She was born in around 1938 in the
Williamsburg neighborhood of
Brooklyn,
New York City, the first child of immigrants Edward Heinrich Sturn and Arcelia (Celia) Del Valle. She attended
Grover Cleveland High School in
Ridgewood, Queens. Both parents worked at the nearby
Pfizer production plant, and she also took a summer laboratory job at the plant. She won a scholarship that enabled her to attend
Adelphi University, where she majored in biology, graduating in 1959. Initially influenced by the herpetologist Bayard Brattstrom, with whom she co-authored her first two research papers on the salamander
Eurycea bislineata, she subsequently became interested in the then-novel disciplines of
molecular biology and
molecular genetics. She briefly studied under geneticist
David M. Bonner at the
Yale School of Medicine's Department of Microbiology, with a
National Science Foundation fellowship. In 1960, she transferred to the microbiology department of
New York University (NYU) Medical School, supervised initially by the bacterial geneticist Werner Maas and then by the biochemist
Jerard Hurwitz, who was researching nucleic acids. She received her Ph.D. from NYU in 1964; her thesis was on
histones. ==Career and research==