The Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole) and the scientific advancement of women in the early 20th century: the example of Mary Jane Hogue (1883-1962)

Collaboration, Gender, and Leadership at the Minnesota Seaside Station, 1901-1907

Mentorship and collaboration necessarily shaped opportunities for women in science, especially in the late nineteenth century at rapidly expanding public co-educational universities. A few male faculty made space for women to establish their own research programs and professional identities. At the University of Minnesota, botanist Conway MacMillan, an ambitious young department chair, provided a qualified mentorship to Josephine Tilden. He encouraged her research on algae and relied on her to do departmental support tasks even as he persuaded the administration to move her from instructor to assistant professor in 1903. Resulting publications on Minnesota algae led her to look further west, first at Yellowstone National Park and then along the Pacific Northwest coast. After visiting a particularly productive littoral site on Vancouver Island, she suggested that they establish a Minnesota Seaside Station there. Over its seven years in operation under the Midwestern leaders, that location proved remarkably productive. At the remote site, the two operated within their typical but not inevitable gendered roles and deliberately defined their seaside station as unconventional. They expected participants to study productively and, at the same time, find imaginative ways to enjoy nature at a place far from urban amenities. Gendered expectations remained casual as participants moved both within and against them. This study investigates how, in the early twentieth century, the role and expectations of mentorship shifted as Tilden established her own independent research agenda. The Minnesota Seaside Station, in particular, proved significant in developing the leadership skills essential for her to pursue research in the Pacific region at a time when American expansionism and indigenous cooperation made sites accessible to academic researchers.

Leaving the Academic Niche-Rhoda Erdmann (1870-1935) and the Democratization of Tissue Culture Research

In the years after Ross Harrison published his pivotal paper on nerve fiber regeneration in 1907, researchers following his line of research presented tissue culture techniques as an extremely sensitive, difficult, and almost occult methodology. When Philip R. White published a manual on tissue culturing in 1954, he declared that he wanted to disenchant this formerly mystified field of study. With a similar aim Rhoda Erdmann had published a comparable manual more than 30 years before in 1922. Her intention was to offer a book that would make the method "a common property of those who want to do biological research in the future." When science was about to move from little science to big science, Erdmann tried to democratize tissue culture knowledge. Rhoda Erdmann was in many aspects an extraordinary scholar deviating from the norm. She was one of the few women in the field, working as a low-level assistant at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin before she took the opportunity to work as a research fellow with Ross Harrison in Yale. She was imprisoned during the First World War on the accusation of being a German spy. After she could return to Germany in 1919, she established a laboratory for experimental cell research in Berlin. In 1929 she was one of the first women to be appointed a professor in Germany. The paper focuses Erdmann's attempts at distributing practical tissue culturing knowledge. Based on her and other scholars' research work on nutrient media for cell cultures, and the attempts to optimize these basic tools for different species, this contribution examines the hypothesis that this work constituted an academic niche for underprivileged scientists. The paper analyzes whether Erdmann, due to her extraordinary characteristics, had to use certain niches in the academic world (topics, places, techniques, communities) to pursue her research, and whether her attempts at democratizing her techniques can also be read as an attempt to move out of the niche to gain academic recognition.

Mary Jane Hogue (1883-1962): A pioneer in human brain tissue culture

The ability to maintain human brain explants in tissue culture was a critical step in the use of these cells for the study of central nervous system disorders. Ross G. Harrison (1870-1959) was the first to successfully maintain frog medullary tissue in culture in 1907, but it took another 38 years before successful culture of human brain tissue was accomplished. One of the pioneers in this achievement was Mary Jane Hogue (1883-1962). Hogue was born into a Quaker family in 1883 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and received her undergraduate degree from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Research with the developmental biologist Theodor Boveri (1862-1915) in Würzburg, Germany, resulted in her Ph.D. (1909). Hogue transitioned from studying protozoa to the culture of human brain tissue in the 1940s and 1950s, when she was one of the first to culture cells from human fetal, infant, and adult brain explants. We review Hogue's pioneering contributions to the study of human brain cells in culture, her putative identification of progenitor neuroblast and/or glioblast cells, and her use of the cultures to study the cytopathogenic effects of poliovirus. We also put Hogue's work in perspective by discussing how other women pioneers in tissue culture influenced Hogue and her research.