Helen Dean King
Helen Dean King | |
---|---|
Born | September 27, 1869 Owego, New York |
Died | March 7, 1955 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Vassar College Bryn Mawr College |
Occupation | Biologist |
Helen Dean King (September 27, 1869 – March 7, 1955) was an American biologist. She was involved in breeding the Wistar lab rat, a strain of rats genetically homogeneous albinos intended for use in biological and medical research.
Life and work
Born at Owego, New York, she graduated from Vassar College in 1892, and in 1899 she received her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, with a thesis supervised by embryologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. She had majored in morphology. She remained at the College after graduation as a fellow and student assistant in biology from 1897 to 1904.[1]
King taught physiology at Miss Baldwin's School, Bryn Mawr, from 1899 to 1907, was research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 1906–08, and served as an assistant in anatomy in 1908-09. After 1909, she worked at the Wistar Institute, for more than 40 years, first as an assistant and eventually becoming professor of embryology in 1927 and remaining there until her retirement in 1949.[1]
She was also an assistant at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Her investigations dealt largely with problems of sex determination.[2]
King served as vice president of the
King participated in breeding the
She died at age 85 on March 7, 1955, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[1]
Research
King's scientific research largely focused on studies of inbred rats, and she was particularly interested in human issues while using for this purpose data from meticulous experiments on laboratory rats. Through inbreeding, her rats were almost homozygous to each other, which facilitated research. In later years, she moved her focus to pursue research on gray Norway rats.[1]
Awards
- Ellen Richards Research Prize of the Association to Aid Scientific Research for Women (1932)
Selected publications
- King, Helen Dean. "On the weight of the albino rat at birth and the factors that influence it." The Anatomical Record 9, no. 3 (1915): 213-231.
- King, Helen Dean. "Studies on inbreeding. I. The effects in inbreeding on the growth and variability in the body weight of the albino rat." Journal of Experimental Zoology 26, no. 1 (1918): 1-54.
- King, Helen Dean, and Henry Herbert Donaldson. "Life processes and size of the body and organs of the gray Norway rat during ten generations in captivity." American Anatomical Memoirs (1929).
- King, Helen Dean. "Life processes in gray Norway rats during fourteen years in captivity." American Anatomical Memoirs (1939).
References
- ^ a b c d Ogilvie, M. B., & Harvey, J. D. (2000). The biographical dictionary of women in science: Pioneering lives from ancient times to the mid-20th century. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-92038-4
- ^ Colby, Frank Moore; Williams, Talcott, eds. (1915). "King, Helen Dean". New International Encyclopedia. Vol. 13 (2nd ed.). Dodd, Mead. p. 240.
- ISBN 978-0-262-65038-0.
- JSTOR 1382670.
- S2CID 12428625.
- S2CID 19971700.
- PMID 11619935. Archived from the originalon 2006-12-16.
External links
- Works by or about Helen Dean King at Internet Archive
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the New International Encyclopedia(2nd ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.