Early Roots: Childhood
I am deeply empathetic; depression runs in my family, and other people’s feelings, especially pain, can affect me deeply. Depression and pessimism are part of my makeup, but at some point, I decided that since nothing I felt would fix anything, perhaps I could make a difference by something I did.
This feeling was reinforced by the role I played as the eldest of six in an extended family where six children was considered on the small side. I was both a parent and a sister; it was my job as a three-year-old to rock my first sibling to sleep at night.
Focusing on doing rather than dwelling on the many things I could do nothing about did not change my empathetic nature or reduce bouts of depression, but it provided a way for me to focus my energies. This may be one reason I decided at age nine that I wanted to be a scientist.
My parents and maternal grandmother were powerful role models. Both parents were the first in their respective families to graduate from college. It was apparent that my father, the middle child of 15, was held in high regard by his siblings. All of his younger siblings followed his example and went to college.
My parents met in college; both worked full time and, unlike most Mexican American men, Dad was a partner in domestic chores until my maternal grandmother moved in with us.
My paternal grandfather, Encarnación Villa, was an indigenous Mexican Indian. We do not know his tribe, but through DNA analysis of his descendants, we do know he had no European blood. His wife, Luz, was Spanish and died of diabetes at an early age.
My maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Larrañaga, a descendant of the Spanish Conquistadors, was a rancher who sent his daughters to teachers’ college because he didn’t want them to marry cowboys. His sons, on the other hand, were expected to help with the ranch as soon as they mastered basic reading and arithmetic.
My grandmother, Margaret, and her sister, Erslinda, taught in one-room schoolhouses in New Mexico, traveling by horseback to visit each other. My grandmother, who raised her three children alone after she left her alcoholic husband, encouraged my mother to complete college because she wanted her daughter to be a successful career woman.
Spanish was my parents’ first language; my maternal great-grandmother, Cleofas, spoke no English, so I learned a little Spanish from her, but my parents had been punished for speaking Spanish at school and felt that having to learn English in school had held them back. They expected all of us to speak English and to go to college, and did what they could to prepare and encourage us.
Animals and Scientific Experiments
I loved animals and nature. Before Grandma Margaret moved in with us, I spent part of every summer with her. She planted a charming garden of annuals in front of her house, and an orchard sloped down to a small creek. As we walked together in nearby meadows, she would point out interesting wild plants and tell stories of life on the ranch where she grew up.
She had a book on natural history with beautiful watercolor drawings of wild animals. I spent hours looking at them, trying to read the text, which was difficult, because it was in archaic English. One of my uncles, Ishmael Ortega, who was a chemist, showed me a reprint of an article he’d written based on his master’s thesis and told me it was much easier to write than a book report. I was impressed!
I wanted to know how things worked. One of my first experiments was to convince my younger brother to join me in using our squirt guns to spray cold water on all the light bulbs in the house, both unlit and lit. It was satisfying to learn that cold bulbs weren’t affected by the water, but hot ones shattered.
While my parents spanked us when they felt we were out of line, I don’t recall any consequences for breaking the light bulbs. When I was 11 or 12, my best present was a brand-new chemistry set, along with handblown beakers and flasks that Uncle Ishmael made. The chemistry set was particularly notable because money was always tight; Christmas presents were often hand-me-downs from cousins, Goodwill toys, clothes, or inexpensive stuffed animals.
As a high school junior, I was selected to attend a National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded summer science training program at Texas College in Tyler, Texas. For many of us, it was the first time we’d been in a group where everybody was interested in science and where being a nerd was a point of pride. We were also a diverse group — black, brown, white. Texas College is a private college founded by the Methodist Church for black students. Most of the students were from Texas or New Mexico. I remember a sign on the highway proclaiming “blackest land, whitest people.”
An article in Reader’s Digest about Hans Selye and the stress response intrigued me; I thought about becoming a physiologist and wrote to Dr. Selye. His assistant replied, explaining that Dr. Selye received too many inquiries from students to answer them all but recommended his book Calciphylaxis. The program directors bought the book for me.
