Chemist Mary Engle Pennington (1872-1952), an expert on the refrigeration of perishable foods, had just been chosen by the American Chemical Society as the 1940 recipient of the Francis P. Garvan Gold Medal to honor outstanding achievement in science by a woman. Pennington had attended the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1895) and worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1905-1919, before becoming a private consultant in 1922