TheScientist.com

Pioneering protein chemist dies
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 3rd November 2009 04:07 PM GMT]
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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.


Image: Erica P. Johnson
"Mildred was a pioneer in many ways," Joshua Wand of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a former student of Cohn's, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "She surmounted great structural barriers (for women) and was essentially forced to work outside jobs to pay for equipment and chemicals during her PhD."

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.


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