Quotations from Women Scientists

"We think of the regular double helix as a one-dimensional sequence of information. But DNA isn't one-dimensional -- it's three-dimensional. ... Some can be a little left-handed; some can have a little loop out; some can be bent."
Jacqueline Barton on Metal Complexes and DNA. Science Watch January/February 1997. http://www.sciencewatch.com/interviews/jacqueline_barton-1.htm

"The remarkable thing about that is when we did see cell death, we observed that it is in the same regions of the brain as one would see in HD. We never expected this. Remember, we have this short fragment of the protein, not the whole protein, being expressed in mice. So in terms of what this polyglutamine load is doing in brains, we can say that it doesn't easily kill cells, because we don't see any cell death until the very, very end stage. And it's very selective. It's making cells dysfunction, and that's what's causing the symptoms. This may well be what's happening in patients."
Gillian Bates of King's College on Huntington's Disease. Science Watch Nov/Dec 1999. http://www.sciencewatch.com/nov-dec99/nov-dec99_page3.htm

"People think that RNA enzymes may be very ancient. So we're interested in whether this might be relic or a molecular fossil of some kind of more ancient RNA enzyme that now has a protein part as well."
Blackburn, Elizabeth. True Tales of Telomeres. The Scientist November 1993. http://www.sciencewatch.com/interviews/elizabeth_blackburn2.htm

"This experience is commonly reported by the impostor phenomenon women we see. One client, a successful businesswoman, described her sense of failure with her family because her house was only superficially clean. Objectively, she performed excellently as a businesswoman and adequately as a housekeeper; but she believed that it was incumbent upon her to be perfect everywhere. If she wasn't perfect, she must be an impostor."
Clance, Pauline Rose; Dingman, Debbara; Reviere, Susan L; Stober, Dianne R. Impostor phenomenon in an interpersonal/social context: Origins and treatment. Women & Therapy 16(4) 1995: 79-106.

"It is the absence of phosphatase from skeletal muscle tissue which explains the fact that muscle does not contribute glucose to the blood."
Cori, Gerty. Polysaccharide phosphorylase. Nobel Lecture December 11, 1947. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1947/cori-lecture.pdf

"It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty."
Marie Curie. As quoted in: Fröman, Nanny. Marie and Pierre Curie and the Discovery of Polonium and Radium. Lecture, Nobel Institute. February 28, 1996. http://www.nobel.se/physics/articles/curie/

"This means that we have here an entirely separate kind of chemistry for which the current tool we use is the electrometer, not the balance, and which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable."
Curie, Marie. Radium and the new concepts in chemistry. Nobel Lecture December 11, 1911. http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1911/marie-curie-lecture.html

"We all can agree on the extraordinary importance of S&T in shaping our future and the quality of our lives. Yet, we have not paused long enough to assess the question of who is (and who is not) being served by any specific S&T agenda and its effects on the majority of the population. How can S&T be truly in the national interest if women's voices are anemically represented?"
Jaleh Daie, President - Association for Women in Science, Chairwoman-Elect - Council of Scientific Society Presidents. The Future Is Today: Leverage Through Strategic Alliances. The Scientist 11(23):8, Nov. 24, 1997. http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1997/nov/opin_971124.html

"In science as everywhere else in the domain of thought woman should be judged by the same standard as her brother. Her work must not simply be well done for a woman."
San Diego Supercomputer Center: Women in Science: Rosa Smith Eigenmann, "First Woman Ichthyologist of Any Accomplishments": http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/eigenmann.html

"After several years of long range commuting, I was informed that I would no longer be able to continue my doctorate on a part-time basis, but would need to give up my job and go to school full-time. I made what was then a critical decision in my life, to stay with my job and give up the pursuit of a doctorate. Years later, when I received three honorary doctorate degrees from George Washington University, Brown University and the University of Michigan, I decided that perhaps that decision had been the right one after all."
Gertrude B. Elion ­ Autobiography. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-autobio.html

"I hope that I have successfully conveyed our philosophy that chemotherapeutic agents are not only ends in themselves but also serve as tools for unlocking doors and probing Nature's mysteries."
Elion, Gertrude B. The purine path to chemotherapy. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1988. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-lecture.pdf

"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment."
Rosalind Franklin, 1940, Letter to her Father. As quoted in:
Maddox, Brenda. Mother of DNA. New Humanist Autumn 2002. http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/issues/0209/maddox.htm
Maddox, Brenda. The double helix and the 'wronged heroine.' Nature 421, 407 - 408 (2003): http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v421/n6921/full/nature01399_r.html

"While the X-ray evidence cannot, at present, be taken as direct proof that the structure is helical, other considerations discussed below make the existence of a helical structure highly probable."
Franklin RE, Gosling RG. Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate. Nature (April 25, 1953) 171(4356):740-741. [About the discovery of the helical structure of DNA.]

