Exclusive Episode: With Courage the Exceptions Rule

In this exclusive episode of Inside Cancer Careers, we hear from Dr. Nancy Hopkins, Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Hopkins shares the exciting early days of the molecular biology revolution that she was a part of, how she decided on a career in cancer research, and the obstacles she encountered, and gives advice on selecting a career in science. She also tells the riveting story of the movement she led to achieve gender equality at MIT and beyond, the subject of a recent book.

Female woman with black multi color blouse with bookshelf behind her.

Dr. Nancy Hopkins became an assistant professor at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research in 1973. She used genetics to map the genes of mouse RNA tumor viruses and to identify genes that determine viral host range and the type and severity of cancers that mouse retroviruses cause. Hopkins switched research areas at midcareer to identify genes required for early vertebrate development using the zebrafish model. Her lab devised an efficient method for large-scale insertional mutagenesis and used it to identify and clone 25% of the genes essential for a fertilized zebrafish egg to develop into a swimming larva. Some of the genes identified in the screen can predispose adult fish to cancer. Towards the end of her career Hopkins became an advocate for cancer prevention and early detection research

Show Notes

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Episode Transcript

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

OLIVER BOGLER: Hello, and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute. I'm your host, Oliver Bogler. I work at the NCI in the Center for Cancer training. On Inside Cancer Careers we explore all the different ways that people join the fight against disease and hear their stories. Today we're talking to Dr. Nancy Hopkins, Professor Emerita at MIT, about her career in science and her work on gender equality, both remarkable and written about in a recent book by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

OLIVER: It's an honor to welcome Dr. Nancy Hopkins to our podcast. Welcome, Dr. Hopkins.

NANCY HOPKINS: Hi.

OLIVER: So Dr. Hopkins is Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita in the MIT Biology Department, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of too many awards from Harvard, AACR, UCSF, and other organizations to list here. She's renowned for her work on the control of gene expression, RNA tumor viruses, and the use of zebrafish to identify key genes, including many involved in cancer, and she's an advocate for cancer prevention and early detection research. Dr. Hopkins is also famous for her work on gender equality in science, and a book by the New York Times journalist Kate Zernike was published in April of this year and titled "The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science." In learning about you from the book and other sources, Dr. Hopkins, one thing that struck me was the tremendous courage that you showed throughout your career and how that shaped your path, and I wonder if we might start with your decision to leave the graduate program at Yale to return to Harvard and work in a technical role, a step that I think few people would have risked. Why did you do that?

HOPKINS: That's an interesting question, and at the time, science for women was a very different thing than it is today, and I was obsessed with a couple of scientific problems, and I thought that my career in science was going to be very short. So my goal was, I was going to do some Nobel Prize-winning experiment by the age of hopefully 25. If it had to be 30, so be it, but hopefully 25. Anyway, I wanted to focus on the most interesting question, and the two questions that I had -- I was interested in from the day I heard about molecular biology was I wanted to understand cancer and I wanted to understand the human brain, human behavior. Those were two things I had in mind which I thought would take a couple of hundred years before people would understand them. However, anyway, I decided to go after the cancer problem, it’s easier than the human brain. But to me, one of the things you had to understand was gene expression, and I knew at Harvard there was a young man named Mark Ptashne who was trying to solve this problem, and I ran around Yale looking for somebody who was working on it and they said nobody -- I couldn't find anybody. So I said, "Well, I got to get out of here. I got to go back to Harvard," and the only way to do that quickly was to just become Mark's technician, so I wrote to him. He said, "Yeah, I need a technician. You want to come work for me?" I said, "Great, I'm on it." So that's what I did. So for me, the science was -- I was -- I mean, it was a luxury, really. You know, in some ways, you could say it was risky, but in some ways, it was a luxury. Women were not expected to stay in science. I didn't expect to, so if I could be a technician, well, that was better than going to graduate school as long as I could work on the problem that I wanted to work on.

OLIVER: Interesting perspective. So it was really the science, but also the fact that you saw your career in a different way than you might now, looking back.

HOPKINS: Well, yes, because the expectation of what women's careers would look like was so different from a young woman today. Often people say, "Oh, there hasn't been that much progress." I say, "You don't know how much progress there's been." You know, just the way we looked at the whole thing was so different. The idea that I would be a professor in a university was not on my mind. The idea that I could win a Nobel Prize was on my mind, which is odd, isn't it?