The NSF program bought me rats, surgical tools, and reagents. I learned how to anesthetize rats and remove their adrenal glands. The rats recovered, and I followed them, then sham-operated other rats to look for differences between the groups. I don’t recall much beyond the thrill of planning and performing an experiment.
I spent one long weekend with a new friend deep in West Texas and rode a horse bareback in the hot sun. At dinner, her parents quizzed us about the black students — did they smell different, what did they eat? They were equally curious about me — what food did I eat? Did my mother really work full-time with all those children?
I think they were impressed, or perhaps puzzled, that both parents were college graduates. The tone of their questions was not hostile; they wanted to know more about the people their daughter had met.
I returned home to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a cage full of white rats wrapped in brown paper and disguised as luggage. They eventually escaped from our garage and intermingled with the local brown rats from the field near our house.
The College Years
Attending college in New Mexico didn’t appeal to me; I felt that if I did, I might never leave the state. College was a chance to explore a different world and maybe find a place where I didn’t feel like an outsider.
Between my junior and senior years of high school, my father decided to make a grand trip as a family because I would be leaving home soon. For my dad, it marked the end of the family as we had known it. So in 1962, he packed all six of us, my grandmother, and our Weimaraner into a blue Ford station wagon, its back doors held closed by seatbelt webbing, and we went to the World’s Fair in Seattle.
After that trip, I wrote to the chairman of physiology at the University of Washington Medical School and asked him, based on my particular interest in the physiology of stress, what I should major in as an undergraduate. I understood I’d have to go to graduate school, but that was a vague thought. His reply was to major in chemistry. This was satisfying, as Uncle Ishmael had a master’s degree in chemistry and had written that tantalizing paper.
I worked as a waitress during high school to save for college, but my meager salary and generous tips went to my dad to help with family expenses.
I applied only to the University of Washington (UW). When I got a postcard from the admissions office stating that tuition would be an additional $25 per quarter, I told Dad about the price increase and said that maybe I ought to consider the recruiting letter I’d gotten from the University of New Mexico (UNM). Based on my grades and SAT scores, UNM offered generous financial aid. I thought I could live at home or with one of several relatives in Albuquerque.
Dad listened and then said, “Hija, how much money do you have for college now?” My reply had an edge, “You ought to know. Nothing!” And he said, “So what difference is $25 going to make?”
Miz B, my ninth-grade English teacher, had become a friend and mentor, so I shared my money concerns. One day she took me to a kind woman, whose name I don’t remember, who gave me a check for $300. That check, a scholarship from the Presbyterian Church, plus a federal loan and work study meant I had a financial plan. So I got on a Greyhound bus in Santa Fe and slept in the front row all the way to Seattle.
College was a wonderful and sobering experience. I thought it would be filled with interesting classes taught by scintillating professors who were interested in the students as well as in their subjects. This wasn’t the case. I quickly discovered the fun of an active social life and was working part-time, so I ignored boring classes.
I started as a chemistry major and quickly ran into trouble. I was not as well-prepared as many of my colleagues; I had done very well in high school without having to develop strong study skills. I had an A in chemistry and a B in physics, although my physics teacher was the football coach and focused on teaching us how to play chess, not much about physics, and I have no memories of the chemistry class.
My first college roommate, Marilyn from France, met few of the specifications I’d provided in my application — she smoked, was messy, and wasn’t into studying. Through her, I began hanging out with the foreign students. I was most comfortable with them since other students assumed I was a foreigner of some sort until I spoke. When they heard me speak perfect English, they asked, “Where are you really from?”
My first serious boyfriend was a political science major; the second was an assistant professor. The assistant professor had a houseboat and took me to a dance in honor of Mohammad Ali. I don’t recall how it happened, but I sat next to Ali, who asked with a friendly smile, “What kind of sister are you?”
The assistant professor and I were on the dance floor when an insistent young black man tried to cut in on us. A group of black men, some of them Ali’s bodyguards, danced onto the floor, surrounded the interloper, and danced him away.
