[4] Marilyn Gist Farquhar was born on 11 July 1928 and was raised in the Central Valley farming community of Tulare, California.
[6] Farquhar attributes her desire to pursue a career in medicine and biology to her mother's friend, Frances Zumwalt, who was a pediatrician.
[4][5] Farquhar later collaborated with the University of Minnesota as a research to study renal biopsies, where they were the first to see glomerular pathology at the electron microscope level.
[7] George Palade was working on the kidney glomerulus at the time and provided Farquhar with formal training in the field of cell biology.
[7] In 1973, Farquhar returned to the University of California at San Francisco, where she remained as a professor of cell biology and pathology for the next 15 years.
Throughout Farquhar's career, her lab maintained two research interests – control of intracellular membrane traffic and the molecular pathogenesis of autoimmune kidney diseases.
However, Farquhar's research spans numerous areas including electron microscopy, cell secretion, intracellular membrane traffic, and glomerular permeability and pathology.
[4] The Farquhar Lab was in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and studied signaling networks that regulate secretion, endocytosis, autophagy, cell migration and cancer metastasis.
The second project is to define the role of podocalyxin in the regulation of podocyte architecture in normal and animals with kidney disease (nephrotic syndrome).
The long-term goal for these three projects is to define the molecular mechanisms of glomerular filtration and protein absorption under normal and pathogenic conditions.