As we promised in an earlier Newsletter, Gaytha Langlois is continuing her review of women protistology pioneers who serve as role models for today’s researchers, based on their dedication and perseverance to their work despite numerous obstacles. Be sure to check out part I if you missed it in the February newsletter.
Sister Monica Taylor (1877 – 1968) was awarded a DSc by the University of Glasgow in 1917. After a struggle to pursue higher education as a nun of the Order of Notre Dame de Namur and being arrested during World War II on suspicion of being a German parachutist in disguise, she received several honors for her work in the field of amoebic zoology. She developed laboratory growth materials and curated her own natural history collection at Notre Dame College. In 1952, she served as Vice-President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1954-1957 as the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Glasgow. In 1953, she was awarded an Honorary DDL by the University of Glasgow as “a protozoologist of international distinction,” and in 1958, received the Patrick Neill medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in recognition of her distinguished contributions to Protozoology.
Helen Pixell Goodrich (1879-1957) was a protozoologist in the UK. The wife of Edwin Stephen Goodrich, she helped with his work, mostly devoted to marine organisms. Helen focused on the life history of the sporozoan parasites of marine invertebrates such as crayfish, traveling to Vancouver to investigate the marine fauna of the Georgean Straits. She was awarded a DSc in 1915 and continued to research and collaborate with her husband studying protozoa.
Annie Porter (1880-1963) was awarded her DSc in Zoology by University College, London University in 1910 for her postgraduate research in parasitology, publishing six papers on this subject. She was the wife of and collaborator with H.B. Fantham and moved with her husband to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1917, staying there until 1933 and then moving to McGill University, Montreal. One of their studies focused on Nosema infections in bees.
Mary J. Hogue (1883-1962) was a pioneer in human brain tissue culture (1940-1950), but she had originally studied protozoa. Her research at the University of Würzburg with Theodor Boveri resulted in her Ph.D. (1909). Although her research interests included experimental embryology, and the use of tissue culture to study a variety of cell types, she is also considered a protozoologist, including studies at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA, USA. Her extraordinary demonstration of multiple fission in the life history of a new species of Flabellula associated with diseased oyster beds was particularly important. Hogue transitioned to the culture of human brain tissue in the 1940s and 1950s and was one of the first to culture cells from human fetal, infant, and adult brain explants. Her pioneering contributions to the study of human brain cells in culture, coupled with her use of tissue cultures to study the cytopathogenic effects of poliovirus, illustrate her remarkable career accomplishments.
Doris Livingston McKenna (1883-1956) was a Scottish protozoologist and parasitologist. She attended Aberdeen University where she completed her Ph.D. in 1914. She became a lecturer at Dundee University in 1916 and during wartime she studied and diagnosed amoebic dysentery and other intestinal parasites that affected the soldiers. She became a lecturer at King’s College London in 1919 and in 1927 she succeeded Julian Huxley as the head of the Sociology Department, the first female lead at a department at Kings College.
Margaret Wolfe Jepps (1892-1977), University of Glasgow, was the author of The Protozoa, Sarcodina, published in 1956. She worked in the Zoology Dept for almost 30 years; her research interests focused on amoebae, but specifically those parasitic species of medical importance. In 1918, along with Clifford Dobell, she described a new parasite of the human gut, Dientamoeba fragilis, commonly found worldwide, which may cause clinical symptoms including abdominal pain and diarrhoea. and after WW1, she worked on amoebic dysentery in Malaysia.
Frieda Feulgen-Brauns (1893-1984) was another famous researcher in Germany. In 1924, her husband, Robert Feulgen and Heinrich Rossenbeck published a chemical reaction which allowed the specific staining of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in histological specimens, but it is also important to note the involvement of Frieda Feulgen, who gave an impactful contribution to the understanding of this chemical reaction, which she discussed in her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Untersuchungen über die Nuklealfärbung” (Investigations of Nuclear Staining), in 1924, the same year in which Robert Feulgen published his work.
