The Scientific Vision of Women

Jane S. Richardson is a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry. She received her BA in philosophy in 1962 from Swarthmore College and her MA and MAT from Harvard in 1966. Although she does not have a formal Ph.D., she has been given three honorary doctorates, from Swarthmore College (1986), the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1994), and the University of Richmond in Virginia (2003). 

Jane Richardson is widely recognized for her creation of ribbon drawings to schematize protein three-dimensional structures, first published in Advances in Protein Chemistry in 1981. The drawings stemmed from Jane's realization that a general classification scheme could be developed from the recurring patterns of structural motifs within the "folds" of proteins. She spent an entire year learning how to create flat two-dimensional ribbon drawings that convey the three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule. The resulting 170-page textbook chapter titled "The Anatomy and Taxonomy of Protein Structure” showcased a uniform set of drawings for the seventy-five protein structures that had been solved at that time and is still highly cited today.  

Label by Rebecca Williams