Transcribed and compiled by Clare Tonks, PhD
Historian at the Center for Humanities & History of Modern Biology
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives
The Center for Humanities & History of Modern Biology has organized an oral-history initiative on Women in Science. In 2023-2024, we interviewed over 30 scientists about their life and their work in science. All oral history interviews are transcribed.
Here, we present excerpts from 20 of those interviews with scientists from 10 countries. Among them are Nobel Prize laureates, Lasker Award winners, and institute directors.
If you have any questions about this project or would like to learn more, please contact the CSHL Archives, archives@cshl.edu
Cori Bargmann
American neurobiologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022.
2021 – Salk Medal for Research Excellence
2012 – Kavli Prize
2013 – Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
2003 – National Academy of Sciences
2002 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Yasmine Belkaid
Algerian Immunologist, President of the Institut Pasteur
2021 – Robert Koch Prize
2018 – Member, National Academy of Medicine
2017 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
Elizabeth Blackburn
Australian-born American biological researcher and Nobel laureate, former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
2009 – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
2006 – Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
1993 – International Member, National Academy of Sciences
1992 – Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
1991 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Emmanuelle Charpentier
French microbiologist, biochemist and Nobel laureate, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Founded the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens
2020 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with Jennifer Doudna)
2024 – Foreign Member of the Royal society
2017 – International Member, National Academy of Sciences
Jennifer Doudna
American biochemist and Nobel laureate, Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley
2020 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier)
2016 – Foreign Member of the Royal Society
2015 – Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
2010 – Member, National Academy of Medicine
2003 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2002 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
Anne Eichmann
Ensign Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Yale School of Medicine
Beatrice Hahn
American biologist, Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
2016 – American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2012 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
LaDeana Hillier
Research Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. She was Director of Informatics at the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center in St. Louis from 1989 through the end of the Human Genome Project.
Susan Hockfield
American neuroscientist, President Emerita Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the first female President of MIT
2016 – Elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
2004 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Meritxell Huch
Stem cell biologist, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Katalin Karikó
Hungarian-American biochemist and Nobel laureate, professor at University of Szeged in Hungary
2023 – Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine
2022 – Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
2022 – International Member, National Academy of Medicine
2021 – Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Narry Kim
South Korean biochemist and microbiologist, Professor, Seoul National University
Mary-Claire King
American Cancer Society Professor and Professor of Genome Sciences and Medical Genetics at the University of Washington. The first to prove that breast cancer is inherited in some families, as the result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1.
2016 – National Medal of Science
2014 – Lasker-Koshland Award for Medical Research
2012 – American Philosophical Society
2012 – President, American Society of Human Genetics
2005 – National Academy of Sciences
1999 – American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1994 – National Academy of Medicine
Titia de Lange
Dutch geneticist, Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, the Leon Hess professor and the head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University
2022 – Foreign Member of the Royal Society
2013 – Breakthrough Prize
2010 – Member, National Academy of Medicine
2007 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2006 – International Member, National Academy of Sciences
Barbara Meyer
Biologist and geneticist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development, UC Berkeley
2018 – Member, National Academy of Medicine
2000 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
1995 – Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Christine Mummery
Biologist, Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University and the head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
German development biologist and Nobel laureate, former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology
1995 – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1992: Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1991 – Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
1990 – Foreign Member of the Royal Society
1990- Member, National Academy of Sciences
Lucy Shapiro
American developmental biologist, professor of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.
2011- National Medal of Science
1994 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
1992 – American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1991 – Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences
Viviana Simon
Microbiologist, Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Sarah Tishkoff
American geneticist, the David and Lyn Silfen Professor in the Department of Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. director for the American Society of Human Genetics
2017 – Member, National Academy of Sciences
Fiona Watt
British scientist, Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization
2008- Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2003 – Fellow of the Royal Society
2000- Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz
British biologist of Polish descent, Professor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Also, Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at California Institute of Technology
2007 – European Molecular Biology Organization
2013 – Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Experiences of Women in Science
Obstacles
Confidence
Leadership
Institutional / Legislative Leadership
Experience of being a Female Scientist
International Differences
Child Care Systems
Life in Science
Career Inspiration
Competition
Collaboration
Recognition
Mentoring
Advice to Young Scientists
Enjoyment of Science
Asking Questions
Personal Interests and Life Experiences
Developing an Interest in Science
Interest in the Arts
Experiences as a Student
Having a Family
Fashion
Research
Biotechnology
CRISPR
Telomeres
Stem Cells
Genome Research
EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Obstacles
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think we all are responsible to change the culture. Not just the leaders, everybody around the table, everybody. Nobody should be a bystander”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “The obstacles of being a woman [in science] for me, is ignoring, in a way, that you are a woman. Focusing on the fact that I’m a scientist, I’m a manager, I’m like my colleagues, so I never really put forward my female aspect”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “You forget about the gender issue, you work professionally, and you deal with a man or woman who obviously are human beings and here you focus on the professional aspect. This has helped me a lot”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “I think, if I had to generalize, that I do see that women maybe have more of a tendency than men to doubt themselves. I see this in myself. It’s something I constantly feel I have to work on with myself and knowing that I try to also help people, they tend to be women but sometimes it’s men too, who have doubts about their abilities. I try to encourage them to trust themselves and go for it. Try things, take risks. That’s the way we make advances. You have to be willing to risk something being wrong so that you have a chance to do something really exciting or really unexpected.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I wouldn’t say there are categorical differences between female and male scientists. There are differences between different scientists. My lab is full of both female and male. Some people are super good at doing one thing and other people are super good at doing something else. It doesn’t have anything to do with either being male or female.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I don’t think scientists who are dreamers will last long because it becomes very practical, very fast. You have to fund your research. If you’re unable to do that, you could have the most fantastic ideas that would change the world, it will not happen.”
– Mary-Claire King: “[At Berkley,] I was going into a new field myself and it was very clear very quickly that the fact that I had never done any experimental biology, I’d never been in a lab, that the learning curve was vertical. It was a tremendous challenge…and I had a lot of trouble…I thought that I should probably drop out of school. My experiments weren’t working, it was just hopeless.”
– Mary-Claire King: “[Allan Wilson] said let’s see if we can help you work out a project that will take advantage of the fact that you can do mathematics without any difficulty – the kind of mathematics one does in genetics, not real mathematics. That will be experimentally not so intractable for you.”
– Titia de Lange: “Like many women in science, I only started really considering my position as a woman at this institution after I got tenured…A lot of women when they’re junior and working hard to get their papers out and write their grants and graduate their students, they don’t experience whatever discrimination is there consciously. I didn’t either in the first seven years, but then, looking back later, it became clear to me how I was not treated exactly the same”.
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “At the time when I did my thesis, jobs were often given to men because they had a family. I remember that when I applied for a job, then the professor said, no, I have to give that to one of my people who has a family. It was not considered necessary to support women who had a husband who would be able to earn money for them.”
– Viviana Simon: “There is so much about luck and being at the right time, at the right spot, and the right discussion. There’s a lot of luck and hard work”.
– Sarah Tishkoff: “I think we’re all competent…As long as we’re given equal resources and equal access and equal opportunities, then we will do well. Certainly, there’s going to be differences in how people manage labs, for example, there might be differences between men and women. There are issues with work-life balance that men also have, but I think the burden has been more heavily on women, and that’s just another thing that we have to juggle. It’s a real challenge to do that.”
– Fiona Watt: “If I go back to when I was a PhD student, then I was the only woman. Now, in my field of research, there are equal numbers of men and women. I think there are equal numbers of male and female postdocs, but the number of women drops off when it comes to faculty positions. Although, again, I think that’s changing and there are schemes which are designed particularly to bring a more female faculty. So, it’s going in the right direction in my world. There are women in leadership positions now, but I’m not arguing for a minute it’s sorted. We have to look in other countries and other areas of science.”
Confidence
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I always felt a scientist. It’s always been so deeply ingrained in my own identity, but when it came to projecting myself as an independent scientist, I didn’t. I never doubted my legitimacy to be a scientist. That was not part of the question, but when it was time for me to position myself as an independent scientist, yes, it was clearly a difference”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think they both lack self-confidence. I think men are as fragile as women are – we’re all human. It’s just that they have developed strategies to fake it better or to project it better, but we are by definition insecure. We are human, all of us”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “In retrospect, at the time I was very oblivious and I think this was a very self-protective mechanism because I was really shy. I wasn’t confident about myself, but I felt if I kept doing the work that I liked doing and if I did it well, then I could make things work out.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “What allowed me to not have one second of hesitation or one second of wondering whether I could do it were those skills that I acquired during the years. Meaning, being well-organized, being strategic, knowing about failures and how to circumvent failures, how to work with people, how to work with a team, having management skills, not being afraid of something that may not work, having learned to react to issues that may come on the way, and to resolve issues. At the end of the day, this is also what we learned as a scientist, and this was making myself quite confident that there was no reason to worry”.
– Narry Kim: “When I gave my first talk as an independent PI at RNA Society meeting in 2002… I felt like I was transparent. People were just looking through me, they didn’t really pay attention to this little Asian woman. Then I gave a talk and right after my talk, when I finished and when the session ended, everyone wanted to talk to me and ask me questions about my findings. So, scientifically I could be recognized and the science community was really appreciating the science that I was doing. From that moment, I felt part of the community and that was really encouraging for me to go on.”
– Christine Mummery: “I think it’s beneficial to give loads and loads of talks so that you get confidence that you could deal with anybody even when there’s some big shot alpha male sitting in the front row, you think I can cope with this”.
– Christine Mummery: “It’s a matter of self-confidence, I’m sure of it. If we are trying to organize a meeting, let’s say about stem cells, we invite women, more women refuse our invitation than men. Then you ask, so why did you refuse? They say, the work’s not ready to go yet…I still have to write the paper. It’s not family very often, it’s very rarely family. They fix that. The men, you ask them, what are you going to talk about? I don’t know, it’s in nine months’ time, I’ll see when the time comes.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: On becoming a director at Max Planck: “It was very difficult. I was very insecure. At the beginning I had almost depression because I felt, how can I fill this position? Am I good enough?”
– Lucy Shapiro: “Having role models around having someone for young women to talk to…but I think equally important is learning how to be confident. I always say this – if you don’t feel confident, act confident and you will be confident after that. I can’t tell you the number of boards and committees and events that I was the only woman, but you learn how to negotiate that and being secure in what you’re talking about makes a huge difference.”
– Viviana Simon: “I’m quite shy, so it’s hard to go out and talk to people I don’t know. I’m very good in one-on-one and tête-à-têtes are easy, and if I know people it’s easy to talk to them, but just approaching a room full of people is very scary. It’s still very scary to me, so I knew that I needed help”.
– Viviana Simon: “I don’t know if it’s being a female or just starting out. Realizing, am I smart enough? Am I working hard enough? Why don’t I publish papers faster? Why am I so scared of talking to people? Having a presentation and not being able to sleep the night before? So, I don’t think it’s female, it’s just being human”.
