Katherine Brehme Warren

Katherine "Kitty" Brehme Warren (1909–1991) was an American geneticist and scientific editor known for her work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Early life and education

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Warren was born Katherine Suydam Brehme in New York City in 1909, to parents Almira and Franklin Brehme.[1] She graduated from Barnard College in 1930[2] and earned a doctorate in zoology from Columbia University.[3] She married fellow scientist Charles O. Warren in 1939.[4]

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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Brehme was a student of Calvin Bridges and after his death the Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Milislav Demerec pushed for Warren's appointment to complete some of Bridges's unfinished work.[5] The project was supported by a fellowship from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the completed work, The Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster (1944), became a classic in the field.[6] For decades "Bridges and Brehme" served as an essential reference for geneticists and later formed the backbone of subsequent scholarship and, ultimately, the online resource FlyBase.[7]

Warren served as the executive director of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology.[3] As Symposia editor from 1941-1958, she was responsible for manuscript preparation, proofreading, and indexing.[8] In addition to her serious editorial duties, she introduced a nonexistent scholar, J. C. Foothills of Tennessee Intermountain College, whose name was derived from her favorite expression of frustration: "Jesus Christ in the foothills!"[9]

Teaching and administration

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Warren taught biology at Adelphi University, Hofstra University, Cornell University Medical College, and Wellesley College. She later spent a decade as a grants administrator at the National Institutes of Health, retiring in 1971.[3]

Personal life

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Warren suspended her teaching career for several years after the birth of her children, but did not interrupt her work with the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia.[10] The couple divorced in 1961, with Warren retaining custody of her three teenage daughters.[11]

References

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  1. ^ Cook, Robert Cecil (1944). Who's who in American Education: A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Living Educators of the United States. p. 134.
  2. ^ "Mortarboard 1930". Barnard Digital Collections. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  3. ^ a b c "Katherine Warren, Research Scientist, 82". The New York Times. April 9, 1991.
  4. ^ Thomas John Hall (1941). The Hall Family of West River and Kindred Families. Rue Publishing Company. p. 165.
  5. ^ "Cold Spring Harbor Summers," Calvin Blackman Bridges, Unconventional Geneticist (1889-1938) (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives, 2013), http://library.cshl.edu/exhibits/bridges/_pages/page6_CSHL.html (accessed 8 February 2015).
  6. ^ "Kitty Brehme Warren," Archives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, http://library.cshl.edu/personal-collections/kitty-brehme (accessed 8 February 2015).
  7. ^ Elof Axel Carlson, "Calvin Bridges and the Development of Classical Genetics," Calvin Blackman Bridges, Unconventional Geneticist (1889-1938) (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives, 2013), http://library.cshl.edu/exhibits/bridges/_pages/page4_carlson.html (accessed 8 February 2015); "Cold Spring Harbor Summers."
  8. ^ "Kitty Brehme Warren."
  9. ^ Jan A. Witkowski, "1955: Population Genetics: The Nature and Causes of Genetic Variability in Population, Vol. XX," Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, http://symposium.cshlp.org/site/misc/topic20.xhtml (accessed 8 February 2015).
  10. ^ Ruth W. Tryon, Investment in Creative Scholarship: A History of the Fellowship Program of the American Association of University Women, 1890-1956 (Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Women, 1957), https://archive.org/stream/investmentincrea028228mbp/investmentincrea028228mbp_djvu.txt (accessed 8 February 2015).
  11. ^ Katherine Brehme Warren to Bentley Glass, July 20, 1961, Bentley Glass papers, American Philosophical Society.
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