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Cornelia Mitchell Downs (December 23, 1893 - January 27, 1987) was an American microbiologist, best known for her work on Tularemia, Rickettsia, and the refinement of fluorescent antibody staining techniques allowing the method to be applied widely for disease diagnosis. Downs spent her academic career at The University of Kansas: she earned her degrees there (BA:1915, MA: 1920, Ph.D.: 1924) and spent the entirety of her professional career there as an instructor (1917-1921), Assistant Professor (1921-1925), Associate Professor (1925-1935), Professor (1935-1962), and Distinguished Professor (1962-1963). She was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from the university as well as the first woman to receive a distinguished professorship from the university. She spent World War II running a research section of 40 scientists in the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories program at Fort Detrick.

Early life and education
Cora M. Downs was born in Kansas City, Kansas on December 23, 1893 to Dr. Henry M. Downs and Lily Campbell Downs, who had met at The University of Michigan. Downs was born into a family was that quite educated: in addition to her physician father, her paternal grandmother, also named Cora M. Downs, was a poet of some note  as well the first women appointed to the Kansas Board of Regents, while her mother's brother, Walton Murphy, had been appointed Consul General in Frankfurt, Germany by Abraham Lincoln. A graduate of Central High School (now Wyandotte High School), Downs enrolled at the University of Kansas intending to follow her father into medicine, but after completing two years of medical school classes, including a year at The University of Chicago, the expense of medical school as well as worries about the professional difficulties a female doctor would face prompted Downs to major in bacteriology instead. Once she completed her B.A. degree at the The University of Kansas, she got a job as a laboratory technician at a hospital in Atchinson, Kansas. After three years, she returned to the university at the request Sherwood of the head of the Department of Bacteriology where she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. . She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas.

Tularemia
When Downs returned to The University of Kansas she was hired to work as an instructor as she completed her M.A.; once that was completed she was hired as an Assistant Professor of Bacteriology as she completed her Ph.D. . In 1925, the year after she completed her Ph.D., she was promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Kansas. In 1928, Downs became interested in Tularemia has she when a couple in Lawrence, KS became ill after eating wild rabbits. The infectious agent that causes Tularemia had only recently been described by Edwin Francis, and thus Downs became interested in further studying the disease when two local residents began exhibiting symptoms similar to those she had heard Francis describe at a recent meeting of the Society of American Bacteriologists. She was able to isolate Pasturella tularensis (now called Francisella tularensis) bacteria from a draining lesion on the finger of the ill man, and began to research the bacteria, and in 1929 published a case study of the local occurrences. These samples formed the basis of 20 years of research on Tularemia, resulting in 24 papers and an increased understanding of the bacteria, the disease transmission via tick infection , and the development of strains that could be used as a living vaccine against Tularemia. Such was her renown in the field that many referred to her as "Miss Tularemia".

War-time research
Downs planned to spend most of 1939 on sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute, but when World War II broke out she instead spent that sabbatical working in the laboratory of Dr. Kenneth Goodner, a former student, at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Goodner was one of the organizers of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories program at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, and at his request, Downs headed a research section there from August 1943 to October 1945. Holding a rank equivalent to Brigadier General, she ran a laboratory of forty technicians and scientists researching how Francisella tularensis, the bacteria that cause tularemia, could be aerosolized and disseminated, as well as how such attacks could be prevented and cured. The goal of such research was not to develop offensive weapons, but rather to be prepared in case of Axis attacks. This top-secret research involved a great deal of travel, including to Alaska, where strains of low-virulence F. tularensis had been reported. It was on one such trip that Downs was able to use her wartime rank of Brigadier General to bump a full Colonel from a full flight to take his seat. Downs maintained throughout her life that she never had any feelings of guilt over this research, stating that "it did not seem any worse than any of the other terrible weapons," noting to that these experiments were "expensive and they could hardly have been done under ordinary civilian conditions". This research advanced the knowledge of infectious diseases tremendously and set the stage for the accomplishments of the latter stage of her career

Rickettsia
Building on her wartime research, as well as connections drawn to Tularemia, Downs began to publish on Rickettsia beginning in 1949. For the next twenty years working with graduate students and her collaborator and colleague David Paretsky (father of author Sara Paretsky), Downs published multiple papers advancing knowledge of the physiology of the bacteria, the diseases caused by these bacteria , and possible immunological pathways.

Refinement of fluorescent antibody staining techniques
In the 1940s, Albert Coons, a doctor at Harvard University, demonstrated that antibodies could be made visible under a microscope with a dye that fluoresces under ultraviolet light. However, Coons used isocyanate as his fluorescing agent, a compound that is unstable in solution and difficult to work with. Downs realized that if a more stable compound could be found, immunofluorescence could be widely applied as a diagnostic tool and thus had her students research fluorescent dyes. By developing a fluorescing antibody stain based on isothiocyanate as the fluorescing agent, she was able to refine this technique to one that allowed diseases to be diagnosed quickly, cheaply, and accurately. Upon publication, her fluorescent antibody staining technique was hailed by Secretary Arthur Flemming of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as having the potential to greatly speed up the diagnosis and treatment of numerous diseases .

Retirement
Downs was promoted to full professor in 1935, and in 1962 was the first woman to be appointed a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas. She was appointed a Solen E. Summerfield Distinguished Professor upon the retirement of the previous Summerfield Professor, R.C. Moore. She found this a particularly gratifying honor, as the founder of the Chair is said to have said that no woman would ever be awarded this position, as none would ever deserve it. Although she retired officially in 1963, she continued to perform active research in her laboratory through 1967. She continued to live in Lawrence, KS until her death in 1987.

Personal Life
Downs never married; she reported she did have "several opportunities to marry and enjoyed companionship with men," but she also felt it was "hardly possible, in the early 1900s, to pursue a profession and yet also have children". Although late in life she felt some regret about not marrying or having a family, she maintained "I don't know whether it's altogether a good thing to try to combine marriage, children and a career, but that will have to be worked out by the generation that does it". In 1930, as a faculty member, she helped found the University of Kansas chapter of the Delta Delta Delta Sorority.

Although fear of how a woman would fare as a doctor is part of what originally caused Downs to major in microbiology, rather than to try to pursue a medical career, she stated that she was not aware of the discrimination faced by women in the sciences until she was a faculty member. Although she felt her colleagues viewed women faculty members as inferior to male ones, that she knew women faculty members earned less than their male counterparts, that she herself was not considered a viable candidate for head of department as her male colleagues would not accept a women in charge, and that she felt "no doubt" that woman had to be better than a man in order to gain the same recognition, she believed that she was affected "very little" by discrimination throughout her career.

Awards and honors
Downs received multiple awards and honors in her life. In 1971 she was awarded both Honorary membership in the American Society of Microbiology, the highest honor bestowed by ASM and the Crumbine Medal, the highest award of the Kansas Public Health Association. In 1975, she was given the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Federal Regional Council International Women's Award, and the award was presented by the then-governor of Kansas Robert Bennett. In 1979, the Missouri Valley Branch of ASM named the annual graduate student award after Downs. In 2017, The University of Kansas named a new $51 million dollar dormitory "Downs Hall" in her honor. She herself was nonplused by the recognition she received in her lifetime, declaring "I'm just a woman who has done something she very much wanted to do, that's all".