Dr. Margaret Jane Pittman (1901–1995) was a pioneering bacteriologist whose research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on typhoid, cholera, and pertussis (whooping cough) helped generate the development of vaccinations against these diseases as well as others.

Her mother supplemented their income as a dressmaker and vendor of canned fruits and vegetables in order to support her children's education at Hendrix College.

[7] Having saved sufficient money from her teaching to enroll in the University of Chicago, she received a master's degree in bacteriology in 1926 and earned a Ph.D. three years later, under the mentorship of Dr. Isidore S. Falk.

In 1934, with the Great Depression gripping the country, Pittman's appointment at the Rockefeller Institute was ended, and, accepting a pay cut, she took a position at the New York State Department of Health Laboratories, where she worked on biologics (vaccines and antisera injected into the human body).

[8] In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, which included funds to expand health research in the federal government.

In 1943, soon after the Division of Biologics Control had moved to the new Bethesda, Maryland, campus of the NIH, Pittman began work on a standard of potency for a pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.

The first woman to head an NIH laboratory, Pittman never complained about sex discrimination, but for historians looking back, it is hard not to wonder whether a man who arrived at any institution with an international reputation for research achievements equivalent to hers would have been made to wait twenty years for such advancement.

During the 1960s, Pittman worked with the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) project headed by Dr. Joseph E. Smadel, an associate director at NIH.

Finally, with NIH colleagues, Pittman worked out standards for a single injection of tetanus toxoid in pregnant women to protect newborns who, in rural areas of New Guinea, were often delivered unaided and left for a period of time on the bare ground.