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Patricia Peck Gossel

Early life and education[edit]

Patricia Louise Peck was born during World War IIinInglewood, California, the daughter of Elsa G. Erickson Peck and Harold G. Peck.^[1] She grew up in Murdo, South Dakota, where her father owned an elevator company.^[2] Peck attended Augustana College as an undergraduate, then earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Montana State UniversityinBozeman, Montana. In 1988 she completed her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, with a dissertation on "The Emergence of American Bacteriology, 1875-1900."^[3]

Career[edit]

Gossel had work experiences as an electron microscopist and as a clinical bacteriologist in the 1970s, and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s. At the Smithsonian, she was a major contributor to organizing the permanent exhibit, "Science in American Life,"^[4] and she founded the museum's History of Biology collection.^[3] She laid the initial groundwork for the 2005 exhibit "Whatever Happened to Polio?", which was realized after Gossel's death, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Salk vaccine.^[5] She also curated a collection of items related to the history and development of oral contraceptives.^[6]

Selected works[edit]

Scholarly publications by Gossel included "Pasteur, Koch and American Bacteriology" (2000),^[7] "A Need for Standard Methods: The Case of American Bacteriology" (1992),^[8] and "Packaging the Pill" (1999).^[9]

Personal life[edit]

Gossel was married once, in 1966,^[1] and divorced. She died from cancer in Bethesda, Maryland in 2004, aged 60 years.^[3]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Patricia Gossel was on C-SPAN in 1989, when she spoke at the Smithsonian on a panel called "Not in My Backyard: A Historical & Contemporary Look at Materials Disposal."