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “I thought I had no chance [to become a PI]. I had no idea that I could be one of those people, who I thought are gods, who will be selected. Me, Polish, I didn’t speak perfect English…I had no idea I had a chance. I didn’t ever place myself in a position that one day I can be a leader. I think I was totally intimidated…I didn’t apply despite that it would have been my dream…I didn’t apply, but they [John Gurdon and Ron Laskey] convinced me to apply…and I was one of the two top candidates for the job and finally was offered that position.”
Leadership
– Cori Bargmann: “I love doing science. I love thinking about science. I think that one of the privileges we have in science is that we are allowed to govern ourselves and we don’t even really think about how untrue that is in other settings or outside of academia. We get to review the grants. We get to decide what gets funded. We get to review the papers and decide what’s really important to the field. In the same way, at some point in our career, we get to be the department chairs and the institutional leaders.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think it still remains a reality that leadership in science, in France in particular, remains very, very masculine, very male-oriented, but I haven’t found that was an obstacle. I reached a point in my life where I overcame certain of those anxieties and I’m capable now to project myself in a different role, but it still remains an issue for younger women to project themselves in this role”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “I always say this to the young generation, it is the step-by-step process. You learn on the way. You don’t become a leader right away”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “I believe that the system could evolve to try to pick up the scientists with leadership skills that are evident early on and help them to evolve their career differently. Not that they should not take the time to learn to be an excellent scientist, but that they should also learn in parallel quite early on how to be a leader, because nowadays it’s a bit more complex than before. It requires a lot of management skills.”
– Anne Eichmann: “I think it’s helpful to instill a little bit of a democracy into how you run a laboratory or how you run a research center. When people feel that they belong, they always give more of themselves than if they feel something is imposed on them.”
– Mary-Claire King: “As a graduate student in Berkeley, during the Vietnam War, I was of course drawn into the anti-war movement. It took many forms in Berkeley. The form that it took for us as graduate students in genetics was that we organized letter-writing campaigns. Our most effective one was at the time that the US invaded Cambodia.”
– Christine Mummery: “Go on leadership courses. There are some extremely good ones, and it sounds a bit trivial, but they do give you the rules of the game then at least you recognize what’s happening in the dynamics in your group and that really is helpful”.
– Fiona Watt: “It’s very important to understand where you came from, to share that with other people, and not to be ashamed of it. If you understand where you’ve come from, you understand all of the value systems, the emotional baggage that bring you here. That’s true for male or female leaders.”
– Fiona Watt: “You have to constantly adjust your leadership style to the person that you are leading. If it works and it’s a partnership, then it can be really a beautiful thing.”
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “Initially, we [women in science] were a curiosity to a certain extent, so I think this gave you some kind of feeling that you represent not just yourself. I always felt that I represent women, not just Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, I am a woman in science and my science, therefore, and the way I handle it, my lab, have to be that every single other woman who will not join only my lab but join science will look at it and would say, I would like to have lab like Magda’s lab.”
Institutional / Legislative Leadership
– Cori Bargmann: “[Becoming the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] was an opportunity to have a bigger impact on the things that I care about than I would have through my own lab. It was clear that that was going to come at some cost to the productivity of my own lab and to the attention that my students and postdocs were going to get for that period of time, but the opportunity to support science in a different way carried weight for me.”
– Anne Eichmann: “They have now lots of classes on how to be a better manager, how to be a better leader. At the time I transitioned from a postdoc to a PI, it was a very abrupt transition and nobody facilitated this, you had to make things up as you went, so I think training is really, really helpful for people. We try to offer lots of this training in the YCVRC [Yale Cardiovascular Research Center], of which I’m a co-director.”
– Susan Hockfield: “I succeeded with many others. Everything I did as president [of MIT] was not me, it was always we. A number of people advised me and a number of people helped develop the plan”.
– Mary-Claire King: “In some ways, I’m very ambitious. To ask questions, to get the answers correct, and ideally to get them correct in a way that demonstrates that my group knows how to do this kind of work. I’m certainly ambitious for my small group, but in other ways I am less ambitious. I’m not at all ambitious for position. I have no desire to be the head of a university or a dean or a department head. I have no ambition in that sort of administrative role, but in my own sphere of asking questions in genetics and being able to obtain answers, yes, I’m certainly ambitious.”
– Christine Mummery: “In the 1990s, it became clear that it was likely that human embryonic stem cells would be derived…and the Dutch government decided that they needed some legislation to be allowed to be working with embryos. It was partly related to improving IVF, but partly in anticipating that human embryonic stem cells would be derived. At this point, I was a junior group leader and working on teratocarcinoma stem cells and mouse embryonic stem cells. I became the person to go to for the real information, but my director, Siegfried de Laat, was involved in the government’s committee to look at how the legislation would be made…my director had a very serious car accident…and was completely out of the running…there was nobody else at that point, so I did it, and it was very interesting to help formulate the first law that governed embryo research. It was called the Embryo Law in the Netherlands.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “I was a member of the academy. I had a bully pulpit…it was my responsibility to do something about two things that I was very worried about. One was emerging infectious diseases, and the other was antibiotic resistance and what this was going to do for global health…I decided to have a three-pronged approach. Number one, I would give talks everywhere and anywhere about this…The second part was to get into the corridors of power so that the people in Washington would understand what the problems were. The third part was to design new therapeutics, to start companies that would address the huge issue of the desperate need for new antibiotics.”
Experience of being a Female Scientist
– Cori Bargmann: “In retrospect, I didn’t even notice it at the time, but I never had a professor who was a woman when I was in college. Not even in my humanities classes, let alone in science or math. It was a time in which on the one hand doors were open to me that had been closed to earlier generations of women, and on the other hand I could not see anyone who had made it through those doors through to their careers.”
– Cori Bargmann: “Now, did everything change all at once? No. Did things become fair instantly after the Hopkins report? No, but it’s a lot better than it was and the improvements are continuous. And as people recognize more of the issues that are important, they try to solve them one at a time and sometimes it takes a few steps…I don’t think that everything is perfect now, but I think it’s a lot better than it was. I think it’s gotten better over my own career, over my own lifetime.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think being a young woman in science is harder. I think age is a good thing and sometimes it’s easier to be more heard. For example, I remember early in my career this feeling of being invisible, this incredibly bizarre thing that happened in a meeting when you’ll say something that disappears, and when you say it a few times and at one point you realize it’s very, very disturbing to feel that you don’t exist. That’s really difficult because then the next time it’s slowly shutting down your voice and you’re becoming less and less engaged with the group or actually fighting for your ideas.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I was treated fine. I’d come from the MRC, I had been Fred’s student, I think people didn’t want to mess with me. That’s my feeling.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “I think that intrinsically there are differences in the way men and women tend to approach their work that stem from probably everything from biology to cultural influences. On the other hand, I try not to treat people differently based on their gender. Frankly, I try to ignore lots of the external differences between people when they come to the lab. I view all of us as participants in this endeavor that we’re embarking on to figure things out and try to get to the truth about nature. I really try to look for people’s unique skill sets and try to help them to overcome challenges that they might have.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I don’t think I was treated differently because I was a woman. Neither in Germany, in medical school, nor at the vaccine institute where I did my thesis, nor in Gallo’s lab. It really did not matter. I never encountered any bias where people would say, “Oh, I don’t believe this data because a woman generated it.” That never happened. I think it was an equal-opportunity lab. Whoever wanted to work hard and had data, it didn’t matter who they were, they had the opportunity to excel. There was no problem there.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “I think of myself as a scientist, and I think in large part, that’s due to how Bob is such a supportive mentor and how he’s been so supportive all along the way. Definitely in the informatics piece, there were fewer women early on…I was unique, but it is a great community. I have not felt that it’s been difficult again, in large part, thanks to Bob.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “I don’t think it’s solved…it’s naturally difficult because of the way women end up typically having to take a larger role in taking care of their children. It’s difficult, but it’s doable.”
– Susan Hockfield: “The more I’ve learned about what goes on… the more grateful I am for my graduate advisor. There was no ambiguity, there was never any ambiguity. The question never came up and I just lived it, but in retrospect, what a gift. What a gift to be treated fairly. What a gift not to be imposed upon, not to be invaded in its psychological way.”
– Meritxell Huch: “I’ve never felt that I was a female or a male in a sense. I mean, I had a female PhD advisor and I had a male postdoc advisor, so both are my mentors, and in both cases I never felt that I was different because I was a female.”
– Narry Kim: “We had a strong preference for sons in Korea when I was born…throughout my education, teachers didn’t really take girls seriously, especially in science. With college, I felt that I was not welcome or encouraged to pursue my career further and I saw many of my seniors giving up their career. So, I was not really optimistic about my career, but I really liked it, so I thought maybe give it a try a little bit more for additional few years and see what happens…when I went to Oxford, I felt less discouraged in terms of my gender. I felt freer in a way that I don’t have to look nice and behave nicely like a girl, so that was liberating, but then I became a minority again in a sense…a lot of social barriers and especially language barriers I still have, that my English is not my mother language. Whenever I give a talk, I have to prepare for a long time and I’m not really confident about what I’m saying, so in terms of communication and social interaction is more difficult. It’s not active discrimination of course, but there are many barriers that I have to pass and a lot of Asian scientists and female scientists, if you are an Asian female scientist it is doubled.”
– Mary-Claire King: “All the UC campuses had new policies in place…they had to consider for a faculty job, a person who was from what we would now call an underrepresented group, so either a woman or a member of a minority, and if such a person applied for a job, they had to either be interviewed or it was necessary for the hiring committee to write an explanation of why they were not interviewed…the committee decided that it was easier to interview me than to write a long explanation…One additional helpful feature was that I was of course not an unknown person on the Berkeley campus. I had been a graduate student there. I’d been active in politics. I’d been active in the union movement…I don’t know the details of what the committee discussed, of course, but I do know that when I was offered the job, this same gentleman said, I just want you to know that we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel in making this offer to you, and this would never have happened if it hadn’t been for all those new regulations.”
– Mary-Claire King: “Bear in mind, I was a year and a half coming out of Chile where there were truly bad guys. This guy wasn’t a bad guy. This was just a guy with a very narrow worldview. Parenthetically, by the time I got tenure a few years later, he denied he had ever said this. He denied he had ever thought this. He said that I was completely fantasizing that I had ever heard it. I was not fantasizing.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I always felt that I had to do the best I could and I had to show them I was good. I never complained about any treatment. I just felt it was my responsibility to show them I was good and that if I did my work well, they had to acknowledge that they had to believe in me and so that was my goal. I never thought about anything other than trying to do the best I possibly could. That was my challenge.”
