Marjorie Lees

Lees was born in New York City and was educated in the New York Public School System. She attended Hunter High School, where she credited her physics and chemistry teacher with her enthusiasm for science. She was an undergraduate student at Hunter College, where she was introduced to neuroscience and the nervous system of the Xenopus. She secured funding from the National Institutes of Health and investigated sulfatides. During her doctoral research, Lees identified that it was possible to extract sulfatide using chloroform. and that extracts of sulfatide including a protein. She measured the amount of this protein by determining the amount of ammonia using Van Slyke determination. The protein later became known as the Folch-Lees proteolipid. == Research and career ==

Lees started her independent academic career at the Geisel School of Medicine (then Dartmouth Medical College), where she continued to study lipid isolation and to develop quantitative extraction strategies. She eventually returned to Harvard Medical School, where she established a laboratory at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She was made Director of the department. Proteolipids, such as the Folch-Lees proteolipid identified by Lees, are critical constituents of cell membranes. They are generally involved with ion channel activity and cellular processes. Lees analyzed the conditions for the electrophoretic analysis of the Folch-Lees proteolipid and developed a strategy to isolate the Folch-Lees proteolipid. She used antibodies raised against Folch-Lees proteolipid to study the membrane topology of Folch-Lees proteolipids. Alongside her work on proteolipids, Lees studied myelin, the fatty substance that surrounds the axons of nerves. She argued that dynamic interactions within myelin were responsible for its function. She studied myelin proteins, and identified Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase as a myelin protein. == Academic service ==

At Harvard Medical School, Lees developed courses on the biochemistry and neurobiology of intellectual disability. Lees was the first woman to be made president of the American Society for Neurochemistry, in 1983. == Selected publications ==

Lees had three children. She died on January 18, 2012, following a long illness. == References ==