For the past decade Betty Burton has organized the Vineyard Haven Public Library’s evening lecture series. On Tuesday it was her turn to speak. Like many Vineyarders, when she came to the Island years ago, she left behind an impressive oeuvre on the continent: Mrs. Burton was a researcher on the cutting edge of the still emergent field of genetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“Even people who have known her for a long time don’t know about her career as a research scientist,” says her husband, John Sundman.

Ms. Burton broke into the field of genetic research as a dewy-eyed, Purdue graduate student, still a “naïve schoolgirl from Indiana,” as she tells it, only 20 years after James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA (the pair famously announced their discovery at the Eagle Pub in Cambridge: “We have discovered the secret of life,” they exulted to bemused barflies).

“In fact, they had discovered the secret of life,” she said at a talk at the library, in which she recalled the salad days of genomics and her role in the field. Now, when the prospect of having an entire human genome sequenced in 15-minutes for $1,000 is nearly a reality, Ms. Burton said that it was difficult to convey the exhilaration of the early days of DNA research.

“It was a very exciting time,” she said. “A whole new world was opening up.”

Even two decades after the discovery of the iconic double helix, the field remained highly experimental, still unequipped to decode the genome of rabbits, mice or even insects. Even bacteria were too complex for the laboratory equipment and techniques of the late 1970s, when computers filled warehouses and the occupational safety standards of labs were spotty at best. Viruses that attacked bacteria, known as bacteriophages, provided the only manageable candidate for research at the time, and a forgettable one named Phi X 174 became the first organism to have its complete sequence of nucleotides mapped, in 1977 by Frederick Sanger, who carried out the work entirely by hand.

At Ms. Burton’s lab in Purdue it became apparent that the information encoded in the genome of a certain bacteriophage that preyed on E. Coli could not account for the variety of proteins the virus produced. It was a mystery, and one that had profound implications outside of the esoteric world of bacteriophages. How, for instance, does a mere molecule encode all of the information necessary to make a baby? To understand the solution Mrs. Burton and her colleagues stumbled upon requires a background in DNA translation, and in the creative ways in which nucleotides code for amino acids (and, in turn, proteins), but suffice to say that the discovery was a major breakthrough in the field.

“All life is made of proteins, and all proteins are made of amino acids,” she said in her talk.

Trained in a mutagenesis laboratory, Ms. Burton recalled an era in the mid 1970s when most genetic researchers worked on cancer grants. Part of that work included handling such hazardous materials as arsenic, cyanide and nitrosoguanidine, one drop of which Ms. Burton claims would wipe out the entire Island of Martha’s Vineyard. One of her jobs was to discern whether certain substances caused mutations and consequently cancer. Occasionally she would irradiate and damage samples of DNA with an ultraviolet light.

“Imagine how I feel about tanning booths,” she said. “That’s exactly what we were doing to cause mutations in the lab.”

UV light was the least of Ms. Burton’s worries however.

“The work we did was dangerous,” she said. “We used radio-isotopes, deadly chemicals and cancer-causing toxins without protection. We were willing to take the risks though because the science was so exciting.”

Those risks often seem preposterous to modern ears attuned to all-American litigious sensibilities. Ms. Burton recalls accidentally sticking herself with carcinogen-filled syringes, sucking lethal bacteria up pipettes by mouth and doing most of her work without gloves. She surmises she is still radioactive from handling phosphorus-32, carbon-14 and tritium. The frontier of scientific research was a perilous Wild West.

It was also a world dominated by males, even if its most fundamental discoveries owed much to the underappreciated work of pioneer Rosalind Franklin, an X-ray crystallographer who died of cancer at the age of 37, four years before Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received their Nobel prizes for uncovering the structure of the sugar-phosphate-backboned molecule of life. Ms. Burton considers Ms. Franklin a personal hero.

“I don’t call myself a pioneer like Franklin but I did run into several roadblocks that men didn’t,” she said. “The main one was getting funding.”

In Ms. Burton’s day, graduate students only received stipends if they were on a grant. In the first few years of her PhD studies, Ms. Burton failed to find grant funding, but it wasn’t for a lack of effort.

“The head of the department told me face-to-face that it was his policy not to put women’s names on grant applications with the rationale that ‘You’ll all get married and have babies anyways,’” she said.

In the meantime she worked as a cocktail waitress and taught pre-med students, before finally landing a grant with the help of legendary geneticist Irwin Tessman. Before long Ms. Burton was invited to present her work on the bacteriophage G4 at the august Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. James Watson was the head of the laboratory at the time, and both Watson and Crick were in attendance when Ms. Burton presented her work.

“This would be like if you were a kid in a rock band and the Beatles were in the back of the room,” she said. Having prepared exhaustively, Ms. Burton said the presentation went well, adding that Mr. Watson, a notorious philanderer, later approached her at a luncheon decked out in what she described as “the most horrible plaid pants you can imagine.” He offered to crack her lobster in a fumbling romantic gesture.

“I let him crack my lobster, but that was it,” she said.

In 1983, after her second child was born, Ms. Burton says she left the lab and never looked back. What she left behind was a body of work that led to the development of a vaccination for Haemophilus Influenza type B that has saved thousand of children from meningitis and untold reams of data on her beloved bacteriophages.

Though she isn’t active in the world of genetics anymore, she would be happy to recommend a library book about the subject.