Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Elizabeth McCoy
Madison-born, Fitchburg-raised industrial microbiologist; UW full professor; Syene Road farmhouse on the National Register
$250,000
Elizabeth McCoy turned a Fitchburg farm childhood into industrial microbiology. Born in Madison on February 1, 1903, she grew up just south of the city on the family farm in the Town of Fitchburg. Her mother, Esther, had been a professor and a nurse and taught canning and household hygiene; her father, Cassius, talked pasteurization and bovine tuberculosis after health forced him off a professorship. A septic pony bite, scarlet fever, pneumonia, and the 1918 flu left their mark. She studied agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, turned down a USDA offer in 1925 to stay with E.B. Fred, and wrote the taxonomy of the acetone-butanol clostridia that wartime industry needed for rubber and munitions. She earned her Ph.D. in 1929 and became a full professor in 1942, one of the first women to hold that rank on the campus. During the Second World War she isolated a Penicillium mutant that industrial labs scaled; descendants of that line still make penicillin. She also found oligomycin, too toxic for the clinic but later a tool for studying mitochondria. She trained 47 Ph.D.s and 110 master's students. With Fred and Ira Baldwin she published the long "root nodule bible" on nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the early 1930s, and she patented phage-resistant Clostridium madisonii after serving as an expert witness in the fight over Chaim Weizmann's acetone-butanol process. In 1949 she bought the cream-brick Italianate house at 2925 Syene Road because her grandfather James had owned it. The house is on the National Register. She left it to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Covering a 1946 patent, the New York Times called her a "Wisconsin University Girl"; she was already a full professor. She died in that Syene Road house on March 24, 1978. Madison was the birth; Fitchburg was the farm and the adult home that ties her here.