Abstract
In 1933 Margaret Lasker, a biochemist who worked at the labs of Montefiore Hospital in New York, developed an accurate method for the differentiation between pentosuria and diabetes. Research into pentosuria, and mostly its genetic aspects, became Lasker’s lifelong passion. Since research was not part of her job description, she conducted the chief part of her study in her home kitchen. Lasker’s extensive and personal correspondence with her patients and their families may be the secret key for her success in maintaining a prolonged research career against all odds. Laker’s last article was published in 1955 in Human Biology, presenting data on 72 cases of pentosuria, which occurs almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. More than half a century later, and long after Lasker was gone, her well kept data and family records allowed the discovery of two mutations in the DCXR gene, by Mary-Claire King and her team.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 247-274 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Journal of the History of Biology |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are deeply grateful to Prof. Mary-Claire King (University of Washington), for giving NK the initial idea to write Margaret Lasker’s scientific biography and for her warm hospitality in Seattle. The valuable information King and her team at the genome sciences laboratory gave us constituted the foundation for this study. We also wish to thank the late Dr. Arno Motulsky, professor of medical genetics and genome sciences at the University of Washington, for sharing his knowledge on pentosuria with us. We are also indebted to Margaret Lasker’s grandchildren, Ted Lasker and Anne Lasker, who, in addition to their generous hospitality in Detroit, allowed NK access to Margaret Lasker’s private archive. This study would not have been possible without the thousands of documents that Ted Lasker kept for decades in ten closed boxes. The conversation with Margaret’s Lasker daughter-in-law the late Bernice (“Bunny”) Kaplan-Lasker, and the email correspondence with Peter Gilmartin, another of Margaret Lasker’s grandsons, contributed important details, and we are grateful to them too. Finally, we would also like to thank the editors of JHB as well as the anonymous referees, for their expert editorial advice. This work was supported by The Open University Research Authority, to whom thanks are also due.
Funding Information:
We are deeply grateful to Prof. Mary-Claire King (University of Washington), for giving NK the initial idea to write Margaret Lasker?s scientific biography and for her warm hospitality in Seattle. The valuable information King and her team at the genome sciences laboratory gave us constituted the foundation for this study. We also wish to thank the late Dr. Arno Motulsky, professor of medical genetics and genome sciences at the University of Washington, for sharing his knowledge on pentosuria with us. We are also indebted to Margaret Lasker?s grandchildren, Ted Lasker and Anne Lasker, who, in addition to their generous hospitality in Detroit, allowed NK access to Margaret Lasker?s private archive. This study would not have been possible without the thousands of documents that Ted Lasker kept for decades in ten closed boxes. The conversation with Margaret?s Lasker daughter-in-law the late Bernice (?Bunny?) Kaplan-Lasker, and the email correspondence with Peter Gilmartin, another of Margaret Lasker?s grandsons, contributed important details, and we are grateful to them too. Finally, we would also like to thank the editors of JHB as well as the anonymous referees, for their expert editorial advice. This work was supported by The Open University Research Authority, to whom thanks are also due.
Funding Information:
In this paper, we have asked what motivated Lasker to dedicate years of her life and her personal resources to studying pentosuria. We believe that the biochemical and genetic study of pentosuria offered her a creative way to escape the “sticky floor.” By working as an amateur laboratory scientist from her own home, Lasker was able to delve into scientific research in a way she was unable to do in her job at Montefiore Hospital. Unlike male scientists, who usually had an official institutional affiliation, Lasker was only able to engage with the questions that intrigued her in an amateur capacity, which required her finance most of her research through her own private means. As she wrote to a colleague, “the study [of the genetics of pentosuria] was undertaken and has been carried out independently by me, entirely in my own time, and hitherto at my own expense.” However, although her research was undertaken privately and without official institutional affiliation, she was nonetheless able to access some modicum of professional support for her work, such as grants, a network of professional colleagues, and participation at conferences, which allowed her to present her findings to other academics and medical professionals. By concentrating on a benign mutation, Lasker became the leading expert on that specific mutation. No one questioned or doubted her expertise—on the contrary, many researchers and colleagues sought her out to consult her about pentosuria. Thus, although her research was performed as an amateur, it was deemed to have scientific merit. For example, she published articles in scientific journals, received grants from the American Medical Association and from the American Academy of Arts, and she applied twice for a grant from the Sugar Foundation. This suggests that the amateur tradition in biology in the United Sates, at least in the case of women, can be extended into the mid-twentieth century.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
Keywords
- Biochemistry of Sugars
- Diabetes
- Gender
- Human genetics
- Montefiore Hospital
- Pentosuria