New endowed chair honors pioneering woman who ‘brought the fireworks’ to molecular biology

“On the night he learned he’d won the 1962 Nobel Prize, legend has it that DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick threw himself quite a party: angry neighbors, cops, the works. One of the guests, it seems, had brought a large supply of fireworks to the event, and the ensuing late-night mayhem was rocking the sleepy streets of Cambridge. That guest was Hildegard Lamfrom, an American biochemist from California Institute of Technology, who was working with Crick and several other future Nobel laureates at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Lamfrom was known for her love of a lively party, but she was better known during the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of the sharpest, most tenacious bench scientists in the burgeoning field of molecular biology.” This article is no longer available from the source website: Oregon Health & Science University, 30 April 2010