“Even though she’ll be a spinster, she’ll be able to support herself.”
These lines, uttered in 1948, were the gateway to a professional career that stretched half a century and opened the door to two generations of women striving for better treatment in the scientific community. They were spoken by the uncle of Millicent Goldschmidt (b. 1926) after her father’s refusal to allow her to attend graduate school to further her scientific education. Her father was convinced that a woman with a graduate degree would never find a husband, and would be a financial millstone around his neck for the rest of his life, and was set to end her academic career right then and there when that good uncle pointed out that, even if she didn’t marry, she would have a profession which, after all, might bring even more long term financial stability than a husband.
Her father relented in the face of this reasoning, and the path was cleared for Goldschmidt (born Cohen) to begin her grad career at Purdue, which she chose because it was the only school with a good microbiology department within the tight radius of acceptability laid out by her mother. She had known since the age of ten, when her time with the Girl Scouts brought her into regular, mentored contact with nature, that she wanted to become a biologist, and her next four years saw her not only receiving her MS (1950) and PhD (1952) in that field at Purdue, but also saw her engaged and married.
Her first summer of graduate school, she had planned to do what she always did during the summers - take up a job as a camp counselor. She was informed, however, by her advisor that things work a little differently in grad school, and that the summer is when she was expected to get her work done. Having already contracted with the summer camp, however, and having had worked especially hard during the school year to push ahead her research, she received permission to skip summer research just this once. When she returned to campus, one of the first sights to await her was an irate labmate, who had been told he was not allowed to go on vacation until she returned, because he had to teach her a particular technique. That man’s name was Eugene Goldschmidt, a PhD student, and from this unlikeliest of starts, a romance soon blossomed. Eugene proposed to Millicent in the pouring rain on their way to a Halloween party, and the couple stayed together for thirty-one years, until Eugene’s death in 1980, a model of mutual respect, encouragement, and love.
Of course, being a married scientific couple in the 1950s would bring its share of problems. As we have seen in the case of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, universities would often hire the man to a full salaried position and expect his wife to work for the institution for free, gaining the benefit of her research and teaching while not paying her a second, “superfluous”, salary. Purdue was unhappy that she was marrying and having children (her first child was born in 1953), feeling that they had wasted time and resources on training somebody who would just end up being a housewife (this was often stated by administrators of the era as the main reason why they resisted accepting women into graduate programs), but Goldschmidt was determined to show that research and domestic life could co-exist, and while pregnant with her second child she was carrying out work for George Washington University involving bacterial reactions to shockwaves. These experiments involved placing bacteria in pillows, putting those pillows on large stacks of explosives, and then seeking safety behind thick stacks of sand bags while detonating the stack in a grand explosion of biological pyrotechnics.
Ultimately, the department that Eugene was working in asked him to help design a super biological weapon, which he could not morally bring himself to do, and the couple moved to Texas, where they would spend the rest of their careers. It was here, while at the Baylor College of Medicine, that she received the position that history knows her best for, the directorship of the lunar receiving laboratory protocols for NASA. At the time, we had no way of knowing what type of pathogens might be brought back from samples collected on the moon. Was it possible that a lunar pathogen could cut a deadly swath through a human population with no resistances to it? How would we even test for such microorganisms in a manner that was efficient, accurate, and timely? These were the questions that Goldschmidt had to ponder, and in the process turned her mind towards the field that would be her unique realm in the decades to come: that of rapid microbe detection, of developing techniques that improved exponentially on the traditional result times for microbial presence verification.
While Goldschmidt’s protocols were employed in the safe analysis of Apollo lunar specimens (some 2,200 samples were tested by the Lunar Receiving Laboratory from 1969 to 1972), she was carrying out research and writing papers on rapid detection techniques, including the use of electrical measurements to determine bacterial cell concentrations (1975) and methods of arginine decarboxylase activity that yielded results in under three minutes (1971).
