Talk:Margaret Oakley Dayhoff

Margaret Oakley Dayhoff was a Engineering and technology good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 27, 2018	Good article nominee	Not listed

Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on March 11, 2017, February 5, 2018, and February 5, 2024.

Biography: Science and Academia

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group.

Molecular Biology: COMPBIO Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Molecular Biology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Molecular Biology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Molecular BiologyWikipedia:WikiProject Molecular BiologyTemplate:WikiProject Molecular BiologyMolecular Biology articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Computational Biology task force (assessed as High-importance).

History of Science Mid‑importance

	History of science portal This article is part of the History of Science WikiProject, an attempt to improve and organize the history of science content on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. You can also help with the History of Science Collaboration of the Month.History of ScienceWikipedia:WikiProject History of ScienceTemplate:WikiProject History of Sciencehistory of science articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Women scientists Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women scientists, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Women in science on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women scientistsWikipedia:WikiProject Women scientistsTemplate:WikiProject Women scientistsWomen scientists articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Women's History Mid‑importance

	History portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women's History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Women's history and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women's HistoryWikipedia:WikiProject Women's HistoryTemplate:WikiProject Women's HistoryWomen's History articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Women in Red: #1day1woman (2020)

This article was created or improved during the #1day1woman initiative hosted by the Women in Red project in 2020. The editor(s) involved may be new; please assume good faith regarding their contributions before making changes.Women in RedWikipedia:WikiProject Women in RedTemplate:WikiProject Women in RedWomen in Red articles

picture

There's a great picture of Dr. Oakley Dayhoff here -- would anyone be interested in contacting the owner (Ruth Dayhoff) for permission to use?--Marysunshine 19:46, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am Judith Dayhoff, daughter of Margaret Oakley Dayhoff. I can be contacted at jdayhoff12@gmail.com and I would be happy to answer any questions. 74.96.65.100 (talk) 08:30, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'd

removed

I removed these sentences:

Even in this early work, she had accomplished what is still a goal in bioinformatics applications,

namely, making computer calculations iterative. Since this was in the late 1940s, just before the

appearance of programmable computers, no single computer could handle so many repeated operations,

and Dayhoff had to manually carry punch cards from one computer to the next.

It just doesn't make sense saying that the "goal in bioinformatic applications, ..., is making calculations iterative."

Maybe the original author had some intended meaning or information about it, but it is not obvious what that would be. /130.237.93.12 10:31, 1 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Picture and Dayhoff sequence work

A few comments:

The picture of Margaret Dayhoff from Ruth Dayhoff's site is a good one. I've got a better version of it, sent me by (Margaret's husband) Ed Dayhoff to use (with permission) in my book. Can supply it if someone gets permission from Ruth Dayhoff or Ed Dayhoff.
The date of the picture seems to be late 1960s, not the date given in Ruth Dayhoff's site (I recall Ed Dayhoff as saying that it was 1966). I met Margaret in the early 1980s a year or two before she died, and she didn't look that thin. She seemed to be a very nice person, BTW.
I am not sure why the wording about "small divergences in sequence homologies". The Dayhoff PAM matrices are computed from pairs of protein sequences that are close. But is the "small" just referring to not so big as to destroy our ability to align the sequences? Or to the PAM procedure? Why not put the PAM stuff later, after starting to discuss Margaret's work?
Some of her achievments that should be mentioned: pioneering protein databases (is there), taking an evolutionary approach to these databases, pioneering in recognizing gene families, and doing (with Richard Eck) the first molecular sequence phylogeny found computationally (being also the first to use a parsimony method on molecular sequences), inventing the PAM model of protein sequence change, the first stochastic model of protein evolution (and it preceded the Jukes-Cantor model too). Felsenst 05:38, 9 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

- This article is definately a work in progress, please feel free to make any corrections and additions that you think are necessary.--Peta 23:16, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also: I don't dare change this amazing phrase: "... Margaret Dayhoff was perspicacious enough to anticipate the potential pertinence of computers to the current theories of Zuckerkandl & Pauling and the method which Sanger had engineered." which is a classic of tongue-twisting tangled thinking. (But perhaps its author might want to reconsider it). Felsenst 14:40, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Cspenser has made a start at correcting this sentence. But I am still not sure what it means to "anticipate the potential" of computer "to" something. If you are the first to use computers on them you are not "anticipating" their use, you are doing it. "Potential to" means nothing unless there is a verb about doing. I think that the "method which Sanger had engineered" is just another way of saying sequencing of proteins. Felsenst 20:22, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- I have finally lost patience and replaced all the tongue-twisting confusion by a something more straightforward. Felsenst (talk) 00:24, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Picture

I've contacted Ruth Dayhoff to request image permission. Cariaso (talk) 14:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

no response. Cariaso (talk) 18:01, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is another daughter, Judith E. Dayhoff. Do not know her whereabouts but presumably she can be found too. Given that the picture has now been deleted by Wikipedia's official obsessive worriers and Worrybots, I guess someone needs to do that. (I don't have time right now). This is very frustrating -- we get a picture of Washington Square but no Margaret Dayhoff. Felsenst (talk) 15:40, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I am Professor Emeritus Vincent Brannigan. Margaret O Dayhoff was my mother in law. I have much of her material. fell free to contact me at firelaw@firelaw.us

Odd digression

For some reason the nearly-last part of the Research section is this: "Frederick Sanger's determination of the first complete amino acid sequence of a protein (insulin) in 1955, led a number of researchers to sequence various proteins from different species. In the early 1960s, a theory was developed that small differences between homologous protein sequences (sequences with a high likelihood of common ancestry) could indicate the process and rate of evolutionary change on the molecular level. The notion that such molecular analysis could help scientists decode evolutionary patterns in organisms was formalized in the published papers of Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling in 1962 and 1965."

It's nice to hear about this but where is Margaret Dayhoff in all this? In fact, as noted earlier in the article, she and Richard Eck were first to use computers to infer a phylogeny from molecular data. But why we need this history from Sanger to Pauling and Zuckekandl is not obvious, nor why this background to her work should be the last thing in the Research section of the Dayhoff article. Felsenst (talk) 14:18, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]