– Christine Mummery: “I thought it was a done deal. I thought, we don’t have to bother about this emancipation. We’re there. I never felt a glass ceiling perhaps because I wasn’t typically very ambitious, it just happened. I do know from women who are ambitious that they are not well treated…Nature has a lot of these studies, [showing] papers when a senior author is female are cited less than male. I think, really? Then you start noticing your own papers. I thought, maybe it wasn’t such a good paper, but it wasn’t cited as much as a not such good paper from a male competitor sometimes and so, I do think it’s a harder world”.
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “We have these meetings of the directors three times a year or so, and my first meeting, I was invited to the wives’ program. They didn’t realize that I was not a wife, I was a director. I was really, really offended by that, but it was not an issue really. In these meetings, I was the only woman. I felt uncomfortable and the men also felt uncomfortable because they were not used to talking with a woman. Often, when they talk with a woman they’d flirt, show their charm, but to do real scientific discussions with a woman for some of the men was very difficult.”
– Sarah Tishkoff: “Eleanor Butts, the senior editor at Science…guided me and gave me the support. It was clear that she was supporting me from one woman to another. I truly believe that. It really set the stage for my career. There’s no doubt about it. I feel like every step of the way, there was a woman who behind the scenes was supporting me. There’s no doubt that we had to support each other. That’s what made this possible.”
– Fiona Watt: “I think for a long time, advice has been pretty gendered. I’ve given a lot of advice and support to women at all career stages, and I hope I provide equal support to men and women who’ve been through my lab, but when it comes to peer-to-peer support or even conversations, I know that people that [my husband] Jim and I both know would tend to go to him rather than to me. Again, I think that is fine, but recently, I would say in the last two or three years, men will sometimes ask me for advice. I feel that’s a very precious thing because it’s precious when anyone asks you for advice, but if advice and mentorship is not purely gendered, I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s really there you can see science maturing.”
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “I always felt uncomfortable in this institute because I felt like magic happened to me to become one of them, but at the same time, there was John Gurdon and he didn’t look at me as a woman in science or man in science. He looked at me as a human being.”
International Differences
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I was always aware that female scientists were extremely underrepresented, for example, and careers would be hard, but in the UK…I really felt it would be very unlikely that I, first of all, am not British and then secondly, as a woman I felt that would be very hard. I had a much more hopeful sense about the US. This was in the seventies, the women’s movement had started, I felt the US was going to be a place where I could thrive”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “In the US it’s different, everyone comes from different places and they care less about this. There is a disadvantage in Europe to be a foreigner, but the advantage of being a female foreigner is that I communicate with my colleagues in English, so I don’t communicate with my colleagues in the national language. It’s not really speaking in English [versus speaking] the national language, it is bringing a man to speak another language, and someone speaking another language is automatically more open…the people have to think a bit differently and maybe they say things a bit differently as well.”
– Anne Eichmann: “What I like about being in [the US and France] at the same time is that they are so different…in terms of the scientific environment, there are advantages and inconveniences to both systems that I perceive. The French system is wonderful because it offers you stability. You can get a permanent position from a relatively young age in your career, and then you are basically a government clerk and you can never be fired. If you are a young mother with children, that’s an incredibly valuable position to have because it offers security and stability, and that gives you the possibility to do risky things and not be in fear of failure. In America, the situation, as you know, is very different because there’s never any security or stability. The advantage there is that it somehow gets people very engaged. You can never sit and relax. You always have to be active, and that’s what generates this wonderful American enthusiasm for science and the progress that there is. I don’t know of a perfect world, but I like the differences in the two countries.”
– Katalin Karikó: “We came to the United States with my daughter and my husband, three of us together. My daughter was two and a half years old. Famously, Hungary allowed somebody to get a position in another country, but they didn’t let them take money…My daughter could have $50, my husband, $50, but because I am getting the job, they won’t give me any money, so we sold our Russian-made Lada. We get around $1,000 equivalent…I put inside my daughter’s teddy bear, and she smuggled it in so that not with $100 we start our life…This hardship definitely helps because in Hungary we complain, and here was no time for that.”
– Narry Kim: “The Asian tradition is that women live at home doing housewife things and so we are behind compared to US or Europe. When I started, I had difficulty finding a position and that’s part of the reason why I had to be a junior fellow…it was very difficult. It has changed it a lot I have to say, but still, if you look at the ratio of women in leading positions compared to undergraduates, then we really have a very difficult situation. Superficially we have everything equal, but in reality, it’s much harder for women to get equal treatment in job opportunities. We have women scientists associations, but the movement is not really strong and not very well-received in society, so the change is more slow and moderate.”
– Titia de Lange: “Things are different now than they were in 1985, but when I came to this country, I came to UCSF and there were already, then, several women on the faculty, which was an eye-opener for me. I had not seen that before, neither in Holland nor in the UK where I’d spent a considerable amount of time. To me, this seemed to be a country that was different in regard to the way women were treated in science and women had possibility”.
– Titia de Lange: “The other thing that was really different in this country versus Holland is that young investigators could be independent. This is not the case in Holland. If you got a junior faculty position, you were appointed within the lab of a professor. You were always under somebody”.
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “When I had my first students, their education in English was not good enough for them to write a paper. Often, they wrote very clumsily and I had to translate it into proper English. When the logic was okay it was not difficult, but there were people who had terrible difficulties writing and they got it back several times until it was moderately understandable”.
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I also taught [my students] to give talks because that’s very important, especially when you’re German and you’re not a native speaker. They have this very strong German accent and it makes them appear so clumsily and I taught some people, you must train your accent.”
– Viviana Simon: “The first time I realized that it’s a real problem establishing myself as a female scientist was when I went around to look for where I would start my own research operation. I went to Germany to interview and that’s when I realized that there are some problems here. After looking at the possibilities in Germany, I decided to accept the position in the United States at Mount Sinai because the opportunities are so much better in the United States compared to Germany”.
Child Care Systems
– Yasmine Belkaid: “[In the US,] the system was not designed to help you. You were supposed to make it work and I think me and many other women had to make it work…times have changed and have changed for the best. There are still ways to go, but we had to make it work and the job was for us to make it as invisible as possible”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “The attitude at the time was, this is your problem. I think women that have had kids know, that was our problem. We had to make it work. I never had specifically sympathy or support. I didn’t have hostility either, but sympathy, no.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “There is a cultural issue certainly in Germany still, and it’s also linked to the fact that there has not been an evolution of kindergarten as it occurred in France…Having said this, in Germany now I have male colleagues who are totally different, very open to female colleagues, having themselves their worries and also their issues”.
– Anne Eichmann: “Where I grew up in Germany, there was no child-support system, so it was very unusual for women to have careers. When you had children, you had to make a choice. You could have children and raise your children or have a career, but then generally without children because no support system was available, and school in Germany stops at noon, so half of the day your children are at home. In France, the situation is much different because here there is a daycare system and much better support and it’s also completely normal for women to have a full-time job and raise their children at the same time.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I wasn’t alone. It was clear-cut that [my husband] would help, so that wasn’t a consideration. In terms of being pregnant and giving birth, that was easy. I was fortunate not to have any complications or any sickness. I worked right up to the day when I delivered, and I was back a week later. My mother came and helped for the first six months and then trained the nanny who came. That was very, very important. In that sense, it was easy. The people in the lab were there and could carry the torch and perform the experiments.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I have a new job. I am a grandmother and that is a lot of fun. Now I have to do what my mother did for me and that is to help my daughter, who is a scientist, with the child-caring responsibility.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “People were helpful. I think it partly came from myself that I felt, they’re doing me such a favor to do this. I need to work more and more and more and more and more to make up for having had children, so that was hard and it was stressful. Sometimes I wondered how much I was taking away from my kids, but definitely, I think in the end it turned out a good balance.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “Thankfully, my mother-in-law came and watched my daughters. That saved me.”
– Meritxell Huch: “In Germany, the school ends at 12:00 pm, so if there is no afterschool, you have to stay at home basically…and also there is no nursery until the age of one year. So, until they are one year, you cannot leave them anywhere so you have to be at home. With our oldest kid, I was in Cambridge [UK] where that was different so he went to nursery very early, at six months he was already at the nursery…with the younger one, we were in Germany and we had to hire a nanny. She was coming every day 7:00 am to 3:00 pm, but that meant that at 3:00 pm I had to be at home or Robert had to be at home…the Netherlands is the same. There are countries where they are not favoring women working while nursing or having young children.”
– Christine Mummery: “In the Netherlands, it was not done for women to work if they had a family. I think 10% worked full-time, another 70% part-time. That’s because working in a public function for women was banned until 1964. That meant there’s a whole generation of women and men [who grew up] with a mother who didn’t work. The schools are designed to come out at two or three in the afternoon. It’s just a disaster”.
– Christine Mummery: “[My husband] worked for IBM as he did software and contracts and all kinds of things. We have three children. We shared the responsibility of the kids equally. We were one of the few people who had the daycare through his work, not mine. IBM was very conservative, that’s meant for the women employees not for the men.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: On the CNV Foundation: “The only real big difference between men and women is that the women get the children. The intelligence is the same and they’re both talented enough to do good science. There is no difference, I think, but the women get the children and this means they lose time, energy because they have two jobs essentially. They are mothers and they are scientists. What can you do to help them? You can only give them money to outsource tasks, to buy time by letting other people do the things, which can be done by other people. The other people cannot do your science. They cannot do the motherhood for the children, but they can clean and they can wash”.
LIFE IN SCIENCE
Career Inspiration
– Cori Bargmann: “The biggest influence on my scientific career was my PhD advisor, Bob Weinberg. He was a wonderful mentor and advisor. He’s an outstanding scientist…he was a terrific scientist and example, both for the way that he interacted with the people in his lab and encouraged them to do their greatest work and for the way that he ran his own life…he was an example of how to be a human being as well as how to be a scientist.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “[After finishing my PhD,] I don’t think I had the maturity in terms of my work to project myself in the next stage. I was very, very lost at the end. I thought I was not good enough. I was not formed enough. I didn’t have my own idea. I was feeling very insecure, but the one thing that may characterize my journey is yes, I may be afraid, I may feel incompetent, but I always try and that is really what I did”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I finished my postdoc and once again…I had no idea what I was going to do. I’m not good enough. I’m not competent enough. I had a lot of anxiety about my own capacity to project myself as a PI…I became a staff scientist for a couple of years, so I didn’t become independent immediately…Steve Katz told me, what the heck are you doing? This is literally what he said. Why are you not independent? And this very simple conversation made me realize, maybe I should try, and this is, once again, what I did”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “The first time that I remember thinking to myself, I could become a scientist, was when I was in 10th grade. I was pretty good at math at school and enjoyed solving various kinds of puzzles. Then we had a visiting scientist come in from the island of Oahu, from Honolulu, who was a cancer biologist…I’m sure I didn’t understand most of what she talked about, but it was so fascinating that I remember that moment of thinking to myself: that’s what I want to do, that’s exactly the kind of work that I would find really exciting in the future.”
