60 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
FOUNDATIONS© BACHRACHBY EMILY MAKOWSKIA Woman of Firsts, Early 20th Century
A
s a child growing up in Colorado,
Illinois, and Vermont in the late
19th century, Florence Sabin
lacked musical talent—but that ended
up being a good thing. After a classmate
told her that her piano-playing ability was
“merely average,” Sabin gave up on her
dream of becoming a pianist and started
to study science. What followed was a
long and illustrious career that spawned
landmark discoveries and helped inspire
women in STEM at a time when they faced
many challenges.
After graduating in 1900 from Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine, Sabin
became the first woman appointed to
the faculty of the university in 1903,
specializing in anatomy and physiology.
It was 17 years, however, before she was
promoted to the rank of full professor.
Later, she became the first woman to head
a department at Rockefeller University
(then the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research). She was also the first woman
president of the American Association of
Anatomists and the first woman elected to
the National Academy of Sciences.
She took a special interest in
embryology and developmental biology,
an emerging field of study at the time.
Sabin’s 1901 book,An Atlas of the Medulla
and Midbrain, a detailed account of the
structure of the brainstem of a newborn
infant, became an important reference
work for developmental biologists. “She
had unbounded curiosity and a deep
love for research,” retired historian
Patricia Rosof, formerly an adjunct
instructor at New York University and
the Fashion Institute of Technology, tells
The Scientist. “She pursued her goals
relentlessly and had an independence of
approach and spirit.”
At Johns Hopkins, Sabin showed that
mammalian embryos’ lymphatic vessels
grow from veins out into surrounding
tissues, in contrast to the then–commonly
accepted belief among researchers that thevessels’ development occurred the other
way around. After accepting a position
at Rockefeller, she studied how white
blood cells attack tuberculosis bacteria
(Mycobacterium tuberculosis). Sabin
retired from research in 1938 and moved
back to Colorado. She became a public-
health activist in Denver, and in the late
1940s, helped launch a TB prevention
and screening campaign that lowered
the incidence of the disease in the city by
almost half in two years. She died in 1953,
at the age of 81.
Sabin’s accomplishments are all the
more notable considering the obstacles
women faced in science during this time.Although medical schools had started to
admit women, their enrollment numbers
were limited so as not to deter men, and
research funding opportunities for women
were scarce. “I hope my studies may be an
encouragement to other women, especially
to young women, to devote their lives to
the larger interests of the mind,” Sabin said
after receiving an achievement award from
the women’s magazine Pictorial Review
in 1929. She had the intended effect on at
least some of her contemporaries. “Your
great work has been an inspiration not
only to women in medicine, but to women
in all walks of life,” Helen Keller wrote to
Sabin in a 1922 letter. ga child growing up in Colorado,
Illinois, and Vermont in the late
19th century, Florence Sabin
lacked musical talent—but that ended
up being a good thing. After a classmate
told her that her piano-playing ability was
n her
dream of becoming a pianist and started
to study science. What followed was a
long and illustrious career that spawned
landmark discoveries and helped inspire
women in STEM at a time when they facedAfter graduating in 1900 from Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine, Sabin
became the first woman appointed to
the faculty of the university in 1903,
specializing in anatomy and physiology.
It was 17 years, however, before she was
promoted to the rank of full professor.
Later, she became the first woman to head
a department at Rockefeller University
(then the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research). She was also the first woman
president of the American Association of
Anatomists and the first woman elected toShe took a special interest in
embryology and developmental biology, PEEP THIS: Sabin at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), where she worked from 1925–1938.^
During her time in New York, Sabin raised money for women in science, including $10,000 (more than $183,000
in today’s dollars) for a scholarship in advanced mathematics that was established at Bryn Mawr College in 1936.