Marian E. Koshland

Marian Elliott "Bunny" Koshland (October 25, 1921 – October 28, 1997) was an American immunologist who discovered that the differences in amino acid composition of antibodies explain the efficiency and effectiveness with which they combat a huge range of foreign invaders.

Biography Marian Elliott was born on October 25, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Margrethe Schmidt Elliott and Walter Elliott. Her mother was a teacher who had emigrated from Denmark and her father was a hardware salesman of Southern Baptist background.

Marian attended Vassar College in New York and graduated in 1942 with a degree in bacteriology. She then attended the University of Chicago, where she received her M.S. in bacteriology in 1943. In Chicago, she worked on reducing the spread of respiratory diseases and was a member of a research team that developed a vaccine for cholera.

While at Chicago, she met Daniel E. Koshland Jr., a biochemist and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. In 1945, she joined him in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and spent a year working on the Manhattan Project, researching the biological effects of radiation. In 1949, she moved with Daniel to Boston, where Marian spent two years in a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School's Department of Bacteriology. They later both worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for 13 years.

In 1965, Koshland became a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, joining its faculty in 1970. She studied molecular biology with David Baltimore in his M.I.T. lab in the late 1970s.

The Marian Koshland Science Museum was in Washington, D.C., and featured exhibits geared toward the general public; the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center at Haverford College houses the elite liberal arts college's science departments. Both are named in her honor. Koshland's children, Catherine Koshland and Douglas Koshland, both attended Haverford and, as of September 2021, hold positions at U.C. Berkeley; Catherine has served as executive vice chancellor and provost since July 1, 2021, and Douglas is a professor of molecular and cell biology.

Entrance to the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resource Library in the Valley Life Sciences Building, at U.C.B.

Publications