Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 249

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science," by Rita Colwell.

 

Two other women scientists—Barbara McClintock and Rosalind Franklin—were more employable because they were unmarried, but both ran afoul of the same man: James Watson. Franklin was on the verge of discovering the structure of DNA and the molecular basis of heredity by herself when Watson was shown Franklin’s spectacular X-ray photograph of DNA’s coiled structure without her knowledge or permission. He described the photo to his lab partner, Francis Crick, who had a background in analyzing crystalline structures. Reminded of the horse hemoglobin he’d studied for his PhD thesis, Crick realized that DNA’s two coiled strands go in opposite directions: DNA was a double helix. It wasn’t until 1999 that Watson publicly admitted, “The Franklin photograph was the key” to their discovery. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-seven. The Nobel Prize is not given posthumously, so it went to Watson, Crick, and another DNA expert, Maurice Wilkins, four years later. Watson’s subsequent bestseller, The Double Helix, turned Franklin—a strikingly good-looking woman with a sparkling wit and chic French tailoring—into an unattractive, inept spinster. A woman’s appearance and age were important to Watson. When, at the age of thirty-nine, he married a Radcliffe sophomore, he sent a postcard to friends announcing, “19-year-old now mine.” When asked in 2007 why it mattered how a woman looks, he answered, “Because it’s important.”

Women, who most people assumed would get married and quit when they had children, weren’t considered worth the time and money it took to train them. As a result, American universities maintained—openly, unapologetically, and legally—two separate tracks for students: one for men, one for women. The men got the top PhD degrees, great jobs, and nearly all the research money. The women got master’s degrees that prepared them to work as technicians in scientific and medical laboratories run by men. A lucky woman could teach introductory college classes but not as a professor. 

The system was casual, collegial, and closed. A few years before I began my PhD, the University of Washington found itself in need of a geneticist, so a professor wrote around to some plant geneticists he knew to ask if any “young man” was available. The future Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock, one of the all-time giants in genetics (whom you’ll remember from the previous chapter), had recently left the University of Missouri in a fury after being told she’d be fired if she ever dared to marry. “Of course the number one person in the world in this field is Barbara McClintock,” one geneticist told his department chair. “It’s too bad you can’t hire her because she’s a woman.”

I wanted the US to do the best science in the world, and that meant we needed to get more talented women into science. Many Americans thought affirmative action would spoil science. But actually, more women = better science. That’s because the best candidates taken from 100 percent of the population will be better than the best candidates taken from just 50 percent of the population—and so far, we’d tapped only the best third of the United States, the white male part. More women and better science: It’s not either/or. You can’t have one without the other. The question was how to have both.