OLIVER: Well, it's interesting, and I think in the book, you -- Ms. Zernike certainly portrays it that you, as you said, strategically went into this, right? You thought at around age 30 you might focus on having a family. You might -- your life might go in a different way, and so you had to have that high impact, and that explains the decision. I still think it was a courageous one.

HOPKINS: Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun, and it was the right one for me, but I'm not sure that -- in some ways, I do think you have to follow your passion in science, and that was really what it was, and figuring out how do I -- is it possible to do that? Is it too risky to do it? Will I survive if I do, do it? What's my goal?

OLIVER: Right.

HOPKINS: You know, what do I do to get there? So --

OLIVER: So the passion you referenced, for you, started really in a quite dramatic fashion.

HOPKINS: Well, yes. I mean, that was a thrilling thing, to be at Harvard at that time, to have met Jim Watson as an undergraduate, to be at the center of this revolution which was clearly going to change our understanding of what life is, and, you know, to believe, rightly or wrongly, that if you understood DNA and how it was controlled, you would understand every single biological problem there is, and then to have been able to go and work with Mark on this repressor problem, isolating the repressor and showing it could bind to DNA, it was extraordinary. Yes, I look back on my life, one thing I have to say, your listeners, be sure to live a long time. It's really fun to get old. Who knew? Who knew?

OLIVER: How much -- yeah, how much we would see. I mean, I remember as a graduate student, post-doc, reading Dr. Ptashne's book "The Genetic Switch" and just loving it and being fascinated by the elegance and beauty of the molecular mechanisms you uncovered with him and others.

HOPKINS: Well, he did -- went on and did it, but those initial experiments were so hard, and so hard to get them to work, and when they did, you know, you really were running up and down the halls screaming and yelling.

OLIVER: So you just mentioned a moment ago that you chose cancer. I mean, that is another indication in my mind of your willingness to be courageous, because at the time that you chose to work on cancer, you know, people were considering it a “graveyard for careers”, right? That's one of the quotes. That is not the case today, but again, help us understand why you chose cancer.

HOPKINS: Well, I think that, again, that being at the Harvard biolabs at that time with Jim Watson and Wally Gilbert, Mark Ptashne, Guido Guidotti and a number of these people, you were at the center where this revolution was happening and you realized that anything might be possible sooner than you thought because what DNA had opened the door. So this question of whether cancer was possible -- and Jim would take people down to Cold Spring Harbor in the summers and there were really two different approaches at the time that were very interesting. One was from John Cairns which was that cancer was a preventable disease to a large extent, and the other was, who knows if it is or not? Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but maybe we can get to the real cause of it through these cancer viruses because, you know, here are these viruses that cause cancer and we know how to deal with viruses now. That's what these phage people had figured out. So my gosh, once you saw the progress that was made in that short period of time, from the time -- and phage, understanding how phage work in genes that control, oh, my gosh, it's just a virus. It's not that different from phage, after all, is it? So maybe there's a hope that you can get to a mechanism. So those were the two approaches right from the start that were very interesting to me, and I chose it, yes, again, I think I had this luxury of nothing. I had to make a long-time career in science, but that it could be a 10-year career and I'd be out of there. So you could take a chance.

OLIVER: But then you decided to join the faculty of -- at MIT, right, in 1973, in the new Center for Cancer Research, and you focused your energies there on tumor viruses becoming an authority in their genetics and how they cause disease. What was that like? That must have been a really exciting period of time in the early days of cancer, cancer research.

HOPKINS: Well, of course, it was, I mean, because, you know, tumor viruses were the key to cancer genes, and so really, the Bishop-Varmus experiment and others showing that these genes, normal genes could be turned into cancer genes and what those genes were, that was the era of that, and that was really remarkable in such, again, such a short period of time to go from not imagining you could work on cancer to, oh, my God, here are genes that actually cause it and they're inherited in the genome. So that was a remarkable thing to be there at that time in the field. And then I think came, I almost think, a kind of a long period of churning along after this big breakthrough to these genes. We thought -- I think we were a little overconfident, and in a way, it kind of stalled in a bit because we thought, oh, yeah, all you have to do is find inhibitors for these genes, you know, drugs that target these oncogenes and we'll be done, you know, eureka.

OLIVER: Yeah.

