Rose Frisch
American biologist (1918-2015)
Rose Epstein Frisch (born Rose Epstein; July 7, 1918 – January 30, 2015) was a pioneering American scientist in fertility and human development whose work was instrumental in the discovery of leptin. She researched infertility and discovered that low body fat is a contributing factor to infertility.
Early life and education
She was born Rose Epstein in 1918, in the Bronx, to Russian-Jewish immigrants Louis and Stella Epstein. Her brother Lee Eastman (born Leopold Vail Epstein) is Linda McCartney's father. Frisch attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1939. She earned her master's degree in zoology the following year at Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. She met her husband, David H. Frisch, while she was at Smith and he was at Princeton. The two worked on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the second World War.
Research
Focusing on the role of adipose tissue (fat) in fertility, Frisch discovered that low body fat (under 17%) could cause infertility, late menarche, and oligomenorrhea. This discovery was published in the journal Science in 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rose Frisch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.