Marjory Stephenson

Marjory Stephenson
Born	(1885-01-24)24 January 1885 Burwell, Cambridgeshire, England
Died	12 December 1948(1948-12-12) (aged 63) Cambridge, England
Alma mater	Newnham College, Cambridge
Known for	Bacterial metabolism
Scientific career
Fields	Biochemistry, Microbiology
Institutions	University College London University of Cambridge

Marjory Stephenson, MBE, FRS (24 January 1885 - 12 December 1948) was a British biochemist. She was one of the first two women (the other being Kathleen Lonsdale) elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945.

She was the author of the textbook Bacterial Metabolism, and the second president of the Society for General Microbiology. The Marjory Stephenson Memorial Lecture (now the Marjory Stephenson Prize Lecture), was established in 1953 in her memory. This is the Society's principal prize, awarded biennially for an outstanding contribution of current importance in microbiology.

Childhood and education

Stephenson grew up in Burwell, a village on the edge of the Fens in Cambridgeshire, between Newmarket and Cambridge and came from horseracing stock. Her father Robert (1847-1929) was a farmer, surveyor and owner of a cement-manufacturing company and her mother was Sarah Rogers (1848-1925), daughter of Samuel Rogers of Newmarket. Robert Stephenson was a prominent figure in the local community, being a Justice of the Peace and then Deputy Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and a chairman of the County Council and he employed many local people in his cement works. Both Stephenson's grandfathers, Robert Matthew Stephenson (-1870) and Samuel Rogers were racehorse trainers in Newmarket and Samuel Rogers been a jockey before becoming a trainer.

Stephenson was the youngest of the family by nine years. She was first inspired to take an interest in science by her governess Anna Jane Botwright, a carpenter's daughter from Bungay (who would go on to marry a solicitor and call one of her daughters Marjory). Stephenson later went to Berkhamsted School for Girls in Hertfordshire. In 1903 she went to Newnham College, Cambridge. One of Stephenson's sisters, Alice Mary, had studied history at Newnham College (she became headteacher of Francis Holland School in London), and a brother, Robert, was a graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Stephenson read Natural Sciences, taking courses in chemistry, physiology and zoology. At this time women were still excluded from Cambridge University's chemistry and zoology laboratories; Newnham College had its own chemistry laboratory and women attended biology practicals in the Balfour Laboratory.

Early career and war service

Stephenson's original plan had been to study medicine after graduating, but her plans were changed and she became a domestic science teacher, first at Gloucester County Training College and then at King's College of Household Science, London. In London she shared a flat with historian Myra Curtis, who was later Principal of Newnham College. But Stephenson did not find domestic science fulfilling and she was grateful when Robert Plimmer, co-founder of the Biochemical Club (later Society), invited her to become a researcher in his laboratory at University College London. Here she investigated fat metabolism, and also taught nutrition. She was awarded a Beit Memorial Fellowship in 1913, but her work was interrupted by the First World War.

Stephenson joined the Red Cross and ran hospital kitchens in France; later she became a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) commandant in Salonika. She was mentioned in despatches, and at the end of the war she made an Associate of the Royal Red Cross and was awarded the MBE for her service. Her war-time experience left her a pacifist and she would later be an active member of the Cambridge Scientists Anti-war Group.

Research at Cambridge

After the end of the war, Stephenson returned to Cambridge to carry out research and teach in the department of biochemistry which was under the leadership of Frederick Gowland Hopkins, in a grouping of scientists under Hopkins who were the centre of modern biochemical studies and it was here that she turned her research attention to bacteria and their metabolism. The department had an unusually high proportion of women amongst its researchers (15 per cent) but it was still very rare for a woman to be offered a University appointment and Stephenson was financed by her Beit Fellowship and later by the Medical Research Council, finally being appointed a University lecturer in biochemistry in 1943. Meanwhile she became an associate and later a fellow of her old College, Newnham, and in 1936 the University awarded her an ScD degree for her research.

Stephenson's main area of research was bacterial metabolism. With Margaret Whetham and Juda Quastel she developed the washed suspension technique, which had originated with Louis Pasteur, for extracting enzymes from bacteria. With Leonard Stickland she was the first to isolate a bacterial enzyme from the cell in 1928 when they obtained lactic dehydrogenase from Escherichia coli. In the 1930s she continued to work with Strickland and was able to demonstrate that a particular enzyme, formate hydrogenlyase, was only present in cell extracts when the bacteria had been grown in the presence of formate, which was one of the first examples of 'adaptive enzymes' (we know understand this as the rapid transcriptional activation of the gene encoding the formate hydrogenlyase when the inducer molecule, formate, is added to the culture). Later in the 1930s she worked with Ernest Gale on enzyme adaptation and later amino acid metabolism and then with Arthur Trim on metabolic studies of nucleic acids.

During her time at the laboratory Stephenson produced, as author or co-author, over twenty papers. She is most widely remembered for her seminal book, Bacterial Metabolism, which ran to three editions between 1930 and 1949 and was last reprinted in 1966 and was the standard work on the subject for generations of microbiologists and biochemists.

Royal Society

In 1902 Hertha Ayrton was the first woman to be proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society but was rejected because the Society's lawyers successfully argued that it was impossible for a woman to be a Fellow. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 and a Privy Council ruling on the legal status of women in 1929 rendered these arguments obsolete, but it was not until 1943 that, spurred to action by a critical article in the Daily Worker by Jack Haldane, the Royal Society considered accepting women as Fellows. Stephenson was proposed by Charles Harington, and, after a ballot in which a large majority of Fellows voted to accept women, she was duly elected in 1945 together with Kathleen Lonsdale.

During the World War II, Stephenson served on the Toxin Committee. She was one of the founders of the Society for General Microbiology and became its second president in 1947. After the war the Rockefeller Foundation and the Medical Research Council funded a new laboratory at Cambridge (known as the "Bug Hut") to which she moved and in 1947. She was also influencial in improving teaching of microbial biochemistry and helped setup a special Part II Biochemistry (Microbial) in Cambridge in the same year. Also in 1947 she was finally recognised by the University for her many years of service and they appointed her as the first Reader in Chemical Microbiology. Sadly she died of cancer on the 12th of December 1948 only a year after her final recognition by the University to appoint her to a permenant position.

In the words of her biographer: "She made her way in science by pioneering her own field, and her life was her work and her friends." She also found time to do gardening and to travel, visiting the United States and the USSR in 1930s. The Society for General Microbiology established the Marjory Stephenson biennial memorial lecture in 1953.

External links

• Newnham College – Newnham Biographies – Marjory Stephenson (1885 - 1948)
• Early women biochemists 1911-1939. People: Marjory Stephenson (1885-1948) A biography from the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick

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