HOPKINS: And it didn't turn out that way on the whole, as you know. But meanwhile, you know, this other track was going along of the prevention people, and ironically, I think if you look back, and I don't know what you would call the golden age of smoking cessation, but -- so we were doing this, and I think that era was the breaking open of the mechanisms that cause cancer at the molecular level. But yes, there was a lot of other things going on, too, that we were less aware of and including, you know, early detection and prevention and the actual causes of cancer in the environment, the viruses that really do cause human cancer which turned out not to be the ones we were working on, and all these ironies, and so things went along for quite a while. I think we were a little overconfident about how long it was going to take, honestly.

OLIVER: Yeah, and how simple the mechanisms would be and how tractable, right?

HOPKINS: Yes.

OLIVER: And cancer turns out to be really flexible and evolution, you know, capable of evolution, and yeah, those are things we didn't know. I wonder, this is probably a terribly unfair question, but given that you have both, you know, devoted a lot of your efforts both in the sort of very highly mechanistic biology of cancer and then in cancer prevention and associated fields, looking back, would you, knowing what you know today, if you were to go back to the 1970s, would you plan your research program differently?

HOPKINS: Ah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that question, so thank you for asking me. Unfortunately, I didn't -- we haven't been able to answer it yet.

OLIVER: Okay.

HOPKINS: Okay? So I don't know the answer. I mean, here's the problem, I think. I really did want to see cancer cured. I really did want to see this problem solved, but I found that I really did love basic science. So I had -- I could have gone on forever, I think, studying viruses. I think they're fascinating. We never can know enough about. It was wonderful. But I really did care about -- thinking all the time, is this really going to lead to results that are going to help cure this disease? And I'm still sort of torn about it, and I think, you know, then we ran into problems that we may talk about later but that I felt had to do with gender and I thought about leaving the field and I was debating this, and I went to a meeting to give a talk and I happened to hear somebody talking about the fact that 50% of cancer deaths in the United States were preventable and 70% worldwide by proven methods, and I was shocked back to my roots when John Cairns at Cold Spring Harbor had been talking about how much cancer was preventable and I had set that aside while we all went off to work on the mechanisms and find the genes and this and this, and that exciting era, and then suddenly being woken up again and thinking, oh, but wait a minute. How did we lose track of that? Now, so you ask, what should I have done? I don't know that I could have gone into public health and been a happy worker in the field, and I think this is one of the things young people, you know, of course, have to think about. You have to do the thing you love to do and that can be complicated. It can be a combination, and in my case, it was a real goal, medical goal, and at the same time, what do you actually like to do, and then what needs to be done, and I think that's a tough one. And so you have to figure that out for yourself.

OLIVER: Yeah, I mean, I want to get to that in a moment. Before I do, I wanted just to touch on another inflection point in your career where sometime then after joining MIT and working on RNA tumor viruses, you decided to take a complete pivot. Again, that strikes me as quite courageous. I mean, perhaps it's fair to say you were mid-career at that point, and having established a very strong reputation in one field, you now ventured into something quite different, which is challenging in the environment of, you know, requiring to get funding and get published because, you know, now you're no longer the expert you were in that original field. So tell us about the pivot you made and how you made it and why.

HOPKINS: Well, I did come to think I had had a wonderful time as a student, and a student and post-doc. I had had this wonderful experience of feeling I was part of, particularly in the phage community, I mean, it was such a community, and it was such a wonderful thing, and I had so many colleagues and we'd talk science all the time, and so forth. In the cancer field, I had found it to be a different experience and I didn't know why. I didn't know if it was the fact that you get older, you're no longer the kid, you know, you're not a student, so everybody else has to take care of you, but whether it was the nature of the field, because the field was closer to medicine, and the medical field at that time I felt was more dominated by doctors and by men than the basic science of phage molecular biology had been. It was such a new and open field that sort of women could come in, anybody could come in. So I thought, well, maybe it's the field, so maybe I should try looking at a different field to see whether it might be possible. So I thought back to my other passion, which I'd always wanted to understand the brain and neuroscience and maybe I could study the genetics of behavior or some crazy thing like this, which was, believe me, naive and wrong, but I went on a sabbatical to the lab of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard who was the great Drosophila geneticist in Germany, and I did fall in love with the zebrafish, which she was starting to work on the zebrafish and I thought, well, maybe you could do genetics of behavior and zebrafish. Well, you couldn't, okay? But I thought, you know, I'll go see, and I kind of fell in love with the organism and I thought the developmental biology field was a much more woman-friendly field. It had many more women in it than the cancer field did at the time. So I thought, well, I'll give that a whirl, and I really got excited about it, and it was courageous and really suicidal, and your comments sound very much like my first grant proposal to the NIH. The reviewer wrote, "This middle-aged woman thinks she's going to go and -- are you crazy?" You know, it was basically that kind of thing, you know, "What is she thinking?" And I think there I was really lucky to be at MIT where there's so many resources available, and by chance, I tapped into funding from this company, Amgen, and they offered me a huge amount of money and I said, "Okay, I'm in," and off I went, and so that was a lot of fun and just a miracle, and yeah, we had a great time and helped establish the zebrafish field and developing insertional mutagenesis technology with my wonderful -- I had a wonderful team in my lab at the time, and so it was a lot of fun and ultimately brought us back to cancer by chance, and so that was when I came back to cancer and discovering, ah, so who's winning the race here? Is it the molecular biologist or is it the cancer prevention people?

