Thread by @STEMthebleeding

For #WomensHistoryMonth I'm going to tell you a story of a #womaninSTEM who:

- 95% of you have never heard of
- 4% of you that have only know her name from a test question
- 100% of us depend on her work to enjoy our modern lives.

Her name is Maud.

Dr. Maud Menten.

Maud Leonora Menten was born in 1879 in Ontario. She went to school at the University of Toronto, where she studied medicine.

In 1904, she got her BA.
Her M.B. in 1907.
Her M.D. in 1911.
And her Ph.D. in 1916 .

But she did her thesis work in Chicago and Germany.

Why?

Canada didn't allow women to do research. So in 1912 she moved to Berlin. Here she met up with Dr. Leonor Michaelis, who was doing work on a subject near and dear to every biochemists' heart: enzyme kinetics.

Together they wrote the Michaelis-Menten Equation in 1913.

V=va/Km+a , or more commonly written as:

Vmax = [s]/Km+[s] , where [s] is the concentration of the substrate, and Km is a constant

Simple. Eloquent. And used by every biochemist and biostatistician the world over to determine just how effectively a enzyme reacts to a substrate.

The formula is demonstrated below, which shows the plot of the reaction of enzyme to substrate in terms of how fast the enzyme reacts to the substrate based on concentration.

Maud did this while learning to speak German and working with a scientist who didn't speak English.

She received her Ph.D. for this work in 1916, from the University of Chicago. But Canada still wouldn't let her do research or teach, and so she took a job as a clinical pathologist at the Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh while also serving as a teacher at the medical school.

During that time, she coauthored or authored 70 (!) publications, including several studies on hemoglobin, bacterial characterizations, and she invented the azo-dye coupling reaction, which in the 1950s allowed for testing for the presence of a protein that warns of kidney damage

It was called nothing short of a "stroke of genius". Dr. Menten also conducted the first electrophoretic separation of hemoglobin, which allowed her to determine the molecular formations of sickle-cell anemia years before Pauling did.

She also led the way to the first scarlet fever immunizations in the 1930s and 1940s in the Pittsburgh area through her bacterial research.

Still she was not granted a full professorship until 1 year before bad health forced her to retire.

She died in 1960 in Ontario.

Dr. Menten was known as a "dynamo" who drove a Model T ford for 32 years around the Pittsburgh campus. She played clarinet, was a skilled artist, and at the time of her death had mastered Russian, German, French, Italian, and Halkomelem, a Native-American language.

38 years later, she was awarded a posthumous place in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, despite being banned from conducting research there.

"She had vision, enthusiam, and compassion."

But because she had a uterus, they ignored her.

cdnmedhall.org/inductees/maud…

Her work is also commemorated in The University of Pittsburgh Medical School's Oct 2000 Journal piece titled "Some called her Miss Menten", and it tells about how her Model T was as unstoppable as she was.

pittmed.health.pitt.edu/oct_2000/miss_…

And finally, I leave you with this: Little is known about Dr. Menten beyond her work. She was an amazing woman, and to limit her life to her accomplishments in the lab almost does an injustice, no matter how amazing they are.

She climbed mountains. She crossed the arctic. She sailed to Germany the same year the Titanic sunk. If someone told her she couldn't do something, she just smiled at you and did it better than you knew it could be done.

Her name is Dr. Maud Menten.

She is a #ScienceWoman

And for fun, here is a video of her life's work told in the medium of Lego.