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Addition to Lead: Katharine Foot

Article: Katharine Foot

Katharine Foot (1852-1944), was an American Cytologist who conducted research with her laboratory partner, Ella Church Strobell.

There is little information about Foot's early life except for the fact that she was born in Geneva, New York. The collected their findings in a book called, Cytological Studies, 1894-1917. Foot was part of the Marine Biological Laboratory until 1921.

[I plan to find more information in the American Men of Science book because it is not cited as a source yet and I think it would contribute more to the article. I also plan to look more into the "Ladies in the Laboratory?" book to add to the information present because it is already cited. I also think it will be good to find a picture of Katharine Foot to add to the article.]

Proposed Biography

The first edition of American Men of Science described her being educated through private schools while growing up.

She went on to study at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts when she was 40 years old.

The Advancement of Women club included the prominent member Alice Fletcher, the American Indian ethnographer. Foot became interested in Indian peoples, and became president of the Washington auxiliary of the Women's National Indian Association in the mid 1800s. She accompanied Fletcher on a trip to Alaska to investigate Indians in the area. Their opportunities for communicating with Indians did not work out as planned. In 1890s Foot was a resident of Evanston, Illinois where she resided with Orrington Lunt, a founder of Northwestern University in Evanston.

Foot lived in London for a period in the 1930s, but moved to the United States by the time of the Second World War. She died in 1944, and her last address showed her residing in Camden, South Carolina.

Proposed Career

After her first six weeks in a course on invertebrates in Woods Hole, Charles Ottis Whitman delegated her to work on the maturation and fertilization of the egg of the earthworm, Allolobophera foetida. She wrote a paper on the subject that appeared in the Journal of Morphology in 1894. In 1896 she was the first woman to give a lecture at the Woods Hole Laboratory. Her lecture was titled "The centrosomes of the fertilized egg of Allolobophera foetida". Ella Strobell joined Foot as her assistant in 1897. In 1899 Strobell's name started to appear as a coauthor of Foot's papers. The photomicrographs that illustrated their papers showed a detailed record of the stages in the development of fertilized eggs of the earthworm. This was a significant technical advance of the time. Between 1906 and 1913 the two researched certain stages of chromosomal development of squash bugs. This was believed to be done in a Laboratory of their own in New York City. Foot and Strobell conducted debates on the role of chromosomes in transmitting definite units of hereditary information such as sex-linked characteristics. They defended their position against T.H. Morgan. In 1914 Foot and Strobell went to England to continue their research under Harry Eltringham of New College Oxford. Their research stopped in 1917 when Strobell became ill.

Foot developed new techniques for preparing samples that could be viewed under microscopes, and found new ways to use photography in cytological studies.

Proposed Sources

Women in the Scientific Search; An American Bio-bibliography 1724-1979

Patricia Joan Siegel and Kay Thomas Finley

• American Men of Science, 1906-1921
• Lillie, Frank R. The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory

Women of Science: Righting the Record

Edited by G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes

• Pg. 227-230

Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900.

Creese

"Nasa Ponds" taken during ICESCAPES expedition in the arctic.

Article Evaluation

Photosystem II

Everything in this article is related to the article's topic. There wasn't much that distracted me except not being clear on a few of the terms. For instance, it would be nice if the article went into a little more detail on the protein subunits. This article is very factual so it remains neutral without much bias if any. The Oxygen Evolving Center (OEC) on Photosystem II seems to be overrepresented compared to the other coenzymes/cofactors but it makes sense because it is the most important part of the molecule. It would be nice if there were a bit more information on the other coenzymes/cofactors though. The links work and the scholarly journals that they are linked to accurately reflect on the Wikipedia article. Each fact is referenced with a reliable source. The sources are all scholarly journals, and there may be some bias in the scholarly journals but there does not seem to be in the Wikipedia article. The editors of the article did a good job of just bringing forth the facts and leaving out the unnecessary information. Some of the sources are from the late 1960s and 70s, but most are from the early to middle 2000s so I would say that the majority of sources are not out of date. I noticed that there is some key points about the OEC that are missing. For instance, the article does not state that it is usually found in two places in Photosystem II. It also does not say anything about why this is the case. In the Talk page of the article there are comments about what needs to be fixed in it. Particularly about the Water Splitting section of the article. There are suggestions by people on how to properly show the mechanism to improve it. The article is rated C-Class with a mid to high importance. It is part of WikiProject Biology and WikiProject Plants. The way Wikipedia talks about the topic is more complicated than they way we have talked about it in class. Someone reading this article must already know a little bit about the molecule, but we are trying to break the molecule down to its simplistic terms.