– Anne Eichmann: “My path was by no means a linear path, and it was marked by a number of accidents. I’m a professor at the Cardiovascular Research Institute and the Yale Medical School, and I started as a half-veterinarian working on chicken embryos so, obviously, there’s been a lot of changes in my career and there were a lot of accidents that set me on my current path.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I was always interested in vaccine development, vaccine research, and I worked at the Bavarian Vaccination Center. My mentor at the time was interested in BLV, bovine leukemia virus, which is a retrovirus and causes leukemia in cattle. There’s a lot of cattle in Bavaria and a lot of opportunity to study it. I did my thesis on bovine leukemia virus and its propensity to switch species, which of course it didn’t. That’s how I got into retrovirology.”
– Meritxell Huch: “I chose to study pharmacology for several reasons. One, because I thought it was a broad discipline. You study botany, which I was very interested in, but you also studied human physiology, which I was also very interested in…I studied pharmacology because I always had the question how drugs work. When I was a teenager, I had a lot of headaches…and I always had to take paracetamol or medicines. I was always fascinated by the fact that you take this thing and that it goes away, and I was trying to understand how it works and that’s why I also chose pharmacology”.
– Titia de Lange: “In high school I figured out I liked chemistry and so I really wanted to study chemistry, but I was too wimpy to study chemistry at the University of Amsterdam because there were no women in chemistry…I would prefer to do chemistry, but it’s scary because there’s not a single woman of my age who wants to do chemistry, so I chose to do biology”.
– Barbara Meyer: “It was a question of following my passion. All I’ve ever done in science is follow my passion. I never thought about a career per se. I just did the next experiment that I thought would be exciting. I kept doing those experiments and coming up with new designs for things both in vitro and in vivo. I just always followed the science.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “I had a painting in a joint show and a professor at Rockefeller University named Ted Shedlovsky bought one of my paintings. We got to talk, and Ted had this thing about finding young people in the arts and after speaking with them for a while, deciding that maybe you should think about science…he said I had to take organic chemistry. Why I listened to him I will never know, but I did…I took advanced organic chemistry with no background whatsoever at Brooklyn College and, to my astonishment, it was wonderful…And that did it. That course changed my life. I knew that chemistry is where I had to be. Then he sent me off to Jerry Hurwitz, and the rest is history.”
– Sarah Tishkoff: “Honestly, I just followed my heart. I did not have any sense of what career I was going to do…I just remember following my passion. That was it”.
Competition
– Cori Bargmann: “In fact, the oncogene field in general, and in particular the projects we worked with, there were many labs working on them. In general, the attitude was one of excitement and much more of a sense of sharing results and talking about them than feeling aggressively competitive with other people.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “One of the values that I always carried is, I do not believe in competition. I really believe that there are enough questions in the world to answer and we should not compete with each other. We are smart people that are passionate and want to do what we do for the right reasons. Let’s not become people that compete with each other…I think we have all to gain to become more collaborative and more open, I really do not believe competition is a value that we should apply to science”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I’ve always tried to advise my students, you don’t lose, you actually gain [from sharing ideas]. If it’s good work, it will prevail, it will be seen. You don’t have to be afraid. I know the pressures are there and it’s really too bad. It takes the joy out of science”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I used to think science was exclusionary, and now I think, the more inclusive it is, the richer it is. This very toxic thing about if you’re inclusive, you’re sacrificing merit. Give me a break. I have seen that so not be true over and over again.”
– Anne Eichmann: “It’s obviously an important subject. One always has the tendency to compare yourself to other people, but at the end of the day, it’s really about the quest of knowledge and not about competition. We’re all in this together…I found it a lot more beneficial for my own mental health to stop these comparisons and forget about the competition and just think about the research, the science, the actual questions and how to best answer them.”
– Katalin Karikó: “At the beginning of your career, you want to understand something in science, and then you find something and you feel the urge to publish. Then you get a little fame, you want more papers, you want money, promotion. It shifts, people’s goal became to get more power, and more money, bigger team…everything is a tool to reach that. When people are reading something that a competitor is doing, they get disappointed because their promotion or their something is out of the window. If you can preserve, like I did, understanding the science you will be happy if you see somebody’s doing similar things to what you have done…If your goal is better understanding and advancing science and not your ego, not your power, not your promotion, then you will be happy if you read somebody is publishing what you are doing.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I hate it. I always seem to have competitors and I try to always win. Sometimes competition can be good because they might have a discovery that you didn’t think about and you have to think about it and then you have to change the way you’re thinking and do other experiments. I’ve always been a very independent scientist and I’ve always done my own work and try to follow what my results would say. But competition does have a good aspect to it. As painful as it is, it does have a good aspect to it.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “The complication was that we had a competing group in Boston with Wolfgang Driever…it was tricky because Wolfgang had been my best and most successful graduate student ever…of course you don’t want your smartest graduate student to compete with you as a postdoc.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I tried to make the best out of it. I couldn’t say, you must not do this, he had all the freedom in the world…We decided to stay on moderately good terms and to exchange knowledge, and this was good…He told us how they bred the fish and he had some inventions, which we used and he also used our inventions, so we exchanged information to the benefit of both groups.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “Competition in science, it’s fierce. It can get very nasty and you should develop a pretty thick skin, otherwise you won’t survive.”
Collaboration
– Cori Bargmann: “The first paper that I was the first author of, very similar work was done at the same time by Tadashi Yamamoto’s lab in Tokyo. We had a very positive interaction about it when we realized we were doing the same things. We traded sequences and made sure we had gotten the same answers before we submitted our papers. It was all very positive…It was always more of a question of wanting to share your excitement about the work rather than deep concern about competitiveness.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I always was, and still am, a very free sharer of ideas. I figured, first of all, biology is really complex. Second of all, no two people are going to really do something exactly the same way unless there’s some very specific goal maybe…but those were less interesting to me.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “[At a Gordon Conference,] Jack [Szostak] and I started a conversation walking across a lawn…we did this long-distance thing where I had the molecular telomeres, Jack put them into the yeast situation, and then I then had people in my lab sequencing what emerged from it. So, it was a lovely collaboration that just came of a conversation. That’s why conferences are great. I think not just communication, but bouncing ideas off each other and then as ideas bounce off each other, they get elaborated upon and refined and changed. That’s a very creative part of science.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in my lab. I collaborated with people whose business it was to observe primates in the wild. These were primatologists and I’m super good friends with them and collaborate with them on multiple different projects.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “We had to get Jane Goodall on board. Jane was very suspicious of us because she always feared that we would do something bad to her chimps. It took some doing to convince her that we were just as much interested in conservation as she was. We could actually do non-invasive sampling, get more information for what we were interested in. It worked extremely well. We are still working in Gombe 30 years later.”
– Susan Hockfield: “[In my lab,] everyone had to come to group meeting because that’s where the big ideas happened. That’s where the breakthroughs happened. I’ve always understood that all of us are smarter than any of us. I think one of the mistakes we’re all inclined to make is thinking that we can do it on our own and you can, but it’s going to be a lot more fun and a lot more productive if you draw people into your confidence”.
– Mary-Claire King: “It’s a tremendous pleasure to say that what I’ve done as a non-clinician, in consequence of my being able to work so closely with oncologists and with clinical people generally, has transformed the way that we think about breast cancer. Women can be tested now to learn if they carry mutations in BRCA1 or the many sister genes. BRCA2 is the most immediate sister and if a woman does carry a mutation in one of these genes, she can take action. It’s drastic action, but it involves typically having the ovaries removed when she’s in her early forties. Some women choose to have prophylactic removal of breasts also, so it’s very drastic action. Certainly, one does this in the context of working with high-risk clinics, but they’re all over the world and we’ve now created an infrastructure so that no woman who has an inherited mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 need die of breast or ovarian cancer. It is absolutely unnecessary. It is completely preventable. And for women who do develop one of those diseases before they realize that they carry a mutation, there have been treatments developed, not by me, but by very good biochemists that are based on an approach called synthetic lethality, which is very effective against tumors that are due to mutation in BRCA1 or the sister genes, so it’s had a huge impact. It’s had an impact on prevention, diagnosis, treatment.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “It didn’t matter much that I was female and [Eric Wieschaus] was male…we just respected each other’s competence and skill. I was good with my hands and he was good with his hands, and we were both excellent in observation…When you have people who you respect and you see that they’re completely competent, it’s easy.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “It was clear to me…that you had to not just do genetics, you had to not just do biochemistry, but you had to become interdisciplinary and you had to use every tool possible to interrogate the system, and this is what we did…collaboration between Harley [McAdams]’s lab that was filled with physicists, applied physicists, electrical engineers, chemists, and my lab that was filled with biochemists and developmental biologists and cell biologists and geneticists. We decided to do something unusual: we combined our labs. We had, sitting next to each other, a physicist next to a geneticist, a cell biologist next to an engineer. Our weekly group meetings were lessons in language. We were teaching each other how to talk to each other.”
Recognition
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think we have to be very generous with the recognition and give an enormous amount of credit to all members that contribute to science. We need to make sure we give leadership opportunities to our trainees; we need to give them more recognition. This is not about building a pyramid for yourself. This is about what you do to actually help the community to grow”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I think you want to feel validated in some way. Your scientific community, because these are the people you like and respect, when you’re recognized by them, you feel, yeah maybe I did okay after all. So, in that sense, I think we all need it now”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “I benefited a lot from the fact that I had done science in France, in Austria, in Sweden, in Germany, that I knew a number of people, and that in a way those people were supporting me through nominating me for awards. I never asked for anything, but it was also the scientific community all over the world, so I was extremely grateful and extremely humbled to see all the distinctions that I could get and that I’m still getting.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “Something that I was confronted with CRISPR, is that very fast, way before having the Nobel Prize, all of a sudden being in the public spotlight and having to respond live or to questions where I was not qualified to answer this question. This is something that I learned along the way.”
– Narry Kim: “Recognition gives me more opportunities and my students more opportunities to have sufficient resources to continue our research and expand our research further. So, I really appreciate and I am thankful for that, but in a way it’s also a burden. You have to spend time on other things apart from your research and that can distract you from your own research. So, it’s good and bad. I try to keep the balance.”
– Barbara Meyer: “What’s important about recognition in science is it gives you opportunities. How do you pick a person out to give grants to? What do you do? And when you have recognition and some degree of fame from your work, you’re on people’s radar. You’re asked to do things, which put you in a position to meet more people and to have influence, so in that sense it’s incredibly important because it gives you opportunities you wouldn’t normally have. There are many people deserving of those opportunities, but if you have recognition, you have a leg up and have the opportunity to have these chances to do other things.”
