Dorothy Hansine Andersen

Dorothy Hansine Andersen was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on May 15, 1901. Her father, Hans Peter Andersen, died in 1914. She then assumed the full responsibility for caring for her invalid mother. After they moved to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Andersen's mother died in 1920.

In 1922, Andersen was graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in zoology and chemistry from Mount Holyoke College. Later, she went on to attend Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where she first began to perform research under Florence Rena Sabin. Andersen's first two research papers were on the lymphatic and blood vessels in the reproductive organs of female pigs. Both of these papers were published in Contributions to Embryology.[4]

Upon graduation from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Andersen served as a teaching assistant in anatomy at the Rochester School of Medicine.[4] A year later she became an intern for surgery at the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. After completing her internship year, Andersen was denied a residency in general surgery at the hospital because of her gender.[5] The denial drove Andersen to focus upon research.

In 1929, she began working at Columbia University's College of Physician and Surgeons as an assistant in pathology. Later, she was asked to join the faculty as an instructor at Columbia Medical School.[4]

In order to further a research career, Andersen began to work on her doctorate degree in medical science by studying endocrinology at Columbia University.[6] Specifically, she studied the influences of the endocrine glands on the onset and rate of sexual maturation in rats. By 1935, she received a doctorate from Columbia University.

She then became a pathologist at Babies Hospital at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.[7] This is where Andersen remained for the rest of her medical career. In 1945, Andersen was given the title of an assistant pediatrician at Babies Hospital.

Because of her knowledge of anatomy, she was called to become a consultant to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology during World War II.[8] In 1952, she became the chief of pathology at Babies Hospital. Later that year, Dorothy Hansine Andersen was awarded the Elizabeth Blackwell Award.[7]

While performing autopsies on infants and children who died with celiac disease she noted fluid-filled cysts surrounded by fibrotic scars in the pancreas, along with lung damage and infection which was worse in older children. Andersen believed that the lung and pancreatic damage came from a new disease, which she called "cystic fibrosis of the pancreas". Her research was published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children in 1938. She was awarded the E. Mead Johnson Award in 1939 for this work.[9]

During the decade following her landmark 1938 study, she was the first to diagnose cystic fibrosis (CF) in vivo, the first to treat patients with CF with a special diet as well as vitamins and pancreatic enzymes, the first to treat CF-related lung infections with antibiotics, and the first to recognize that CF was likely a genetic disease transmitted in a recessive manner.[10] In 1948, she received the Borden Award for her research in nutrition.

In 1951 Andersen (with Walter Kessler, a resident MD) reported heat prostration in a cohort of infants, some of whom had CF. In this second landmark study of CF by Andersen, she hypothesized that CF patients “are especially susceptible to heat prostration,” and that hypochloremia in that setting was “partly the result of vomiting and partly due to loss of chlorides by sweating”.

In 1953 she was a coauthor on the first report of excessive chloride loss in CF sweat: this was her third landmark study of CF. Though another coauthor (di Sant'Agnese) has been recognized as the first to make the critically-important observation about sweat chloride losses, it is likely that Andersen had a larger role in this discovery than previously suspected (potentially making this another example of the Matilda effect).[11]

By 1958, Andersen was a full professor at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Parenthetically, the channelopathy associated with sweat chloride losses in CF was not described until 1983- several decades after Andersen's death- by Paul Quinton, and the genetic locus of this channelopathy was not described until 1989 by Lap-Chee Tsui's team.

In addition to her research on CF, Andersen also described a rare glycogen storage disease, glycogen storage disease type IV (GSD IV) also known as Andersen's disease. It is caused by a lack of activity in glycogen-branching enzyme, resulting in accumulation of glycogen in the liver.

Anderson was well-liked as a professor. She had a reserved personality. Although often characterized as supposedly "unladylike", Dorothy Hansine Andersen enjoyed an active lifestyle that included hiking, canoeing, and carpentry.[12] She was defended following such criticism by the supporters of her talent and contributions to the professional field of medicine.

Toward the end of her career, Andersen had developed lung cancer and she underwent surgery in 1962. Dorothy Hansine Andersen died at the age of sixty-one on March 3, 1963, in New York, New York.[13] She was buried near her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.[14]

After her death in 1963, her work garnered further recognition. She was honored with the Distinguished Service Medal at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.[15] In remembrance for her work on cystic fibrosis, Dorothy Hansine Andersen was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2002.[2]

• Andersen's disease

• Shearer, Barbara; Shearer, Benjamin (1996). Notable women in the life sciences : a biographical dictionary (1. publ. ed.). Westport, Conn. [u.a.]: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0313293023.
• Windsor, Laura Lynn (2002). Women in medicine : an encyclopedia. Oxford: ABC-Clio. ISBN 9781576073926.

• Changing Face of Medicine Biography
• Lost Women of Science, Episode 3: The Case of the Missing Portrait of Dorothy Hansine Andersen by Katie Hafner in Scientific American