It was a most satisfying freshman year, except for my grades. As a sophomore, I moved to an apartment with Laura, another work-study student; my French friend left the university.
Although I’d been an honors student in high school, my grades at UW were mediocre. Over three years, my grade point ranged from 2.35 to 2.68, with C’s in math and chemistry. I failed inorganic chemistry the first time, aced it when I repeated the class, but followed that up with C’s for the next two quarters of the subject. Glimmers of promise appeared in the grades I got in biology classes as well as that one A in organic chemistry.
During the second quarter of freshman year, I took quantitative analysis. Struggling, I went to my chemistry advisor for advice. He told me my difficulties were because “women don’t belong in chemistry.” It didn’t occur to me to argue; I decided to change my major.
After taking a class in the history of science and medicine, I considered majoring in history; however, there was no major in the history of medicine, and the introductory courses in history involved dry lectures in a warm auditorium given by professors who appeared as bored as the students.
Next, I considered biology. The introductory course struck me as old-fashioned and dry, although the TAs were very supportive. Then, new faculty were hired. Their ethology and developmental biology classes were all I’d hoped college classes would be. Ethology was the first class where I asked a question. My professor said, “That’s an excellent question. You should consider a career in science.”
Developmental biology was particularly exciting. We studied chick embryos and used radiolabeled amino acids to follow protein synthesis. We brought sleeping bags to the lab and throughout the night took turns taking time points of developing frog eggs.
Of the visiting scientists who talked to the class, one was particularly riveting. A tall, young redhead enthusiastically described his work on the very organism we were studying. He had shown that cell differentiation wasn’t just unidirectional, as everyone had assumed. He had transplanted the nucleus from a differentiated somatic cell of a tadpole into a frog’s egg and cloned a frog. He was, of course, John Gurdon. He changed my perception of what science was and what a scientist could be.
My work-study job was in the medical school library. In November of my sophomore year, a fourth-year medical student, Tony Komaroff, introduced himself. I don’t know why, but I was disdainful of medical students; however, Tony offered to take me to a local pastry shop I couldn’t afford. Over coffee and delectable Viennese pastry, we talked for hours. I was captivated. This was a man who seemed genuinely interested in my family and me, and he didn’t think it weird that I wanted to be a scientist.
By spring, I’d fallen in love, but I was unsure about the future. Since he was heading to the East Coast for an internship and residency, we struggled with what to do. I visited him during his year in Boston. At the end of that year, he took a two-year position at the National Institutes of Health, after which he would return to Boston to complete his training. I decided we couldn’t move forward unless one of us moved, and that had to be me, so I decided to transfer to a school near Bethesda, Maryland.
A friend who was a professor suggested Johns Hopkins; however, Hopkins didn’t accept women then. I inquired about transferring to Goucher College, a women’s college that was the sister college to Hopkins. Dr. Robert Cahn, the professor of the developmental biology class, wrote to Dr. Gardner Moment at Goucher, who sent me a very encouraging letter.
I wrote to Goucher for information about financial aid, and was told that there was no room in the dorms, that off-campus students lived at home, and it was too late for financial aid. I wrote back and asked if I could apply for admission later in that year or the following year. Hearing nothing, I decided to fly east and knock on Goucher’s door.
Tony met me at the airport. I had an interview with Miss Flowers, the head of admissions, but I headed in the wrong direction on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and arrived with no time to decompress.
Miss Flowers was intimidating: a tall, thin, elegant woman who wore a hat. I’d never met anyone who wore a hat on a regular workday. She put me through a grueling three-hour interview, after which she had me write an essay explaining my spotty academic performance, the reasons I wanted a transfer, and my future plans.
I labored on this assignment, but shortly after I delivered it, I was accepted. Miss Flowers became a friend and mentor. She said, “I knew you had the IQ, but I needed to see if you had the ‘I do.’” During my two years at Goucher, I did very well academically and graduated cum laude.
Graduate School
I have focused on these early life events because they laid the foundation for all that followed in my career. It was because I went to Goucher that I was able to get a summer job at NIH with Loretta Leive, one of the first women to be a lab director there. When she learned I was applying to several graduate schools in Boston — but not to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because my math skills were weak — she insisted I include MIT if I wanted to focus on molecular biology. As it turned out, MIT was the only school that accepted me!
