#biochemists

Audrey Stevens Niyogi was born in 1932 in Leigh, Nebraska. Niyogi was a biochemist who studied messenger RNA for nearly twenty years. She was one of four researchers credited with discovering RNA polymerase, the protein that transcribes DNA into RNA. In 1998, Niyogi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

“One of our most important solutions to the global challenge posed by climate change lies right under our feet.” That’s according to Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biochemist at the University of Merced, and she’s talking about soil, which isn’t acknowledged as a key factor in the fight against climate change.

When it’s healthy, soil is incredibly effective at storing carbon, Berhe said on the stage at TED in Vancouver. Soil stores around 3,000 billion metric tons of carbon, which is double the amount stored in vegetation and in the atmosphere, combined. The ability of natural ecosystems like soil to capture and sequester carbon is essentially bailing us out of experiencing the effects of excessive amounts of CO2 that human activities produce. Around half of the 9.4 billion metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere every year are captured in soil, plants, and the ocean, and soil is doing the bulk of that heavy lifting.

But “the ability of these natural ecosystems to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it is being compromised, as they’re experiencing serious degradation because of human actions,” Berhe says.

Gertrudis de la Fuente was born in Madrid in 1921. De la Fuente was a biochemist who specialized in enzymology and the metabolism of sugars. She was a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, and was key in the establishment of the biochemistry department at the Medical School of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. De la Fuente applied her work in enzymes to the study of human disease. In 1981, she was tasked with coordinating the investigation into Toxic Oil Syndrome, a disease outbreak in Spain that affected more than 20,000 people and killed over 1,000. Over the course of her career, de la Fuente won awards from the Spanish Society of Cardiology and the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. 

Gertrudis de la Fuente died in 2017 at the age of 95.

Biochemist Mary Locke Petermann was born in 1908 in Laurium, Michigan. Petermann is best known for the discovery of animal ribosomes. She also conducted research on diphtheria toxins and blood proteins. At Memorial Hospital in New York City, Petermann researched the role of plasma proteins in the spread of cancer, and at the Sloan-Kettering institute, she researched nucleoproteins’ role in cancer. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Cornell University’s Medical School, where she taught biochemistry. In 1966, Petermann won the Garvan Medial from the American Chemical Society.