Barbara Ruben Migeon (July 31, 1931 – January 14, 2023) was an American geneticist who was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Institute of Genetic Medicine.
Migeon applied for a job as a technician in the Stanbury Thyroid Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, and simultaneously submitted an application to medical school at the University at Buffalo where she studied medicine.
During the fellowship she was taught by H. Bentley Glass and Carl Swanson and worked in the cytogenetics laboratory of Malcolm Ferguson-Smith.
Then Migeon began as an instructor in Pediatrics at Hopkins working in cytogenetics which was only just starting, as cytogeneticists were beginning to identify the chromosomal basis of various diseases.
Migeon has argued that women have an advantage over men in coping with disease and the environment owing to X-inactivation.
[1][4] She was at a meeting Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory shortly after her work on X-inactivation was becoming mainstream, when a group of women researchers voiced their support for the study.
Migeon describes women as genetic mosaics due to their two distinctly different kinds of cells.