Marian Elliott was born on October 25, 1921, in
New Haven, Connecticut, to Margrethe Schmidt Elliott and Walter Elliott. Her mother was a teacher who had emigrated from
Denmark and her father was a hardware salesman of
Southern Baptist background. Marian attended
Vassar College in New York and graduated in 1942 with a degree in
bacteriology. She then attended the
University of Chicago, where she received her
M.S. in bacteriology in 1943. In
Chicago, she worked on reducing the spread of respiratory diseases and was a member of a research team that developed a
vaccine for
cholera. While at Chicago, she met
Daniel E. Koshland Jr., a biochemist and heir to the
Levi Strauss fortune. In 1945, she joined him in
Oak Ridge, Tennessee and spent a year working on the
Manhattan Project, researching the biological effects of radiation. In 1949, she moved with Daniel to Boston, where Marian spent two years in a postdoctoral fellowship at
Harvard Medical School's Department of Bacteriology. They later both worked at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory for 13 years. In 1965, Koshland became a researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley, joining its faculty in 1970. She studied
molecular biology with
David Baltimore in his
M.I.T. lab in the late 1970s. The
Marian Koshland Science Museum was in Washington, D.C., and featured exhibits geared toward the general public; the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center at
Haverford College houses the elite liberal arts college's science departments. Both are named in her honor. Koshland's children, Catherine Koshland and
Douglas Koshland, both attended Haverford and, as of September 2021, hold positions at U.C. Berkeley; Catherine has served as executive vice chancellor and provost since July 1, 2021, and Douglas is a professor of molecular and cell biology. , at
U.C.B. ==Publications==