Dora Priaulx Henry (1904-1999) studied infections of Coccidia in small mammals and birds, leaving for future researchers the unpublished records of 75 bird species that she had examined. After completing her Ph.D. with Charles Kofoid in 1931, she became a researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA (USA). Early studies included gregarines in Puget Sound barnacles and later addressed barnacle systematics and tunicate studies. During World War II Dora served as an assistant oceanographer for the U.S. Army Air Forces and later with the Navy’s Hydrographic Office.
https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/85/85/f790bef656a03c1e69be412717f3.jpg
Lucy Graves Taliaferro (1895-1984) American parasitology and professor, notable for her research on Trypanosomes. As a student at Goucher College, Lucy traveled to Washington, D.C., with about thirty other students to participate in a women’s suffrage picket outside of the White House. She received her ScD in 1925 after publication of her thesis on malaria in birds. She and her husband, William, later moved to the University of Chicago, working as a research team for thirty-six years, with extensive trips to Central and South America. Together, they published over 100 works.
There was a major shift for women protistologists in the latter half of the 1990s, resulting in broader participation in all aspects of research, publishing, and membership in SOP and later ISOP.
Jumping ahead to more recent contributors, both of whom I knew well, and who were Presidents of the Society of Protozoologists, and Editors of the Society Journal (then called the Journal of Protozoology).
https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/kaneshes
Edna Kaneshiro, University of Cincinnati, USA, who received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University Syracuse, New York, in 1968, was prolific in her research and publication efforts. Her lab focused on the lipids of eukaryotic protists, including free-living, parasitic, and opportunistic pathogens. Late in her career, Edna redirected her focus onto the AIDS-associated opportunistic infection caused by Pneumocystis carinii. This organism causes a type of pneumonia that can lead to the death of immunocompromised individuals. Pneumocystis proliferates extracellularly in the lung alveolus where lipids constitute a major part of lung surfactant. Thus, lipids are thought to be important to the nutrition, physiology, and metabolism of the organism. The biosynthesis of pathogen-specific lipids provided potential targets for drug development.
https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/kaneshes
Next time, in Part III, we will complete our survey of accomplished women in protistology, focusing on other 20th Century contributors with whom many of us studied and collaborated.
References:
- Corliss, John O. 1978. A salute to fifty-four great microscopists of the past: a pictorial footnote to the history of protozoology. Part I. Trans. Amer. Microsc. Soc. 97(4):419-458. https://doi.org/10.2307/3226162 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3226162
- Corliss, John O. 1979a. A salute to fifty-four great microscopists of the past: a pictorial footnote to the history of protozoology. Part II. Trans. Amer. Microsc. Soc. 98:26-58. https://doi.org/10.2307/3225939
- Corliss, John O. 1993. The contributions of women to the science of protozoology – Acta Protozool. 32 (3): 129 – 134. https://rcin.org.pl/Content/12049/WA488_17686_P1825-T32-nr3_AP.pdf
- McLaughlin, Patsy & Whitney, Anita & Ross, Arnold & Southward, Alan & Newman, William. (2009). DORA PRIAULX HENRY 24 May 1904–16 June 1999. Journal of Crustacean Biology. 20. 199-203. 10.1651/0278-0372(2000)020[0199:DPHMJ]2.0.CO;2.
- Sylph, Ann. 2025. Women in Zoology: moving into the 20th century. Accessed at https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1469-7998.women_in_zoology
- Vickermann, K. and Sleigh, M.A. 2001. A Century of Protozoology in Britain. British Section, Society of Protozoology. Parasitology. 2001;123(5):531-535. doi:10.1017/S0031182001248987
- Women in Science, Unsung Heroes of Microbiology. 07 March 2024. Accessed at https://www.internationalmicroorganismday.org/blogs/10-women-microbiologists-you-dont-know-about-but-should
- Zottoli SJ, Seyfarth EA. The Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole) and the scientific advancement of women in the early 20th century: the example of Mary Jane Hogue (1883-1962). J Hist Biol. 2015 Spring;48(1):137-67. doi: 10.1007/s10739-014-9384-1. PMID: 25103622.
- Zottoli SJ, Seyfarth EA. Mary Jane Hogue (1883-1962): A pioneer in human brain tissue culture. J Hist Neurosci. 2018 Oct-Dec;27(4):333-354. doi: 10.1080/0964704X.2018.1468967. Epub 2018 May 16. PMID: 29768082.
