Elizabeth Waterbury Beach was born on December 28, 1917 in Fujian Province, China, the daughter of Congregational missionaries. She attended Oberlin College for two years and received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1940. Her Ph.D. work on the formation and transfer of methyl groups in metabolism was carried out at the Cornell Medical College under the direction of Dr. Vincent duVigneaud, and she received the degree from Cornell in 1948. Her work involved some of the early uses of radioisotopes to trace metabolic pathways. From 1949-1960, at Harvard University and MITshe studied the process by which cells make proteins. She came to Cornell in 1965 to work with Dr. Robert Holley, contributing to the work that culminated in the determination of the nucleotide sequence of a transfer RNA from yeast, work for which Holley received the Nobel Prize. She married Leonard B. Spector in 1984.