Gail R. Martin

Gail Roberta Martin
Photo 2015
Born	1944 Bronx, New York
Nationality	United States
Fields	Developmental Biology
Institutions	University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI (UW- Madison) University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley)
Notable awards	Member, US National Academy of Sciences; Foreign Member, Royal Society; Pearl Meister Greengard Prize; E.G. Conklin Medal
Spouse	G. Steven Martin (m. 1969)
Children	1 son

University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI (UW- Madison)

Gail Roberta Martin (née Zuckman) is a professor emerita in the Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco. She is known for her pioneering work on the isolation of pluripotent stem cells from normal embryos, for which she coined the term ‘embryonic stem cells’. She is also widely recognized for her work on the function of Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGFs) and their negative regulators in vertebrate organogenesis. She and her colleagues also made valuable contributions to gene targeting technology.

Martin grew up in The Bronx, New York, the only child of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher. She graduated from James Monroe High School in 1960, and earned her A.B. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI in 1964. She then enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley (UCB). It was a tumultuous time, because the student protest known as the Free Speech Movement took place in that academic year (1964–65), and Martin along with her fellow graduate students spent many hours in political discussion and activity. Martin did her doctoral work in the laboratory of Harry Rubin, where she pursued several projects aimed at elucidating the mechanisms that control the growth of fibroblasts in vitro. She completed her Ph.D. thesis in 1971. It was during that time that she married Steven Martin, a British scientist who had come to Berkeley to do postdoctoral work in the Rubin laboratory.

After completing her graduate studies, Martin and her husband moved to London. In 1973, she worked with Martin J. Evans at University College London. Evans was then working with (a type of tumor), which are of interest because they contain pluripotent stem cells (known as embryonal carcinoma, [EC] cells) from which all the differentiated cell types in the tumor arise. During the two years she spent working in Evans' laboratory, Martin devised a protocol for isolating and maintaining EC cells in the undifferentiated state and for differentiating them in vitro. This work laid the groundwork for the future isolation of pluripotent stem cells from normal mouse and human embryos. In 1976, Martin and her husband returned to Berkeley, where he took up a faculty position at UCB and she began a year of postdoctoral work with Charles J. Epstein in the Department of Pediatrics at UCSF. During this period she and her colleagues demonstrated that female EC cells had two active X chromosomes and could be used to study X-chromosome inactivation in vitro.

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