– Christine Mummery: “I think the Royal Academy in the Netherlands is very precious because you’re elected by peers. If you were elected by the public for something that’s super, but it may be for all kinds of other reasons…but being elected by peers is your greatest honor.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “[Recognition] does matter a little bit, but I think the most important thing is the respect of your colleagues, not the prizes. Recognition, when someone tells you, I read your new paper, this is lovely, or something like that.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: On being awarded the Nobel Prize: “I asked who else? He said, Eric Wieschaus, and I jumped and I said, this is great because Eric never had prizes before. I had plenty, but he didn’t, and Ed Lewis also had prizes before, but Eric didn’t. I was very scared that he would not get it because this work, the most important work, we did together.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “Of course, it’s important. Is it going to be something that I would chase? No. The feeling you get when you publish a beautiful paper. That’s it. That’s the recognition. Getting prizes is fine. I love it. It’s wonderful, but it’s not terribly meaningful.”
Mentoring
– Yasmine Belkaid: “It’s a life commitment. This is really people that are going to be with you that you’re going to care for and protect for your whole life. It’s a really profound relationship, so my first advice is to pick very selectively who you’re going to have”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “You have to accept people for absolutely who they are. You’re not molding them to be a mini you. You have to really allow them to express this unique quality or this unique aspect that can make them extraordinary scientists”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “You cannot direct scientists; it is like wild cats. You have to inspire them, guide them a bit, but you have to tap into their strengths not into what you want from them. If you want to raise scientists, independent-minded people, you can’t force them to do anything, so I believe very much in the ability of people to drive the project. I’m here as a guide”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “Mentors are so important to all of us. They’re people who can motivate us, they can help us through difficult times in our lives, difficult challenges, whether they’re personal or professional, and they’re also inspirational. They are people who we look to for guidance, who we look to for ideas about how to conduct our own work.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “Probably the most mentoring that I’ve done is in high schools, going to talk to my kids’ classrooms. Talking with girls there saying, you can do this and you can do anything in STEM. It still works, either to have a family or not, you can do this. Really deep friendships with some girls have continued, helping them choose their schools and helping them think about the best path forward to graduate school. I haven’t done that as much here at work [at UW].”
– LaDeana Hillier: “This is why I took such an active role in talking to my kids’ friends. I think it’s really early, maybe kindergarten and elementary school, when you make sure math is going well and you make sure science is going well and you see women around you that are in positions. So, my kids tell their friends, my mom does this, and then they want to talk. I think it’s really very early, to support kids in all areas of science.”
– Susan Hockfield: “Mentors are everywhere. It’s not an official relationship. It’s a friendship. It’s someone you know can turn to for advice. And frankly, there are few things that people like more than being asked for advice”.
– Susan Hockfield: “My advice for women is find mentors. We don’t talk about it enough and we talk about it in trivial ways. Women think they need one mentor. You don’t need one mentor. My view of mentors, the more the merrier.”
– Narry Kim: “In my lab and in my department, there are many younger professors and postdocs and students, so I try to encourage them to stay there and stay strong and be positive to continue their study instead of thinking about giving up. I thought about it myself, but I’m very glad that I was hanging in there.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I had fantastic graduate students at MIT and I encouraged them to both take a risky project and a more straightforward project. I’ve always wanted students to dream big, but I also wanted to make sure there were some projects that could work. They would learn techniques and if they got discouraged about the bigger project, they would at least feel secure about a different project”.
– Lucy Shapiro: “One of the most important and good parts of my entire life as a scientist was mentoring the next generation of scientists. Watching them grow into being a scientist, accumulating not only the confidence, but the curiosity and passion that makes them a real scientist is the very best part of anything that we do.”
– Viviana Simon: “I’m trying to support women as much as I can and without excuses. I’m trying to support junior faculty…encourage students of all kind of genders and backgrounds and ancestries. I truly believe that having different points of view will make everyone better. I’m very eager and quite passionate about getting more medical doctors into research…I think that’s really important to have those different points of view”.
Advice to Young Scientists
– Cori Bargmann: “I think we’re all responsible for charting our own path and doing what’s best for us among the options that we have open to us. I would not consider my own particular decisions about my personal life or my career to be necessarily right for anyone other than myself, but I did what I wanted to do and I did my best, and you can’t do any better than that, really. I would say that I have advised other women, and sometimes men, who felt some amount of conflict about their different priorities and which of those should take precedence at different times…I think they found it reassuring to hear that it was their own decision, they should do what they thought was the most important thing to do, and that they should not be afraid to do what they really wanted to do.”
– Cori Bargmann: “Science has rewards that no other field has. That joy of discovery, of seeing something for the first time, of solving a problem, is unique and exciting and intensely rewarding and if you feel that you’ll want to do it. Now, science is also often difficult, frustrating, full of experiments that don’t work and papers that don’t get accepted, and all kinds of setbacks that you ultimately have to be able to accept as you move toward a path, and how you balance those things and how you balance those against the other things that you might want to do in your life is a decision that you have to make for yourself. You have to decide what your own priorities are. You have to decide what’s best for you of the options that are open.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “My advice is be stubborn. Don’t let others intimidate you. Make sure that if something destabilizes you sometime, try to think about why someone destabilized you…I reanalyze the conversation and try to understand the intent of the other person and usually this makes me feel much better after”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “Don’t waste your time on things that you don’t fully believe in. Don’t say this is going to be a quick paper. Nothing matters but your passion. That’s the one thing you cannot recover. When it’s gone, it’s gone, so protect it”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “Remember that [a career in science is] really interesting and you have a right to be part of doing things that are really interesting because the content is so rewarding. We know the sort of abuses that will happen in this profession, but they’re happening in other professions too. So, you might as well enjoy doing a profession in which it’s intrinsically worthwhile. It’s also so engaging and fascinating, especially biology because it just never stops.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “Science is hard. Ideas don’t always pan out. Experiments don’t work. It can feel very, very frustrating. It’s often helpful for students to realize that it’s not just them. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had failed experiments. We’ve all had that sense of failure at times where you realize something’s not working out and you need to make some kind of change.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “They should trust themselves. Trust their ideas, trust themselves to go after things that they feel truly passionate about and not be dissuaded. That’s not to say we don’t take advice or we don’t make changes when things aren’t panning out. It’s more to really know that this is something, that if you want to go after something or you want to try something there’s a reason that you feel that way and you should explore it.”
– Anne Eichmann: “Science is not easy. Usually, it’s one step forward and two steps back and you fail and then you’ve got to pick yourself up and start over. I’ve had many moments in my career where I had to do the same experiment for six months until it succeeded. It is important to keep at it and until you succeed, you have to be persistent and put in a lot of hard work.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “Hang in there. To be strong and to pursue your goals and not to be easily discouraged, and hope for some luck because you need it to go your way.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I think if you’re so passionate about science to the point where you can’t do anything else, which was the case for me, you just do it.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “It’s a difficult choice. I think that any career is difficult. The hours that are required for science, it doesn’t stop at eight hours. That, I think, is a unique challenge of science, but the return on the investment is to be a part of something…just to be a part of science and to see things that people have never seen before – there’s no way I could put a value on that.”
– Susan Hockfield: “I think the mistake that I did make and others could make, is that you have to titrate your enthusiasm against reality. That comes from talking to people and having real conversations with people. I think one of the things that inhibits young scientists is feeling some reticence to engage in conversation with people who can give them insights that you can’t read about”.
– Susan Hockfield: “Go talk to people. If you’re curious and you’re honest, people will respond. If someone doesn’t, you just shake the sand off your feet and leave that person aside because I think believing that the world is curious, I tend to be ridiculously optimistic, but I think that’s part of what’s allowed me to do what otherwise would be impossible things. People, good people, want to talk to other interesting people”.
– Susan Hockfield: “You don’t need to go it alone. My guess is everyone can be better than they themselves are by engaging with the intelligence of others. For some, maybe it’s embarrassing that you can’t solve the problem on your own. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed by it. People love sharing curiosity”.
– Meritxell Huch: “I always say, you should pursue your dreams. If you think this is what you really want to do, this is where your heart goes, just do everything you can to get there, because at the end, eventually, it will happen, it will work out. You have to pursue it.”
– Katalin Karikó: “You have to focus on what you can change. What I can say is that young scientists look at and see the other colleagues, classmates who’s not working that hard and they are advancing and they are the favorite, they are promoted. Don’t do that. Don’t pay attention to that…You are in the system, focus on what you can change because you cannot change that. I managed this because from early on I practiced that. That’s why if these days I get an award, I always thank people who try to make my life miserable because they made me to be stronger, work harder.”
– Narry Kim: “I cannot lie, it can be tough sometimes, but it’s not something impossible. You should not be worried about it too much in advance when people around you can help you and support you, so keep a positive mind and things will turn out well.”
– Titia de Lange: “The most important thing I think for anybody in science, not just women, is to find a subject, an area to work in that you truly love. Not to do science to publish papers, or to get grants, or to be recognized, but work on something you truly care about because, ultimately, that’s where the joy in science comes from. No negative input from the outside can diminish the joy of working on something you really care about”.
– Titia de Lange: “Women have a hard time with this duality in what is expected from them. They’re expected to succeed in science, but at the same time they’re expected to be nice and it’s really difficult to do both. You cannot always be nice. And we don’t have that expectation of men in science…My advice to women is forget about the nice part because it’s too difficult to always be nice if you want to succeed”.
– Barbara Meyer: “My advice to any scientist, male or female, is follow your passion. Do what you really love to do. If you do what you love to do, you’ll have the energy to get up in the morning and run to the lab and see what the result is. Just follow your passion and don’t listen to people who say you can’t do this or you can’t do that.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “It’s a job which has high demands on your faculties, on your intelligence, on your energy. You have to work hard.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “I have pretty strong feelings about this, and that is you should focus on your science. If you are starting a scientific career, don’t worry about being a woman, don’t worry about being a mother, don’t worry about being God knows what. It’s your science that matters. It is excellence in science that will give you the ultimate feedback and what you need for a good and worthwhile life. Being a scientist means passion, and it doesn’t go away and it’s there every day.”
– Viviana Simon: “Go for it. It’s a great career. Don’t worry so much, just go for it and take it one step at a time, one day at a time. My advice to everyone is to ask for help. Ask for help. Don’t be shy. Go and say, how should I do this? How would you do this? It takes a village to solve those things and I think together we can do it”.
– Sarah Tishkoff: “You can’t be shy and you’ve got to be willing to let it be known that this is what my needs are. Then, as faculty and as administrators, we have to make sure that that support is there as well.”
– Sarah Tishkoff: “My message is, it is very common, this imposter syndrome that I guarantee all of you are probably feeling because I felt it myself…. You’ve got to ignore it somehow. You’ve got to just trust yourself that you can do it. Other people have done it, and it’s not going to be easy.”
– Fiona Watt: “We don’t know when mistakes are going to surface, but if it’s a science mistake, you correct it. If it’s a mistake in leadership, I think you reflect on it, you learn, and you move on, and you ideally make that a more positive experience for your next leadership experience.”
