Ruth Hubbard Wald, 92
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 7, 2017, the following Minute was placed upon the records. Ruth Hubbard Wald was a superb biochemist who studied the light-sensitive molecules (visual pigments) in photoreceptors and a prominent feminist and social activist. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1924, she and her parents, physicians and leftist intellectuals, fled Austria when the Nazis arrived in 1938, came to the United States, and settled in Brookline. Ruth lived much of her life in Cambridge and died Sept. 1, 2016, at the age of 92. Ruth attended Radcliffe College as a pre-med student and soon met her first husband, Frank Hubbard, who became a leading harpsichord maker and whom she married at age 18 in 1942; they separated in 1951. After her graduation from Radcliffe in 1944, she spent a year working as a Research Assistant with George Wald, a Professor of Biology at...