"So we were thinking that although we might not have been able to understand the genome of Haemophilus at 1,750 genes, we'd certainly manage to understand the Mycoplasma genome with less than 500. But when we finished that sequence, we found once again that 30 to 35% of the genes were unknown. At that point, after having done our second genome, one from the most minimal self-replicating organisms, we all realized that it was going to take us a long time before we figured out the biology of even the simplest prokaryotic cell. And that 30% number has held up even though we're now at 60-plus completed genomes."
Small is Bountiful: TIGR's Claire M. Fraser on Microbial Genomes. Science Watch Jan/Feb 2002. http://www.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2002/sw_jan-feb2002_page3.htm

"Sometimes I can't go to all those meetings because I simply run out of steam, and if I'm too tired, I can't think of other things," she says. "You get a life because you must have a life in order to give so much to an institution. You have to replenish yourself."
Gabelnick, Faith. Struggling for a Balanced Life as President. Chronicle of Higher Education April 27, 2001. http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i33/33a03701.htm

"Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man."
Maria Goeppert-Mayer, A Life of One's Own. J. Dash

"The shell model, although proposed by theoreticians, really corresponds to the experimentalist's approach. It was born frm a thorough study of the experimental data, plotting them in different ways, and looking for interconnections."
Goeppert-Mayer, Maria. The Shell Model. Nobel Lecture December 12, 1963. http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1963/mayer-lecture.pdf

" ... I became captivated by the edifices chemists had raised through experiment and imagination -- but still I had a lurking question. Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules as complicated as the sterols, or strychnine were just as experiment suggested?"
Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot. The X-ray analysis of complicated molecules. Nobel Lecture December 11, 1964. http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1964/hodgkin-lecture.pdf

"May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman's thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the 'eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward'?"
Louisa Parsons Hopkins. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981).

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
Chips Ahoy, Navy Microcomputer Periodical, July 1988, http://www.norfolk.navy.mil/chips/grace_hopper/86.gif

"These unstable atoms disintegrate spontaneously, some very quickly, others very slowly, but in accordance with unchanging laws which it has never been possible to interfere with. The time necessary for the disappearance of half the atoms, called the half-life, is a fundamental characteristic of each radio-element; according to the substance the value of the half-life varies between a fraction of a second and millions of years."
Joliet-Curie, Irene. Artificial production of radioactive elements. Nobel Lecture December 12, 1935. http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1935/joliot-curie-lecture.html

"When something comes along and is really important to your career and important to science, important enough so that lots of other people are working on it, you have got to do it in a short time. You have got to get in there and run experiments quickly and get published. That is the killer instinct. I do not think women have that part of it. Part of it comes from sports. It's like scoring a goal."
Marian Koshland. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 182.

"After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom."
Rita Levi-Montalcini ­ Autobiography. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1986/levi-montalcini-autobio.html

"As for the presence of large NGF [nerve growth factor] sources in snake venom and male genital organs, they may be conceived as instances of bizarre evolutionary gene expression."
Levi-Montalcini, Rita. The nerve growth factor: Thirty-five years later. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1986. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1986/levi-montalcini-lecture.pdf

"I boarded a plane for Rio de Janeiro, carrying in my handbag two mice bearing transplants of mouse sarcomas 180 and 37."
Levi-Montalcini, Rita. The nerve growth factor: Thirty-five years later. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1986. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1986/levi-montalcini-lecture.pdf

"You ask if my career has been affected by the fact that I am a woman. Of course! On the whole, for me, as a non-U.S. citizen it has been a help to be a woman. Because I was not born and bred in the USA, I do not have to follow, and sometimes do not even know, the rules of conduct for American women. This has allowed me to break all sorts of rules and get away with it."
Phillippa Marrack, Immunologist. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 180.