My grades in the first two years at UW clearly had made several Boston universities uneasy. So why did MIT accept me? It had to have been because Loretta vouched for me, and she was well-respected by several key members of the MIT faculty who were involved in the selection of graduate students: Salvador Luria, then graduate officer, Boris Magasanik, Gene Brown, and Maury Fox.
Graduate school was all I had dreamed college would be. The faculty considered us junior partners in an exciting and difficult endeavor. The entering class of 1970 was a small, collegial group. We all had to take classes for most of the first year; the assumption seemed to be that we were all capable, but we all had gaps in our preparation.
After the faculty presented a description of their work, we were supposed to select our thesis lab. As a group, we discussed our choices so that no two of us approached the same faculty member. I first approached David Baltimore, who told me he had no room in his lab. David shared a large open lab with Harvey Lodish, so I then went to Harvey and proposed a joint project utilizing Harvey’s expertise in protein synthesis and David’s expertise in virology. I was the first student in the MIT biology department to have two thesis advisors.
Poliovirus RNA is very long and codes for 14 viral proteins. My thesis demonstrated that the RNA had a single site where protein synthesis began, and the 14 viral proteins were generated from a long polyprotein.
Post-doctoral Experience
In most colleges and universities, post-doctoral work is essential to being competitive for faculty positions in the biological sciences. After graduate school, I decided to conduct research as a post-doctoral fellow in a developmental biology lab and arranged with Fotis Kafatos, an outstanding developmental biologist at Harvard University, to study genes from the developing eggshell of a silk moth.
I wrote grant proposals to fund the project. When I told Harvey and David that I had arranged a post-doctoral appointment, they were both miffed that they hadn’t been consulted. I realized that good mentors considered helping their mentees one of their responsibilities.
The project, funded by a prestigious fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, required using newly discovered tools for rearranging DNA, and the Cambridge city government banned recombinant DNA experiments except in high containment facilities — facilities Harvard didn’t have — so I went to Cold Spring Harbor Labs on Long Island to do the experiments.
It was a miserable year where nothing worked. I got a lot of practice connecting DNA from one source to DNA from another. I also learned to identify and purify restriction enzymes, a critical skill at a time when such enzymes were not commercially available. And I was given a small quantity of each enzyme in Rich Roberts’ refrigerator when I left Cold Spring Harbor Labs, a priceless treasure.
Those enzymes were a key reason for the success of my next stop as a post-doc in Wally Gilbert’s lab at Harvard. Argiris Efstratiadis, a colleague in the Kafatos lab, approached me shortly after I returned to Harvard and asked me to join a project he was working on in the Gilbert lab to clone the rat proinsulin gene. Since I’d had no results with the project I had chosen as a post-doc, I agreed.
In Wally’s lab, I regained confidence. He had a large lab and tended not to pay much attention to projects until they began to show results or when progress was slow. I was invited to join the lab in part because Wally removed a graduate student when he had made no progress in his part of the insulin project. I had the skills and the tools to fill the role and returned to Harvard at the right time.
Six months later, we had not only successfully cloned the rat DNA that specified rat proinsulin, but we also showed that it was synthesized and folded correctly in bacteria. This work is described at length in Invisible Frontiers, a book by Steven Hall.
The Lessons That Launch You
As a child, I learned responsibility and persistence. My siblings taught me the value of both competition and collaboration. Struggles to find financial support for my education and especially my dad’s admonition that when you have nothing, the threat of needing a bit more is not an insurmountable barrier helped me to continue through difficult times. I learned that difficulties were to be expected and were not a reason to give up.
It was many years, however, before I stopped dreaming that I had forgotten to pay one of my student loans. Struggles with academics as a freshman and sophomore provided a lesson in setting priorities and taught me I could do well when I was willing to work hard, and that it was far easier to work hard at the outset than to have to explain subpar performance. I learned that my expectations of others did not excuse my own failures to make the grade.