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “The work we do is unpredictable…there is a lot of failure on a daily basis. Believe that you can do it. I wouldn’t say every day is successful, but that every day brings some kind of pleasure. I try to do it with my lab. I try to tell them we have to enjoy the path, it’s not just an endpoint.”
Enjoyment of Science
– Cori Bargmann: “I think the great joy of science is the joy of interacting with other scientists, hearing their greatest new idea, hearing their most exciting new results or however that is.”
– Cori Bargmann: “Seeing something for the first time and having it make sense is a terrific joy in science. It’s a selfish joy, but why not?”
– Cori Bargmann: “There are two joys in science. The first is discovering something and the second is sharing it with someone else. It’s that sense of a new discovery, of something that you can’t wait to tell someone else because they will be fascinated by the result as well.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think the fact that I will never know which person and discussion could change the way I see the world or think about the questions or the people I meet, or guiding a new student, or discovering a new aspect of something that can be created. I think the unexpected is the most incredible aspect of a career in science”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “One of the joys is you talk about science and ideas with other scientists. There’s this process by which the ideas get better and more creative, and you and the other people or person you’re talking with, who cares about the same questions, are having fun just playing with ideas. I think that’s been one of the loveliest things I’ve enjoyed and still enjoy doing. Now, I have many clinical study collaborators and they come in at questions and they make me open my eyes and think, I didn’t think of it that way. I hope that I do the same with them.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “The thing I enjoy the most about my scientific career is the incredible people I’ve had a chance to work with. No question. It’s a real pleasure. It’s something that I didn’t necessarily expect or even have awareness of when I started my career. I was thinking more about experiments I wanted to do personally, but now when I look at all the folks I’ve had a chance to work with over the years, it’s extraordinary. It’s really fun.”
– Susan Hockfield: “For me, one of the greatest joys in human experience is to explore some topic with someone and feel that kind of mounting acceleration and interest as the ideas swirl… It’s what science is about. Science is about discovering this little thing over here and this little thing over here and saying, wait a minute, those things are related… It’s exciting to create, to see opportunity and be able to seize it”.
– Meritxell Huch: “I love looking through the microscope…I enjoy thinking about the problems and brainstorming. When we get the result that seems that we cannot fit or we don’t understand, I like to go deep into it and try to understand it, which in a sense means that it becomes an obsession.”
– Titia de Lange: “It’s telomeres. That’s it. Nothing else. Telomeres and my trainees”.
– Titia de Lange: “[My favorite contribution to science is] always the last experiment you did. It’s always what is going on right now. We’ve done a lot of good experiments and found important things, but my own enthusiasm is for the most recent stuff”.
– Barbara Meyer: “I was so interested in science. I wanted to tackle questions that I couldn’t even imagine the answers to. I loved the independence of being a scientist. I loved the discovery. I loved being able to design experiments and think about the answers. If my thoughts were wrong, the experiments would tell me that. I just loved the process. It was so engaging, so all-consuming. I couldn’t imagine a happier career.”
– Christine Mummery: “The variability, the variety of intellectual input you get. There’s not a single day that’s the same. Almost every day you meet somebody new, what kind of job can you say you are always meeting new people who are extremely interesting? I think that’s what makes it the most exciting is the people.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “Many scientists rest on their first big discovery and then they repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, and I got bored. I had to move on and do new things.”
– Viviana Simon: “What I enjoy most is that every morning when I get up, I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I might discover something. I might meet someone. I might have discussions that trigger a new project. The novelty that everything is possible”.
Asking Questions
– Cori Bargmann: “The main thing I remember getting from Bob [Weinberg] was a sense of excitement and scholarship. How are we going to understand this? What were the big questions? What had we really learned here?”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “In my family we had free range of asking question and challenging everything, so our dinners or discussions were always about questioning and pushing and knowing and debating. I think very early I was taught that actually you learn by questioning and you learn by exploring”.
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I think tools are wonderful. They’re accelerating things, they are new ways to go deeper, but we are driven by questions…Don’t forget the question. This is what drives us and I think asking the right question, the tools are nothing else than tools”.
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “Reach out to people who would help you understand the situation. Asking questions: asking questions to oneself, asking questions to others, really analyze the situation and see whether it’s possible, not possible”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “When I was growing up, I loved to ask questions but I often asked them of myself. I went to the public library multiple times a week…trying to find out information. This was my first exposure to the fields of biology and chemistry and material science…I found it really exciting to have an idea and wonder about something and then be able to go look up information about it.”
– Mary-Claire King: “A scientist is a person who asks questions that are important to them for whatever reason. There can be many reasons that questions are important to individual people that ask those questions in a rigorous way and have the goal of obtaining answers that will live beyond themselves.”
– Titia de Lange: “At UCSF, I learned how to ask questions in biology…I was used to the European style of asking questions to show the speaker and the audience that you were smarter or that you had critically analyzed their experiment and found a flaw, but Mark [Kirschner] had a very different approach and so did Bruce Alberts and Christine Guthrie. They asked about what things meant and why they had evolved this way and why they worked that way, and that opened my eyes. I realized I did not know how to think in biology”.
– Barbara Meyer: “I really disliked the biology labs that I took in college because they required you to get a specific answer and I wasn’t interested in getting an answer that was already known. When I got to do research with David Clayton [at Stanford Medical School], I realized you can ask a question about something. You can’t even imagine how it works, and you can design experiments and figure out experimentally yourself what happens. That was such a freeing feeling that I decided I wanted to go to graduate school. I was dazzled by what research could do.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “The reason I was asked to consider founding a new Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford was because I was asking the critical questions in developmental biology. Not that they cared about the organism. It wasn’t a eukaryotic cell. It was not a multicellular organism. It was not something that had classic embryology. It was the questions that mattered. I said, ultimately, yes and here I am at Stanford. We built a very exciting department.”
PERSONAL INTERESTS AND LIFE EXPERIENCES
Developing an Interest in Science
– Cori Bargmann: “In high school I started to just become attached to science. I really liked the chemistry lab and I would hide there when I was supposed to be going to the pep rallies. Then, when I was 17 years old, I got a summer job at the university making fly food for a population genetics lab, Wyatt Anderson’s lab. My job was the most menial thing imaginable, just mixing cornmeal and autoclaving it and putting it in these vials, but I loved the lab setting. I loved listening to people talk and think about big ideas and at some level I just got hooked there and never left.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “When I entered university, I knew then I wanted to do biology because I always had this affinity…that’s where I really found my calling. Then, there was absolutely no question of choosing. I loved everything about it, absolutely everything. I became really this really passionate student and I was given the opportunity to do research”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I was always curious about animals. If it moved, I was really interested in it…there are these big ants in Australia called bull ants. They’re very large and they have a very bad sting, but I was fearless and I’d pick them up and stroke them and sing to them…we had lots of animals as pets, and I was fascinated by them.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “I probably learned about [science] reading Jim Watson’s book actually, The Double Helix, that my father gave me when I was in sixth or seventh grade. I read that book and it was an absolute revelation to me as a young kid to read about how science actually gets done…there were rivalries, these were real people, they had foibles, and he writes about all of that. That’s not the kind of thing that when you’re studying science in school, you learn about in textbooks. I realized from that book that science is an active process. It’s something that people do and it very much has the character of the people that are involved in it.”
– Anne Eichmann: “My father, his love of science rubbed off on me and I acquired that through contact with his laboratory. We used to hang out with the postdocs on weekends and I fell in love with that and his many quirky friends. But I think my desire to become independent came in equal proportions from my mother because my mother didn’t like to be responsible for the children and not be independent. She always told me, you should be your own woman and be able to stand on your own two feet, so that’s what I did.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “I was always curious about science. A key event was in high school when I learned about DNA, how DNA encoded genes and how genes were transcribed. I thought this was the most fascinating thing. I couldn’t believe because it was so simple, so elegant, and so fantastic. I wanted to become a scientist and wanted to do microbiology”.
– Susan Hockfield: “When I was a kid, I realized I was an anatomist. I understood things by taking them apart and anything was vulnerable. I would take flowers apart, seed pods apart, my mother’s iron I took apart, her vacuum cleaner, because if I took it apart, I could understand how it worked. I was obsessed with understanding how things worked, which I’m sure left a trail of dissected objects behind me. I was not that interested in putting them back. I was just interested in understanding how they worked”.
– Meritxell Huch: “I was always interested in understanding how things work, basically that was the question. Even in secondary school when we started to learn about biology and how photosynthesis works, I was always asking “and then what” and “what more”, and it turned out that it was never enough”.
– Narry Kim: “We grew up in a house full of books because my mom loved to read. And I think how I got interested in reading and later I read a book about science history starting from Greek scientists and mathematicians and philosophers. And I thought it’s so fascinating, so I decided to be a scientist.”
– Mary-Claire King: “When I was young, I had no concept of what it was to be a scientist. I didn’t know what a PhD was…I didn’t have a concept of being a scientist. When I went to college to do mathematics, I always assumed that I would be a person who would do mathematics in some context. I didn’t have a good sense of what that would be…It was after I went to Berkeley and took the first genetics course I’d ever taken from Curt Stern…I remember sitting in the auditorium and saying to myself, imagine people being paid to do this, imagine being able to do this all the time – this is just terrific. I was a statistics graduate student and I spoke to Dr. Stern. I said, is there any way I could learn enough genetics to actually do genetics? And he said, of course. And I did, and I never looked back.”
– Mary-Claire King: “When I was ready to go to college, the Ivy League schools were not yet open to girls. I wanted to be able to do math. I was completely intimidated, unnecessarily in retrospect, but I was completely intimidated by going to MIT or Caltech, which are the places that didn’t care if you were male or female, they only cared that you cared about math and science. But I was completely intimidated by that so I went to Carleton, which is a small co-ed school and still does have a very good math department, and then graduated in three years and went to Berkeley.”
– Titia de Lange: “Like many biologists, we all have a childhood of looking at beetles and salamanders and plants and so on. I was like that. I liked nature”.
– Barbara Meyer: “I loved math, I loved chemistry, I loved physics. I really liked the logic of it…I love literature, but diving into science had such pure logic and was so beautifully able to describe and think about questions that I was really drawn to that because of the security and the solidness of being able to think scientifically.”
– Barbara Meyer: “Ironically, in high school I really disliked biology because it was all descriptive. It was botany, it was zoology. There was never a mention of DNA or RNA. There was no molecular biology. So, when I went to Stanford, I didn’t think I would like biology, but I took biology and chemistry and physics and math. At that point, Jim Watson’s book, Molecular Biology of the Gene, came out and I read that when I was a sophomore and I realized biology can be really mechanistic. It was because of his book that I decided to major in biology.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I was very curious as a kid and actually not just science, but also other things. I poked into many interesting things which happened to come around.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “At school we had very good biology teachers and I was very, very interested. I got books. My mother and also my father bought books for me…so rather early on I learned about behavioral biology and decided to be a scientist, a biologist, in my future, not really knowing what that meant, but I just said, I want to be a researcher.”
