Mary Ellen Avery

Mary Ellen Avery was an American pediatrician whose research in the 1950s helped identify the main cause of respiratory distress syndrome in premature babies. Born in Camden, New Jersey in 1927, she studied chemistry at Wheaton College and medicine at Johns Hopkins, where she was one of four women in her class. While recovering from tuberculosis she became interested in how the lungs work. At Harvard Medical School she compared the lungs of infants who died of the syndrome with healthy animal lungs and found that a foamy substance, surfactant, was missing, a finding published in 1959 that led to replacement therapy and is credited with saving very many infant lives. She became the first woman to head a clinical department at Harvard Medical School and the first woman physician-in-chief at Boston Children's Hospital, and received the National Medal of Science in 1991. She died in 2011.