Meet Betty Hay, Who Saw How Cells Grow and Limbs Regenerate | Massive Science

Elizabeth Hay researched limb regeneration over many summers at while earning her degrees at Smith College and Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Elizabeth Hay. Credit: Wikimedia
Elizabeth Hay. Credit: Wikimedia

Limbs regenerate, embryos grow, and cancers invade.

In each of these processes, cells change dramatically. Betty Hay studied fascinating biological phenomena, relentlessly asking questions with her students and colleagues to understand how cells behaved. By the end of her life, she had made enormous research contributions in developmental biology, on top of committing herself to mentoring the next generation of scientists and advocating for more representation of women in science.

Betty Hay began as an undergraduate at Smith College in 1944. She loved her first biology course and , a professor at Smith who studied limb regeneration in frogs. “I was self-motivated and very attracted to science,” she said  in 2004, “Meryl at that time was working on regeneration and by the end of my first year at Smith I was also studying regeneration.” 

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