| MARCH 2003 |
Excellence X 3
CC's Top Women in Science
By Anne ChristensenMarcia Kemper McNutt ’74 is the president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, overseeing 200 scientists, engineers, and marine technical workers as well as a $30 million annual budget. She remains active in geophysical research. Read her story.
Margaret Liu ’77 is the vice-chairman of Transgene, S.A., a French gene therapy/cancer immunotherapy company, a visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. An M.D. and a serious musician, she has lectured at the Nobel Forum in Stockholm at the invitation of the Nobel Committee. Read her story.
Jane Lubchenco ’69 is professor of marine biology at Oregon State University; she recently won the Heinz Award for the Environment for her work assisting scientists to get involved in political action. Lubchenco’s research focuses on measuring the impacts of human activity upon ecosystems, especially those in intertidal zones. Read her story.
What caused these women to bloom first in CC’s pastures of high achievers, then later in such disparate fields?
Picture an anonymous member of the academic cognoscenti agitating in a dreary waiting room, flipping through the prematurely gray-edged pages of a November magazine. “Ah,” she says, “The 50 Most Important Women in Science — how many are from my alma mater?” If she’s from Colorado College, it’s three. Only MIT had more, with four – but hey, who’s counting?
Discover magazine, that’s who. Associate editor Kathy Svitil found paleobiologists, computer scientists, geneticists, astronomers… and from CC, an immunologist, a physicist, and a marine ecologist. These alumnae share certain characteristics: an unconventionally framed enthusiasm for mathematics, a career path better described as a tapestry than a straight trajectory, and an unflappably pragmatic perspective on breaking ground in male-dominated fields.
At CC, all three were challenged by the vigor of the curriculum, while independent studies honed their enthusiasm for research. And they absorbed the liberal arts’ quiet insistence that true understanding of one subject requires looking for its connections to other subjects; hence their common refusal to be confined by traditional boundaries of scope and specialty.
Marcia McNutt
Marcia McNutt came to CC intending to major in physics, but
her first physics professor told her bluntly that women didn’t
belong in the field. She credits her perseverance to a natural
stubborn streak and a two-block geology sequence from Professor
John Lewis which, she says, “instilled in me the concept of
science as a way of approaching the natural world, as opposed
to science as a body of knowledge to be learned and remembered.”Though she enjoyed undergraduate forays into math and geology, McNutt remained profoundly intrigued by physics. “Had it not been for the fact that geology seemed to lack the predictive power of physics to explain the natural world, I might have decided to major in that subject,” says McNutt. Instead, she intensified her studies in physics, finding other members of the department much more supportive of her work. She’s encountered little bias since that first advisor (since retired), and in fact, she says, any disadvantages have been balanced by advantages: “Senior scientists were more likely to remember having heard my paper because I stood out from male students. But women scientists do carry an extra burden because we are so often called upon to be role models in ways that male colleagues are not. I get asked to give a lot more lectures, write more letters of recommendation, etc. because I am female.”
McNutt says plenty of female students are interested in science in college, especially biology, but are underrepresented in the profession due to “the science lifestyle”: long hours in the lab, long periods in the field, and little chance to take time off without falling behind. She thinks the culture of science – “always questioning everything and everyone else’s results” – also leads some women to conclude that there are other ways they would rather contribute to society and earn a living. In that sense, she says, CC’s intellectual environment and Block Plan prepare all its students for the real-life day of a scientist, focusing for long periods on solving problems in one area.
McNutt recently lectured at CC on how developments in microprocessors, artificial intelligence, and new ways to supply power to and communicate with autonomous devices are now revolutionizing our ability to explore the ocean. “The most important new technologies allow us to sample life in extreme ocean environments: deep in the undersea sediments, in the hydrothermal hot springs, in the methane hydrate deposits and under the polar ice cap, and to use in-situ tools to sample their genetic codes,” she says.
Recently, MBARI got a $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to install a deep underwater observatory in Monterey Bay linked by Internet bandwidth to the lab. “The observatory will be serviced by remotely operated vehicles, and will interface with autonomous underwater vehicles that can dock to observatory ports to recharge batteries and download data without ever returning to shore, ushering in a new era in our ability to monitor, understand, and interact with the deep sea,” she enthuses. “At MBARI, we’ve tried to break down the disciplinary and cultural boundaries between science and engineering.”
