#TBT honoring Maud Menten (1879-1960)
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Maud Menten was a Canadian physician-scientist whose name is associated with the famous Michaelis-Menten equation used in biochemistry. As a biochemical and medical researcher, Maud co-devised one of the fundamental models of enzyme kinetics with her work alongside Leonor Michaelis. When Maud earned her Master’s degree at the University of Toronto in 1907, there were not many opportunities that would allow women to conduct research and Maud moved to New York to work with the Rockefeller Institute. Maud’s publication of her research on radium compounds was the Rockefeller Institute’s first published monograph.
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After returning to Canada to study medicine, Maud became one of the first women in Canada to qualify as a medical doctor in 1911 but soon returned to research. Maud later returned to the USA for her PhD in 1916 and studied histochemistry and pediatric pathology, while still authoring or co-authoring around 100 research papers. She is credited with conducting the first separation of proteins by electrophoresis and developed a staining method using azo dyes that is still practiced in histochemistry today!