This biography was written by Dawn Elder based on secondary sources.
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1944 graduate
Molly Marples completed her MD in 1951 on the topic ‘Some Observations of the Distribution of the Fungi Pathogenic to Man’. She earned a BA and an MA in zoology at Oxford University before immigrating to New Zealand in 1937 with her husband, Brian, who had been appointed professor of zoology at the University of Otago. (1)
Marples had two young boys but was clearly ready for something new: she enrolled in Otago Medical School and graduated MB ChB in 1944. During her medical training, she completed a preventative medicine project on the topic ‘A Survey of Ringworm in Dunedin’.
In 1946 Marples was appointed to the staff of the department of bacteriology and public health at Otago Medical School. This was the first appointment of a woman academic who was expected to teach and carry out research. Marples was greatly respected by her colleagues in what later became the department of microbiology at Otago.
She was involved in a major development in the department, whereby microbiology was taught to science students as well as medical students: the course, which Marples proposed and promoted, first became available to science students in 1949.
She participated in several research expeditions to Western Sāmoa from 1950 to 1951 to research medical mycology; this was the basis of her MD thesis and her book, The Ecology of the Human Skin (1965). In 1969 she published an article on ‘Life on the Human Skin’ in Scientific American. Two articles co-written with her PhD student John (Sandy) Smith were published in Nature.
By the time Molly Marples was looking for an academic position after graduating, she was able to secure a position as assistant lecturer; she was promoted to associate professor in 1960 and retired in 1967. In 1981 Molly Marples was made an honorary member of the New Zealand Microbiology Society.
Her wide influence is demonstrated in the April 2017 edition of the University of Otago alumni magazine cover story, which reports on the career of university alumnus Robert Webster, an international expert in avian flu. Webster, who initially was studying chemistry at Otago, reports that his early career path took an unexpected turn when Molly Marples spoke to the chemistry club in the microbiology department she was heading up: ‘She talked about microbiology — micro-organisms, bacteria, viruses, yeasts — and captured me, as it were, to the idea of putting together chemistry, disease and animals. So, I moved my focus to microbiology.’ (2) Molly Marples died in 1998.
References:
- “The Inside Story,” Microbiology Memoirs: The History of the Microbiology Department, April 28, 2017, https://otagomicrobes.com/category/The-inside-story/?order=asc.
- “‘Influenzial’ Career,” University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, accessed August 9, 2024, https://www.otago.ac.nz/otagomagazine/issue44/features/influenzial-career.
