Like many women, I was excited about the number of women who received Nobel Prizes earlier this month. It seemed like a dismissal of Larry Summers’ famous remarks when he was president of Harvard that women are less capable in the sciences than men. Here’s my fantasy TV show, The View reimagined, if it covered events in the science milieu.
CHELSEA: Oh wow, what a Nobel week that was! All those women scientists—Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for medicine. Ada Yonath for chemistry. I’m totally thrilled.
ESTELLE: Isn’t it great? That brings the total for science and medicine to only 16 since 1901, though. (See women Nobel prize winners.)
FAITH: Yes, but we can also celebrate a first for economics––Elinor Ostrom.
CHELSEA: What did they win for?
ESTELLE: Blackburn and Greider won for their research on DNA––on sections of chromosomes called telomeres. See, whenever a cell divides, it gets shorter. But telomeres usually don’t stay short, so scientists were trying to figure out how telomeres keep their length. Greider went to work in Blackburn’s lab in 1984.
CHELSEA: Woah. I wasn’t even born then.
ESTELLE: Greider discovered an enzyme—that’s a molecule that helps along a chemical reaction––that would lengthen the telomeres again after they’d shortened.
CHELSEA: Cool. What’s it called?
ESTELLE: Telomerase.
FAITH: I heard that there’s some relationship between telomerase and preventing aging.
ESTELLE: Yes, some scientists hope to find telomerase inducers, which can reset our aging clocks. They might even reverse the effects of aging by restoring shortened telomeres so that cells function as though they were brand new.
CHELSEA: You mean, I may never have to use wrinkle cream?
TANIKA: Kids whenever I’m ready to have them! Hey, what about the chem babe?
ESTELLE: Ada Yonath? She won for deciphering the structure and mechanism of the ribosome––the cell’s protein factory.
FAITH: Hey leadies, let’s not forget Elinor Ostrom.
Elinor Ostrom Photo Credit: U. of Illinois
CHELSEA: It’s interesting. She’s a political scientist, but she’s interested in how communities share resources. Like fisheries and forests and grazing lands. Even oil. And because people know everyone needs them to survive, they come up with cooperative systems to avoid exhausting the resource.
FAITH: That’s right. Without Big Government intervention.
TANIKA: Yeah, well look at this article–Field Study: Just How Relevant Is Political Science?–I just read in The Times. A Republican senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, wants to get rid of funding for political science. Isn’t that ironic? Right after Ostrom gets the Nobel.
ESTELLE: I saw that. He wants the money to go to science. But just because research is funded in a certain category doesn’t mean it’s strictly within it. I mean, come on. Ostrom was studying ecosystems.
CHELSEA: Yeah. We’re in an age of cross-disciplinary everything. Collaboration. The world is flat and overlapping. Why can’t people see that there are grey areas?
TANIKA: Maybe before I meet my maker the Nobel committee will recognize us women of color. Way too few of us girlfriends in science.
ESTELLE: Absolutely.
TANIKA: Listen to these numbers. The National Science Foundation says three years ago there were over 200,000 women grad students in science and engineering––
FAITH: ––out of how many total?
TANIKA: Under half a mill. 486,287 to be exact. Click here for the NSF statistics.
FAITH: So that’s around 43 percent women.
TANIKA: Yes, but of the women, not quite 16,000 were black and 13,000 were Hispanic. That’s seven-and-a-half percent and 6 percent.
FAITH: But don’t you think the prizes should be given totally blind? I mean, without regard to gender or race?
ESTELLE: Oh, please. For years women have been passed over. Their work was played down because men could get away with it. Look at Rosalind Franklin.
Rosalind Franklin Photo Credit: Physics World
FAITH: Yes, but look at Rosalyn Yalow for the radioimmunoassay technique.
Rosalyn Yalow Photo Credit: NobelPrize.org
ESTELLE: Watson still can’t acknowledge that Rosalind Franklin contributed any valuable crystalography data about the double helix. Despite her notebooks. And sexism is still with us. I saw this one-woman show the other week about a woman who was going for a PhD in math at MIT. A very talented young woman, Gioia De Cari.
CHELSEA: What’s it called?
ESTELLE: Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through MIT’s Male Math Maze. And her professor thought it was perfectly OK to demand that she serve cookies at seminars.
TANIKA: Oh. You cannot be serious.
ESTELLE: Uhuh. And she kept hearing comments like, “Wouldn’t you be happier at home raising babies?” and “You don’t look like you’d be good at math.” This from contemporaries. ‘Cause she’s kinda curvy.
CHELSEA: So what happened––she quit to become an actress? How defeatist is that?
ESTELLE: Not really. She got her Master’s first.
FAITH: Well, if she has talent in another area, what’s wrong with that?
ESTELLE: It wasn’t her first choice!
CHELSEA: Yeah, how can you say that?
TANIKA: Listen, women in science and tech especially, need encouragement all along the way. I mean every step. With prizes like the L’Oreal and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize for women in biology. I heard Blackburn won both of them.
ESTELLE: See. There you go.
To read Claudia Dreifus’ interview with Carol Greider in Science Times, click here.
Here’s a list of women Nobel Laureates in all categories.
Tags: Ada Yonath, Carol Greider, Elinor Ostrom, Elizabeth Blackburn, Nobel Prize, Rosalind Franklin, Rosalyn Yalow, The View, women and science
About Karen Frenkel:
Karen A. Frenkel covers science, technology, and their impacts on society. Her articles have appeared on SciAm.com, in Scientific American, and Communications of the ACM. She has also produced two documentaries for Public Television—one on women and computing and the other on online learning. Email her at kfrenkel@nyc.rr.com, follow her on Twitter as KarenAFrenkel, and visit her website, www.karenafrenkel.com.
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[...] in the Nobel announcements. Why such a big deal about women winning? Read Karen A. Frenkel’s insightful and witty comments about the ranks of the too-few women that Nobel Laureates Blackburn, [...]
This is such a smart and lively script. I could see it played out in minds eye all the way through. Karen, you should take this to The View and to Oprah, too.
I love your blog!!! So nice to meet you yesterday.
Great blog, Karen! The block to women in science occurs in academia as well as industry where women end up taking administrative or managerial roles out of frustration with the opportunities available to them. There is great creative talent squandered in this way.
Karen,
Your smart, sassy blog gave me a good dose of information and inspiration. I’ve been smiling non-stop, despite the seriousness of your topic and the persistence of “Old Boys’ Club” norms in the realm of science. You’ve also given me some invaluable how-to’s (I’m on the verge of starting a blog, to be called Disconnect Diary…launch date: January 1, 2010). I’ll keep you posted (sic). Hope to see you in the neighborhood!
Nice article, but check your science facts. Ada Yonath won for the structure of the ribosome, not RNA, but yes the ribosome is the protein factory of the cell. Rosalind Franklin couldn’t get the Nobel because she was no longer alive, but yes Watson is still a jerk for not acknowledging her contribution.