Hildegard Lamfrom

Hildegard Lamfrom , also Hildegarde Lamfrom , née Hildegard Lammfromm (born June 19, 1922 in Germany , † August 28, 1984 in La Jolla ) was a German-American molecular biologist.

Live and act

Lamfrom emigrated with her parents from Germany in 1938 while fleeing the persecution of the Jews by the National Socialists. They moved to Portland, Oregon . She studied at Reed College , during World War II she financed her studies at times by working as a welder in shipyards. After graduating from Oregon State University with a Masters degree , she wanted to study medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but then switched to biochemistry. Under Harry Goldblatt she was involved in the work on the characterization of the renin system. She received her PhD in 1949 and followed Goldblatt to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles .

From 1955 to 1958 she was with Kaj Ulrik Linderstrøm-Lang at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen with a scholarship from the American Heart Association . In 1958 she began her fundamental research in molecular biology in Henry Borsook's laboratory at Caltech . From 1962 to 1965 she was at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner and then until 1967 at the Institut Physico-Chimique in Paris. She then went to the University of Oregon , where she began working with her close friend Anand Sarabhai , and from 1970 to the University of California, San Diego , where she did research on t-RNA synthesis with Sarabhai and John Abelson . In the 1970s she spent a long time with Sarabhai in India, where they founded a bio center in Ahmedabad . Most recently, she conducted research with Tom Benjamin at Harvard Medical School on the middle t antigen of polyomaviruses in the experimental induction of cancer. She died of a brain tumor.

At the end of the 1950s she was involved in the elucidation of the mechanisms of protein synthesis in cells and developed one of the first in vitro systems for studying them ( reticulocytes , with Richard Schweet). In it, she provided some of the earliest evidence for messenger RNA and the existence of polyribosomes .

In India she arranged contacts between American artists such as Roy Lichtenstein , Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella and Indian artists. Abelson emphasizes in his obituary her successes and her commitment as a mentor to young scientists and her persistence in carrying out experiments.

In his autobiography, Feynman describes a collaboration with Hildegard Lamfrom at Caltech that failed from Richard Feynman's point of view due to his own mistakes .

She was the sister of Gert Boyle .

Fonts

• with Richard Schweet, Esther Allen: The Synthesis of Hemoglobin in a cell-free system, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 44, 1958, 1029
• with DP Nierlich, A. Sarabhai, J. Abelson: Synthesis of tRNA in Cell-free Extracts, Nature, Volume 246, 1972, p. 11, abstract
• with DP Nierlich, A. Sarabhai, J. Abelson: Transfer RNA synthesis in vitro, Proc. Nat. Acad. USA, Vol. 70, 1973, pp. 179-182

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hildegard Lamfrom on deathfigures.com

Web links

• Obituary by John Abelson, CSHL Archives