Maud Leonora Menten (March 20, 1879 – July 17, 1960) The paper has been translated from its written language of German into English.
Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario and studied medicine at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1904, M.B. 1907, M.D. 1911). She was among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate. Her dissertation was entitled "The Alkalinity of the Blood in Malignancy and Other Pathological Conditions; Together with Observations on the Relation of the Alkalinity of the Blood to Barometric Pressure".
Menten joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1923 and remained there until her retirement in 1950. She became an assistant professor and then an associate professor in the School of Medicine and was the head of pathology at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Her final promotion to full professor, in 1948, was at the age of 69 in the last year of her career. Her final academic post was as a research fellow at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute.
Early life
Menten was born on 20 March 1879 in Port Lambton, Ontario, the eldest of two children of Charles William Menten and Emma Trusler. Her father worked as a river pilot and boat operator, while her mother was involved in managing family business ventures including a hotel and general store.
In 1889, when Menten was ten years old, the family moved west to the Harrison River region of British Columbia. Her father served as postmaster at Harrison Mills and operated boats on the nearby Fraser River, while her mother helped run the family’s hotel and store. Menten worked as an intern at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. After a year at the Institute, Menten returned to Canada and began her studies at the University of Toronto where, in 1911, she became one of the first Canadian women to qualify as a medical doctor. Around this time she became acquainted with Leonor Michaelis, who was one of the world's leading experts in pH and buffers.
The equation shows not only that each enzyme is specific for its substrate, but also that the rate of reaction rate increases to saturation as the substrate concentration increases. The constant <math>K_\mathrm{m}</math> used in expressing this rate is now called the Michaelis-Menten constant. The paper deriving the Michaelis–Menten equation is Menten's most famous work. In 1923, she still could not find an academic position for a woman in Canada; she took a position as part of the faculty of the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh while serving as a clinical pathologist at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. Despite the demands both jobs had, Menten found time to maintain an active research program, authoring or coauthoring more than 70 publications. Although her promotion from assistant to associate professor was timely, she was not made a full professor until she was 70 years old, within one year of her retirement. Menten invented the azo-dye coupling reaction, which is still used in histochemistry. This was described in a major textbook of the 1950s
in the following terms:
She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina, and Salmonella ssp. that were used in a successful immunisation program against scarlet fever in Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. She also conducted the first electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin proteins in 1944. In this she anticipated the results of Linus Pauling and his collaborators by several years; however, he is usually credited with the discovery.
Menten also worked on the properties of hemoglobin, regulation of blood sugar level, and kidney function. as well as other illnesses of children.
After her retirement from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950, she returned to Canada where she continued to do cancer research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute (1951–1953).
Poor health forced Menten's retirement in 1955, and she died July 17, 1960, at the age of 81, in Leamington, Ontario.
Although Menten did most of her research in the United States, she retained her Canadian citizenship throughout her life.
In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. She also was honored at the University of Toronto with a plaque. At the University of Pittsburgh she was honored with a named chair and memorial lectures.
See also
- Timeline of women in science