As a bio-medical and medical researcher, she made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry, and invented a procedure that remains in use.

[3][4] Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario and studied medicine at the University of Toronto (B.A.

In 1912, she moved to Berlin where she worked with Leonor Michaelis and co-authored their paper in Biochemische Zeitschrift,[2] demonstrating that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex.

Menten wanted to further her medical research, but found that opportunities for women in Canada were scarce at the time.

As a result, she accepted a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and left Canada, arriving in New York City in 1907.

After a year at the Institute, Menten returned to Canada and began her studies at the University of Toronto where, in 1911, she became one of the first Canadian women to qualify as a medical doctor.

Despite his modest laboratory establishment in Berlin, she made the difficult decision to cross the sea to work with Michaelis.

A decade earlier, Victor Henri had included an equivalent equation in his doctoral thesis, but he did not appreciate the importance of the steady state nor the simplification that would result from considering the initial rate, and did not use it.

Despite the demands both jobs had, Menten found time to maintain an active research program,[14][15][16] authoring or coauthoring more than 70 publications.

[12] As part of extensive work on alkaline phosphatase,[17][18][19] Menten invented the azo-dye coupling reaction, which is still used in histochemistry.

This was described in a major textbook of the 1950s[20] in the following terms: It is not too much to say that the use of this principle was a stroke of genius.She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina, and Salmonella ssp.

[7][1] Rebecca Skloot portrays Menten as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore "Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes".

[7] She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies.

She played the clarinet, created paintings worthy of art exhibitions,[1] climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, and enjoyed astronomy.

She will long be remembered by her associates for her keen mind, for a certain dignity of manner, for unobtrusive modesty, for her wit, and above all for her enthusiasm for research.