Margaret Ransone Murray (November 16, 1901 – July 13, 1986) was an American scientist known primarily for her work on methods to establish cultures of neuronal cells.
Her father's ancestor, Governor Sir George Chardley, arrived from England in 1609, having received 1100 acres in Mathews County Virginia.
[3] Margaret grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Western High School there [4] and received a four year scholarship to Goucher College.
Her work attracted the attention of Arthur Purdy Stout, who invited her to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York to establish a research program in Surgical Pathology in 1931.
She was one of the first to employ and compare the results of parallel in vivo and in vitro techniques to examine the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic agents on mouse gliomas and human glioblastomas.
[16][17] Murray's major contribution was the development of tissue culture methods to study normal myelination and synaptogenesis in vitro.
She devised an organotypic explant culture technique to study the long-term in vitro differentiation of explanted embryonic tissues from both the peripheral and central nervous systems using special culture chambers (the Maximov double coverslip assembly) and complex media containing embryo extracts and human placental serum..
[19] In addition, she, Peterson and graduate student Stanley Crain reported that bioelectric activity could be maintained by nerve cells in vitro.
[21] Murray's later work examined the functional differentiation of neuro-muscular junctions,[22] to understand degenerative diseases of the nervous system.
Further work examined the role of circulating demyelinating factors that contribute to neurological degeneration in multiple sclerosis and other diseases[23] Murray was widely recognized as an important mentor in the field of neurobiology.
As part of her work with this group, she and Gertrude Kopech created the first edition of the "Bibliography of Tissue Culture" which cited every reference in the field from its inception until 1950.