OLIVER: Right, right. Interesting. So, you know, you've tried so many different things, you've worked in so many different areas, and you've also had some interesting mentors. I use the word "interesting," you know, judiciously. I wonder what you might say, when I ask you, what does it take to be a great scientist? I would certainly describe you as a great scientist. What does it take? In the book, there's some interesting quotes. Jim Watson, Dr. Watson apparently said that you had, quote, good taste in science. What's your assessment of this question?

HOPKINS: Ah, I don't know, you know. I mean, first of all, I don't think of myself as a great scientist. I think myself as a good scientist, confident scientist, a successful scientist, a passionate scientist. I think part of it, a huge amount, in my case, certainly, I think, was passion. I really do. I mean, I don't know if that's true for everybody. I think that passions can be different. Some people want to make a lot of money. They go into biotech. That's fine, too. I really was passionate about understanding cancer and seeing it cured and that drove me for a long time, and then I discovered that this passion for science itself and how nature works was so intense that that could drive me forever. So I was really lucky, I think. I don't know if all people have that sort of feeling.

OLIVER: Another thing that Jim Watson said is, again, I'm quoting from the book, "You should be a scientist. You're like me. You have a one-track mind."

HOPKINS: It's a very complicated thing about Jim Watson, as you know. He was an extraordinary mentor to a very large number of people and one of the first men that I knew in science to encourage women to be scientists, and he, it was me, it was Joan Steitz, Susan Hockfield, Shirley Tilghman, a whole number of people, he was hugely important. So that was a remarkable thing, and we can talk about the later Jim Watson, if you want. It's very painful for me, because later on, I don't know why, he changed his views about everything in some ways. He was a very different person, in half the way that he was then. But this obsession quality, the thing that science is intense, and people are there night and day, and that's kind of the way it was around, and that was -- I loved that. I mean, I didn't want to go home. I just wanted to be there. It was that exciting, and so forth. So I think -- but I don't know that every scientist has to think like that. I think there are different routes, different kinds of people, but I don't know anybody who ever did really well and wasn't pretty obsessed, I have to say. I think, you know, just loved it. Loved it.

OLIVER: I mean, I think we're trying to encourage a generation today to come into science and into cancer research who, to some extent, have a slightly different view of this, right? They see their life more holistically and maybe they're not, you know, maybe they are looking to go home at the end of the day, not spend, you know, night and day in the lab, and so on. Is that your perception, and what are your thoughts about that? Does that mean they won't be able to be great scientists?

HOPKINS: First of all, I have -- I want people to know, I have been retired for 10 years, so I don't -- I'm out of touch, really, with very young people. However, I've worked in the last few years with an extraordinary woman who's really opened -- made me understand a lot more things. Her name is Sangeeta Bhatia and she's a professor at MIT, and she and Susan Hockfield and I worked together on the gender equity project we might talk about, and there's a person who is a member of all the academies, I believe. She is a parent of two children, a wife of a wonderful man, takes excellent care of her parents. She has lots of friends. In her spare time, she is dedicated to mentoring young women, encouraging women, women of color to go into science. She has a sort of open hours for people who want to sit, you know, ask expert opinions of her. So there are people who can do amazing amounts of things, and I don't know that I was one of them. I'm not quite sure what to say about that, but different people have different capabilities. They can do all these things at once. In my generation, I think the women really felt they couldn't be a parent easily and be a great scientist. But today, all our junior faculty, they have children, almost every one of them, whereas in my generation, they didn't. So something has changed and I don't really understand exactly what it is, but there is something else that I don't understand. Maybe you can explain it to me, that people -- because you talk to more people probably, and that is I do sometimes hear young people say -- who have married, who have children, and who are, you know, doing science at a high level, "I wish I had time for life," and I'm saying to myself, "Excuse me, you have a life. That is a life. It's an extraordinary life." And that's, I think, how I felt about it. I mean, all these lives are so rich and full and so privileged, really, and so why do people feel -- what are they missing that they feel they don't have a life? You know, I do see from my generation that women really did have to do a lot more to succeed in making a choice of having children, for example, even, you know, whatever, but something's changed because they're doing it. I think it's still too hard for most people. I don't know I could do it, but we have to keep working at that.

