Helen Free

Helen M. Free says of tracking down diabetes, “It was . . . like being a detective.” She invented a chemically coated paper dipstick that measures a patient’s blood sugar by changing its color when dipped in a urine sample.

About Her Life

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923, Helen Murray Free was the daughter of James S. Murray, a coal company salesman, and Daisy Piper Murray, who died in an influenza epidemic when Helen was six. She received her early education in the public schools of Youngstown, Ohio, and graduated from a small high school in Poland, a Youngstown suburb.

After attending a summer church camp at the nearby College of Wooster, Free set her heart on attending Wooster. Impressed with her high school English teacher, Free decided to emulate her and major in English at Wooster, preparing to become an English teacher and a Latin teacher as well. She arrived on the Wooster campus in September 1941. When six months later the male student population started to decline as young men went off to fight in World War II, the housemother at her dorm, Hoover Cottage, told her young charges that some of them should go into science, a predominantly male discipline, to fill the void. Free liked her chemistry course and was getting good grades, so she switched majors to chemistry without hesitation. Free has said that it was the “most terrific thing” that ever happened to her.

At the end of her senior year Free had one job interview, at the Koppers Chemical Company in nearby Orrville, Ohio. When she was told that her role would be to test the creosote that fence posts were dipped in before being sold to the local farms, she decided there must be something better. She applied for a research fellowship at the Mellon Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where she still had a lot of relatives. While waiting to hear about the fellowship, one of her chemistry professors, who knew the personnel director at Miles Laboratories (now part of Bayer) in Elkhart, Indiana, arranged for her to have an interview there.

Free interviewed with the head of the control laboratory at Miles. Afterward he and several other men dropped her off at the YWCA on their way to lunch. She recalls that they didn't offer to take her to lunch, especially since they were headed to Elkhart’s “Friday Club”—an all-male organization. Free was nevertheless offered a job at Miles, working in the control lab and testing the quality of ingredients for the firm’s line of vitamins. Before the interview, she had known of Miles Laboratories primarily through its main consumer product, Alka-Seltzer (known for its “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” TV commercials), and such radio programs as One Man's Family and Quiz Kids that Miles sponsored. Deciding that she would much rather work in research than in quality control, Free waited without success to hear from the Mellon Institute. Finally, she accepted the Miles offer, beginning work a few days after her graduation from the College of Wooster in May 1944. Ironically, the offer from Mellon came just a few weeks later, but by then it was too late, and her unplanned career path had been fixed.

The postwar expansion of research at Miles brought in a number of new people, including Alfred H. Free, a biochemist from Western (now Case Western) Reserve University. Helen was still itching to do research, so when a position opened with Alfred Free and his biochemistry research group, she asked for an interview. Not only did she get the job, but two years later she married her boss! The two became lifelong research partners.

One of the early projects she and the Free research group worked on was Clinitest, a tablet for testing the level of glucose in the urine of diabetes patients. Miles Laboratories had previously developed the tablet, but Free and her colleagues were asked to improve it so it was more sensitive. Clinitest contained cupric sulfate, citric acid, sodium hydroxide, and—because it came from Miles, producer of Alka-Seltzer—a little bit of carbonate to make it “fizz.” The amount of glucose was determined from the color change when the tablet was placed in a small test tube with a dilute urine solution. It was the first diagnostic test of its kind: it could be done in a doctor's office or a hospital without elaborate laboratory facilities. Much later it was realized that the test was simple enough to allow patients to do their own monitoring at home.  The group also developed a second test for diabetics, a tablet called Acetest. In keeping with the pattern of turning clinical tests into tablets, Free and her colleagues also developed Icotest, for diagnosing Hepatitis A, a liver disease caused by a virus. It worked by chemically detecting the presence of a substance called bilirubin in urine, a symptom of the disease.

During the development of Ictotest, Alfred Free thought there might a better way to conduct these types of diagnostic tests, one even more convenient than tablets. He came up with the idea of a dipstick or urine test strip. This is a strip of paper coated with a chemical that turns color in the presence of a particular chemical substance in urine. The Frees developed Clinistix for Miles Lab, the now ubiquitous “dip-and-read” test for glucose in urine. Helen and Al went beyond testing for glucose and developed other strips for testing levels of key indicators of disease. Once they achieved success with a number of different test strips, they turned their attention to combining more than one test on a single strip. By 1981 they had developed Multistix, a strip for urinalysis that had 10 different clinical tests on a single strip. Their inventions revolutionized diagnostic urine testing.

Helen Free retired in 1982 but still serves as a consultant to what is now Bayer Diagnostics. In her retirement she has become a champion for science education and outreach, chairing the National Chemistry Week task force of the American Chemical Society (ACS) for five years. In 1993 she was elected president of the ACS. As president, Free considered her top priority to be to raise public awareness of the positive role chemistry has played in our lives. The ACS named an award in her honor, the Helen M. Free Award in Public Outreach. She and her husband hold several patents and coauthored two books on urinalysis. She received the ACS’s Garvan Medal, honoring distinguished service to chemistry by a woman, in 1980 and was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2000. The Frees had six children together.

Adapted from James Bohning, “Diagnosing Disease with Fizz: A Story from CHF’s Oral History Program,” Chemical Heritage 21:3 (Fall 2003), 12-13, 42-44.

For Further Reading on the Web

Free, Helen Murray. Oral history interview by James J. Bohning, Elkhart, Indiana, 14 December 1998. Interview 0176, Chemical Heritage Foundation Oral History Collection, Philadelphia. Abstract, table of contents, and biographical information available online.