Maud Menten

Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario, Canada. Her family moved to Harrison Mills, British Columbia, where her mother worked as a postmistress. After completing secondary school, Menten attended the University of Toronto where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1904 and a master's degree in physiology in 1907. While earning her graduate degree, she worked as a demonstrator in the physiology laboratory at the university.

Menten wanted to further her medical research, but found that opportunities for women in Canada were scarce at the time. As a result, she accepted a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and left Canada, arriving in New York City in 1907. There she studied the effect of radium bromide on cancerous tumors in rats. Menten and two other scientists published the results of their experiment, authoring the first monograph published by Rockefeller Institute.[8] 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.[7]

In 1912, Menten returned to medical research, working with renowned surgeon George Crile, in whose honour the Crile crater on the Moon is named. Their work concentrated on the control of acid-base balance during anaesthesia.[9] Around this time she became acquainted with Leonor Michaelis, who was one of the world's leading experts in pH and buffers.[10] Menten became attracted to early work of Michaelis in enzyme kinetics. Despite his modest laboratory establishment in Berlin, she made the difficult decision to cross the sea to work with Michaelis.

Menten and Michaelis used an equation to express the relationship they were investigating:

${\displaystyle v={\frac {Va}{K_{\mathrm {m} }+a}}}$

for a steady-state rate ${\displaystyle v}$ in terms of the substrate concentration ${\displaystyle a}$ and constants ${\displaystyle V}$ and ${\displaystyle K_{\mathrm {m} }}$ (written with modern symbols). A decade earlier, Victor Henri had included an equivalent equation in his doctoral thesis, but he did not appreciate the importance of the steady state nor the simplification that would result from considering the initial rate, and did not use it.[10] [11] 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 ${\displaystyle K_{\mathrm {m} }}$ used in expressing this rate is now called the Michaelis constant.[12] The paper deriving the Michaelis–Menten equation is Menten's most famous work.[2]

After her research in Berlin, Menten enrolled in University of Chicago, where in 1916, she obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry.[13] 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,[14][15][16] 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.[12]

As part of extensive work on alkaline phosphatase,[17][18][19] Menten invented the azo-dye coupling reaction, which is still used in histochemistry. This was described in a major textbook of the 1950s[20] in the following terms:

It is not too much to say that the use of this principle was a stroke of genius.

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 - 1940s.[21] She also conducted the first electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin proteins in 1944.[22] In this she anticipated the results of Linus Pauling and his collaborators[23] by several years, however, he usually is credited with the discovery.

Menten also worked on the properties of hemoglobin, regulation of blood sugar level, and kidney function.[24]

She continued to work on cancer, especially in children,[25] as well as other illnesses of children.[26][27]

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).[28]

Poor health forced Menten's retirement in 1955, and she died July 17, 1960, at the age of 81, in Leamington, Ontario.[7][1]

Rebecca Skloot portrays Menten as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore "Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes".[7] She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies. She played the clarinet, created paintings worthy of art exhibitions,[1] climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, and enjoyed astronomy. By the time of her death, she had mastered several languages, including Russian, French, German, Italian, and at least one Native-American language, Halkomelem.[29] Although Menten did most of her research in the United States, she retained her Canadian citizenship throughout her life.[29]

Throughout her career Menten was affiliated with many scientific societies.

At Menten's death, colleagues Aaron H. Stock and Anna-Mary Carpenter honored the Canadian biochemist in an obituary in Nature: "Menten was untiring in her efforts on behalf of sick children. She was an inspiring teacher who stimulated medical students, resident physicians, and research associates to their best efforts. She will long be remembered by her associates for her keen mind, for a certain dignity of manner, for unobtrusive modesty, for her wit, and above all for her enthusiasm for research."[24]

In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.[1] 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.[7] Port Lambton, Canada, where Menten was born, installed a commemorative bronze plaque about her in 2015.[30]

• Timeline of women in science