Loading AI tools
Carolyn Cohen (June 18, 1929 – December 20, 2017)[1] was an American biologist and biophysicist. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Carolyn Cohen was born June 18, 1929, to parents Anna and Philip Cohen.[1][2] After Cohen's father died in 1939, she credited his lawyer Samuel Sumner Goldberg for mentoring her and nurturing her curiosity.[2][3] Cohen attended Joan of Arc Junior High School, then the selective Hunter College High School.[3] After rejections from McGill University and Barnard College, Cohen's French teacher urged her to apply to Bryn Mawr College, where she was accepted with a full-tuition scholarship.[3] In the summer of 1949, Cohen took a job in the kitchen of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA.[4] There she met Shinya Inoué, worked for Otto Schmitt, and attended a lecture by Dorothy Wrinch that she later credited with stimulating her career interest in protein structures.[4] Cohen completed her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Physics from Bryn Mawr in 1950, graduating summa cum laude.[5] She then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a PhD under the supervision of Richard S. Bear. There she worked on the structure of collagen and other helically structured proteins, completing her degree in 1954.[4]
While at MIT, Cohen met then-visiting researcher Jean Hanson, who was working on the structure of muscle fibers. After graduation Cohen took a postdoctoral researcher position in Hanson's laboratory at King's College London, working on the X-ray crystallography structure of actin filaments.[4] After nine months, Cohen returned to MIT working first in Bear's lab, then with Andrew Szent-Györgyi on the structure of fibrous proteins. She enrolled in medical school at Boston University, but left after less than a month, returning to full-time research at MIT.[4] In 1957, she began what would become a long collaboration with Donald Caspar, investigating the structure of tropomyosin.[4]
In 1958, Cohen started her own laboratory, co-led by Caspar, at the Children's Cancer Research Foundation (now the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute).[4] There she worked primarily on the structure of myosin. With postdoctoral fellow Susan Lowey, Cohen predicted a model for the myosin structure with an alpha-helical core bookended by globular masses. Studying the catch muscle in molluscs, Cohen and Kenneth Holmes (then a postdoctoral researcher with Caspar) demonstrated the presence of alpha-helical coiled coil filaments, published in 1963.[4] A few years later in 1967, Lowey and Henry S. Slater confirmed the predicted globular heads by electron microscopy.[4] From 1969 to 1972, Cohen and Caspar published a series of papers describing the structure of tropomyosin – the first protein structure determined by electron microscopy.[4]
In 1972, Cohen, Caspar, and Lowe – together called the "Structural Biology Laboratory" – moved their laboratory to become the first research group at Brandeis University's Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center.[4]
Cohen retired from Brandeis in 2012.[6]
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Member, National Academy of Sciences
- 2000, Biophysical Society Founder's Award for her accomplishments in Biophysics[citation needed]
Wikiwand in your browser!
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.
