Mary Osborn

Early life and education

Osborn was born in Darlington, UK on determination of the molecular weight of a protein via SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, published in 1969 in Journal of Biological Chemistry. To see if this method applied to proteins of various sizes and shapes, Osborn and Weber took 40 known proteins, including globular and filamentous proteins, analyzed them via SDS PAGE, and plotted the logarithms of their molecular weights against their electrophoretic mobilities. They also found that intermediate filament composition was tumor-specific.

1979 Elected member, European Molecular Biology Organization.

1987 Meyenburg Prize for Cancer Research.

1995 Elected member, Academia Europaea.

1997 Doctorate honoris causa, Pomeranian Medical Academy, Szczecin, Poland.

1998 Carl Zeiss Prize, German Society of Cell Biology, (shared with Klaus Weber).

1998 Helena Rubenstein / UNESCO Prize for Women in Science (UK).

2002 L'Oréal / UNESCO Prize for Women in Science.

2003-2006 President of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB).

2005 Outstanding Science Alumni Award, Pennsylvania State University, USA.

2014. Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class, Federal Republic of Germany.

2007 Dorothea Schlözer Medal, University of Göttingen, Germany.