Maud slye biography of donald

Details

1.25 linear ft

This collection is arranged by size and then alphabetically

1934-1936

Maud Slye papers (approximately 1.25 linear feet) contain two books written by Dr. Slye and some newspaper articles about her scientific research as well as a framed portrait of her

Includes a framed portrait

The collection is open to the public and is available for viewing during the hours that the Medical Heritage Center is open to the public or by appointment. Materials do not circulate and must be used in the supervised reading room. Restrictions, including copyright, may exist and some materials may be too fragile to photocopy or digitize. The MHC charges for duplication services, which must be performed by staff

[Identification of item], Maud Slye papers, Spec.199834.Slye, John A. Prior Health Sciences Library, Medical Heritage Center, The Ohio State University

The records are in English

Finding aid available in the library and online

Related Resources

Connect to finding aid: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/archives/ead/OhCoMHC0025

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Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1879, Maud didn't initially set out to answer the question 'is cancer inherited?' In fact, she almost didn’t even make it through her undergraduate science degree at all.

At the time, few scholarships were available for women, and her family couldn’t afford to pay for her to go to university.  So as a student, she combined a full academic load with working long hours to pay for her tuition and board. It eventually led her to the point of a nervous breakdown, and she had to take a break from her studies to recover. 

When she eventually made it through her degree, she found a job as a psychology teacher - work that introduced her to the fields of genetics and psychiatry. The topics fascinated her, and in 1908 she ditched the teaching gig and took up a position as a graduate assistant with Charles Whitman, Professor of Zoology at the University of Chicago. 

Drawing on her experience in psychiatric problems and her growing interest in genetics, she decided to investigate the inheritance of so-called ‘nervous abnormalities’.

She chose Japanese waltzing mice for her study - animals with an inherited neurological disorder that causes them to whirl and spin in circles like dancers - planning to cross-breed them with regular white mice and observe the results. Her experiment was a bit like what Mendel did with his peas, but with dancing mice instead of coloured flowers. 

She purchased the mice with her own money, including buying several from Massachusetts mouse breeder Abbie Lathrop, the ‘mother of all mice’, who we talked about in episode 7 of our first series, Supermodels of science.

Maud’s project had no funding for an assistant or expenses, so she worked 18 hours a day caring for hundreds of mice.

 She also had to paid for their bedding straw and grain with her meagre stipend, often going without food herself. Outside of the laboratory, Maud was a keen poet

American pathologist

Maud Caroline Slye (February 8, 1879 – September 17, 1954) was an American pathologist who was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A historian of women and science wrote that Slye "'invented' genetically uniform mice as a research tool." Her work focused on the heritability of cancer in mice. She was also an advocate for the comprehensive archiving of human medical records, believing that proper mate selection would help eradicate cancer. During her career, she received multiple awards and honors, including the gold medal of the American Medical Association in 1914, the Ricketts Prize in 1915, and the gold medal of the American Radiological Society in 1922. In 1923, Albert Soiland, a pioneer radiologist, nominated Maud Slye, a cancer pathologist for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The nomination came as a result of her work as one of the first scientists to suggest that cancer can be an inherited disease, and for the development of new procedures for the care and breeding of lab mice.

Education and career

Slye received her undergraduate training at the University of Chicago and Brown University. While at the University of Chicago, she supported herself as a secretary for University President William Rainey Harper. After a breakdown, she completed her studies at Brown in 1899. After teaching, she began her postgraduate work in 1908 at the University of Chicago, performing neurologicalexperiments on mice. She would remain at the University of Chicago for the rest of her career. After hearing of a cluster of cattle cancers at a nearby stockyard, she changed the focus of her research to cancer. Slye raised—and kept pedigrees for—150,000 mice during her career. On 5 May 1913, she first presented a paper before the American Society for Cancer Research regarding the work on general problems in heredity, carried on at the University of Chicago in the Department of Zoology.^[3]