Because I considered myself to be an outsider within my own extended family, the prospect of being a Mexican American woman in arenas where people like me were scarce or invisible did not faze me and made it easier for me to make unorthodox changes in my career.
Because both of my parents were the first in their respective families to go to college, I had the benefit of their experience and their support. They encouraged my curiosity and made it clear to all their children that college was not optional. Many family members provided stories that built our pride in both our Spanish and Mexican heritage.
It is because I had these advantages that I devote time to mentoring students. The skills needed to thrive in any field can be taught. Despite a growing number of programs teaching such skills for K-12 and college students, there is need for many more.
Working as a post-doc in the Kafatos lab taught me a painful and important lesson in failure. I knew that experiments often don’t work, but I had not experienced failure that appeared to leave me little options for going forward. My first project as a post-doc had failed, but I had not failed. This failure was promptly followed by the work for which I am probably best known: the insulin cloning work in the Gilbert lab.
Marrying Tony Komaroff and going to MIT are among the most important events of my life. Our marriage ensured stability in my personal life. My thesis advisors at MIT, Harvey Lodish and David Baltimore, and other faculty provided me with rigorous training and a pedigree that ensured that I would be taken seriously as I moved forward.
Becoming a Scientist
When I entered graduate school, my ambition was to be a professor and a scientist. As I progressed through my thesis work, my goal was to run my own lab. As a post-doc, I wanted my lab to be in an academic setting.
In my first academic job, in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMass), I made errors that were variations on the mistakes I’d made as a college freshman. I took on too many service jobs (e.g., extra teaching, more students, and many committees) and failed to focus on my research plan and publications. As a result, the tenure process was particularly painful and a squeaker.
Fortunately, Susan Leeman from the Department of Physiology was on my committee. She had isolated and characterized Substance P and neurotensin. She had left Brandeis and then Harvard Medical School after learning she wouldn’t be considered for tenure. She peeled me off the ceiling when necessary and was a strong advocate.
I was awarded tenure and left UMass one year later to accept a non-tenured position at Harvard Medical School. My reasoning at the time was that I would be returning to a more rigorous environment. I had not yet realized that good research was dependent on one’s own efforts, not on the institution — at least as long as there are appropriate resources available. Those resources were available at UMass. My move was the right one for me at the time, but I made it for the wrong reasons.
I worked at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School for a decade. I had wonderful students and post-docs, and we published on a wide variety of subjects, many of which continue to be cited in the current literature.
My lab used the tools of molecular biology to investigate the development of vision, the effect of amyloid peptide on neuronal cells, secretion of insulin, the DNA sequence of several genes, the role of insulin-like growth factor 2, and the development of the human brain. Each subject was very important and very interesting; however, focusing on so many different topics and not following up on initial findings was not the best way to gain professional recognition.
Although I had become more selective in what service work I took on, I was often the only non-tenured faculty member on a committee, and I learned a great deal about how academic organizations work. Harvard is a particularly complex place. It is not one institution but a confederation of many independent entities.
It was at Children’s Hospital that I had my first leadership role beyond running a laboratory. I served as acting head of the Division of Neuroscience at Children’s Hospital for six years, starting during a particularly turbulent time for the division.
I also was responsible for a large center grant and some institution-wide facilities. The personal leadership skills required were no different from those needed to run a lab, but the scope of activities broadened, and the number of people I needed to interact with greatly expanded. It came more easily to me than I thought it would.
Becoming a Scientific Administrator
After 10 years, it was time to explore my options. Initially, I thought I’d return to the lab full-time, but after consulting with many people, it soon became apparent that I had strong administrative skills. I moved to Northwestern University as Associate Vice President for Research Administration. Six months later I was promoted to Associate Vice President for Research, and the scope of my duties increased.
Bill Kern, the vice president of research, was a theoretical chemist and a wonderful mentor in the ways of academic administration. Faculty are independent and cannot be told what to do; consensus must be built. It was one thing to know that as a faculty member, but another to appreciate its implications as an administrator.
