By Chuck Sanders
Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879. She completed her undergraduate and M.D. education at the University of Toronto prior to research stints at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, New York, and the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. She then traveled in 1912 to Berlin, Germany, to work for a year as a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis. During this stint, she and Michaelis published their classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics. She returned briefly to Western Reserve in 1913 and then moved to the University of Chicago, where she earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1918. The next 30 years of her career were spent as a clinical pediatric pathologist on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where she published roughly 100 research papers. She retired in 1950 and returned to Canada, where she passed away in 1960.
We join her conversation with Professor of Biochemistry Chuck Sanders…
Sanders: Wow, Dr. Menten, it is SUCH an honor to meet you! My understanding is that my friend, Protein Society CEO Raluca Cadar, had to use her full Transylvanian magic to set this up. She said that since you and she are from small towns that happen to lie on the exact same latitude, she was able to establish a connection with you. I am not sure how that works, but I am so glad she pulled it off!
Maud Menten: Call me Maud, s’il vous plait. I was very happy to hear from Raluca and am pleased to meet you.
Sanders: Let me begin by asking you about growing up. When you were little, you moved from Port Lambton, Ontario, to what was then a remote small town in British Columbia: Harrison Mills. In reading about this, I was particularly impressed by the fact that a great many of your neighbors were First Nations folk and that you learned to speak fluent Halq’eméylem. Plus, to attend high school you had to paddle a canoe three miles each way up and down the Fraser River to the schoolhouse. It sounds like you lived a true Tom Sawyer life!
Menten: I will take that as a compliment and assume you mean Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and not Geddy Lee’s! Yes, my parents moved to BC, recognizing that the expansion of the railroad across the Rockies all the way to Vancouver would lead to many new opportunities. This proved true for our family. So, I had the privilege of living in a challenging but spectacular environment while not being so poor that my prospects were limited.
Sanders: Which helps to explain how you managed to go to college at the University of Toronto. While you were there you seem to have fallen in love with medical science—not just the idea of practicing medicine but also doing research.
Menten: Yes, I worked there with Professor Archibald McCallum, who went on to found the National Research Council—Canada’s National Institutes of Health, if you will.
Sanders: Thanks for mentioning Dr. McCallum because he seemed to represent the start of a pattern. After completing your M.D. in Toronto, you then moved to New York to do a brief research stint with Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute, with whom you published the results of pioneering tests of the clinical use of radium. You then moved to Cleveland to work with George Crile at the Western Reserve University. Crile was a physician who is credited with developing protocols that dramatically lowered mortality rates during surgery and went on to cofound the Cleveland Clinic, just a few blocks away from what is now Case Western Reserve University. You certainly had a way of recognizing and successfully pursuing some of the absolute cutting-edge medical research of your era! I note that your work on enzyme kinetics and your Ph.D. in biochemistry came only after this early training. Let me ask, deep in your heart are you a medical doctor or a biochemist?
Menten: I’m a physician scientist who from the very beginning learned that fundamental research is the magic recipe that most often drives medical discoveries and advances. When I was in the Crile lab, we were looking at how blood pH can change to alter medical outcomes. For example, if your blood gets too acidic during anesthesia, you die 100% of the time. The medical relevance of pH is why I went to the Michaelis lab. Leonor was a pioneering expert on pH and buffers—this was before the term “pH” as we now know it had even been proposed! I went there to learn approaches that would help advance medical practice.
Sanders: Thanks for sharing that. Can I ask you about your one-year stint in Berlin between 1912 and 1913? I read that you paid your own way to get there and that you worked with Michaelis as a volunteer research assistant. True?
Menten: Back then there was no system for supporting research, so you had to do what you had to do if you really wanted to do serious research. Going to the Michaelis lab was even more challenging because even though—at the age of 37—he had already published 100 papers, he was never able to get a faculty position in Germany. This was mostly because he was Jewish, but with the added factor that he had publicly and quite rightly called out the pseudoscience of a prominent professor at one of the universities there in Berlin. Leonor therefore had to work as an M.D. at a hospital to earn a living. But he and a friend used their meager salaries to set up a lab at the hospital. What a dump! It just goes to show that there is little correlation between how shiny your lab is and the quality of the science that comes out of it!
Sanders: Do you mind if I ask what Michaelis was like and how it ended for him in Berlin?
Menten: He was great. He set high standards for scientific rigor but was very kind and patient with his trainees. In 1921 he was offered a one-year position in Japan and wisely departed Germany once and for all. He ended up staying in Japan for three years and played a central role in establishing their biochemical community. In another smart move, he then decamped to the United States, where he ended up working for many years as a group leader at the Rockefeller Institute, where he was pivotal in establishing the concept and importance of free radicals in biology.
Sanders: While completely irrelevant to me, my understanding is that Michaelis also invented the chemical protocol used to generate the hair permanent wave—the “perm.” This was a massive contribution to modern human culture, for better or worse!
Menten: Ha ha! Yes, it is irrelevant to me as well. But it is true that a perm is all about protein chemistry and that Leonor discovered the recipe.
Sanders: Your classic paper on enzyme kinetics was written in German (which you mastered) and submitted only six months after you arrived in Berlin. I have read an English translation of the paper and there is a heck of a lot of high-quality data in there, not to mention the amazing analysis. Given the fact that Michaelis then had a large lab and a full clinical load I assume this means that it was you who collected all the data for the paper. You must have worked EXTREMELY hard.
