Alma Howard
| Alma Howard | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 23, 1913 |
| Died | April 1, 1984 (aged 70) Sutton, London Liver cancer |
| Resting place | Pine Hill Cemetery, Magog, Stanstead, Quebec 45°16′41″N 72°08′51″W / 45.27800°N 72.14757°WCoordinates: 45°16′41″N 72°08′51″W / 45.27800°N 72.14757°W |
| Other names | Alma Howard Rolleston Ebert |
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| Citizenship | British |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Fields | Radiobiology |
| Institutions | |
| Patrons | Louis Harold Gray |
| Education | BSc, PhD |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Thesis | The correlation between chromosome behaviour and susceptibility to mammary gland cancer in mice (1938) |
| Doctoral advisor | Charles Leonard Huskins |
| Known for | Co-creator of the concept and nomenclature of the cell cycle |
| Influenced | |
| Spouse |
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Alma Clavering Howard Rolleston Ebert (23 October 1913 – 1 April 1984) was a Canadian-born English radiobiologist. She was Joint Editor for many years of the International Journal of Radiation Biology and Deputy Director of the Paterson Laboratories in Manchester. She made a "fundamental contribution to cell biology" in collaboration with physicist Stephen Pelc when they "were the first to ascribe a timeframe to cellular life," creating the concept of the cell cycle. Their nomenclature for the stages of cell replication is used universally and appears in every textbook of biology and pathology.
She married twice after the start of her career but published, and was generally known in the scientific community, under her maiden name.
Alma Clavering Howard was born in Montréal on 23 October 1913, the fourth and youngest child of barrister Eratus Edwin Howard and Evalyn Isobel Peverley. Her paternal aunt was the mother of Northrop Frye, a cousin who would become one of the twentieth century's most influential literary critics and theorists. First educated at the Trafalgar School for Girls, she attended McGill University, graduating in 1934 with an Hons. B.Sc. in Botany and Zoology. She then completed graduate studies at McGill in the Department of Genetics under Charles Leonard Huskins. Her Ph.D. thesis was The correlation between chromosome behaviour and susceptibility to mammary gland cancer in mice (1938), for which she won the Governor General's Academic Medal for graduate work in science.
In 1939 Howard married Patrick William Rolleston and took up a Finney-Howell Research Fellowship at McGill. She was demonstrator in Genetics at McGill into 1940 and "in the course of this work she discovered a new murine mutation." In 1940, her first son, Francis, was born, followed by a second son, Patrick, in 1942. After World War II, she moved with her husband and children to England. However, her husband died in 1947 and her colleague Jack Boag would later note that she "had to find work which would allow her freedom to bring up her two young sons." At the same time, Louis Harold Gray was looking for a cytologist to work in his radiobiology team at the UK Medical Research Council's Radiotherapeutic Research Unit at Hammersmith Hospital. By "fortunate chance he was introduced to Dr. Howard and flexible working arrangements were readily agreed." On a preliminary visit to the Radiotherapeutic Research Unit, she met physicist Stephen Pelc who had developed a variant autoradiograph technique and "was much interested in his use of radioactive iodine for the autoradiography of rat thyroid slices."
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