WiSE CSHL

This week for WiSE Wednesday we’re featuring Dr. Estelle Ramey co-founder and former president of The Association for Women in Science (AWIS). She was an endocrinologist who became famous after a confrontation and debate with Edgar Berman, a then retired surgeon and part of the Democratic National Committee on National Priorities in 1970. After he made comments that a woman would be unfit to be president because of “raging storms of monthly hormonal imbalances” Estelle Ramey published a letter in the Washington Evening Star refuting his comments based on science and debated him at the National Women’s Press Club. After her comments gained national attention Berman was forced to resign and Ramey became a popular speaker.

From the time Estelle was young, her mother – despite having no formal education herself, encouraged Estelle to pursue her education as a path to independence. She received her bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in biology and math in 1937, then received her master’s from Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in physiology and went on to teach at Queens College and the University of Tennessee before becoming faculty at Georgetown. She was an endocrinologist who studied the link between stress and hormones. She was a professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical School and also studied differences between males and females.

Throughout her career, she was an outspoken advocate for women in science. She led a campaign against a textbook company that used a picture of a n**e female stripper to illustrate anatomy. She was a founder and president of AWIS and the President’s Advisory Committee for Women.

She died in 2006 at the age of 89 leaving behind her husband and daughter.

Entry courtesy of Claire Regan

Sources:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-sep-17-me-ramey17-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/obituaries/12ramey.html
https://mujeresconciencia.com/2021/08/23/estelle-rosemary-ramey-endocrinologa/

http://cshlwise.org/wise-wednesdays/estelle-ramey/

This week for WiSE Wednesday we’re highlighting Beatrice Mintz, who died earlier this year at the age of 100. She was a pioneer in the fields of epigenetics and the tumor microenvironment before the words to describe these fields were invented. She was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1973 and the recipient of an AACR lifetime achievement award in Cancer Research in 2012.

Dr. Mintz was a cancer biologist and embryologist who greatly furthered our understanding of how cells influence the cells around them. As a young woman she initially began her studies in art history before discovering a love of biology and obtaining her bachelor’s degree in biology from Hunter College in New York and her master’s and Ph.D. from University of Iowa. She taught at University of Chicago before accepting a research position at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and serving as an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has helped advance both cancer biology and embryology and has helped science to understand how cancer cells are similar to the cell types seen during development. One of her noteworthy discoveries came when she mixed cancer cells with a developing mouse embryo in an attempt to develop a mouse model of cancer. However, instead she discovered that signals from the neighboring cells in the embryo could cause the cancer cells to enter a benign state and a normal mouse to develop. This idea of how nearby cells influence the cancer cells is now the basis for studies of the tumor microenvironment.

Beatrice’s work was at the cutting edge at a time in which in order to study embryology and cancer she had to invent the tools to do it. She liked to work alone and did most of the hands-on work herself. To study embryology she made ‘multi-mice’ mixing embryos from white mice with embryos from black mice so she could study what parts of the embryo contributed to the grown mouse. She was also among the first people to generate transgenic mice and her model of cutaneous melanoma was used as a model for human melanomas.

Dr. Mintz also loved art and poetry. In her spare time she collected artwork and wrote poetry, often about her mice. She died on January 3, 2022.

Entry courtesy of Claire Regan

Sources:

https://dnyuz.com/2022/01/13/beatrice-mintz-groundbreaking-cancer-researcher-dies-at-100/

https://www.foxchase.org/about-us/history/women-science/beatrice-mintz

https://cshlwise.org/wise-wednesdays/beatrice-mintz/

This week for WiSE Wednesday we’re featuring May-Britt Moser!

Dr. May-Britt Moser is the founding Director of Centre for Neural Computation and Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. She received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the identification of grid cells which contribute to the brain’s coordinate system and make it possible for the brain to determine its position and navigate complex environments.
She received her undergraduate degree in psychology at University of Oslo and her Ph.D. in Neurophysiology in 1995. She married her husband and longtime research partner, Edvard Moser, in 1985 and went on to two postdoctoral fellowship positions where she worked with him, one at University of Edinburgh with Richard Morris and another at University College, London with John O’Keefe with whom she and Edvard shared the Nobel prize.
Her research is focused in neuroscience on spatial memory and spatial location. Her main contribution to science has been the work for which her 2014 Nobel Prize was awarded, the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex and she has also identified other related cell types in that circuit which also contribute to the brain’s spatial positioning systems.
Dr. Moser serves as a role model to many young scientists. During her Ph.D. she had both of her children and has helped normalize being a mother and a scientist by bringing her children to scientific conferences or the lab when she needed to and breastfeeding in public. She believes that “We need all kinds of people doing science” and learns from the positive mentorship experiences she had when she was a trainee that encouraged her to pursue science as a woman.
In 2002, Dr. Moser became one of the cofounders of the Centre for the Biology of Memory and later became the director of the Centre for Neural Computation.
Noteworthy Publications:
Fyhn M, Molden S, Witter MP, Moser EI, Moser MB. 2004. Spatial representation in the entorhinal cortex. Science 305:1258–64
Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S. et al. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436, 801–806 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03721

Entry courtesy of Claire Regan

Sources:
https://www.nobelprize.org/mentorship-a-lasting-gift/
https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/may-britt-moser
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/press-release/
https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/may-britt.moser
https://www.nobelprize.org/mentorship-a-lasting-gift/

Check out this post and our other WiSE Wednesday posts on our website: https://cshlwise.org/wise-wednesdays/may-britt-moser/