"One of the most misunderstood things about science, is that scientists do not lead solitary lives in their own laboratories. Actually, scientists are amongst the most gregarious kinds of people there are -- because science is a very interactive business."
Marrack, Phillippa. Becoming a Scientist. Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://www.hhmi.org/becoming/marrack.html

"When I decided to do a Ph.D., I was going to do something different. But I met my future thesis adviser, Alan Munro, at a cocktail party, and he sort of seduced me into working in his lab. T cells had just been recognized to exist by Jacques Miller of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, Australia, and others. So Alan set me to work to set up some cultures for the cells. Very luckily, the cells were very interesting. They turned out to be different from what we had expected and significant in all sorts of human diseases. Also, they've never stopped being useful sources of information about cell biology and eukaryotic genetics. T cells are the Human Genome Project of the cell world."
Philippa Marrack Targets T Cells and Autoimmune Disease: An Interview. Science Watch January / February 1996. http://www.sciencewatch.com/interviews/philippa_marrack.htm

"The ability of a cell to sense these broken ends, to direct them towards each other, and then to unite them so that the union of the two DNA strands is correctly oriented, is a particularly revealing example of the sensitivity of cells to all that is going on within them. They make wise decisions and act on them."
McClintock, Barbara. The significance of responses of the genome to challenge. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1983. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1983/mcclintock-lecture.pdf

"I immediately loved working with flies. They fascinated me, and followed me around in my dreams."
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard ­ Autobiography. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1995/nusslein-volhard-autobio.html

"Although the elegant method of homologous recombination in the mouse allows the introduction of mutations into the chomosomal copy of any previously cloned gene, there is no way of predicting which genes are indispensable in development and will therefore give an informative phenotype in knockout mice."
Nusslein-Volhard, Christiane. The identification of genes controlling development in flies and fishes. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1995. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1995/nusslein-volhard-lecture.pdf

"The three of us have worked on the development of the small and totally harmless fruitfly, Drosophila. This animal has been extremely cooperative in our hands - and has revealed to us some of its innermost secrets and tricks for developing from a single celled egg to a complex living being of great beauty and harmony. ... None of us expected that our work would be so successful or that our findings would ever have relevance to medicine."
Nusslein-Volhard, Christiane. Banquet Speech. Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1995. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1995/nusslein-volhard-speech.html

"There are three space dimensions and one time dimension that we see and one extra dimension that we don't. We're not very sensitive to it. Because the brane itself carries energy, it basically applies an attraction acting on gravity so that gravity stays very localized near the brane. Even though there is an infinite extra dimension, gravity extends so little into that dimension that it is almost as if space were compactified and you only see four dimensions. ... Now I'll tell you what happens if you have a second brane in the theory. One of the very interesting things about this theory, called warped geometry, is that they have something called a warp factor."
MIT's Lisa Randall: Two Branes are Better Than One. Science Watch Jul/Aug 2001. http://www.sciencewatch.com/july-aug2001/sw_july-aug2001_page3.htm

"Sometimes a fruitful approach to the big, seemingly intractable problems is to ask questions whose possible answers will be subject to experimental test. These questions generally address physical laws and processes we've already seen. Any new insights will almost certainly have implications for even more fundamental questions."
Theories of the brane: Lisa Randall. The Edge (2.10.03). http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/randall03/randall03_print.html

"Basically, I'm just a theoretical physicist who, like all the rest of us, would like to figure out how the world works. If that involves some string theory, great, but ultimately I think we should be able to connect it to what we see in the world and be able to test it. I'm just trying to put those things together."
MIT's Lisa Randall: Two Branes are Better Than One. Science Watch Jul/Aug 2001. http://www.sciencewatch.com/july-aug2001/sw_july-aug2001_page3.htm

"Cells that are hyper-stimulated tend to die, or at least most do. Some eventually find a way to survive, and one way is to delete or mutate the genes that are putting the brakes on -- to delete ARF, for instance. That allows the cell to be immortal, or to grow forever. So deletion of ARF is an immortalization mechanism. Once the cell is immortal, the chances that other genes will be hit by mutations also increase. We don't know, really, what those other hits might be, and that's what interests us. In other words, deleting or mutating ARF allows a cell to be immortalized, but other events still have to occur to get cancer, and that's what we want to learn more about."
St. Jude's Martine Roussel Answers the Call of ARF. Science Watch Mar/Apr 2001. http://www.sciencewatch.com/march-april2001/sw_march-april2001_page3.htm

"Do women quit because a mentor discourages them? Do they quit because they do not like the lifestyle they see as the accepted norm? Are they repelled by the high level of aggressive behavior that is displayed by some colleagues for whom success is the only goal, no matter what the price?"
Janet Rowley. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 187-188.