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Margaret Liu
Like McNutt, Margaret Liu came to CC fascinated by a particular
science — biochemistry — yet eager to explore other areas of
interest. “I like math for some of the same reasons that I like
chemistry and physics. It’s fun to tinker with equations,” says
Liu. “At CC, it was fine for me to be a dedicated pianist, live
in the French house, and be involved in Christian student groups.
I didn’t have to specialize.”But biochemistry remained her academic focus. “I like to know how things work, so chemical reactions and the pathways of organic chemistry intrigued me, and I always liked visualizing them.” Her creative approach was encouraged by her professors, whom she credits for focusing on teaching rather than just on their own publishing. “I had professors in small classes or independent study, like an advanced biochemistry course with the late Professor Richard Taber where I first encountered interferons and became intrigued with immunology. The professors took us all seriously,” says Liu. “They didn’t treat females any differently than males, so I never thought about being a woman in terms of science at CC. It was only later that I began to experience biases about what women ‘are’ or ‘aren’t’ capable of doing.”
After CC, she found no bias on the part of her professors at Harvard Medical School, she says, but it crept in around the edges of her clinical experiences. “Some nurses would help male interns and residents much more — like cleaning up after a procedure, whereas the women physicians had to clean up after themselves — so women had more work than men,” she remembers. Once she left clinical practice for the biotech corporate world, Liu says, “I really noticed how less-competent men are often promoted over women,” she says. But it wasn’t all sex-based, she says; many promotions of less-competent people were through “the old-boy network,” so competent men were passed over as well.
Like McNutt, Liu says being female has given her extra visibility, though it sometimes smacked of tokenism. “Once I became prominent, I was asked to be on more committees because people needed a woman to make a list look equitable,” she says. She assigns some blame to misguided cultural expectations (“women aren’t good at math or spatial reasoning”) and stereotypes (“beauties, not brains”), but says the most serious career development challenge for female scientists remains “the biological clock for childbearing. Science careers require an advanced degree followed by one or two postdoctoral periods. One is expected to, and often needs to, put in horrendously long hours.”
Liu contrasts her experience accommodating that biological clock with that of a colleague at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute: “I hid my first pregnancy from co-workers because I worried about my bosses taking away my research groups,” she says. In Sweden, which mandates maternity and paternity leave, her colleague is taking off four months now that his physician wife has returned to clinical rotation, months after childbirth.
Liu’s pioneering research focuses on the development of DNA-based vaccines, which might work against viruses that have many strains or mutate quickly, like HIV, by spurring the body to produce proteins that provoke its own immune system into a more efficient response to such viruses. If it’s successful, the same technique may be employed against diseases that require similar immune response, including cancer, tuberculosis, and malaria.
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Jane Lubchenco
Like Liu, Jane Lubchenco travels constantly in several orbits:
hands-on research, political lobbying, and simply changing the
way that scientists communicate with the rest of the world.
Lubchenco attributes this ability to multi-task at such a high
level to her CC years: “the emphasis on critical thinking, integration
of science and liberal studies, high standards, individual attention,
and encouragement to be independent.”At Oregon State University, Lubchenco serves as Valley Professor of Marine Biology, Distinguished Professor of Zoology, and co-founder of the Lubchenco/Menge Lab. She directs and conducts research at all levels, from biochemical and suborganismal work to controlled field experiments in intertidal communities along the coasts of Oregon, New Zealand, and Chile. Her work has revealed the complexity and fragile nature of these ecosystems, and has encouraged the development of sustainable aquaculture and the establishment of marine reserves to preserve ocean habitats.
Lubchenco’s passion for study and protection of the environment is balanced by a dispassionate but hefty list of credentials, the kind that gain credibility and access in the political arena where she is internationally recognized as an expert on global warming and other global ecological changes. She is currently president of the International Council for Science and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America, a trustee for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and a former James D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow.
Lubchenco’s most likely legacy, and the work for which she recently won the Heinz Award for the Environment — at $250,000, among the largest unrestricted individual awards in the world — is her effort to help scientists to communicate effectively with political policy-makers and the public. To this end, she co-founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains scientists in a wide range of topics from infectious diseases to the greenhouse effect, to move beyond academic journals and conferences, sharing their expertise with decision-makers at any level. Lubchenco plans to use the Heinz Award money to expand opportunities for students to learn about ocean protection and restoration.
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