After two years, Bill retired, and after a nationwide search, I was appointed Vice President for Research. It was a wonderful time to be VPR at Northwestern. Arnold Weber, past president, had brought fiscal discipline to the university. Henry Bienen, under whom I served, was a prodigious fundraiser who wanted to increase research productivity and, therefore, the university’s standing. There were sufficient resources that I could say “yes” more often than I said “no,” an ideal position to be in. I’m proud of the progress the university made under the Bienen administration.
During the seven years I was in Chicago and Evanston, Tony remained in Boston, but finally we had an opportunity to end our commuter marriage. While at Northwestern University, I tried to recruit Susan Lindquist from the University of Chicago. At the same time, Sue became director of the Whitehead Institute, an affiliate of MIT. After arriving at the Whitehead, Sue recruited me to become COO and VPR. I accepted and joined Tony in Massachusetts.
During my three years there, my main task was to move the Genome Research Center from the Whitehead Institute to an independent center affiliated with Whitehead, MIT, and Harvard University. Eric Lander, MIT Provost Robert Brown, and Susan Lindquist negotiated the establishment of the Broad Institute.
My job was to ensure that all the administrative pieces were in place so that the employees of the center went to sleep as MIT or Whitehead employees one night and woke up as Broad employees the next day. It was intensely satisfying to see a complex and highly exacting set of processes and procedures come together smoothly.
After three years, Susan decided to return to her science lab as a Howard Hughes investigator; I left Whitehead for the next phase of my career.
Becoming a Biotech Board Chair and CEO
While at the Whitehead Institute, I became a member of the board of directors of publicly traded TransKaryotic Therapies, Inc (TKT). I was the only woman on the board and had the least business experience. When Shire Pharmaceuticals made a bid to buy TKT, the relationship between the CEO and chairman deteriorated, and the board split into two factions with strongly different views on selling the company. After a long, contentious meeting, I was elected the new board chair, in part, I suspect, because each faction felt they could influence me.
Two factors contributed to my ability to successfully negotiate this situation. First was the ability to keep lines of communication open with all members of the board. Second, I knew what I did not know and asked for advice from the board members and others.
The first person I called was Don Jacobs, dean emeritus of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. On his advice, I sought an independent bank to assess the value of TKT. The board members all agreed that Cravath, Swaine & Moore was the preeminent firm for mergers and acquisitions, and we hired Faiza Saeed from that firm. It was an education to see her at work during our six months together. She is now the presiding partner at Cravath. About a year later, TKT was sold for $1.6B and became Shire Genetics.
Wally Gilbert, who had also served on the TKT board, suggested I join the board of Cytonome, a company his son John had founded. After a discussion with John, we decided I would be more useful inside the company than on the board, so I became Cytonome, Inc.’s chief scientific officer.
John began Cytonome to develop an instrument, GigaSort, that could rapidly sort human white blood cells under sterile conditions. He had invented a microfluidic chip that could quickly switch cells from one path to another; however, assembling the chip, hardware, and software necessary to build a functional cell sorter turned out to be a challenging problem in essentially all areas of engineering.
My intent had been to stay for a year, but I remained for eight years. John left to start other companies, and the board asked me to become the CEO.
It was the summer of 2008, and I had to find money to keep the company going — just as the economy was crashing. Alan Dworsky, Wally Gilbert, and I kept the company going thanks, in part, to a loan on our home as my contribution. The executive team took no salary, and I laid off half of the staff. It was a very hard time.
Academic experts in bone marrow transplants and cell therapy were enthusiastic about the possibilities of the GigaSort, but it was not surprising that I had such a hard time finding funding. In addition to the recession, I was a 60-year-old dark-skinned Mexican American female and first-time CEO.
As is often the case, it’s impossible to judge how much this factored into funding decisions. We had a world-class team in the company and a very strong board. Experts in bone marrow transplants and cell therapy in the academic world were enthusiastic about the possibilities of the GigaSort.