OLIVER: Well, I have a hypothesis of what might have changed, and I think that things have gotten better for women in science, and I think you are one of the people who deserve credit for that, and after the break, we'll dive into that when we talk about some of the culture-changing work that you did on gender equality and science.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

OLIVER: The NCI recently launched a new online seminar series. Here to tell us more is Nas Zahir, the Director of the Cancer Training Branch.

NAS: Yes, we launched the NCI Rising Scholars Cancer Research Seminar Series in January to highlight the research and contributions made by NCI-supported postdoctoral fellows and early career investigators at NCI laboratories and NCI-funded institutions nationwide.

The talks are every month on the third Thursday, and you can see them and register for them on the NCI website. There will be a link in the show notes, or you can search for “NCI Rising Scholars”.

OLIVER: That sounds great. What kind of topics are the speakers covering?

NAS: We have a broad range of topics – pretty much any kind of cancer research. We have had basic science topics, clinical research, health disparities, cancer prevention, immunology and many more. Each talk is related to a recent publication by the presenter and there is plenty of time for Q&A.

OLIVER: What if you missed a talk?

NAS: We post a recording of the presentation a few days after the talk, along with a transcript and captions so you can always catch the talks at your convenience.

OLIVER: Thanks, Nas – check out NCI’s Rising Scholars seminar series if you are interested in some great research that’s increasing knowledge right now.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

OLIVER: All right, and we're back. I wonder, Dr. Hopkins, if you could describe for us some of the challenges you faced during the late '60s and early '70s as you were building that early phase of your career. You already mentioned that there were very few women in science, so there were some fields, like early gene expression, where you felt there was room. How was that different from today?

HOPKINS: Ah, I think that, you know, it was so unusual for a woman to be there at the time, and our expectations of them, as I've just said, were different from our expectations of a man. We didn't expect them to be a great scientist. We didn't expect them to have a long career. We didn't certainly expect them to join the faculty, and when your expectations are like that, that has consequences. We see people a certain way in the culture and, guess what, they do what we expect them to do. And so to break out of those and to go -- so for example, women were supposed to be always nice and polite and this and that, and men were very -- supposed to be aggressive and whatever. I remember, you know, when I became a professor, it was hard for people to believe that you actually were a professor, and you didn't want to pull rank and say, "Oh, I'm a professor, you shouldn't speak to me like that," because you're a woman, so you had to be nice and charming to everybody, which you were because you wanted to be, you were what you wanted to be. But it meant that, you know, you were signing for the packages and you were doing all the work of the technician and the secretary and the whatever and people kind of expected -- or didn't expect it of you, but if you pulled rank, it could be a problem of not being seen as likable, as nice, as staying in your place, and your place was not the one that you really needed to be in to be a professor. So I think a lot of it -- when I look back on it, I'm going to say this. I think Kate Zernike did write a rather brilliant book. We're going to talk about it maybe, but I don't know that I understood my life till I read the book. I think when you see the culture of the time, you see that women were -- who did have the life I had were considered a bit odd and, you know, to go off and not have children and do this work like that hard in this field of science, there weren't many women, and it turns out, as I say, there are consequences to that, and now we look back on it and I think that research, we understand it so much better, that when people are out of place, they tend to be undervalued and excluded from participation. It's kind of like a splinter that wants to go away, and I, you know, I don't like to -- I think at the time it was hard to understand that, and I think it was a feeling that, oh, these people are so competitive and they'd, you know, trample on their mother, but actually, I think it was more that it was just inappropriate for a woman to be doing this, and I think we've seen it also when minority faculty tried to integrate into the system. I mean, they face a much more extreme problem and where it makes it even more stunning where they are not expected to, you know, even be necessarily on the campus. I mean, it's -- and so the problem extends outside of the science situation into the whole living situation and being where you are just physically. So all these, it's a fascinating thing and we could talk about it.

