Cancer geneticist, advocate honored with WSI Eminent Scholar Award

Nancy Hopkins, Ph.D., has worked in two very disparate fields in her lifetime and seen extraordinary progress in both. In studying the molecular biology of cancer, she helped unlock secrets that may one day lead to a cure for the disease. And in advocating for women in the sciences, she started a national conversation which led to important reforms at her university, MIT, and others across the country.

“We’ve made great progress in both fields, but we’re not done yet,” she said. “We still have quite a long way to go before we can declare victory.”

The Women’s Scholars Initiative presented Hopkins with the 2017 Eminent Scholar Award at Hollings Cancer Center March 23.

WSI was created more than a decade ago to advance women faculty at MUSC and provides a number of career development programs and workshops. The Eminent Scholar Award recognizes nationally renowned female scientists, clinicians, scholars and leaders who have made major impacts in their fields.

“Nancy Hopkins was selected as the 2017 eminent scholar due to her outstanding achievements in cancer genetics and her nationally recognized role in calling attention to female gender equity issues that still exist in academia,” said eminent scholar selection committee co-chairs Peggi Angel and Melissa Cunningham. “We are honored to have a woman of Dr. Hopkins’ accomplishments visit campus as an outstanding female academician role model to both male and female faculty.”

A professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hopkins’s work identifying gene expression in tumors was an important early breakthrough in the fight against cancer.

“I fell in love with molecular biology when I was a junior at Radcliffe College,” Hopkins said. “That was the women’s division of Harvard at that time, for those who are too young to know that. I took an introductory course in biology. It was 1963, and one of the professors teaching that class was Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. I was completely hooked. I mean, that was it for me.”

It was clear to Hopkins within an hour that molecular biology held the secret to life. “You could already see that, one day, biology was going to explain everything from human diseases to maybe even human behavior,” she said. “My fantasy was that one day it would be possible to study the genetics of cancer. I thought it would take about a hundred years before that would be accessible, but incredibly by the time I finished my Ph.D., it was already possible.”

When Hopkins joined MIT’s cancer research center in 1973, she became one of just a handful of female faculty members at the school. “Had it been ten years earlier, I would not have been hired,” she said. “But by the 1970s, civil rights, the women’s movement and affirmative action laws had combined to pressure universities to hire women. So, it was double good timing: scientifically and socially.”

“Timing is everything,” she added.

Throughout the early part of her career, Hopkins said gender discrimination was something she thought happened to other women, not to her. “I just didn’t know what feminists were complaining about. Some of the most powerful men in science, people like Jim Watson, had encouraged me to be a scientist. I had a fabulous job that I had not even applied for — they called me up and recruited me.

“Now, it’s true, I had noticed there were no women on the faculty at Harvard, but I thought the reason for that was pretty obvious. Men who did the kind of science I was interested in worked seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, in an era before there were family leave policies or day care. Women were primary caretakers of children and the family, and women had to choose between science and motherhood. Apparently, I assumed, they had all chosen motherhood — kind of amazing, when you think about it.

“It had not occurred to me that a profession in which half the people on Earth must choose between participating and having children is by its very structure discriminatory.”

The civil rights and women’s movements, as well as affirmative action laws, removed barriers to hiring women, Hopkins said, but didn’t end gender discrimination in science and the workplace. “It took 20 years, but the way I figured it out was by watching how other women were treated. It took so long because there were very few other women. It also took a very long time because what I discovered was so unbelievable. I had to see many examples before I was willing to believe it.

“My astonishing discovery was that when a man and a woman made discoveries of equal importance, the man and his discovery were valued more highly than the woman and her discovery.”

How could this be true if science is a meritocracy? Hopkins asked herself. Still, it took many more examples before she would believe it.

“It took me five more years to realize I wasn’t the one exception to this rule,” she said. “I think many young women today are just the way I was a long time ago.”

Finally, it dawned on Hopkins when she was denied her request to co–teach a class with a male colleague.  Her dean told her that the students wouldn’t believe scientific information if it came from a woman. A decade later, she was removed from co–teaching another class so that two male colleagues could form a company based around the class.

“I was told venture capitalists and businessmen wouldn’t work with women,” she said.

In 1994, Hopkins decided to write a letter to MIT’s dean of science asking him to establish a committee to look into gender discrimination at the university. When a colleague read the letter and wanted to sign it, Hopkins decided to ask other women faculty if they wanted to join in as well. Of the 15 tenured women at MIT at the time, all but one decided to sign onto the letter.

“This was a radical request in 1994,” she said. “The department heads didn’t like this at all.”

Ultimately, though, the committee was approved and Hopkins was asked to chair it.

The committee’s report, "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT,” found that women worked harder with fewer resources to achieve the same results as their male colleagues, regardless of whether they had children. At that time, there were no women in higher administration at MIT, and the percentage of women faculty had not changed in 30 years.

According to the report, women also faced discrimination when it came to raising a family.

“Women were afraid to take family leave because of the stigma attached to it,” Hopkins said. “Men took family leave and used the time to start a company or do more research, while their wives took care of their families.”

At a National Bureau of Economic Research meeting in 2005, when then–President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers proposed that there are fewer women in science due to lower aptitudes, Hopkins famously walked out.

She said, “Some people ask, ‘were these women really good enough?’ Well, today of the 16 women who led this initiative at MIT, four have won the U.S. National Medal of Science — an award handed out by the president on the level of the Nobel Prize. Only 7 of 162 male professors have received this award. Eleven of the 16 women are members of the National Academy of Science. Less than a third of their male counterparts can say the same.”

In 1999, Hopkins helped to publish a public summary of the report. It made the front page of the New York Times, and Hopkins was asked to present it at the White House.

“After that, the world changed,” she said. “The MIT report was picked up by newspapers all over the country and around the world.”

The report was among the first to measure gender inequity in a rigorous way. As a scientist, Hopkins said that was important, because anything that can be measured can be fixed. MIT quickly took steps to address family leave issues and the unequal distribution of resources, and other universities followed suit.

Hopkins learned two important lessons from her years of experiences. First, time doesn’t fix a problem, people do. And second, maintaining progress requires continuous effort over decades. “You don’t fix it once, and it’s done,” she said.

Hopkins believes the seismic advances she has seen, both in cancer treatment and gender equity, are not entirely coincidental. Diversity in science improves the quality of research being done, she explained. And as science departments hire faculty members with diverse backgrounds and points of view, breakthroughs come quicker.

“As I look back on my life in science, it really is hard to believe that in 1963, the genetic code was just being cracked, and women could not be hired at most research universities. It’s breathtaking to have lived through those changes. On the other hand, there are other days when I wonder why cancer isn’t cured and why we’re still taking about gender equity. I’d like to see the next generation not have to deal with either issue.”