Born Zofia Julia Teresa Jakowska in Warsaw on February 12, 1922. Her own 1960 hand-written statement anchors the date against a 2005 obituary that got it wrong by three weeks.
Her father Josef Jakowski — a Warsaw obstetrician — was killed at the Majdanek concentration camp for trying to help Jewish people; FBI sources record the cause of death as typhoid fever in the camp. Her mother Maria Świergocka survived the war and died around 1959 in Poland on the eve of her planned emigration to America. By 1963 Sophie had no close living relatives remaining in Poland.
Sophie met Constantine as a student at the University of Rome; they married there on June 11, 1941, weeks before he crossed to New York. She followed on the SS Serpa Pinto from Lisbon, arriving New York June 5, 1942, last residence on the manifest: Évian-les-Bains, France.
In the US she built a long scientific career — Fordham PhD in Cytology (June 1947), Sloan-Kettering, College of Mount Saint Vincent (resigning 1959 at Associate Professor), the National Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (helping establish the national Network of Cystic Fibrosis Centers), the Food and Drug Research Laboratories as Head of Pathology, and a senior emeritus appointment at CUNY College of Staten Island. She organized and edited several NY Academy of Sciences symposia and published more than 100 articles in American and foreign journals. She spoke nine languages, including a 1962 paper delivered in Portuguese in Brazil.
Late in life her work pivoted from clinical pathology to environmental issues, bioethics, and eco-spirituality, on which she lectured worldwide. She was a devout Roman Catholic and a US citizen since April 21, 1947 (Certificate of Naturalization No. 6705767, NYC).
Sophie and Constantine had three children: Peter (b. 1943), John C. (b. 1953), and Marie Helene “Penny” (b. 1960). After Constantine’s death in Santo Domingo in 1980, Sophie returned there in retirement, living with Penny and Juan Medina until her death on December 4, 2005 — the day after her grandson Alex’s wedding in St. Martin.
