Remembering Gail Martin, PhD

Dear Friends,

By now many of you have heard that Gail Martin, a long-term member of the Anatomy department, passed away a few weeks ago. Gail was a remarkable scientist, a pioneer in the field of stem cell research and gene targeting technology, for which she was widely recognized. In fact, Gail was to first to isolate pluripotent stem cells from normal embryos, after which she coined the term"embryonic stem cell".

Originally from New York, she came west and was a grad student at UC Berkeley in Molecular Biology and after postdocs in University College London and in the Charles Epstein lab at UCSF, she became a UCSF faculty member and ran her lab until 2012. Gail served as the Director of the UCSF Development Biology graduate program from 1986 to 2009. And in recognition of her incredible contributions, Gail was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and as a Foreign Member of the UK Royal Society.

After retiring from UCSF, Gail became a docent at the Asian Art Museum and organized memorable tours of Turkish, Indian and Chinese art and history. And on a personal note, I have to admit that I serve as Chair of the Anatomy department only because Gail turned down the Dean's request to take on the position.

Allan Basbaum, PhD