Stanford Report, January 21, 2004
Ruth Evelyn Hurwitz died Dec. 18, 2003, in San Francisco at the age of 89. Hurwitz, whose career as an investigator spanned more than 50 years, participated in training numerous students, postdocs and young faculty members in laboratory technology. Many of her trainees went on to become leaders in their fields.
Born in Boston in 1914, Hurwitz graduated from Radcliffe College in 1935 with a BS in chemistry and went to work with electroencephalography pioneer Frederick Gibbs, MD.
In 1955 she relocated to California and joined the medical school as a research associate, working first in pediatrics with Ruth Gross, MD, on the enzymology of red blood cells and later with Norman Kretchmer, MD, on developmental enzymology and biochemistry.
She remained at Stanford until 1982 when she re-joined Kretchmer, who by then had left to run a lab at UC-Berkeley, where she continued working until retirement in 1989.
