Maud Menten

Maud Menten
Born(1879-03-20)March 20, 1879
Port Lambton, Ontario, Canada
DiedJuly 17, 1960(1960-07-17) (aged 81)
Leamington, Ontario, Canada
Alma materUniversity of Toronto
Known forMichaelis-Menten equation, inventing the azo-dye coupling reaction, electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin proteins, contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry
Scientific career
Institutions
Thesis The Alkalinity of the Blood in Malignancy and Other Pathological Conditions; Together with Observations on the Relation of the Alkalinity of the Blood to Barometric Pressure  (1916)

Maud Leonora Menten (March 20, 1879 – July 17, 1960)[1] was a Canadian physician and chemist. As a bio-medical and medical researcher, she made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry, and invented a procedure that remains in use. She is primarily known for her work with Leonor Michaelis on enzyme kinetics in 1913.[2] The paper has been translated from its written language of German into English.[3][4]

Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario and studied medicine at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1904, M.B. 1907, M.D. 1911). She was among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate.[1]

Since women were not allowed to participate in research in Canada at the time, Menten looked elsewhere to continue her work. In 1912, she moved to Berlin where she worked with Leonor Michaelis and co-authored their paper in Biochemische Zeitschrift,[2] demonstrating that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex. This relationship between reaction rate and enzyme–substrate concentration is known as the Michaelis–Menten equation.

After working with Michaelis in Germany she entered graduate school at the University of Chicago where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1916.[5] Her dissertation was entitled "The Alkalinity of the Blood in Malignancy and Other Pathological Conditions; Together with Observations on the Relation of the Alkalinity of the Blood to Barometric Pressure".

Menten joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1923 and remained there until her retirement in 1950.[6] She became an assistant professor and then an associate professor in the School of Medicine and was the head of pathology at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Her final promotion to full professor, in 1948, was at the age of 69 in the last year of her career.[5][7] Her final academic post was as a research fellow at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute.

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Can Med Hall Fame was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b Michaelis, L.; Menten, M. L. (1913). "Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung" [The kinetics of invertin action]. Biochemische Zeitschrift. 49 (17): 333–369.
  3. ^ Michaelis, L.; Menten, M. L. (2013). "The kinetics of invertin action". FEBS Lett. 587 (17). Translated by Boyde, T.R.C: 2712–2720. doi:10.1016/j.febslet.2013.07.015. PMID 23867202.
  4. ^ Johnson, Kenneth A.; Goody, Roger S. (2011). "The Original Michaelis Constant: Translation of the 1913 Michaelis–Menten Paper". Biochemistry. 50 (39): 8264–8269. doi:10.1021/bi201284u. PMC 3381512. PMID 21888353.
  5. ^ a b "Leonor Michaelis and Maud Menten". Science History Institute. June 2016. Retrieved March 20, 2018.
  6. ^ Menten, M. (1919). "A Study of the Oxidase Reaction with α-Naphthol and Paraphenylenediamine". The Journal of Medical Research. 40 (3): 433–458.3. PMC 2104435. PMID 19972493.
  7. ^ Skloot, Rebecca (October 2000). "Some called her Miss Menten" (PDF). University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine magazine. Retrieved October 14, 2014.