Menten: Throughout my career I often worked 18 hours a day. What you say is correct.
Sanders: I believe it. When you died one of your former colleagues observed: “She did not waste away, she used herself up.”
Menten: I do agree with Canadian Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Sanders: I wish I could ask you how you know the music of Neil Young, but the ground rules to this interview dictate that this is off limits.
Since it is Halloween time, I will point out that nothing is scarier to students taking their first biochemistry course than the Michaelis-Menten model of enzyme kinetics and its associated equation. Boo! However, now that I have been teaching it for years, I appreciate that what you were up to was to take an extremely complicated system and then making a series of simplifying assumptions that lead to an elegant little equation that conveys a tremendous amount of insight into enzyme function. From the cheap seats: Bravo!!!
Menten: Why, merci beaucoup! Let me just say that if Raluca had also invited Leonor to this interview that we would both point out to you that our study was not carried out in a vacuum. The final form of the M-M equation that appears in textbooks was proposed a decade after our work by George Briggs and John Haldane, who were the ones to make the steady-state assumption. And prior to our work, Victor Henri in Paris had arrived on a model very close to mine and Leonor’s. But Henri didn’t quite get it right because he didn’t understand the importance of running enzyme reactions under pH-buffered conditions.
Sanders: Which takes us back to Cleveland and then Chicago, where you continued to work on the role of pH in medical problems.
Menten: Yes, I got back to the States just before the Great War broke out.
Sanders: Did you see it coming when you were in Berlin?
Menten: No. I was too busy making those invertase measurements for the big paper.
Sanders: My family and I have been to the Vimy Ridge battlefield near Arras in France, where the Canadians won a big battle in 1917, but at horrific cost. Very moving place.
Menten: We from north of the border do not forget Vimy Ridge.
Sanders: You never took up U.S. citizenship, did you?
Menten: No. Par Dieu, I love the States, but I have a Canadian heart!
Sanders: You ended up on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, where it is my understanding that you were an outstanding clinician and maintained an active research program for nearly 30 years. Looking through your work, I am especially struck by three of your discoveries that I think are just extraordinary. 1) You were the first to apply electrophoresis and sedimentation to human hemoglobin samples, showing that fetal hemoglobin is fundamentally different than adult hemoglobin, a result that predates Linus Pauling’s application of the same methods to sickle cell hemoglobin S by a number of years. 2) You founded the field of enzyme histochemistry by developing a colorimetric azo dye–based method for assaying alkaline phosphatase. And 3) you purified a streptococcus toxin that was then used for pioneering immunization protocols to ward off scarlet fever epidemics, then a scourge. You also helped to educate the public there in Pittsburgh about this so that non-scientists understood enough to not be scared to get their children immunized.
These MAJOR advances well complemented your work with Michaelis. And yet, you were promoted to full professor at Pitt only in 1948, 25 years after joining the faculty and only two years before retirement. You received little acclaim during your lifetime for your work. Did this bother you?
Menten: Sacre bleu, it did! I do not deny it. I tried to mitigate my displeasure by being active in promoting women in science. Of course, I was never one to let a rainy day interfere with my canoe trip and so I carried on. I found much pleasure in jobs well done, even when no one else recognized it.
Sanders: Understood. I want to ask you about an incident from your life that I don’t necessarily expect you to answer. When you worked with George Criles, one of the projects you were involved in was testing how extreme stress alters blood pH. Criles got it into his head that electric fish must get really stressed when they zap prey or predators. So, he sent you to Cape Lookout, North Carolina, to collect electric fish with the help of a local shark hunter, RC (a famous naturalist back in his era). However, through his diaries it is well documented that he was rogue when it came to women. Apparently, your work ethic and personal dignity made quite an impression, and he wrote in his diary, “Dr. Menten is unquestionably the most wonderful human being in the world!” That’s high praise. As a woman working in “a man’s world,” how did you manage to keep at bay the rogues that I am guessing must have come down the pike from time to time?
Menten: This is indeed a bold question. Perhaps I exuded a certain type of charm that made men think of me more as their daughter, sister, or mother rather than un objet de désir. Maybe I also comported enough gravitas that they understood: Do NOT mess with this woman! You know, I could speak six languages and could outwork any of them, so maybe they also suspected I also knew karate.
Sanders: Did you?
Menten: Hi-yah!
Sanders: (Laughs) May I ask you one more question? You had a Model-T Ford in Pittsburgh. One writer claims that you drove it recklessly and that you also didn’t really know which pedals to push. True?
Menten: Hmph! I certainly did enjoy driving my car up and down the hills of Pittsburgh. As for the claim that I did not know how my Model-T worked… Zut alors! I could disassemble the entire vehicle and put it back together with my own two hands.
Sanders: Ha ha! Just as I suspected. Maud Menten, M.D./Ph.D., it has been SUCH a great honor to meet you. May I wish you a happy Halloween?
Menten: Certainement! And please send my best regards to your colleagues at Vanderbilt. See you some day on the other side!
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Raluca Cadar and Becky Sanders for their helpful redactions. Source material used to prepare for this interview were collected in a PDF.
A slightly modified version of this interview was originally published in the October 2025 Protein Society newsletter Under the Microscope.