Mary Osborn was born in Darlington, UK, and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College. She studied maths and physics at Newnham College, Cambridge, receiving a BA in Physics in 1962. She obtained a PhD in biophysics from Penn State University and was a postdoc in Jim Watson's lab at Harvard University. She was a scientific staff member at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, for three years, and then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for two and a half years. In 1975, with her husband Klaus Weber, she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where she remains today.
Mary's research has focused on the cytoskeleton and in particular on microtubules and intermediate filaments. Antibodies developed in her lab have proved to be useful reagents in typing human tumors. Her more recent work has focused on nuclear structure and in particular on the NuMA...