OLIVER: Yeah. Since you mentioned the book, I'd love to get a little bit deeper into that. You just said that you didn't understand your life until you read the book. The book is part biography and I think a very interesting biography of you, and one of the things that I perceived and I wanted to check in with you, whether you think this is accurate, is that it seems to me almost as if your perspective changed over the years. So when you are described in this book in your early career, you were not really seeing any gender discrimination, but obviously, that changed. Is that accurate? Is that how it was?

HOPKINS: It is accurate. I think I saw the differences, but I didn't understand that they had consequences and that cumulatively they were discrimination. And I think the reason was that we so strongly believe that science is a meritocracy. We believe that we really can rank the experiments. Certainly, when -- certain experiments, somebody would come along, tell you result, "Oh, that's going to win a Nobel Prize," and it does, okay, you can tell. You can tell instantly. So we're very good at telling what's important and what's not, but we think that if you or people aren't treating you a certain way, it must be that you really aren't good enough, and that belief, which really underlies sort of all of the discrimination, it's this cultural belief that women can't do science and blacks can't do science, certain people can't do science, only certain people can. That undervaluation is sort of what underlies it, and the people themselves absorb this belief as well, and so you think, oh, I must have done something wrong. Either I wasn't -- I didn't express myself well, I wasn't aggressive enough, something I did wrong, or I'm just not a good enough scientist. I'll keep trying harder. I'll do better. I'll make a better experiment. And I think finally, after 20, I figured it out really not from myself, my own experiences, but from watching how other women were treated, because there you could be, you know, you could see it more objectively. In your own case, you can always say, "Maybe I'm not good enough," but when it's other women, then I could see it and it was very clear, no, these -- this woman is as good or better than this man and she is not treated equally. And so over 20 years, I've started to watch how other women were treated, and finally, it was very clear to me, and then finally, it was clear that I could finally have the confidence to say the things that were happening to me were also not things that would have happened to a man.

OLIVER: I wonder in this context, you spent some of your time at Cold Spring Harbor Labs, I think, before you joined the MIT faculty, right? And one of the leading scientists there, Dr. Barbara McClintock, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, from the book I perceive she had a slightly different take on that issue, but -- and you knew that because you interacted with her, but at the time it did not affect your worldviews.

HOPKINS: Yes, I thought she's so old, of course she's experienced discrimination, she couldn't even get a job. Why is she telling me this, it's not happening to me. And in fact, I think it was not happening to me because I was young and that's the way it was when you were young. And so when I was offered a job at MIT, she said, oh, I don't think you should go there, I mean you'll never be able to stand the discrimination. I thought, why is she telling me this, you know, it was so odd. And of course I came to understand what she was telling me, I just hadn't understood it at the time. But it took, it did take 20 years to figure it out, and looking back on it, I was very slow, I mean I really was. I can't-- it is remarkable how slow I was to understand it I think.

OLIVER: Let me turn to how you underwent that change in perspective, in part I think it was through the amazing work that you did, which led to what is known as the MIT Report. You started in the mid-'90s, as a member of the faculty. The report was published in 1999. It's another instance of courage if you permit, in my mind, and as the report itself says, it's important to realize how difficult this effort was for the senior women faculty at the time. This is a quote, "Driven all their professional lives to achieve at the highest possible level, to many it seemed they were putting a lifetime of hard work and good behavior at risk. They feared being seen as radical troublemakers, as complainers." So help us understand what motivated you and you and your colleagues, the group that you led to take this risk?

