Maud Lenora Menten was born in Port
Lambton, Ontario, Canada in 1879 and died in 1960. She received
her B.A. in 1904 and a masters in biology [chloride
distribution in nerve cells] from the University
of Toronto in 1907; in 1911 she received her medical doctorate
from the University of Toronto. She was a demonstrator of
physiology at the University of Toronto, a research fellow at
the Rockefeller Institute, and faculty member at Western Reserve
University.
While she was studying in Berlin [1913]
with Lenoir
Michaelis, the Michaelis-Menten
equation was developed. This equation gives an
expression for the rate of an enzyme reaction and became
fundamental to the interpretation of how an enzyme reacts on its
substrate. Maude Menten returned
to the U.S. and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University
of Chicago [1916] and later became an assistant professor [1923]
on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine [1923-1950].
