Mary F. Lyon

Early life and education Mary Lyon was born on 15 May 1925 in Norwich, England as the eldest out of three children of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. She was educated at a grammar school in Birmingham. During that time, she said, she became interested in science thanks to a good schoolteacher and nature books she won in an essay competition. During the Second World War in 1943, she began her studies at Girton College, Cambridge at the University of Cambridge, where she read zoology, physiology, organic chemistry and biochemistry, with zoology as her main subject. At this time, only 500 (less than 10%) female students were allowed to study at the university, in contrast to more than 5,000 men. Furthermore, despite doing the same work as male students, female students received only "titular" degrees, rather than full Cambridge degrees that would make them members of the university.

Research and career After her PhD (awarded 1950 ), Lyon joined the group of Conrad Hal Waddington, with whom she worked in the last part of her PhD. The group was funded by the Medical Research Council, and she worked with TC Carter to investigate mutagenesis and the genetic risks of radiation. She also did extensive work on the mouse t-complex.

She was head of the Genetics Section of the MRC Radiology Unit at Harwell from 1962 to 1987. Although she retired from research in 1990, according to an interview from 2010, she was still active in the laboratory a few times a week.

Awards and honours Lyon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1973, In 2004 she was awarded the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. In 2006 she received the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize awarded by the Rockefeller University. Since 2015 The Genetics Society has awarded the Mary Lyon Medal in her honour.

Other awards and honours include:

In 1973 Mary Lyon was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 2018, the International Mammalian Genome Society established the Mary Lyon Award in recognition her role as a mentor and her remarkable career which began in a time period where very few women became scientists. The award is presented annually to early- and mid-stage independent female researchers.