Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor

Harriett Elizabeth Ephrussi-Taylor (April 10, 1918 – March 30, 1968) was an American geneticist, microbiologist and educator, who initiated and made crucial contributions to the fields of transformation and bacterial recombination.

During her doctoral studies in the laboratory of L. C. Dunn at Columbia University in New York, she investigated genetic mechanisms underlying the growth kinetics of yeast cultures and earned her PhD in 1945.

In 1945 she joined the laboratory of Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where she began building a collection of mutant bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) deficient in their ability to synthesize the cell wall.

In 1947 Harriett started working with Boris Ephrussi, her future husband, in Paris before they moved to the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Gif-sur-Yvette in 1952.

Ephrussi-Taylor collaborated and corresponded frequently with James Watson[5] and Maurice Wilkins[6] generating scientific hypothesis, sharing experimental protocols, discussing data interpretation and exchanging the latest findings from other researchers such as Macfarlane Burnet.

From left to right- Harriet Taylor, Audre Luoff, Jacques Monod, Boris Ephrussi with an issue of the New Yorker at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium.
Experimental protocol to "Inactivate TP with X-Rays" shared by Harriett Ephrussi Taylor with James Watson
Sharing the latest findings from Macfarlane Burnet - the flu virus might contain exclusively RNA