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About Her Life
As a faculty member of the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, Maud Menten (1879–1960) cut a striking figure—a tiny woman, driving somewhat erratically, in a Model T Ford. She was an avid mountain climber, went on several expeditions to the Arctic, loved to paint, played the clarinet, and spoke half a dozen languages, including at least one Native American tongue.
Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario, and raised in rural British Columbia. She completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto in natural science and English before enrolling in medical school there. In the course of her medical schooling, she held a scholarship at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City and showed her promise as a researcher with a study of a transplantable tumor. In 1911 Menten completed her M.D. at the University of Toronto—one of the first such degrees awarded to a Canadian woman. Then she was off to Berlin, Germany, to work with Leonor Michaelis.
Michaelis was an M.D. similarly interested in doing fundamental research on the chemistry of the body’s processes, particularly on enzymes, or molecules in the body that spur other molecules into action. He and a chemist friend had set up a small research laboratory in one of the hospitals operated by the city of Berlin. Despite its modest facilities, over the 15 years of its existence, more than 40 young researchers came there to work with Michaelis.
When Michaelis and Menten started to work, it was already known that each enzyme in our bodies acts on a very specific chemical compound (substrate) to change it into something else—“like a key in a lock” said chemist Emil Fischer. And like a key, at the end of the process, the enzyme is intact, ready for more work. Michaelis and Menten were able to demonstrate that each enzyme, given enough substrate, has its own rate of causing that substrate to undergo chemical change. This information turns out to be very important in designing drugs that can inhibit enzymatic reactions that produce substances like cholesterol, which in excess can be harmful to the body.
When Menten returned from Berlin, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1916. Unable to find an academic position in her native Canada, in 1918 she joined the medical school faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, while also serving as a clinical pathologist at the city’s children’s hospital. Despite the demands of these two positions, Menten maintained an active research program, authoring and coauthoring more than 70 publications, including discoveries related to blood sugar, hemoglobin, and kidney functions.
While Menten’s promotion from assistant to associate professor at the medical school occurred in a timely fashion, she was not made a full professor until 1948, when she was 70 years old and within one year of retirement. In so-called retirement she returned to British Columbia to do research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute almost until her death.
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