Mary “Molly” Bernheim was a graduate student when she unlocked a world-changing secret of the brain that led to the first generation of effective antidepressant medications, but it was far from her only achievement.
Her long career in biochemistry research also provided the first chemical evidence of tobacco’s link to cancer. She was a feminist author, a public health advocate, and an accomplished pilot and flight instructor. Her love of nature laid the foundation for Eno River State Park.
When she died at age 95 in 1997, Bernheim was the last surviving member of the original Duke University faculty from 1930.
Molly Bernheim was born on June 28, 1902 in England into a family that believed in science for the greater good. It was her grandfather’s idea to use quinine against malaria, which plummeted the fatality rate from the disease. Her father carried on the legacy of disease hygiene with the Indian Medical Service.
Until the age of nine, she grew up in Bengal, India before her parents shipped her back to England for her education. It was there she too decided to study science. One day she took an amble amongst the labs of Cambridge and stumbled upon her future husband, Frederick, sitting on a bench in the department of biochemistry. With time, she decided to become a biochemist too.
Molly Bernheim immediately made her mark with a brief yet monumental research paper that toppled a Biblical-level theorem in the field of biochemistry and also proved the existence of a previously unknown enzyme. She didn’t know what her shiny new enzyme did just yet in 1928, but she knew it was important, and she was right.
Over the next few years, while she and Frederick fell in love, got married, spent a year drinking beer in interwar Germany, and went first to Johns Hopkins then to Duke, she and other researchers around the world continued to piece together the puzzle she had unearthed. The Bernheims took a career gamble by accepting jobs among the first faculty hired at the brand-new Duke University in 1930.
They arrived with the first class of faculty hired; Frederick as an assistant professor and Molly as an instructor. Because of the Great Depression budget, Molly Bernheim was asked to share a salary with Susan Smith, another researcher’s scientist-wife in the early class of faculty. During those early years, they often hosted the other new faculty at improvised potlucks in their Durham home despite insufficient chairs, while Duke and its fresh roster scrambled to figure out housing.
What Molly Bernheim discovered as a grad student would be renamed monoamine oxidase. The class of medications to fight this monoamine oxidase would be called its inhibitors, and those medications would get abbreviated as “MAOI”s. At first, the MAOIs sprouting from her work showed great power but unclear utility. Then, when they were being tested to fight tuberculosis in a sanatorium, some recipients of the medicine were described as “dancing in the halls.” In this way, the world’s first effective anti-depressants were born.
An image of the MAOI enzyme.
As with Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin, Molly Bernheim’s genius lay in noticing the exception to the pattern that had been insisted upon by doctrine, and recognizing its importance.
Current Duke professor of pharmacology and cancer biology Theodore Slotkin referred to Bernheim’s solo paper on monoamine oxidase as “one of the seminal discoveries of twentieth-century neurobiology,” and her enzyme is among the key agents influencing biological events as wide-ranging as schizophrenia, cancer biology, and drug addiction.
Bernheim did not, however, rest after the one world-shaking discovery. By 1935 she was also a mother. In 1940 Frederick submitted his draft card for the rumbling war-to-be and the couple took in two refugee children whose homes had been bombed in England. Duke accelerated the duo’s teaching schedule to help train physicians for the war effort.
Molly Bernheim ran teaching labs for medical students three days a week. Among other things, she taught them how urinalysis worked and what it meant, but sometimes she had to do so in the sweltering North Carolina heat. She spoke of the smell in oral history: “There was no air conditioning, and each one had a little open dish of his twenty-four-hour urine, and they were all boiling these down, like everything. That lab was pretty awful.”
Her colleague Susan Smith had started Bernheim thinking about the then-new field of vitamins, so Bernheim crafted another lab lesson where she sent Duke medical students to the grocery store with a budget appropriate for a low-income family, and instructed them to purchase food for a week that provided all necessary nutrition. It was a key experience, she felt, before they could advise their patients, who were often restricted by finances.
Frederick Bernheim said “the byword here [at Duke] was that we trained academic physicians,” physicians who would know how to research the problems in their clinics, because of Duke’s hope that “a large proportion of the graduates” would go into medical research. Duke wanted physicians who also noticed the patterns and exceptions, and sought to study them to improve the health of all.
During World War II, Frederick and Mary pivoted their research to tuberculosis because the pattern of history showed that tuberculosis outbreaks followed every war, and in a research climate with limited funding, Frederick said “You can grow your bacteria for a year on the price of a dozen rats.” Sources conflict, but some say that Frederick Bernheim was nominated for a Nobel Prize for the wartime tuberculosis work they did together.
As the war wound down, Mary and Frederick Bernheim turned their attention to measuring the oxidation processes of fats, a fundamental concept that would prove to have a major impact on humanity. Fats are called lipids in the chemical world, and lipids are the key ingredient in the outer protective wall of every cell. The Bernheims were studying how our body’s cells get murdered when they are exposed to chemical poisons, because they had figured out how to measure which chemicals can break down cell walls, and how aggressively.
In 1948 the duo devised a series of tests to measure how much those lipid walls were being broken down, which meant they could predict how toxic a chemical might be to people. They mixed the target chemical with a chunk of tissue and ran the mixture through a series of reactions to produce liquids of various colors. By measuring the strengths of the resulting colors they could assess how much of the tissue had been destroyed by the chemical. Their groundbreaking test has been used nonstop in the decades since, and continues to be used, to measure the chemical threat to our bodies from all manner of potential poisons.
One of the early poisons they tested was cigarette smoke. Molly and Frederick Bernheim’s chemical protocol proved that cigarette smoke can assault the cells of the lungs in ways that release hordes of cancer-causing agents. Their conclusive study proving the link between cancer and smoking in humans was published in 1954, and beginning around 1957, when the majority of physicians still did not believe the link was true, Molly Bernheim volunteered her time to provide public lectures about the dangers of smoking.
By then, she was also a maverick of the skies. Frederick had announced to her one day during World War II that he wanted to learn to fly once the global ruckus had settled. She did not believe him at first, but he stuck to it, and she was left wringing her hands with worry over his aviation adventures. Until one day she decided to join him.
She quickly became a flying addict, and the two took to the skies together. She logged thousands of flight hours, became an instructor, and wrote a successful book about the topic in 1959. It was an era after women had flown non-combat missions on behalf of the US military during the war, but flying was still publicly considered a man’s hobby, and she named her book A Sky of My Own in sly reference to Virginia Woolf.
Years later, in her obituary, a fellow flight instructor would lovingly describe her as “an exotic sight in those days, a gray-haired lady in pants, who was also a Duke professor, teaching people to fly.”
Both Molly and Frederick Bernheim took great joy in nature, and after their retirement, they became involved with establishing the area north of campus now known as Eno River State Park. Molly frequently walked the terrain and maintained diaries on behalf of the association, and the two donated a total of 113 acres of land. The park area now called Cabe Lands is almost entirely comprised of donations from the Bernheims.
Molly Bernheim was promoted to a full professorship at Duke in 1962, after 32 years of service on the faculty, and she led a healthy life until the age of 95. In the end, she was dedicated to science, airplanes, and public health. After the world had acknowledged the inarguable facts about smoking, she turned her focus in her final years to another issue she considered a public health concern for the biochemistry of our bodies: the harms caused by fad diets.
