10 Facts About Ida Maclean

Ida Maclean was an English biochemist and the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society.

Ida Maclean was taught by her mother at home until the age of nine and lived in "a cultured and progressive home".

Ida Maclean was educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham from 1886 to 1896, when she won a scholarship and began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge.

In 1906 Ida Maclean became an assistant lecturer in at the chemistry department of Manchester University, the department's first woman staff member.

Ida Maclean taught there until 1910, as well as acting as a demonstrator in the women students' laboratories and researching the optical properties of organic compounds.

Ida Maclean married Hugh Maclean, a co-worker at the Lister Institute, on 28 March 1913; the couple had a son and a daughter.

Between 1920 and 1941 Ida Maclean published in the Biochemical Journal approximately thirty papers, many in collaboration, on her particular interests, namely the role of fatty acids in animals and the synthesis of fats from carbohydrates.

Ida Maclean came to be regarded as an authority on biochemistry, and her 1943 monograph The Metabolism of Fat was the first published of Methuen's series Monographs on Biochemical Subjects.

Ida Maclean worked hard to improve the status of women in universities and was among the founders of the British Federation of University Women in 1907.

Ida Maclean died on 2 March 1944 at University College Hospital in London.