The Exceptions by Kate Zernike

Author:Kate Zernike
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14 “Fodder”

Boris Magasanik, the former chairman of Biology, called Mary-Lou from Washington in April 1982 to share big news: she’d just been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific association. The academy, headquartered in a massive marble temple not far from the Lincoln Memorial, had been founded during the Civil War to designate leaders of the field to advise policy makers on science, and its members now served the National Research Council and other government agencies. It was an elite group, with membership reserved for about one-half of 1 percent of all American scientists, and nominations and elections were highly secretive—no one was supposed to know who put names into nomination, and nominees were not supposed to know they’d been elected until the academy made its formal announcement. Boris, who’d long ago declined to even interview Mary-Lou for a job, couldn’t contain his excitement.

Mary-Lou’s professional stature was growing: by the time she was formally inaugurated into the academy the following year, she had also been elected president of the Genetics Society of America. In 1985, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the year after that as president of the American Society for Cell Biology, the first of three of Gall’s Girls to serve in the role. She had been teaching the summer course in molecular cytogenetics at Cold Spring Harbor for a decade. At MIT, she continued studying how cells respond to stressors in their environment and had also moved into work on transposable genes and telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that help prevent damage to DNA.

She turned fifty the year she was president of the Genetics Society and that December represented the United States at the International Congress of Genetics meeting in New Delhi. After the meeting, she fulfilled a longtime dream to trek the Annapurna Range of the Himalayas, one of the steepest hikes in the world. Annamaria Torriani-Gorini, a friend from the Biology faculty at MIT, joined her on the trip to Nepal, and on their way home, Mary-Lou stopped into an artist’s stall in a crowded market in Kathmandu where a young man was painting thangkas of Buddhist deities. They got to talking, and Mary-Lou told him she was a geneticist. The young man’s face lit up in recognition. “There’s an old lady who is a geneticist who won the Nobel Prize this year,” he said.

She had to laugh: the lady was Barbara McClintock, the woman Mary-Lou’s college professors had tried to hold up as a role model for her thirty years earlier. Now she was only the eighth woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, noteworthy enough to be news in Kathmandu. Still, women on campuses had few role models in the sciences, especially at the most elite levels. Forty years earlier Barbara had been the third woman elected to the National Academy. The year Mary-Lou was elected it had about twelve hundred members and less than 5 percent of them were women.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.