Rita Colwell - A Lab of Ones Own: One Womans Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science

Also by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

The Theory That Would Not Die

Prometheans in the Lab

Nobel Prize Women in Science

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Methods in Aquatic Microbiology

(with M. Zambruski)

Estuarine Microbial Ecology

(with L. H. Stevenson)

Effect of the Ocean Environment on Microbial Activities

(with R. Morita)

The Role of Culture Collections in the Era of Molecular Biology

Vibrios in the Environment

Biotechnology in the Marine Sciences

(with E. Pariser and A. Sinskey)

Biotechnology of Marine Polysaccharides

(with E. R. Pariser and A. J. Sinskey)

Method for Coding Data on Microbial Strains for Computers

(with Morrison Rogosa and Micah I. Krichevsky)

Current Methods for Classification and Identification of Microorganisms

(with R. Grigorova)

Biomolecular Data: A Resource in Transition

Microbial Diversity and Ecosystem Function

(with D. Allsopp and D. L. Hawksworth)

The Global Challenge of Marine Biotechnology

(with R. A. Zilinskas, D. A. Lipton, and R. T. Hill)

Microbial Diversity in Time and Space

(with K. Ohwada and U. Simidu)

Nonculturable Microorganisms in the Environment

(with D. J. Grimes)

Oceans and Health: Pathogens in the Marine Environment

(with Shimshon Belkin)

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Copyright 2020 by Rita Colwell and Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket art by Duncan1890/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-8127-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-8128-3 (ebook)

To Jack Colwell: champion golfer, brilliant polymath, accomplished yachtsman, loving father, and beloved husband, without whom this book could never have been written nor my life have been so blessed and joyful

And to my husband, George F. Bertsch, without whom this book could not have been written

What follows is Rita Colwells story, told in her voice. But the stories of others, who had similar experiences, are based on interviews conducted by Dr. Colwell and/or Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. To make it easy for the reader, those too are told in the voice of Dr. Colwell.

G raduate student Margaret Walsh Rossiter made a habit of attending Friday afternoon beer parties with Yale Universitys eminent historians of science. One day, out of curiosity, she asked the great men present, Were there any women scientists? This was 1969, and none had been mentioned in her courses or reading material.

No, came the answer. There have never been any.

Not even Madame Curie, someone asked, who won two Nobel Prizes?

No. Never. None, was the response. Marie Curie was a drudge who stirred pitchblende for her husbands experiments. According to some of the worlds leading male academics, we women scientists did not exist.

A few years later, Rossiter, still curious, found herself thumbing through a biographical encyclopedia titled American Men of Science. Despite the name, she discovered that it included entries on more than a hundred women. Rossiter tried to get an academic job to study more women scientists, but no university was interested. And she couldnt get a grant to do her research independently, because no one else knew enough about women scientists to judge her proposal.

Rossiter didnt have much money, but, liberating her parents second car, a highly unfashionable Dodge sedan, she spent months driving at top speed, crisscrossing the Northeast from the archives of one womens college to another. Then she expanded her search to the rest of the country, trawling through boxes of records in library basements and attic filing cabinets, finding evidence of women scientists everywhere. A representative denounced her on the floor of Congress, arguing that writing about women scientists was a waste of taxpayers money. The resulting publicity helped even more people learn about her mission, and soon Rossiter was planning a bookalthough one Harvard professor joked, Thatll be a really short book, wont it? A dozen publishers brushed off her proposal because everyone knew women scientists didnt exist.

Nevertheless, in 1982, the first book of Rossiters three-volume history, Women Scientists in America, began documenting the existence of our hitherto invisible world. Suddenly, reading those pages, we women in science knew we were not alone. We were the intellectual descendants of a long line of women whod done significant work. As for Rossiter, she expanded the world of science, founded a new area of study, won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and became a chaired professor at Cornell University.

As the story of my life as a scientist, this book tells the human side of this history. It tells what its like for a woman to go into a field so dominated by men that women were rendered invisible. Its about an enterprise in which, even today, many men and women believe the ability to do high-level science is coded by the Y chromosome; in which men are seen as more competent than identically qualified women; in which the more decorated a male scientist is, the fewer women he trains; in which universities hire their junior faculty members from these elite mens labs.

But let me say from the outset: this book is not a litany of complaints. I have had my own laboratory for almost sixty years, and for every man who blocked my way in science, there were six who helped me. Nevertheless, the scientific enterprise remains a deeply conservative institution filled with powerful menand some womenwho reject outsiders, whether women of any stripe, African American men, Latinos, other people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, or anyone else who doesnt fit the stereotype of the white male genius.

Science is an institution struggling to shed its past. And every time I hear someone say, with the best of intentions, that we have to get more women into science, I get irritated. We have never had to interest women in science. Everywhere Ive looked, there have been hidden figures, working in the shadows of their husbands labs or in the labs of male allies, in medical museums and libraries, in government agencies, or in low-level teaching positions across the country. There have