The Stadtman Way A Tale of Two Biochemists at NIH

...

Thressa and Earl, the first scientist couple at the National Heart Institute, were soon joined by other couples looking for employers that did not discriminate against married women. Marjorie Horning found a position at NHI in 1951, where her husband, Evan Horning, had been appointed chief of the Laboratory of the Chemistry of Natural Products; Martha Vaughan arrived from the University of Pennsylvania a year after marrying Jack Orloff in 1951; and Barbara Wright followed her husband, the famed Danish biochemist Herman Kalckar, who had first come to Building 3 in 1953 as a visiting scientist but had stayed on to become an NIH employee. It is interesting to note that all of these women scientists worked in the same room in Anfinsen's laboratory. As Donald Fredrickson recalled: "I got into a room of Thressa Stadtman's because we [the Clinical Associates] were all waiting for the Clinical Center to open. I was there with four women and I thought all the scientists at the NIH were women." This clustering had not so much to do with administrative obstacles as social conventions that made male scientists reluctant to work with female partners, especially their wives. The level of their concern was greatly reduced in 1954 when DeWitt Stetten, Jr., was appointed Associate Director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases (NIAMD). He and his wife set a precedent for other NIH couples by working closely together in the same section of the laboratory.

...