– Sarah Tishkoff: “I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist. My earliest memory of this was in high school. I read a book by Margaret Mead that was on the Samoan cultures, and I said, that’s it. I’m going to be a field anthropologist. I want to go do fieldwork in places like Samoa, learn about the culture, and so on”.
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “When I was born, we didn’t have an apartment or place to live. My father was offered a laboratory space that was converted as our apartment, so we lived in my father’s scientific institute…where he had his own lab as a very young PI. So, I was really growing up on the corridors of that institute and until I was nearly five, I was brought up by my father’s PhD students and colleagues”.
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “I realized that I was interested in brain function. I guess this must have come from my father…but because he was a scientist in neuroscience, I decided not to be a neuroscientist. I wanted to go and become psychologist. So, I started to prepare for entering psychology department in Warsaw University, but at the end biology won and I entered biology department. But again, I was not becoming a neuroscientist. I got fascinated with the plasticity of early embryos. I wanted to understand the beginning of life and really this is the beginning of life that I’m still studying.”
– Fiona Watt: “My love of science, and really it’s a love of biology, came from our summer holidays on the west coast of Scotland where we would put the caravan in a little croft, so that’s a farm, very near where my mother had grown up. We were allowed a lot of freedom, so we could go down to the shore of Loch Linnhe where I got very interested in different kinds of seaweed, the ecosystem of rock pools. We would go for very, very long hikes in the mountains, and I would collect wild flowers and look at different kinds of moss. I would have pets at home as well. I particularly enjoyed keeping a tank with newts or frogs in it, so it was all about really loving biology.”
– Fiona Watt: “At school, I was always interested in science and that marked me apart because it was a school that was mainly designed to educate young ladies who would go to university, study art subjects, and then get married and leave the workforce. So, I’ve always felt that I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t doing that in a team really.”
– Fiona Watt: “I’ve always been interested in how things work and if somebody tells me something is true, I will normally, if I can, check it.”
Interest in the Arts
– Cori Bargmann: “I grew up in Athens, Georgia…in an incredibly overeducated household…we grew up in a household filled with music and art and books, and it was always clear to us that we were likely to end up in an academic setting when we grew up.”
– Meritxell Huch: “I like music, classical music, very much. I stopped playing [the piano] when I went for my postdoc…not that I was good at all, but it was a good way to relieve mind. I like reading classics, not the science fiction novels from now, but classics.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I loved literature, but I felt I really needed science. It’s a very similar process. It’s a creative process where you can imagine and invent shapes and forms, and they all have representative features in them that remind me of something. So, it’s a creative part of my life that I enjoy.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “My father and my mother were very good at these things. Both were very good painters and both were very good musicians, so art and music were the things in the family and I was very good at school in both of them. I had the best grades in music always.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I’m a passionate musician. I play the flute and I sing. I love to play music with other people and I regularly train with a pianist who accompanies me, he is a very good pianist, and I have singing lessons every week.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I was also very interested in German literature. I’m a fan of Goethe and I’m a fan of Büchner and other German classical poets and writers. I’m pretty knowledgeable in this field too… Now, I love to read English novels. Of course, Jane Austen, my hero, and Dorothy Sayers and others.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “[To succeed in science] you have to be very good at looking at things. [Eric Wieschaus and I] both had an artistic background. Eric is a very good painter. I’m not a very good painter, but I made very good drawings. I could draw and I was a very good observer too.”
– Lucy Shapiro: “We heard about the High School of Music and Art, and because I was both a student of the piano and because I learned how to draw and paint, I took the entrance exam and got in. That changed my life…I went to Brooklyn College…I majored in fine arts with particular interest in the Italian Renaissance. I did some biology because it was fascinating and I supported myself by being a medical illustrator.”
– Viviana Simon: “Initially, I wanted to be a painter and an artist – I wanted to create. Medical school really was plan B, but it fed into my curiosity and trying to understand problems and solving puzzles, which led me then to doing a PhD because med school is not really encouraging to ask you why and trying to understand mechanisms. A PhD was much more conducive to that. I was always really curious and I was lucky enough to be able to follow my passions. They did change. They might change in the future. I might do other things”.
– Viviana Simon: “For another career, I could have been a linguist. I would’ve loved that. I love books, any language I can find them. Sometimes I read the same books in German, French, and English if I really like it, and each time it’s a different experience. I could have been a translator. That was also something in the cards”.
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “I had no idea that I would be a scientist. I actually didn’t want to do the same as my parents, so I didn’t want to be either doctor or scientist – I wanted to be an artist. I really expressed myself much more in art and I liked culture and of course we all, as young people at the time [in Warsaw], in one way or the other were protesting against the regime. So, my upbringing, I would say, despite of the roots being in the scientific lab when I was born, were not very scientific.”
Experiences as a Student
– Cori Bargmann: “I went to public schools in Athens, [Georgia]. It was a college town, so many of the people there were also faculty brats like me. It was during the civil rights era and the schools weren’t integrated until I was in the sixth grade, so I remember that actually quite vividly and the cultural upheavals that happened during that period.”
– Yasmine Belkaid: “I was very picky about what I did in school. For me, going back to the point about passion, I could only do well what I really liked, which means I was a very irregular student. I was extremely good in certain areas and terrible in others”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I knew pretty early, in middle school, I really liked science, especially biology and chemistry. I knew I wasn’t going to be a physicist or mathematician or geologist or astronomer, but I really loved biology and what I felt biology was about. So, I was lucky. I really knew that in one way or another I was going to be a scientist and in science”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “In high school I started reading about molecules and chemistry…amino acids and things like that. I was hooked. I thought, if you understand the molecules in life, you’re going to understand life”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “I had a wonderful teacher in 10th grade of our chemistry class, Ms. Wong. I remember her being very, very calm. She never raised her voice to the class. She was very calm, very collected, loved her work, clearly loved chemistry. She was great at telling us kids about chemistry being a process of solving puzzles rather than something that was all done that you read about in a book.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “One of my favorite stories is about my high school AP English teacher, Bob Hillier…who was always looking for ways to make literature more accessible to high school kids, and he was very good at it…He was somebody who continually would push us kids to think about how to explore ideas we were excited about and to learn from our mistakes. He really wanted us to do creative work.”
– Katalin Karikó: “When I was at the high school, at 16, I announced I will be a biologist…There was an excellent biology teacher and he believed that I can be a researcher, which I had no idea, but then I started to believe myself. It is very important that you have somebody who encourages you, the teacher is doing that.”
– Mary-Claire King: “I grew up in an environment that was really a very middle American, very old-fashioned environment. I was very active in my church. I think if it had been possible in those days for women to become pastors in the Methodist church, I probably would’ve been a pastor…but when I was doing math, I realized by the time I was in high school that I liked it and I was reasonably good at it, but nowhere near good enough to be a professional mathematician…I did do mathematics as an undergraduate at a school called Carleton College in Minnesota, and then went out to Berkeley and fell in love with genetics.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I went abroad and I lived in Germany. That was mind boggling because I’d been raised in the Central Valley of California with intellectually rich parents, but I didn’t see the sites. When I moved to Europe, I got to go to museums and see all these famous artists and all these famous works, and I was dazzled”.
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “When I loved things, I was better than average and when I didn’t like things, I was worse than average – the teachers didn’t like that. They gave me very bad grades, even if I didn’t deserve them, because I just didn’t listen…I think I was not really ambitious, but I love to do interesting things so I took what I could get, but not more than that.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I liked school and I found it very interesting and I listened and I kept up with the school except in the topics which require lots of learning, so I was not good in languages. I ended with a bad grade in Latin and in English, but I had a good grade in mathematics and German and foremost in biology and chemistry.”
– Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: “I learned all the things young girls learn, I mean knitting and sewing and stitching and other things. I love that actually, to do my handicraft stuff…We had very good teachers, devoted teachers, mostly women who were not married and had lots of interests.”
– Fiona Watt: “At that time, Edinburgh was full of, they were called dame schools for girls to turn girls into young ladies, and I went to one of these. I was at school with the same girls from the age of four and a half to when I left at 17 and a half, and two of those people that I met when I was four are still my good friends”.
– Fiona Watt: “My father took us on sabbatical to America when I was 10. He was in the State University of New York at Buffalo, and this year changed all of my childhood assumptions. We didn’t wear a uniform at school. It was a mixed school, rather than an all-girls school, and the whole attitude to education and life was utterly different to what I was used to. So, I went back to my old life with my eyes opened. I could tell from then, from the age of 10, that there was more to the world than my home in Edinburgh.”
Having a Family
– Yasmine Belkaid: “Frankly, I think [my children] made me incredibly organized. Before I had kids, I was this kind of scientist that was arriving, working 15 hours in the lab, making a mess, because the reality is at one point you need also discipline and rigor. I think that’s what parenthood teaches you, it’s about being organized and not wasting your time”.
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “Often it’s very daunting for a young person with a family, man, woman, any gender. It’s daunting when you’re dealing with it all at once, but the idea is…keep on doing science one way or another, maybe part-time, maybe differently, but don’t just give it up. Don’t give up science if you love it because eventually, they do grow up…so persevere”.
– Jennifer Doudna: “It was very disruptive to become parents. It was very disruptive, no question. It changed everything. It changed the way we did our work, in the sense that the workday became very defined…we made a decision very early on that we would include our son in a lot of our work. I used to take my son to work with me…We also took him on a lot of trips where we were attending scientific meetings…It was a great way for our son to see us doing our work and that that was very normal. It was normal for a woman, his mom, to be a professional and to be going to meetings and presenting work…that was one important way that we could educate him about our values and the way that we wanted to have our family be clearly prioritized, but at the same time, including him in our professional work.”
– Anne Eichmann: “It’s a very delicate balance and often you feel like you need eight arms and still you fall short of all your major duties, which are of course, first and foremost the children, but then also towards your work, towards your career, and towards your husband. It’s a very delicate balancing act and honestly Mila, looking back at it, I wonder how I did it.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “The first couple of years being junior faculty, I wasn’t thinking of having a family. After a while, once you establish yourself and funding comes in, and the clock is ticking for women, you can’t wait until forever, we decided, yes, it would be nice to have a baby…The honest truth is, being both a junior faculty and having a family and a child, and my husband helped 50%, it still is a lot of work to have both a reasonable, balanced family life and work.”
– Beatrice Hahn: “The time management is different. You have to carve out time for your children. Before that point, I was doing 100% research. You have to find a balance. We did it by designating the weekend to be for the kids. If we went out for dinner, we would take them. During the week, they had a nanny and we would work.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “It was definitely a difficult decision to have a family. I felt very committed to what I was doing and I wanted to make sure to be able to do that, but I also felt a strong desire to have a family…It was a real challenge, but definitely one I would never have sacrificed.”
