Mary I. Bunting

[Evelyn Witkin]

The CSH Symposia were suspended for four years during WWII. Salva Luria was one of those asked to organize the program for the first postwar Symposium in 1946, which was to feature the exciting new field of microbial genetics. Salva had read a paper on color variants of Serratia marcescens, published in 1938 by a woman scientist named Mary I. Bunting. He believed that Bunting's work was a pioneering study of bacterial genetics, and he wanted her to present her work at the Symposium. She had published nothing since, and no one seemed to know where to find her. Salva persisted, and I remember him saying "We can't hold the Symposium without her!" Finally, Bunting was located at Yale, where her husband was on the faculty of the Medical School. Bunting herself had two infants, was expecting a third, and at first she insisted that she couldn't possibly speak at the meeting. Salva wore her down and she agreed to participate. She came, presented her paper, and her life was changed forever. Ed Tatum, who was at the Symposium, offered Bunting a space in his lab at Yale, and an open invitation to work when she could find time and to attend seminars. Gradually, she got back into research and caught up with the new developments. After her husband's death, she accepted a research and teaching position at Rutgers, soon becoming Dean of Douglass College there. From there, she accepted the Presidency of Radcliffe College, and while there established the Bunting Institute, which offers retraining and mentoring to women whose scientific careers have been interrupted by family pressures. Later, she spent some years at Princeton University, helping to ease the initial culture shock when women were admitted as students in the early '70s. I should add that those of us who knew Salva were not surprised by his scientific generosity, his complete lack of gender bias, and his readiness to back up his beliefs with energetic effort.