Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth (05 April 1901–24 June 1968), microbiologist and pediatrician, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of William Bain Alexander, a merchant, and Elsie May Townsend, both of Scottish ancestry. The family remained in Baltimore throughout Alexander’s relatively happy and comfortable childhood. She attended Baltimore’s Western High School for Girls prior to enrolling in Goucher College, to which she won a partial scholarship. While at Goucher, her enthusiasm for a variety of sports—hockey, baseball, basketball—exceeded that for academics, and she was an unimpressive student. Nevertheless, she exhibited marked, though largely unapplied, skill in Dr. Jessie King’s bacteriology class, and fellow students in the Goucher yearbook declared that “ambition fires her; hygiene claims her; kindness portrays her.”...
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Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth (1901-1968), microbiologist and pediatrician
Allison Aydelotte
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Scharrer, Berta Vogel (1906-1995), cell biologist and pioneering neuroendocrinologist
G. Terry Sharrer
Scharrer, Berta Vogel (01 December 1906–23 July 1995), cell biologist and pioneering neuroendocrinologist, was born Berta Vogel in Munich, Germany, the daughter of Karl Phillip Vogel, a prominent judge in the Bavarian state court, and Johanna Weiss. Berta grew up in happy circumstances at home and in school, and she showed an early interest in biology and in becoming a scientist. But after 1914 her life was shadowed by World War I, by Germany's defeat and economic chaos, and ultimately by the rise of Nazism, which gained an early foothold in Munich. Scharrer entered the University of Munich in the swale of Adolf Hitler's conspiracy to overthrow of the Bavarian government, and she graduated with a Ph.D. in 1930, as the Nazis came to national prominence....