Alma Howard

Alma Clavering Howard Rolleston Ebert (23 October 1913 – 1 April 1984) was a Canadian-born English radiobiologist. She was joint editor for many years of the International Journal of Radiation Biology and deputy director of Paterson Laboratories in Manchester. She made a "fundamental contribution to cell biology" in collaboration with physicist Stephen Pelc when they "were the first to ascribe a timeframe to cellular life," creating the concept of the cell cycle. Their nomenclature for the stages of cell replication is used universally and appears in every textbook of biology and pathology. a cousin who would become one of the twentieth century's most influential literary critics and theorists. First educated at the Trafalgar School for Girls, she attended McGill University, graduating in 1934 with an Hons. B.Sc. in Botany and Zoology. She then completed graduate studies at McGill in the Department of Genetics under Charles Leonard Huskins. Her Ph.D. thesis was The correlation between chromosome behaviour and susceptibility to mammary gland cancer in mice, for which she won the Governor General's Academic Medal for graduate work in science. and "was much interested in his use of radioactive iodine for the autoradiography of rat thyroid slices". On her first day, she suggested to Stephen Pelc that radioactive phosphorus taken into the cell might be incorporated into DNA and give some information on the replication and synthesis of this important substance. Howard and Pelc published this finding in 1953, the same year Watson and Crick published Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. While Howard and Pelc were sure of the significance of their findings, "the relevance of cell-cycle studies in the bean root to either cancer or medicine was not immediately accepted." Howard returned to England. She died on 1 April 1984 from cancer of the liver after a short terminal illness. Following her death, the annual Alma Howard Memorial Lecture was inaugurated at McGill.

The fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick's publication of the double helix structure of DNA was in 2003 and their discovery was widely celebrated in the scientific community. However, some also noted that Howard and Pelc's discovery was "in danger of slipping past unmarked" and that their "paper, also published in 1953... set the scene for the model of the cell cycle as we know it today." While their findings are "now common place, the inventors are largely forgotten and rarely quoted." Despite this, "cell-cycle studies have flourished ... the concept was later developed and the checkpoints in cell-cycle regulation and universal control mechanisms were determined by using genetics and molecular biology."

Shirley Hornsey explained the clinical impact in her 1984 obituary of Alma Howard: "... the whole basis of cell kinetics was developed from their original concepts. These developments have led to our present understanding of the growth and turnover of tissues in health and disease and in the production and use of the cell-cycle based chemotherapeutic agents in the treatment of cancer."