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Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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MARIAN ELLIOTT KOSHLAND
Pages 212-235

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From page 212...
... Photo Courtesy Marian Kosshland Science Museum
From page 213...
... That table was where we -- the four graduate students, the postdoc from Lausanne, the two technicians, and Marian -- gathered every day at lunchtime to eat and to talk about J chain -- the joining protein of immunoglobulin molecules that Marian & Co. had recently identified and were characterizing -- the structural peculiarities of secretory antibodies 213
From page 214...
... America was still involved in Vietnam. Harvard's George Wald had recently returned from a fact-finding trip to China, and he was traveling around the country giving talks at colleges and universities -- including ours -- called "Acupuncture for McGovern" and donating his honoraria to the McGovern campaign.
From page 215...
... Her mother -- Margrethe Schmidt Elliott -- was a teacher who had come to the United States from Denmark; her father -- Walter Elliott -- was a hardware salesman with a Southern Baptist background and the prejudices that came with it. Marian had a little brother who developed typhoid fever when his big sister was just four years old.
From page 216...
... Academically that meant enrolling in the hardest courses in the school. Culturally her activities fell into the "high" version -- attending productions of the Metropolitan Opera -- and the "low" -- holding a long black snake in the biology classroom and eating canned rattlesnake meat.
From page 217...
... Marian identified this research as the springboard for her lifelong interest in secretory antibodies, those antibodies that are made by cells in mucous membranes and are responsible for immune reactions at all of the body's orifices, and which in milk and colostrum protect newborns "passively" until their own immune systems kick in. Her other project focused on finding ways to reduce the spread of respiratory diseases in soldiers during basic train
From page 218...
... As long as I could have an evening with her, that was it. I always enjoyed talking to her more than I enjoyed talking to anybody else." Marian joined Dan at Oak Ridge in 1945 and spent a year there working on the Manhattan District Atomic Bomb Project.
From page 219...
... When the Koshlands arrived at Brookhaven, the head of the department reneged on his promise of a job for Marian ("We are not going to have the wife of anybody."2) They had four children under five at the time and Marian seriously considered giving up science altogether.
From page 220...
... There was a raging debate between instructive models, which held that antibody proteins were all the same and just fold around their target antigens, and selective models, which argued that they were the products of different cells. Bunny analyzed polyclonal antibodies directed against two different haptens, and on the basis of exquisitely careful amino acid composition analyses, convincingly showed that these antibodies had different amino acid compositions and therefore must differ in their amino acid sequences.
From page 221...
... In an invited talk at the national meeting of the American Association of Immunologists in February 1997, she presented a wonderful description of recent work from her lab demonstrating that the action of a transcription factor, BSAP, was very complex and dynamic, and that it could have both positive and negative effects, extinguishing some genes whose products were no longer needed, while turning on new genes with roles important to the emerging antibody-producing arm of the immune system. This talk was a marvel, and put together complex biochemical phenomena in an understandable context of biological function.
From page 222...
... " was something of a mantra in our lab) , she insisted that we write precisely and with integrity (She was an excellent and careful writer, although she said she found the task difficult.
From page 223...
... Chip Wilde, who was a graduate student at the same time I was and now teaches microbiology in Indianapolis at the University of Indiana, recently told me that he had gone to Berkeley to work with another professor, but after taking Marian's immunology course, he realized that immunology was what he wanted to do. Chip said, "There were so many unanswered questions, so many neat possibilities.
From page 224...
... Elaine Hansen, who was provost of Haverford and one of the faculty members on the board during Marian's tenure and who is now president of Bates College, told me that Marian "connected us to the broader academic world and helped us see the college in that landscape. She was confident and forthright.
From page 225...
... Today the 140,000-square-foot science complex -- the Marian E Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center (KINSC)
From page 226...
... Haverford awarded Marian an honorary doctor of science degree in 1995. In 1998 the college established the Marian E
From page 227...
... These included festive holiday gatherings for our small lab group and Dan's large gang and also intimate dinner parties, where my husband and I had an opportunity to meet some of Berkeley's luminaries. It was at one of these parties, sitting next to Bruce Ames, that I observed that black cloth napkins were orders of magnitude classier than white ones.
From page 228...
... She demanded high quality but she was at heart a true egalitarian, believing everyone deserved a fair go and was capable of real achievement." Interviews with several of her children are included in Berkeley's retrospective volume, and it is clear that they all admired and appreciated their mother.1 Gail described Marian as being "definitely Protestant ethic, New England, brought up with the idea that you work hard, and that's part of the purpose of life." Gail's twin brother, James, said that his mother was "very interested in development and always said that her kids were a lifetime experiment.
From page 229...
... Let's go. Let's do it." The volume includes an interview with James's wife, Catherine, who graduated from Haverford and, like her mother-in-law, is a professor at the University of California and a member of the Board of Trustees of Haverford College.
From page 230...
... She was on the Executive Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Fellowship Screening Committee of the American Cancer Society in California, and the Postdoctorate Fellowships Screening Committee for the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research. She was on the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation, the National Council of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Interdisciplinary Cluster on Immunology and Microbiology of the President's Biomedical Research Panel, the Director's Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health, and the Allergy and Immunology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health.
From page 231...
... :545-546. Many of the quotations in this biographical memoir are, as the text indicates, from conversations that I had with James Allison, Marcy Blackman, Elaine Hansen, Daniel E
From page 232...
... Shapanka. Differences in the amino acid composition of a third rabbit antibody.
From page 233...
... Dray. Differences in amino acid composition related to allotypic and antibody specificity of rabbit heavy chains.
From page 234...
... Differentiation-specific methylation of the immunoglobulin heavy chain locus. In Biochemistry and Biology of DNA Methylation, eds.


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