Then an opportunity arose from a most unexpected quarter. Texas-based Sexing Technologies (ST) was using cell sorters to provide dairy farmers with bovine sperm that was greatly enriched in the X chromosome, which produced milk cows rather than bulls. The CEO of the Texas company, Juan Moreno, saw our technology as a platform for cell therapy in humans, as well as providing technology that could more inexpensively and reliably sort bull sperm.
ST decided to invest in Cytonome on the condition that the scientist responsible for their cell sorters, a talented electrical engineer named John Sharpe, would become CEO. I would become scientific director, and Wally and I would remain on the Cytonome board. There was a culture clash; Juan respected scientists but didn’t have much faith in their ability to execute in a business setting. All decisions were made in Texas.
As CEO, John immediately began to develop an easy-to-maintain-and-operate sorter based on conventional technology to sort sperm; the available cell sorters were complex, finicky, and required a highly trained PhD-level scientist to keep them running.
The machine John and the Cytonome engineers developed in less than two years could be rolled out of the shipping container and used immediately to sort sperm. This project was essential for Cytonome’s continued existence but greatly slowed the development of GigaSort, the human cell therapy machine.
In 2014, I left management of Cytonome but remained on the board. Cytonome entered into an agreement with Sumitomo, a Japanese company, to provide a working prototype of GigaSort for use in a clinical trial where the sorter would be used to sort neuronal cells that had been differentiated from pluripotential stem cells to treat a human neurological disease. The COVID pandemic slowed everything down, but in 2022, Sumitomo announced that clinical trials would commence in the United States.
Life Without a Day Job
After I left Cytonome, I started a one-person consulting company to serve as an umbrella for my activities. I continued to spend a lot of time talking to students and early career scientists to provide them with lessons learned from my career.
I had always been puzzled by how slowly women and people from historically marginalized groups were incorporated into science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM), since many people I knew in those fields seemed to agree that more diversity was needed and desirable.
Florence Bonner, then senior vice president for research and compliance at Howard University, and I were members of the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM), a joint committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. We were asked to organize a workshop on women of color in academia.
I had attended many such meetings, and not much progress seemed to result, but Florence, a behavioral scientist specializing in sociology and anthropology, pointed out that while natural scientists often organized meetings about diversifying STEMM, they didn’t take into account any of the findings and insights of social scientists. Our committee focused on the social sciences for the workshop.
The workshop, held in 2012, and Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow were transformational. I began to explore the literature on how humans make decisions, including the role of unconscious bias. I had the opportunity to develop a formal talk on the subject when the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT awarded me the Elting E. Morison Prize in 2016.
I determined that going forward, I would spend time introducing my colleagues in the natural sciences to basic concepts in the study of human behavior. I never took a class in the social sciences, and natural scientists I knew were very skeptical about social sciences.
In my presentations, I focus on the neuroscience of unconscious biases because there are many rigorous studies from both social and natural sciences that support the conclusion that biases of which humans are not consciously aware underlie many decisions that perpetuate the lack of diversity in STEMM fields.
Some of my colleagues who have done important work to increase diversity have expressed skepticism about my approach, saying it is too limited and not likely to be effective. This may be so; however, I believe that individuals and organizations will not change unless they recognize that none of us make decisions based solely on merit and that all humans make decisions based on negative associations and assumptions about groups of people that we may hold without conscious awareness.
These associations, such as black man/crime or Latina/housekeeper, permeate our culture. My role is to provide a dispassionate, data-driven explanation for why well-meaning people have not been able to improve the diversity of STEMM fields. My goal is to open minds, especially at the decision-making level. As of this writing, I have given more than 80 presentations to universities, colleges, companies, and federal agencies.
I am encouraged by the increased efforts we see to change organizational processes and practices in recruitment and retention, even as our society continues to struggle with the consequences of inequity. There is so much left to do, so much more to learn.
Lessons in Leadership
The lessons I have learned are not unique or novel. There are many routes to leadership. The one I’ve taken is a result of my experiences, a willingness to learn from those experiences, and a determined optimism. Some lessons are universal; persistence and hard work are essential, failure is opportunity, discouragement and uncertainty are inevitable and only matter if one allows them to prevent progress.