Ruth Sager

Ruth Sager (February 7, 1918 - March 29, 1997)  was an eminent American geneticist. Sager enjoyed two scientic careers. Her first was in the 1950s and 1960s when she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics. Her second career began in the early 1970s and was in cancer genetics; she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes.

Ruth Sager was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1938, master's degree in plant physiology from Rutgers University in 1944 and doctorate in maize genetics under Marcus Rhoades from Columbia University in 1948.

She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller Institute on the chloroplast from 1949 to 1951 and from 1951 to 1955 was a staff member at the Rockefeller, using the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardi as a model organism. She was a research scientist from 1955 to 1965 at Columbia.

Although her research was highly original and productive, she was not given a faculty position until 1966, 18 years after receiving her doctorate, when Hunter College invited her to be a Professor of Biology.

In 1975 she joined the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a Professor of Cellular Genetics. Her laboratory was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she was Chief of the Division of Cancer Genetics. She died of bladder cancer in Brookline, Massachusetts