– LaDeana Hillier: “My husband wanted children, and I was working all the time up until I had my first daughter. Even after I had her, it was demanding. She would come to work with me or we would work things out. My husband was a resident, which added to the challenge, and my daughter, fortunately, was great. I did wait quite a while to have my second child, and when I had my second daughter, she’d come into work…it wasn’t easy to work from home like it is now, so that really wasn’t an option.”
– Susan Hockfield: “Someone told me this and it was one of the very, very most important lessons – buy whatever care you can get. I learned that I needed to be spending time. Anytime I had was time for Elizabeth. So, I stopped doing laundry, I stopped doing much of the cooking, I stopped the things that I could have someone else take care of”.
– Meritxell Huch: “I would say it’s not easy. You have to be very organized and conscious of the division. I would not do it any other way. I love my children to pieces and I would be unable to live without them, but it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work. It means that when I’m in the lab, I’m in the lab. I am Meritxell the scientist…When I’m at home and they are awake, I’m Meritxell the mummy…When they go to bed, I’m back to being Meritxell the scientist”.
– Katalin Karikó: “Encourage [women in science]. They don’t have to choose between family and science. They can have all. I have a daughter who eventually turned out to be two-times Olympic champion, five-times world champion. She was the fame in the family… I would say don’t lower the bar that you will be assistant to somebody. You can do it. Then you ask for help. Help from husband, from other family member, to take care of that.”
– Barbara Meyer: “I understood what it was like to be a woman in science and I understood that was an extremely important thing to have both a family and a career. They were less productive as a consequence, but I was happy to let them do that. So, my lab, it was a joke, we worked on sex determination, we are one of the most fertile labs.”
– Sarah Tishkoff: “I’m not going to lie; it’s going to be incredibly hard. It’s going to be incredibly challenging, and you’re going to need a supportive partner. I did it. You can do it if you choose. Some people may choose that that’s not for them. That’s fine, but if you do choose to, get all the help you possibly can. That is my advice.”
– Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz: “I think my children helped me to become a better scientist. It’s not because I had more time, because I had less time, but the love I have towards them allows me to see life in a broader way, a more colorful way. When I am with them, I am totally with them. When I’m with my lab, I’m totally with my lab. When they sleep, I work. So, the only thing that suffers is really my sleep pattern.”
– Fiona Watt: “I have three children: a boy and then twins, a boy and a girl. I feel that having my first child made me a better scientist because I’d got to the point where I was working so hard in the lab all the time, nobody could work as hard as me…but it gave me that perspective. I’ve always been very good at shutting off. If I’m at work, I’m at work. If I’m not at work, I’m not at work.”
Fashion
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “I learned as well that the outfit is important. One has to feel comfortable.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “With regard to outfit, when you’re a woman, it’s very important. During the day, I often [wear] jeans and sneakers because it’s more convenient…my professional dress for me has always been jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt or shirt. This is my daily thing. When I know that someone is going to come or I’m going to have an important meeting, then I dress more.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “A struggle people don’t think of is makeup…One anecdote with this regard is the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences…A friend of mine in Paris told me, I have a friend, she’s in California, she’s a makeup artist, you have to have a makeup artist. So, I take this makeup artist. Ultimately, Jennifer Doudna ended up using her…because they had not organized a makeup artist for us…and this was typical because they are used to having men receiving prizes and they don’t think of this aspect.”
RESEARCH
Biotechnology
– Jennifer Doudna: “I think science and entrepreneurship are related in a way. I’ve often felt that when you start an academic research lab, there are some interesting parallels to starting a company. In a similar way, you have an idea, something you want to pursue, you’re attracting people to come and work on that idea, you’re building a team. I didn’t think about it that way when I was starting my academic lab, to be honest, but I see it more now that way. My lab is like a team and people are collaborating with each other on projects and sharing certain ideas that they want to work on and achieve together.”
– Katalin Karikó: “In 2013, Moderna got $240 million from AstraZeneca. I said, “Now, the messenger RNA is ready for a primetime”…[They] offered me that I can be a vice president in BioNTech. It was just a campus company. It was a very small one…nine more years I was there”.
– Lucy Shapiro: “This was at the time when Anthrax was out, right before the World Trade Centers. This was right before 2000. Things were scary. I had three prongs [to address issues that concerned me] and one of them was to design new drugs. Steve Benkovic, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, was one of the most visionary chemists I knew and I knew him from sitting on the advisory board at Glaxo and at SmithKline Beecham. I said to Steve, with your chemistry and my microbiology, we should be able to design new therapeutics that are really different.”
CRISPR
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “With CRISPR the very high impact I found very, very interesting. Everyone was thinking, but CRISPR is a technology that could also be dangerous…there were nevertheless media that understood how transformative the technology was that they really focused on the good aspects of the technology and the bad aspect was mentioned, but was not emphasized in a negative manner as if CRISPR was only a negative technology and this has been very important.”
– Emmanuelle Charpentier: “The idea that CRISPR could be used to treat genetic diseases, I advocated for it quite early on.” “It was through my connection to [Roger Novak], but also in Vienna, the chance that I was in a campus where they were doing a lot for startups and biotechs. These factors developed in me this understanding, in addition to the fact that it’s also the Pasteur Institute mentality, you do research and you need always to think of applications. So, I have this attitude towards research since early on, but it developed even more with Rodger Novak because he’s an MD.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “I have always felt that CRISPR is a technology that has enormous benefit to bring to humankind, with appropriate caution. We have to be responsible in its use. We have to be proactive about making sure that it’s being used properly. I think, for the most part, that’s happened in the field so I’m pleased about that. There’s always work to be done.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “Right now, the thing I think about the most is access to the technology…It can remove the cause of genetic diseases. That’s just extraordinary, but it won’t have impact unless we figure out how to reduce the cost and make it easier to get those technologies into patients that can benefit.”
– Jennifer Doudna: “I would really like to see CRISPR become a technology that is the standard of care for treating certain diseases as well as for addressing some of the major challenges that the planet has with the changing climate, so those are two things that we’re working on very actively at our institute.”
Telomeres
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “It was the possibility, what could you do? I think that’s key. I always try to think, what will the new technology open up for you? At that time, it was the new technologies of being able to sequence, albeit little, bits of DNA, but sequence something at the ends and nobody knew what was there. I proposed this to Joe Gall and said, should I work on a different ciliated protozoan…and Joe very wisely said, no, if you want to get lots of DNA…you can grow them like yeast…take the system that you can get lots of material from quickly.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “[Barbara McClintock] called it the natural ends…I had some wonderful conversations with her about chromosomes and telomeres…but she was the one, I thought, who actually defined what they were about functionally even though she didn’t give them the name.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “I think Barbara McClintock had two really important influences on me. One was that she said to me, “feel confident in what you are seeing in your experimental work”…because I was looking at telomeric DNA behavior in its molecular form and was very puzzled about what was going on…Then, the second was that she told me about a strain of maize she had, which was a mutant.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “Jack Szostak and I did this experiment where a yeast circular plasmid was cut, then I provided the telomeres that I’d isolated from Tetrahymena ribosomal RNA gene linear chromosomes, and they were fused on and Jack put them into cells. And lo and behold, those plasmids now could work as linear plasmids, so that defined functionally a telomere.”
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “There were multiple discoveries. Everybody thinks in science that there was one discovery.”
Stem Cells
– Elizabeth Blackburn: “It was the principle; you don’t just shut off research if you don’t really understand what’s going on, and people were trying to say very untrue things about what adult stem cells could do”.
– Meritxell Huch: “[After my PhD on gene therapy,] I started to apply to many stem cell labs, particularly in Europe, and then I got no reply, zero reply because I was coming from a totally different field. Now they seem similar, but back then they were seen as totally different fields…Then, there was a lucky coincidence because Cristina was supposed to attend a meeting that was organized by who afterwards became my postdoc advisor, Hans Clevers, in Barcelona. [Cristina] got sick and she said, do you want to go? I went and then I met Hans…I approached him, and I said, “I thought your talk was very nice”. And then he said, “do you want to come to my lab?” And I said, “well, yes”. “Just send me your CV”. That was our conversation.”
– Christine Mummery: “It was still a sensitive issue and we had an incredible lot of discussions on it, and I just presented myself as a person to present the facts, the numbers, the efficiencies and what you might do with them, but I never said we are going to cure patients. That’s where it went a little bit wrong in the US. People like who were wonderful in doing the publicity, Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve, Nancy Reagan, they did it all wonderfully but they promised too much…I think we did it right mostly as scientists, but we are not very good at preventing the publicity seekers”.
– Christine Mummery: “I went with the minister to Germany for a medical conference on controversial issues and one of them was about embryonic stem cells, the other was about euthanasia. I was presenting and she was in the background looking at what was presented. When I was asked in one of the questions, how many leftover embryos are there in freezers in the Netherlands, I said, between 10,000 and 20,000. When the Germans were asked, how many did they say? 10. It is not possible. It’s not true, but it is true if you have a complicated and different definition of what’s an embryo. The German law says an embryo is only an embryo after first cleavage, so one cell to two cells, so they froze at the one-cell stage and it wasn’t officially an embryo. They had thousands of one-cell fertilized eggs, but only 10 embryos. We let them grow to the 8-cell stage and they were embryos, so we had tens of thousands. It was so strange how things wriggled around to be on the moral high ground. I found it a totally amazing process how politicians and even scientists would lend themselves to this sort of manipulation of the facts.”
– Fiona Watt: “I was quite involved in some of the discussions in Britain about the use of embryonic stem cells. What was good in Britain was that we already had an act which regulated fertility treatments involving implantation of embryos and so the act was extended to allow and regulate the creation of embryonic cell lines. In other countries, that has not been acceptable.”
– Fiona Watt: “If you want to make an embryonic stem cell line, you take a discarded fertilized embryo, which has been frozen because the parents thought that they might want to make a baby in future, but they’ve decided their family is complete. Then, you simply isolate the cells, put them in a culture dish, feed them with medium, and they will grow into a cell line so that you can have many millions or billions of cells. Using the cells for that reason is not dangerous, and I think when we come to dangers of stem cell therapies, it’s typically of using cells in an inappropriate way.”
Genetics and Genomics
– LaDeana Hillier: “How can information really be dangerous? That’s why they had such a large fraction of the [HGP] funding dedicated to the ethical, legal and social implications…There are dangers, but I think it’s necessary.”
– Mary-Claire King: “As a geneticist, I think of us as being in a golden age of tools and one of those tools for us is mathematics. I realize that mathematics is the holy grail to a mathematician, but for us it is a very powerful tool. Computer science is a tool. Genomics is a set of tools. Genetics is a way of thinking about the world and of thinking about biology that allows one to state questions in an objective, testable way, and to use all these tools from mathematics, from physiology, from genomics, from proteomics, from transcriptomics, to address them.”
– Mary-Claire King: “People sometimes say, do you do genetics or genomics? I can’t imagine doing one without the other. Genetics is a way of thinking. Genomics is a set of tools.”