Ruth Sager should be remembered above all as
a gifted, original, and imaginative scientist who
loved her life of exploring nature, and in her later
years, brought her gifts and passion to investigating
the scourge of breast cancer.
Her discovery of science came through an
epiphany. She enrolled at the University of
Chicago with the intention to study music or
literature. The University’s insistence on a broad
liberal arts education brought Ruth to courses in
biology, where she is said to have encountered the
physiologist, Professor Anton Carlson, and was so
taken by his course in physiology that she switched
her major to biology and her concentration to
physiology. She found all her science courses
stimulating and at first thought medicine would be
her career choice.
Having received her B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) from
the University in 1938, Ruth spent the war years
first as a secretary, and later in a graduate program
at Rutgers University, where she participated in
a wartime research project. She obtained her
master’s degree in Plant Physiology in 1944.
The title of her master’s thesis was “Nutritional Status of the Tomato Seedling in Relation to Successful
Transplanting.”
The taste of research and her duties as a teaching assistant at Rutgers convinced her that a life of laboratory
research and teaching was her true calling, so she enrolled in 1945 for a Ph.D. at Columbia University, and
wisely selected genetics as her field. Professor Marcus M. Rhoades was her thesis advisor, and the genetics
of corn her special area. It proved her good fortune to have selected an area graced by one Barbara
McClintock, who, along with Professor Rhoades, strongly influenced Ruth’s scientific development.
A Merck fellowship awarded for a postdoctoral period with Dr. Sam Granick, a microbiologist that the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, permitted Ruth to spend the summer at the Hopkins Marine
Station at Pacific Grove, California. There she took the highly regarded course of Professor Van Niel
In tribute to their dedicated efforts to science and medicine, deceased members of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine (those at the
rank of full or emeritus professor) receive a review of their life and contributions with a complete reflection, a Memorial Minute.
Ruth Sager
