[2] She enrolled at Bryn Mawr, then transferred to Radcliffe College where she earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
She obtained a PhD in bacteriology from Harvard Medical School (1969) and was awarded an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
[4] In 1996, she received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award and medal, the highest scientific honor bestowed by the United States Department of Energy.
She is credited with the radical but increasingly accepted notion that phenotype can dominate over genotype in normal development and disease.
[8][9] Where she mainly focused on the idea that a cancer cell does not immediately form a tumor; instead, its growth and development are influenced by signals from the surrounding microenvironment.