Muriel Davisson

“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I wanted to get out of the state and see what the rest of the world was like and to do something at a more professional level.”

After graduating at the top of her high school class, Davisson was offered a full-tuition scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, a women’s liberal arts college in South Hadley, Mass.

“Kind of like the Lab, I fell into genetics,” she said. “I actually majored in the German language and literature my first year in college, and I thought I wanted to go off to the U.N. and be a translator or something. I took genetics as part of a basic biology course that was required at Mount Holyoke. The minute I took the first few lectures in genetics, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I probably wouldn’t have come back to the Island until I reached retirement age, but genetics was something that I could do here.”

While earning her bachelor’s degree, she spent the summer after her junior year working with a colony of rabbits at The Jackson Lab’s Hamilton Station research center at Salisbury Cove. Her experience as a summer student in 1962 changed her life.

“Had they not had grants that gave scholarships to kids, I wouldn’t have been able to do that either,” she said. “I was able to live at home. At the end of the summer I was asked if I would come back after college to work as a research assistant.”

She did, at a salary of $4,300 a year. After working for one year while living at home in Tremont, Davisson decided to enroll in graduate school and to pursue a doctorate.

“I realized that I could either be my own boss or I could work for somebody else,” she said. “And, in working for somebody else, you may or may not be able to do what you really want to do.”

After earning her doctorate at Penn State University in 1969, Davisson returned to Tremont with her husband, Farrell Davisson, who was a journalist.

“When I came back here, I didn’t actually have a job at the Lab,” she said. “I was a geneticist with a specialty in chromosome work. In those days, it was such a small place that you sort of knew somebody who knew somebody to get a job. I met with Earl Green, who was the director then, and let him know I was in the area. We really wanted to stay here. I got a call that there was an opening for a cytogeneticist, and they hired me half-time. One thing led to another.”

Most of Davisson’s 36-year career in genetics research at The Jackson Laboratory has involved finding spontaneous mutations and genetically mapping and characterizing them. She recently cut back to three days a week after serving for the last 15 years as the Lab’s director of genetic resources, which involved management of mutant mouse strains.

After being named a principal investigator in 1971, Davisson began exploring how abnormalities in chromosomes affect development.

While geneticists can now manipulate virtually any gene, Davisson said spontaneous mutations are a better mimic, or model, of the comparable human disease.

“The rare accidents are still rare, but, in a breeding population of a million mice a year, there are a lot more of them, even though they are rare,” she said. “They are like raw material.

“It’s discovery. Every time you discover a new mutation, you don’t know where it will take you. You’re always learning. It might be a cranial-facial defect this time, or developmental, or skeletal. It’s always something new. That’s the excitement of it. And then, if you develop a new model for other scientists to use, you expand the benefit of what your research does for human health. For me, that’s a major reason for doing it.”

Davisson is best known within her field for developing a durable new mouse model for Down syndrome, a condition related to a chromosomal anomaly linked to mental retardation in more than 350,000 Americans. Eighteen years later, her mouse model is so essential to research that the National Down Syndrome Society named Davisson the 2002 “Researcher of the Year.”

“It is the model being used by all the scientists who are doing research on Down syndrome and studying behavior, memory and how kids learn if they have Down syndrome,” she said. “They can now study this mouse.

“There has been a tremendous increase in publications in the literature on learning and memory and behavior, as these mice have some of the behavioral characteristics of people with Down syndrome. They’re fairly docile, but can instantly become hyperactive if they get perturbed.”

As her career winds down, Davisson is looking forward to devoting more time and attention to local history and to seeing Jackson Lab from the sea.

“I’m in my first year as president of the Tremont Historical Society,” she said. “And I like outdoors stuff. I’m learning to sail.”