Mrs Tikvah Sterne (nee Alper) : physicist

Abstract

Tikvah Alper was born in South Africa. She graduated with distinction in physics from University of Cape Town in 1929, and then studied in Berlin. In 1932, she returned to South Africa to marry the (later) renowned bacteriologist Max Sterne, the inventor of the most effective livestock vaccine for anthrax. Among many other initiatives and discoveries, she was among the first to find evidence indicating that the infectious agent in Scrapie does not contain nucleic acid: a finding that was instrumental in understanding the development of the Prion theory. Despite their growing scientific renown, in 1951, Max Sterne and Tikvah Alper were forced to leave South Africa because of their outspoken opposition to apartheid. (Source; Wikipedia)