The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science - Softcover

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Kate Zernike has been a reporter for The New York Times since 2000. She was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for stories about al-Qaeda before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. She was previously a reporter for The Boston Globe, where she broke the story of MIT’s admission that it had discriminated against women on its faculty, on which The Exceptions is based. The daughter and granddaughter of scientists, she is a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and sons.

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Chapter 1: An Epiphany on Divinity Avenue

Chapter 1 An Epiphany on Divinity Avenue

It was hard to deny the promise.

It was the second Tuesday in April 1963. Midmorning sunshine splashed the campus of Harvard University, where the trees were budding, and students were just back from a weeklong midsemester break. A Harvard man was in the White House, the youngest man ever elected president of the United States, heralding the dawn of a New Frontier. And here in Cambridge the next generation of ambitious young minds set out in crisp air along the tree-lined paths of the nation’s oldest university, any of them on the way to do—it could be me—the next big thing.

At eleven o’clock, just north of the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Yard, and just east of the grounds where George Washington had once assumed control of the Continental Army, some 225 undergraduates, many in jackets and ties, filed down the gentle slope of a lecture hall to hear from a professor leading a revolution for the twentieth century. Five months earlier, James Dewey Watson had been in Stockholm with Francis Crick to collect a Nobel Prize for decoding, at age twenty-four, the structure of DNA, a discovery he called, immodestly but not incorrectly, “the secret of life.” Watson and Crick’s double helix had immediately placed them in the pantheon with Darwin and Mendel for explaining the development of life on earth and sounded a starting gun in the high-stakes race of modern genetics.

Now tenured at Harvard, Watson was about to begin his series of lectures in the introductory biology course for undergraduates. A tutor had written him that the students had done “rather well” on an hour-long test just before break: “They will return to Cambridge full of seasonal and customary liveliness and anticipating meeting you.”

Nancy Doe, a junior, was already seated in the second row of the center section, almost directly in front of the lectern. She had arrived early, against her norm, and chosen her seat carefully. Not in the front row, because she didn’t want her classmates to think she was a celebrity hound, and not in the back, where she usually hid, because she had read in the student evaluations that Watson dropped his voice at the end of his sentences, and she wanted to hear every word. Tall and slender, she had a sprite-like smile and wide blue eyes that took in everything but gave little clue to what she made of it. Her expression could shift from excited and girlish to wary and jaded in an adolescent minute. She nearly itched with intensity, considered her thick dark hair impossible to manage, her legs in their black wool tights absurdly long. Her mind tended to race, restless until it could alight on the biggest problem she could find, which at that moment was what she was going to do with her life. At nineteen, her future lay wide-open in front of her, but sitting in the wooden fold-down desk, she felt nothing as much as time closing in. Her father had died the previous year, and neither her wide circle of friends, the prerogatives of an Ivy League education, nor her tall, handsome boyfriend had insulated her from mounting dread.

Watson appeared suddenly, as if by a tailwind in a cartoon. Nancy sat up to look. This could not be him, she thought. He looked no more than thirty—in fact, he had turned thirty-five on Saturday, still young for a professor, much less a Nobel laureate. He was well over six feet tall but still gangly like a teenager, with enormous ears, a long bony nose, and round, protruding eyes. His hair was receding and barely tamed, a disobedient squiggle airborne over his forehead, like Tintin. He radiated impatient energy, his eyes everywhere at once—on his notes, on the students filling the room—looking through more than at. Watching, Nancy thought of him as a winged messenger, a wizard in a J. Press suit stopped in the middle of some monumental discovery to deliver the word to these lucky Harvard undergraduates.

Watson was cultivating a reputation as a showman, and he began grandly: What is life? Life, he told the students, came down to one molecule, DNA, which was in every cell of the body. It was made up of four bases, always in two complementary pairs that fit together in sequence, like the teeth of a zipper, to create genes. In those bases was all the information needed to create a living organism. Tear apart the zipper and DNA gave you a template to create an exact copy, the next generation. It was life, and the ability to start a new one.

Nancy had come to class understanding little about the double helix or DNA, little more than that a Nobel Prize was a big deal. From what she had read, she expected that Watson was going to deliver a master plan to explain human biology.

But as he spoke, she realized that Watson knew the answers to the questions that had been preoccupying her over the last year, or at least where to find them. If DNA was in every cell, everything there is to understand about humans must be written in there somehow: not just the color of their eyes, but cancer, and even how they behaved. Watson and the new cadre of molecular biologists were going to be able to figure it all out: a dumb gene, a smart gene, a fat gene, a thin gene, a nice gene, a nasty gene.

Watson was conversational, funny, prided himself on being the liveliest of the four lecturers in Bio 2. His voice was indeed quiet, but his tone was imperative, and she began to feel as though he were speaking directly to her.

It would all become more complicated—the science, Watson—much, much more complicated. But in that moment, the idea that life could be reduced to this one set of rules comforted and thrilled her. The promise of it drowned out everything else: the pressure of the hard wooden seat against her tailbone, the grief over her father, the worries about her widowed mother and her own future.

At the end of the hour, Nancy floated out of the classroom building to join the noontime stream of students emptying out of lecture halls onto Divinity Avenue. They passed hulking Memorial Hall and crossed Kirkland Street and Broadway, oblivious to the four lanes of traffic waiting for them to pass, then funneled through the ornate gates to disperse onto the diagonal paths of Harvard Yard. Normally, on a sunny day like this, rather than walk back to the Radcliffe dining hall, she would meet her boyfriend, Brooke, on the other side of the Yard. They’d grab the special at Elsie’s Sandwich Shop—roast beef with Russian dressing on a roll—and join the other young couples on the grassy banks of the Charles. But on this day, she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, to give her brain time to absorb what it had just heard. She took her time, avoided eye contact. She did not want anything to break the spell.

All year Nancy had been casting about for what to do with her life. She was adamant that it be something serious and meaningful, but she had little idea what that would be, beyond a diffuse desire to reduce human suffering. She imagined she would get married and have children—few young women her age would do otherwise—and she knew that she had to do so before she turned thirty, after which childbirth was thought to be dangerous. That gave her ten years to accomplish the professional goals she had not yet determined, and now, a year to figure out what those goals might be. Otherwise, she feared, she would too easily slide from graduation to marriage, a dog, children, the suburbs. A fate she thought of as...