Pebbles on the Hill of a Scientist. SIGNED BY FLORENCE SEIBERT.

SEIBERT, Florence B.

Published by St. Petersburg, Florida: Florence B. Seibert, 1968.

About this Item

x, 162 pp; 3 text figs. (the unnumbered pages 88-99 contain many photos). Original cloth. Corners of covers slightly bumped and worn. Very Good, in worn and torn dust jacket. Pieces are missing from the front and rear panels of the dust jacket, with loss of a small part of the text on the rear panel of the dust jacket. The front flap of the dust jacket is shorter than the height of the book. I do not know if all copies are like this. First Edition. SIGNED BY FLORENCE B. SEIBERT on the front flyleaf. "After high school Seibert attended Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied science hoping to be a doctor; going to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was her dream. But when she graduated from college in 1918, she took a temporary job in a chemistry lab at a paper mill in New Jersey, just to earn money for medical school. . . . Seibert soon decided she liked chemical research more than medicine, partly because the duties of a chemist did not require her to be on her feet as much as the duties of a doctor. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale University in 1923 and did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago. . . . Next Seibert went to work at the Sprague Memorial Institute, where she eventually met [Esmond R.] Long. In her first year there she received the University of Chicago's Howard Taylor Ricketts Prize for work she began at Yale and continued in Chicago. In those days patients often came down with short but intense fevers after receiving distilled water intravenously. Seibert discovered that although distilling the water killed bacteria and other microbes in the water, it often did not destroy the toxins that the bacteria had produced before they were killed. Sometimes spray from the water boiling in the distillation flask carried the toxins into the receiving flask, contaminating the distilled water. These toxins were causing the severe fevers. Seibert invented a new spray-catching trap for the still that kept the toxins from contaminating the distilled water. At the institute Seibert began working with Long on TB studies. When Long became professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of laboratories at its Phipps Institute for TB in 1932, he invited his talented collaborator to come with him to Philadelphia, and she became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Their objective was to improve an existing test for diagnosing TB called the tuberculin skin test. In the test a small amount of a substance called tuberculin, which is made by the TB bacteria, is injected underneath a patient's skin. . . . The test as it existed in the early 1930s, however, was unreliable owing to impurities in the tuberculin. Back in Chicago, Long and Seibert had discovered that the active agent in tuberculin was a protein. It now became Seibert's goal to separate the protein from the other substances in the tuberculin and purify it. It took almost a decade of work to develop the purification process. Finally, she developed a technique that used filters made from porous clay and cotton that had been treated with nitric acid. The purified tuberculin protein that Seibert developed is now known as purified protein derivative, or PPD, and is still used in TB skin tests today. Seibert spent most of the rest of her career at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite her scientific achievements she remained at the rank of associate professor for nearly 20 years before being named a full professor. She became a specialist in the field of protein separation. As in the case of tuberculin, sometimes proteins need to be separated from each other or from other substances in order to study them individually. Seibert was one of the first U.S. scientists to master two important protein-separation techniques, ultracentrifugation and electrophoresis. . ." ("Esmond R. Long and Florence B. Seibert" on the website of the Chemical Heritage Foundation).

Seller Inventory # 16848

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pebbles on the Hill of a Scientist. SIGNED BY FLORENCE SEIBERT.
• Publisher: St. Petersburg, Florida: Florence B. Seibert, 1968.
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)