"My travels ... left me a misfit. ... I decided I may as well accept myself for who I am, and if I don't fit in with most, then so be it."
Myriam Sarachik. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 180.

"It's not an easy life for women or for men. We would all like to have a wife at home. It is still true that women, even when they have the most sharing husband on the face of the earth, end up doing slightly more at home and it's damn hard."
Joan Steitz, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 187.

"I've let myself get admittedly overcommitted. I do too much. I work harder than I should work ... and I really worry about how that affects the perspective of students. I feel terribly guilty about some of our women students who decided to go into industry, when everybody thought they would be wonderful in the academic scene. I wonder whether it was my fault, letting them watch me turn myself inside out."
Joan Steitz, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 187.

"It was a large room, an auditorium you entered from the rear with a long set of steps descending to the speaker's podium in the front. I slipped in, hoping to take a seat as close to the back as possible. But when I stepped into the hall and took my first step, the students, all male, began stomping, slowly and deliberately, in time with my steps. As I took my first step into that room, bang! came the sound of 200 men stomping their feet in unison. I took my second step and the stomp was repeated. Every step I took, there was this stomp, stomp, stomp . My first instinct was to duck into a seat and disappear, but no -- every row was blocked by the men. I was forced down to the front row, where I found three other girls and a Nigerian. These medical students had managed to segregate us out -- they weren't going to have anything to do with women or minority populations."
Alice Stewart. As quoted in: Greene, Gayle. The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, http://www.alicestewart.org/Chapter_3.html

"My crystal ball -- or intuition -- tells me that in the '80s the impact of RIA on the study of infectious diseases may prove as revolutionary as its impact on endocrinology in the 60s."
Yalow, Rosalyn. Radioimmunoassay: A probe for fine structure of biological systems. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1977. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1977/yalow-lecture.pdf

"The first telescope opened the heavens; the first microscope opened the world of the microbes; radioisotopic methodology, as examplified by RIA, has shown the potential for opening new vistas in science and medicine."
Yalow, Rosalyn. Radioimmunoassay: A probe for fine structure of biological systems. Nobel Lecture December 8, 1977.

"Perhaps the earliest memories I have are of being a stubborn, determined child. Through the years my mother has told me that it was fortunate that I chose to do acceptable things, for if I had chosen otherwise no one could have deflected me from my path. ... The Chairman of the Physics Department, looking at this record, could only say "That A- confirms that women do not do well at laboratory work". But I was no longer a stubborn, determined child, but rather a stubborn, determined graduate student. The hard work and subtle discrimination were of no moment."
Rosalyn Yalow ­ Autobiography. http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1977/yalow-autobio.html

"There is no evidence that the contractile vacuole is formed by accessory vacuoles, as described and figured by Khainsky, nor does any section show a pulsatorial papilla or evagination, such as he describes. This study, therefore, indicates that the excretory apparatus of Paramecium caudatum is a permanent continuous structure."
Young RA. On the excretory apparatus in Paramecium. Science 60 (1550) September 12, 1924:244.

"I feel strongly that a valued woman (or man) should be able to make choices about their life and career, not having to abandon childrearing to pursue a successful career (or vice versa). ... I hope my election to the National Academy demonstrates that a variety of career and life choices can be 'successful,' and this is what I view as the true impact of the women's movement."
Mary Lou Zoback. IN: Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000, p. 190-191.

Women in Science: General Sources

Advocates for Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (AWSEM):
http://www.awsem.com/

Archives of Women in Science and Engineering:
http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/wise.html

Association for Women in Science:
http://www.awis.org/

• "Mentoring - Women Helping Other Women in Science":
  http://www.awise.org/whatsnew.htm#mentor

AWiSE (Association for Women in Science and Engineering):
http://www.awise.org/

dti: Gender and Innovation:
http://www.set4women.gov.uk/

Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/

Historia: Women Scientists in History:
http://www.liquidleaf.com/historia/careers.html

Index of Women Scientists Profiled in "The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences.":
http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/women.html

Intelihealth: Women in Health History:
http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH?t=8173

International Registry for Women in Science:
http://library.thinkquest.org/20117/cgi-bin/registry.cgi

LSU Libraries: Subject Guide for Women in Science: Guide to Reference Resources:
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/sci/chem/guides/srs117.html

National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals:
http://www.noglstp.org/

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC): Women in Science:
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/

Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science. National Academy Press / John Henry Press, 2000.
http://www.nap.edu/books/0309065682/html/