the time I was just a "pure" mathematician trying to see whether I could do something interesting in biology. Mildred suggested that I worked on transfer RNA and its interactions with paramagnetic divalent ions. She taught me all the intricacies of experimental work and of the importance of physics applied to biology. We used a NMR spectrometer which was much irritable and unpredictable (not today?s extraordinary machines), but we could go through. It is clear that she played a central role in my interest for biology and the first training years of a young scientist are probably the most important ones.
At the time it was not so frequent that women were taken seriously by men colleagues, and it happens that I was working not with one, but with two women scientists, Mildred Cohn, and Marianne Grunberg-Manago (who had accepted me as a trainee, against all odds, and against the advice of many ? all males- colleagues). We rapidly came to publish observations that we thought interesting, and submitted a paper to the Journal of Molecular Biology (known to be fairly tough at the time). One of the reviewers asked a lot of questions which looked strange to me (this was my first contribution to a peer-reviewed article), but we answered them. And I remember how I was surprised and shocked when at a meeting in the US (it might have been at a Gordon conference) I met a well-known scientist (I will not give his name here) who told me : ? I was a reviewer of your paper; don?t worry it will go through, I had to give a lesson to these two women who eclipse you ?. Of course I repeated the anecdote to Mildred who told me that this was standard behaviour around her and that she was not surprised. The paper was indeed rapidly published:
Cohn M, Danchin A, Grunberg-Manago M.
Proton magnetic relaxation studies of manganous complexes of transfer RNA and related compounds
J Mol Biol. 1969 39:199-217.
Perhaps this is the reason why I kept working and collaborating with women colleagues, and perhaps the reason why I shy away from fashion and media, most often clear attibutes of male primates display!
I will not say more about Mildred, as others are better placed than me to describe the importance of her contribution to science (I left NMR very early on to go to bacterial genetics and genomics), but I wish simply to recall how important she was as a tutor, as I am sure many others will remember. I was not able to attend the anniversary of her 90th birthday because I was in Hong Kong, where I worked at the time and unfortunately quite sick, and this is one of my deepest regrets.
Antoine Danchin
At the time it was not so frequent that women were taken seriously by men colleagues, and it happens that I was working not with one, but with two women scientists, Mildred Cohn, and Marianne Grunberg-Manago (who had accepted me as a trainee, against all odds, and against the advice of many ? all males- colleagues). We rapidly came to publish observations that we thought interesting, and submitted a paper to the Journal of Molecular Biology (known to be fairly tough at the time). One of the reviewers asked a lot of questions which looked strange to me (this was my first contribution to a peer-reviewed article), but we answered them. And I remember how I was surprised and shocked when at a meeting in the US (it might have been at a Gordon conference) I met a well-known scientist (I will not give his name here) who told me : ? I was a reviewer of your paper; don?t worry it will go through, I had to give a lesson to these two women who eclipse you ?. Of course I repeated the anecdote to Mildred who told me that this was standard behaviour around her and that she was not surprised. The paper was indeed rapidly published:
Cohn M, Danchin A, Grunberg-Manago M.
Proton magnetic relaxation studies of manganous complexes of transfer RNA and related compounds
J Mol Biol. 1969 39:199-217.
Perhaps this is the reason why I kept working and collaborating with women colleagues, and perhaps the reason why I shy away from fashion and media, most often clear attibutes of male primates display!
I will not say more about Mildred, as others are better placed than me to describe the importance of her contribution to science (I left NMR very early on to go to bacterial genetics and genomics), but I wish simply to recall how important she was as a tutor, as I am sure many others will remember. I was not able to attend the anniversary of her 90th birthday because I was in Hong Kong, where I worked at the time and unfortunately quite sick, and this is one of my deepest regrets.
Antoine Danchin
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