At UC Berkeley she continued her interest on the effects of radiation on cells by studying the effects of X-rays on yeast and the induction of dominant lethality. In 1958 she joined the MRC Bone Seeking Isotopes Research Unit at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford Selleckchem Panobinostat as a Member of the Medical Research Council Staff, with Dame Janet Vaughan as Honorary Director. This small interdisciplinary group had been established in Oxford in 1947 in the post-war era to study the adverse

effects on bone of the many radioisotopes generated by the atomic bomb. At that time there was little understanding of the biochemistry and physiology of these so-called ‘bone-seeking isotopes’ in the body. It was in this setting, and under Dame Janet’s mentorship, that Maureen’s long interest in bone tissue began. She thus entered this field at an early stage of the interest in Sr90 deposition in bone and was Docetaxel directed by Dame Janet to work on this topic in a laboratory that, most unusually for the time, was populated almost entirely by ladies. These included Betty Bleaney,

Jennifer Jowsey, and Elizabeth Lloyd, who all became prominent in the bone and radiation biology fields, together with a majority of female technical staff. Maureen spent several years working on 90Sr dosimetry in bone and the radiation hazards, including the relationship between radiation dose and skeletal damage after different patterns of administration of this isotope to rabbits. Included were measurements of variations of calcification in normal rabbit bone and investigations of growth and structure of the tibia by using microradiography and autoradiography. She was sheltered at the time from any adverse radiation effects by Dame Janet who gave all radioactive nuclide injections herself to protect her younger colleagues. However, the safety standards were not as demanding as today and in vivo effects in rabbits of plutonium and strontium-90 were studied in relatively open laboratories. It was during this time that her interest in bone biology increased and she decided to study bone cells.

SPTLC1 This coincided more or less with Maureen’s one-year break from Oxford in November 1962 when she obtained leave of absence from the Medical Research Council and accompanied her husband John, also a physicist, to Long Island New York. There she was employed as a Research Fellow in the Biology Department at the Brookhaven National Laboratory where she was fortunate to work with Henry Questler who was at the time the foremost expert in cell and tissue kinetics. Her first venture was in the study of cell population kinetics of growing bone by using labelled thymidine and glycine in association with autoradiographic techniques. Many years later these studies were honoured by being reprinted in 1995 as a classic article by the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.