Women in STEM

"In the mid-1980s, two groundbreaking findings were made in Allyn Howlett's laboratory at St Louis University that provided conclusive evidence that cannabinoid receptors do indeed exist...since the discovery of CB1 and CB2 receptors, a great deal has become known about how these receptors signal and about their roles." - British Journal of Pharmacology, doi: 10.1038/sj.bjp.0706406
Howlett's discovery opened a new branch of neuroscience and revolutionized our understanding of the brain, which will most likely earn her a future Nobel Prize. Howlett was also a former colleague of our very own biology professor Dr. Patton.

In 1947 Gerty Cori became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. She and her husband, Carl Cori, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the eponymous Cori cycle, the catalytic conversion of glycogen in the body. She did research at Washington University in St. Louis from 1931 to 1957. You can find many books and articles about her life and contributions from the SCC Library's site.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a former neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986, died in Rome on December 30. She was 103. She and a colleague were honored that year for discovering chemical tools the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks. Their discovery furthered the study of the causes of cancer, dementia, and other diseases in which those processes go awry. - Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2013.

Educated at Washington University (St. Louis), she was a journalist and market researcher who dabbled in country music. In 1957 she joined Dr. William Masters' research group at Washington University School of Medicine and by 1959 she and Masters were founding the Masters and Johnson Institute to investigate the physiology of sexual intercourse and physiology. Their first popular publication, Human Sexual Response (1966), caused a major uproar with its explicit descriptions. She stayed on with Masters, helped operate their sexual therapy service, and married him in 1971. Later she and Masters published On Sex and Human Loving (with Robert Kolodny, 1986) - Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, 2001