HOPKINS: Well I think, you know, as I say, I watched how other women were treated and I finally realized that none of them were valued as they should have been, and were treated with you know, sort of respect and recognition they should have had. And I was looking also at women outside MIT, it wasn't just MIT, I could see what's happening to other women. And then as I took another five years to realize in my own case it was when I need some more space for this new project I was doing, I couldn't get it, and then I looked at the space I had and looked at the space everybody else had and I realized I had, you know, my own, was like a starving assistant professor and I was by then a tenured professor that they had much more space. And I couldn't get it, you know, it was, it was this crazy argument that went on for you know, a year or something, a year more, about space until I finally went and measured the labs to prove a point which, you really honestly could’ve just walk through the space and seen it, you know. So I, that was the first thing and I was by that exhausted, and then there was one more final blow where I was removed from teaching a class that I had co-developed with somebody else because he wanted to turn this thing into a company with some man. And I said, you know, that's it, I'm done. And I think it was the, I suddenly realized the energy and exhaustion it took for women to do all this extra work to try to be accepted, to try to be seen as good enough. And I'd been doing it for 20 years and I finally came to the point that I couldn't continue to do it, I was worn out, exhausted and either I was going to you know, fight and fix it or I don't know, leave science, retire. I think if I'd been older, I would have retired right then and there actually. But I decided I wasn't old enough or rich enough to retire so I would have to fight this battle if I wanted to keep being a scientist because I just couldn't do it any longer. And I thought I'd be fighting alone, and that would have been really hard and probably would have gotten nowhere, but the extraordinary-- because the funny thing was, I thought I was the only woman that figured this out, it was so, something you didn't talk about because people would think you weren't good enough if you said, you thought women were undervalued, of course they'd say oh, they're just not good enough, which is what people secretly believed, you know? So I thought, they don't know and if I tell them, they'll just be hurt and feelings would be hurt so I was afraid to even discuss it with them. But I finally did and when I went and spoke to this woman I had so much respect for named Mary-Lou Pardue, and she said -- I wrote a letter to the president of MIT and before I mailed it I wanted to get the opinion, and I asked her and she said she wanted to sign the letter and she thought we ought to go and see the president. And that started the entire movement at MIT really, because if that woman had figured it out and felt the same way, then MIT had a problem. It wasn't just the women who had a problem, it was MIT. And so, from there we went on discovered that you know, they'd offer you to, some of them had not figured it out the same way, but they had, they knew something was wrong, they hadn't figured out what it was. Some were so isolated, there were no women in their field. You know, and so they couldn't see the comparison. But when we got together it was listening to each of those women, there were so few of them, you know, total we were 16 people, but listening to their individual stories you could see the pattern so easily, really. And so, it really was an extraordinary thing that happened.

OLIVER: So the report showed several things; it showed obviously the unfair treatment, the space, the salaries, honors and awards and other kinds of things. Another thing that it showed, which I thought was fascinating, was that, and again, this is a quote, “that junior women faculty feel well-supported within their departments, and most do not believe the gender bias will impact their careers.” Which to me reflected sort of your own path when you had been early in your career, you felt the same way. So this was fascinating to me.

HOPKINS: Yes, it was and it was fascinating to the president of MIT. That was one of the things that really captivated him. It was when women said, I felt that way when I was young too. And then he realized, we realized, you know, this is a, that's how it works. When young women, the ones who don't get driven out by sexual harassment or who knows what, they can't have children, whatever. The ones who are well-mentored and encouraged by powerful faculty, they are having a good time. They're not having a problem. And it's when they have to stand on their own and become you know, not equals to and competitors to this powerful faculty, that's when the problems begin. And yes, however, I have to say one thing about that, that one thing you just quoted from the '99 report, I've thought about it a lot, because something we didn't study was the distribution of resources to junior faculty. We couldn't have done it, the numbers were too small and the fields so diverse, but years later a man, a man who was running a foundation in Boston, collected the data on the startup packages of women versus men in comparable fields and discovered they was a huge discrepancy in biomedical. So, they thought they were equal, they felt they were equal, but it's not absolutely clear that in terms of resources, they were equal. So I'd worried about that because I think it's, the one sort of inaccuracy in the report. But what they, we only interviewed them and you know, that's how they felt, and yes, you're absolutely right, that was the pattern. And it's the pattern is still true, I think, that, and I think it's also still true there are women who say I never experienced discrimination. I live now in a retirement community and it's fascinating, and there are women there who are scientists who are older than I am. And never went through this kind of process that I have at MIT, with my colleagues at MIT. And a couple of women have said to me, I didn't have that experience, that's so interesting and I'm older than you are. Now, it's true that when I discovered the salaries, it turned out I was seriously underpaid, but that really was just something that happened. In other words, they can't see those things that happened to them, that's what we're talking about.

OLIVER: Right. It's again an individual experience rather than a systemic problem.

HOPKINS: Right, right.

