Mary Belle Allen

Early life and education Mary Belle Allen was a daughter of Frederick Madison Allen and Belle W. Allen. She had a sister, Dorothy Llewellyn Allen (later Flynn).

Allen earned her bachelor's degree with honors in 1941 from the college of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. She was 19. Allen is listed as an assistant at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley for 1941-42 and as a chemist for the Manhattan District for 1942-44.

Following Sam Ruben's death in 1943, Allen transferred to Columbia University. with a thesis on Phosphorus in Starch.

Postdoctoral work For 1946-1947, Allen received a National Research Council fellowship in chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.

In 1947, she became a research associate at Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York. She was able to continue the work through Stanford with funding from the Office of Naval Research. and Kenichiro Negoro (1935). Allen was also able to study blue-green algae, publishing a "fundamental paper" on their cultivation in 1952.

University of California, Berkeley In the mid 1950s, Allen worked at the University of California, Berkeley with Daniel I. Arnon and F. Robert Whatley in breakthrough research on the role of chloroplasts in photosynthesis processes. Arnon et al. were the first to publish a demonstration of the synthesis of ATP in light by chloroplasts in 1954, followed by a more detailed paper by Allen et al. in 1955.

quote| In 53 I came into a lab. where, in fact, three different people – Arnon, myself and Mary Belle Allen – had suddenly decided, from different points of view, that chloroplasts must be able to make ATP. ... So we actually set out to discover this. |author= F. Robert Whatley quote|Arnon had, you know, the white towels laid out all over the bench. Marybelle had the mortar and pestle and the acid-cleaned sand, and Andy and I were down there with the stuff ready to go. And Marybelle and Bob, the four of us, lined up when Arnon, in a pristine white coat and so forth, marched in with a tray full of spinach that had been kept in the cold room to be nice and crisp. And the procedure started. It was ceremonial, absolutely incredible. Marybelle and Bob dumped the leaves in the mortar and pestle, someone dumped the sand in, Arnon grabbed the pestle and ground the [spinach], they went to the right centrifuge with the right speed with the right head on it, spun down the cell debris, they got beautiful dark green colours -- pure chloroplasts. |author= R. Clinton Fuller As of 1956, she reported on the photosynthetic products of Chlamydomonas. In January 1957 she was listed by the Phycological Society of America as studying plankton as an assistant research biochemist and lecturer in physiology in the Department of Soils and Plant Nutrition, University of California, Berkeley.

In 1967 Allen was nominated jointly for a Nobel Prize with D.I.Arnon and Frederick Whatley. The nomination was put forward by J.H.Northrop but was not successful.

Kaiser Foundation Research Institute In 1958, the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute (Kaiser Permanente) formally established a Laboratory of Comparative Physiology and Morphology in Richmond, California, for fundamental research in comparative biology. Ellsworth C. Dougherty was named the director, and Mary Belle Allen was named the associate director. Using spectrophotometry and other techniques, she continued to examine chlorophyll absorption and to study algal phylogenesis.

University of Alaska In 1966 Allen was recruited as professor of microbiology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There she worked with the Institute of Marine Science She studied high-latitude phytoplankton and chrysophyceae. To better understand populations of aquatic microorganisms in lakes in interior Alaska, she studied bacteria in soil, which can wash into lakes. This research led to an unexpected result. She found that in many soil samples there were very few bacterial cells; some were comparable to sterilized soil.

Memberships American Society of Limnology and Oceanography Botanical Society of America

Publications