Ruth Hubbard - Biography

Biography

Hubbard was born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria and escaped Nazism as a teenager. With her family, she moved to the Boston area and she became a biologist. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, earning an A.B. degree in biochemical sciences. She was married tp Frank Hubbard from 1942 to 1951.

As a research fellow at Harvard in the years after World War II, she worked under George Wald, investigating the biochemistry of retinal and retinol. Wald shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his discoveries about how the eye works. She received a Ph.D. in biology from Radcliffe in 1950, and in 1952, a Guggenheim fellowship at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark.

During her active research career from the 1940s to the 1960s, she made important contributions to the understanding of the biochemistry and photochemistry of vision in vertebrates and invertebrates. In 1967, she and Wald shared the Paul Karrer Medal for their work in this area.

She and Wald married in 1958. Hubbard and Wald became the parents of two children: a son, musician and music historian Elijah Wald, and a daughter, Deborah Wald. She also has two grandchildren.

Read more about this topic:  Ruth Hubbard

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)