These were years of steady progress in the development of microbial testing procedures, but also of steady frustration in the face of both official and unofficial sexual discrimination. In addition to fending off co-workers who felt they had the right to grope her while she was at work, she had to contend with the active ill will of department heads who felt that women were a drag on their resources, and who consequently either found reasons to transfer her to other departments, or to give her only the lowliest of academic jobs to perform in spite of her degrees, experience, and published research. She was refused a position at Baylor College from the new department chair there for asking for a salary equivalent to what a male would earn. She then went to a position at M.D. Anderson Hospital, where she ran the clinical microbiology lab and worked on the development of rapid bacterial detection methods, where she pointed out that the new lavish carpeted private suites the administration was proposing were, from a microbiological point of view, a disaster waiting to happen, to which they responded, “No woman PhD is going to teach us how to practice medicine,” and dismissed her.
Ultimately, she ended up at the University of Texas, where she and the few other women working in biology formed a group to pressure the administration into creating sexual harassment classes that male faculty accused of sexual misconduct would have to take in order to learn the bare basics of laboratory decorum between the sexes. Meanwhile, she found herself shuttled between departments as cronyism and sexism kept her at reduced salaries, and always made her the first to be transferred when funding got tight. But she kept on, and in the 1990s carried out ground-breaking research in oral bacterial detection which is, to my mind, among the most fascinating aspects of her career.
In spite of having been taught by our parents from our first conscious moments about being careful with what we ram into our mouths, there are aspects of our daily lives that we regularly cordon off from that minute diligence. We swab our toothbrushes around in our mouths when they are at their dirtiest, perfunctorily run them under the tap, put them in a cup, leave them for twelve hours (or twenty-four if we’re being honest), and then, with just the barest of rinses, stick that mass of dried mouth goop back in our faces again. And we’re not much better about our retainers or our dentures. Goldschmidt set out to determine what the bacterial cost of these behaviors was. What bacteria can get into and thrive in our denture adhesives? (1994) What can we add to toothpastes to make toothbrushes less disgusting over time? (2001) How can we ensure that facial and oral prosthetics don’t become breeding grounds for infection? (1994) These are all fantastically important questions with bearing on our day to day health that Goldschmidt investigated at the University of Texas, while also carrying out research into better and faster tests for food contamination, an area which has just become more important over the years as smaller and smaller inspection staffs have had to take up the weight of greater and greater responsibilities in keeping our food safe.
For thirty years, she gave her summers to teaching concentrated courses on mechanized microbial detection at Kansas State University. Wanting to ensure that future generations of women scientists wouldn’t have to undergo the treatment she received throughout her career, she has been a fixture of committees investigating the hardships faced by women in microbiology, and creating awards recognizing and encouraging women’s accomplishments in the field. She pushed forward better testing procedures for determining the health impact of different cosmetic routines. She developed the medium that would prevent all fungi except Candida albicans (a fungus that collects on implanted medical devices and can prove deadly to immunocompromised individuals) from growing, fantastically increasing the discovery time of that pathogen. And she just kept on going, not retiring from an active university role until the age of 85, and holding onto an emeritus status since.
Everything about Millicent Goldschmidt is, in short, magnificent. The pregnant woman crouching behind sandbags blowing up bacteria became the director safely shepherding lunar rocks onto the surface of the Earth became the rapid detection maestro who made us think about the things we put in our mouths, on our face, and in our stomachs, and how we might better order our lives to make all of those acts a little safer, and today, approaching her 99th birthday, after having been a mentor to two generations of women microbiologists, she is a beacon of inspiration to those just emerging and who see in her the individual who took the hard knocks of institutional prejudice, and kept standing, that they might run.
FURTHER READING:
Goldschmidt is featured in a chapter by Hazel Barton in Rachel Whitaker’s 2018 Women in Microbiology, but while you’re waiting for that the prime source for her life can be found in the interviews she has given to historians in the past two decades, and most particularly in the Texas Medical Center Women’s History Project interview of 2017, and the 2023 This Week in Microbiology interview she did in Houston. Put together with her classic papers (many of which, amazingly in this day and age, are not bricked off behind a paywall), they will allow you a pretty good insight into her life and work while we wait for some intrepid soul to put together the full biographical treatment that is her due.
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