Patricia Peck Gossel (1944 — June 12, 2004) was an American science historian and curator, who chaired the Science, Medicine and Society Division at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Patricia Peck Gossel | |
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Born | |
Died | 2004 |
Occupation | science historian |
Patricia Louise Peck was born during World War II in Inglewood, 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 University in Bozeman, Montana. In 1988 she completed her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, with a dissertation on "The Emergence of American Bacteriology, 1875-1900."[3]
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]
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]
Gossel was married once, in 1966,[1] and divorced. She died from cancer in Bethesda, Maryland in 2004, aged 60 years.[3]