BERYL BENACERRAF '71

ECHOES OF LIFE

"Whenever you make an important discovery, you're not understood right away," says Dr. Beryl Benacerraf ’71, the first woman to become clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School.

Twenty years ago, when Benacerraf’s research showed that ultrasound technology could detect Down syndrome in a fetus, her findings were largely ignored by the medical community.

Today, the use of prenatal sonograms is widely accepted as a way of identifying genetic fetal abnormalities. Especially for pregnant women 35 and older, whose offspring are at increased risk, ultrasound technology provides an alternative to invasive amniocentesis. Benacerraf’s latest focus, three-dimensional ultrasound, promises even further advancements.

Benacerraf attended Barnard and Harvard Medical School after overcoming severe dyslexia in childhood. “The flip side of my dyslexia is that I'm good at imaging, which includes seeing things in 3-D,” she says.

Today, in addition to teaching at Harvard, she is president of Diagnostic Ultrasound Associates in Boston. She treats patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. She has contributed to many medical textbooks, and is the author of Ultrasound of Fetal Syndromes, a diagnostic reference text.

Benacerraf recalls that she chose Barnard in part because her mother, Annette Dreyfus Benacerraf '43, had such a positive experience as an undergraduate. Part of that experience was meeting her husband, Baruj Benacerraf, who went on to become a Nobel laureate and to serve as president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center Institute.

While Beryl Benacerraf met her own husband, Dr. Peter Libby, at Harvard Medical School, her family’s Morningside Heights connection remains a strongly personal one. Benacerraf’s daughter attended Columbia University, and her son, who attended Harvard, is married to Barnard alumna Melissa Thompson Libby '05.

On September 18, 2007, Benacerraf returned to Barnard to give the Roslyn Silver ’27 Science Fellowship Lecture.

—Anne Schutzberger