Helen M. Dyer, a pioneer in cancer research

Abstract

In those days, there was no specialization and the word 'biochemistry' meant the chemistry of proteins, carbohydrates and minerals, enzymes and hormones, vitamins ... and on and on. Of course, we did not have all the vast information we have now in any of the branches and we were just starting to learn about them," stated Helen Dyer, a pioneer in the field of cancer-related biochemistry, during an interview (1). As one of the early women chemists, Helen Marie Dyer applied her scientific know-how to biochemistry and to nutrition. She was inspired by her teachers and colleagues and, in turn, inspired her students. Her life and career were spent methodically, lecturing in university classrooms and performing research in various laboratories. Having written and cowritten more than 60 articles and being the first to have compiled an index on tumor chemotherapy, Dyer is still quite modest about the personal and professional accomplishments in her life, the story of which began on an early summer day near the turn of the century.As the second woman to hold office in 1959 in the Washington Chemical Society's history (2), Helen Marie Dyer was born on May 26, 1895, in Georgetown in Washington, DC. Helen's father, Joseph Edwin Dyer, was a local businessman and her mother, Florence Robertson Dyer, was once a public school teacher. They were both Roman Catholics. Unlike her older sister and two older brothers, Helen Dyer was sent to public school. She was enrolled in the old Curtis School in Georgetown until she was in sixth grade, when her father, deciding that Georgetown was deteriorating, sold the house, moved the family to a country home in Virginia for a while, and returned later to the city to a house in Mount Pleasant. She then continued her primary education at Morgan Ele-

Women and chemistry: Shifting the equilibrium toward success

“…Women's methods, on the other hand, are seen as stressing intuitive and holistic approaches. 4. Science is thought of as "hard" and tough minded.…”