Lina Stern - Infinite Women

Born: 26 August 1878, Latvia
Died: 7 March 1968
Country most active: Russia, Switzerland
Also known as: Лина Соломоновна Штерн

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

Born in 1878 in what is today Latvia, Dr. Lina Stern faced the dual barriers of being a woman and being Jewish but nevertheless was able to become a groundbreaking researcher who, in her 40s, introduced the scientific community to the barrière hématoencéphalique—the blood-brain barrier.
The oldest of seven children, Stern was initially prevented from attending Russian universities due to anti-Semitism. So, like many Jewish students of the time, she left the Russian empire to study, enrolling at the University of Geneva, where she completed her “doctor of medicine” in 1903. Returning home, she passed the exams to practice medicine under Russian law but was soon invited back to Geneva for a research position. In 1918, she would become the first woman to attain the rank of professor at her alma mater, as head of the newly formed “Physiological Chemistry” department.
Between 1904 and 1922, she and her colleague Frederic Battelli would publish more than 50 articles on their research into cellular metabolism, which contributed to scientists’ understanding of what would later be known as the Krebs cycle, the chemical reactions in cell respiration. But it was her work with Raymond Gautier from 1918 to 1925 on the central nervous system for which she is most remembered. The blood-brain barrier is a semi-permeable wall of cells that protects the brain from anything nasty that might be in the person’s blood. Stern and Gautier conducted extensive tests to study how it works, including what substances do and do not penetrate the barrier and their various effects, as well as the development of the barrier in immature subjects. Stern introduced the term barrière hématoencéphalique in 1921 at a meeting of the Medical Society of Geneva, publishing her article on the topic the same year.
In 1924, she was invited to head the Physiology Department at the Second Moscow State University, where she would continue her research in addition to the duties of a leader in academia. Five years later, she founded the Institute of Physiology with the support of the People’s Commissariats of Education and Health. In 1939, she was the first woman elected as a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She also joined the Communist Party and, in 1943, was awarded the Stalin Prize for her work on the blood-brain barrier.
During World War II, she was recruited to three of Stalin’s five Anti-Fascist Committees, on Women, Scientists and Jews, mobilizing support among those groups against Nazi forces. Yet despite this, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the Russian empire, and Stalin also came after scientists after the war. At first, the government’s attacks against her were professional, undermining her reputation and having her lab taken from her. Then in the late 1940s, the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested and Stern, now 71, was subjected to interrogations that could last 24 hours, with accusations that she had prostituted herself while at international conferences. She spent time in the punishment cells of Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison, leading her to hallucinate. But in the end, she was the only committee member who was not executed; the other thirteen were shot in 1952 while Stern was exiled to Kazakhstan. But she returned after Stalin’s death the following year, resuming her life as a prominent scientist and heading the physiology laboratory of the Biophysics Institute of the USSR Academy of Science until her death in 1968.