Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks

Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks
Brooks, before 1927
Born	1888
Died	1981
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Known for	Discovering that methylene blue is an antidote to carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning
Spouse	Sumner Cushing Brooks
Scientific career
Fields	Biology, cell biology
Institutions	United States Public Health Service, University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Quantitative studies on the respiration of Bacillus subtilis (Ehrenberg) Cohn (1920)

Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks (1888–1981) was a cellular biologist best known for her 1932 discovery that the staining compound methylene blue is an antidote to carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning. She held a PhD in zoology and spent her professional career working as a researcher at the United States Public Health Service and the University of California, Berkeley.

Education

Brooks earned her BS and MS at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, and her PhD in zoology from Harvard University in 1920.

Career

United States Public Health Service

Brooks conducted joint research projects with her husband, biologist Sumner Cushing Brooks. They worked together for the United States Public Health Service from 1920 to 1927.

University of California, Berkeley

In 1927, Sumner Brooks was offered a faculty position in Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, to teach physicochemical biology, becoming the first person at Berkeley to teach classroom and lab courses in experimental cell biology. When her husband had taken up his faculty post, Matilda had been barred from a paying job by Berkeley's anti-nepotism policy and allowed only a non-paying appointment. Thereafter she was described as being on the research staff at Berkeley, where she continued publishing her own papers and collaborating with her husband for 20 years.

Lawsuit for recovery of professional expenses

When Sumner Brooks died in 1948, Matilda was left with a lab and some small grants at Berkeley but no salary, the result of the university's anti-nepotism policy, which had barred her from a paying job when her husband had accepted his faculty post. Berkeley then offered Matilda a stipend of $500 a year to continue on.

By drawing on personal savings and investments, plus the small research grants, Brooks was able to continue her career on the meager stipend. In 1952 and 1953, she made trips to Europe furthering scientific aims, claiming expenses of $2,988 and $3,685, respectively, incurred during the travel. These deductions were denied on her Federal income tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Brooks then took the matter to Tax Court, but lost.

She appealed the decision with the Ninth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals. In Matilda M. Brooks v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, she argued that even though she couldn't hope to earn a living from publishing scientific papers alone, she would profit professionally by gathering materials and conferring with peers to preserve her academic reputation during European travel. In 1959 Justice Stanley M. Barnes held in favor of Brooks and reversed the lower court decision, writing: "It is difficult in view of mankind’s almost universal drive for monetary reward alone to recognize that petitioner was required to spend many thousands of dollars to retain the position paying her but $500 per annum."

Activism

In 1933, Brooks published a rejoinder in JAMA after a previous paper by a male physician reported successful treatments of cyanide poisoning with methylene blue omitted the fact that Brooks had published her discovery the year before.

In June 1936, Brooks wrote to the Board of Trustees of Mount Holyoke College. "May I add my voice of protest to that of the others against the appointment of a man as head of Mt. Holyoke College? The education of women has progressed a long way from the time when they were allowed to sit out of sight behind curtains to listen to the words of wisdom which proceeded from the mouths of men instructors... It seems to me that in this modern age when there are so many able women in this country, educated and trained for leadership among not only women, but also men, that it is a very curious reactionary decision on the part of those in power, to revert to the age-old custom of considering a man as the only one able to head a group of women."

Personal life

Brooks met her husband, Sumner Cushing Brooks, in 1916 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was working on her PhD in zoology at Harvard and he had just finished his in botany. His father was the American agricultural scientist William P. Brooks who served as the president of both Hokkaido University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Selected works

• 1944, with Sumner Cushing Brooks, The permeability of living cells. Ann Arbor, MI: J.W. Edwards, Incorporated. OCLC 5136643