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Stephenson’s Personality

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Book cover Holding Hands with Bacteria

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Abstract

Stephenson’s scientific achievements have already been treated in detail, but her personal qualities only marginally, though the attentive reader could already get some impression of her exceptional individuality. To write about Stephenson’s personality is not a simple task. There exist no interviews with Stephenson we know about and she evidently did not like to talk about herself. Therefore, her individual portrait assembled from the fragments of correspondence, personal memories of her collaborators, and various archival documents will only look like an incomplete mosaic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stephenson had been mentor of the biochemistry student Audrey Jane Pinsent (Gibson) (1924–2008) who graduated in 1946. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 1949 at the Lister Institute, worked with Elsden in Sheffield where she met and married the biochemist Quentin Gibson. Jane and Quentin spent most of their lives at Cornell University (New York, USA), see [3].

  2. 2.

    The collection of Stephenson’s letters to Elsden is kept at Newnham College Archives. Valuable are Elsden’s hand-written notes to each letter which comment the circumstances and people mentioned in the letters [7].

  3. 3.

    Muriel Robertson (1883–1973), British protozoologist and bacteriologist, worked at the Lister Institute. Cooperated with Stephenson during WW2 and wrote Stephenson’s official obituary published by the Royal Society [13].

  4. 4.

    Agricultural Research Council.

  5. 5.

    Chester H. Werkman (1893–1962) American microbiologist from the Iowa State University specializing in physiological and chemical microbiology.

  6. 6.

    Ernest F. Gale.

  7. 7.

    Elsden’s commentary: “Following Sir Joseph Barcroft’s death I did raise the question of coming back from the U.S.” [7] J. Barcroft (1872–1947) was British physiologist, since 1941 head of the animal physiology unit of the Agricultural Research Council in Cambridge (Dunn). Elsden apparently aspired to his position.

  8. 8.

    Agricultural Research Council.

  9. 9.

    Cornelius B. Van Niel (1897–1985), American Dutch microbiologist with whom Elsden worked in the US.

  10. 10.

    Elsden commented Stephenson’s criticism of his lecture in the following way: “A beautiful example of M.S. at her [?] forthright. I had delivered an appalling lecture to the Biochemical Society Symposium on Chromatography and wrote to agree with her” [7, p. 9].

  11. 11.

    Ernest Gale.

  12. 12.

    Latin expression which means “much in little”.

  13. 13.

    Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994), chemist and crystallographer, confirmed the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12. She was awarded Nobel Prize in 1964 “for her determination by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances”.

  14. 14.

    Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), American geneticist, Nobel Prize winner (1983), whose life and work was brilliantly elaborated by Keller [15].

  15. 15.

    See Chap. 8.

  16. 16.

    According to Cope, Stephenson lived in Latham Road from 1934. She was able to build the house thanks to the inheritance from her father who died in 1929 [18].

  17. 17.

    Surgical removal of breast.

  18. 18.

    We can only deduce this from Elsden’s remark to Stephenson’s letter dated 15 October 1948 [7, p. 8].

  19. 19.

    Cope [17] mentions among the personalities who came to pay tribute to Stephenson, for instance, Sir Alexander Fleming; Sir Edward Mellanby, Secretary of the MRC; Charles Raven, Master of Christ’s College; Dame Myra Curtis, Principal of Newnham College; representatives of the Society for General Microbiology as well as many research institutes and academy departments with which Stephenson had connection. Documents related to the Memorial Service are kept at the Newnham College Roll Office, File on M. Stephenson.

References

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  1. Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic

    Soňa Štrbáňová

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Štrbáňová, S. (2016). Stephenson’s Personality. In: Holding Hands with Bacteria. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49736-4_8

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