The pioneering chemist who helped invent a lifesaving diabetes test

1923–2021

For much of the 20th century, diabetes tests were cumbersome, expensive, and dangerously imprecise. Technicians had to collect a urine sample, combine it with a reagent, and then heat the mixture over a Bunsen burner. The sample changed color according to the amount of sugar in the urine, but mistakes were common because the test couldn’t distinguish glucose from other sugars. Then in 1956, chemist Helen Murray Free and her husband devised a way to coat strips of filter paper with chemicals that turned blue when exposed to glucose. This dip-and-read test allowed patients to regularly and accurately monitor their glucose levels at home; its importance hit home for Free decades later when she was approached by a grateful woman at an event in Austin. “She said her husband was a diabetic and if we hadn’t done this, he wouldn’t be alive today,” Free recalled. “We all cried.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Free “described herself as a nerd in high school,” said The Wall Street Journal. She enrolled in college in 1941 with expectations of becoming a teacher, one of the few professions then open to women graduates. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor a few months later, male students began streaming out of colleges to join the military.

The country still needed scientists, so on the advice of a dormitory housemother, Free switched her major from English to chemistry.

She “went on to pursue a decades-long career as a chemist at Miles Laboratories in Indiana,” where her future husband, Alfred Free, was a biochemist, said The Washington Post. The pair worked as a double act: He provided the ideas; she made them real. “Once you find out the joy of discovery,” she said, “nothing can beat that thrill.”

Helen Murray Free