OLIVER: And of course another thing the report showed was that in actual fact that tenured women at MIT, MIT at the time were more accomplished than their male counterparts, right? By easily measured metrics, academy memberships and all these you know, these kind of impact measurements.

HOPKINS: As a group, as a group, they are, were yes, I mean it's a tiny number of people, I wouldn't put… the MIT faculty is pretty amazing. But we don't have, we haven't had a women Nobel Prize winner and that bothers me. But I did a calculation at one point and I said, well, we've only had enough women here that we shouldn't be expecting the first woman now, you know, so there haven't been that many that you can expect to have many. But you know, they were hugely accomplished and of course yeah, those woman, the majority of them are members of the academies. One of them went on to be the first head of the National Academy of Sciences and four of them won the U.S. National Medal of Science and so forth. So, I mean they were extraordinary, to know them was a privilege.

OLIVER: Right, and the fact that they had fewer resources really was not a reflection on their abilities or accomplishments, it was a systemic problem. Now, that's what the report showed, what was the impact to the report?

HOPKINS: Unimaginable, it was, you know, I honestly did believe you know, that this was a problem that pertained to this tiny number of people, women who wanted to be, you know, scientists at the high end places like MIT and Stanford, and Harvard, CalTech. I just had no idea that it was going to, that it was a universal problem. I mean how naive was I? It's shocking. But anyway, that's how it was. There was a person, her name was Lotte Bailyn, who became the chair of the faculty at MIT and she was a sociologist and she did know and she was the person who pushed us to write this report up into something that could be made public. And so when it was published and Kate Zernike was the reporter who was at the Boston Globe at the time, who got wind of it and decided to write about it, and she came to interview me and I was telling her all this stuff, and who knew, you know, I thought I had no idea what was going to happen. And when it happened, it changed my life, I mean there were cameras up and down the halls, the phone never stopped ringing. There was email deluges of email from women saying thank you, you won't believe it the exact same thing happened to me and no one will believe me. And it went on for, I mean, 15 years. And the press called every day, I mean as I went to the White House, I mean it was, I had no idea. Then of course I mean I did find it very, very hard to leave the issue behind, because when you realized it was a universal societal problem, and all these women were having this same difficult experience, you know, you really didn't have a choice and you know, but to go on with it. So, that's what happened.

OLIVER: What was the response from MIT leadership?

HOPKINS: Well, the president was overwhelmed by email, the dean was overwhelmed by email, I think he found himself on the evening news, this doesn't usually happen, as he says, in the academic administration decisions. So it, you know, talk about courage I think you know, what they did, Dean Birgeneau and Chuck Vest at MIT, to support the women at that time was extraordinary. And really courageous undertaking and risking you know, the institution's reputation in a way. So, they were amazed and Chuck Vest, I remember him being called by one of the great foundations and asked if he would please come down and tell them how to distribute money so they could fix this problem. And he said, we just announced there was a problem, we don't know how to fix the problem. And so he set about trying to fix it. But he was a great administrator and he put his provost, Bob Brown on the case, and Bob Brown is another great administrator, so together they really made lots of change and there was so many people became involved in it at MIT, it really did change MIT.

OLIVER: So they fixed the inequalities, they I think also set out to hire more women onto the faculty, right?

HOPKINS: Yeah, they did. They did those things and they set up a council on faculty diversity to look into it for the women and for the minority faculty as well to collect data on an ongoing basis, which they did, put daycare on campus for the junior women, and review, obviously pointed to the central administration to work with the provost and the chancellor at the time, Phil Clay, to review salaries and all of these things. So the inequities I think were addressed and hiring, but the amazing thing they did also was to bring women into the administration, the two things that really changed it were bringing women to high level positions in administration. And to put daycare on campus. And to see a baby on the campus of MIT, I'll never forget it. You know, you see young faculty member pushing a baby carriage, I just stopped and stared.

OLIVER: Well that's a sign of real change. So, I mean you received a little bit of criticism for I think your very balanced view of how the administration responded, right? You said in a, and this is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle, through in the book, that the difference this time, you're talking about the response of MIT, is that the respected president of MIT, one of the most prestigious universities in the nation, not only did not ignore the report, he acknowledged existence of the discrimination and took steps to redress it. But not everybody saw it that way, is that accurate?

HOPKINS: I must, you know, there was some criticism from some you know, there were a couple of women at the time who were associated with on the, what is it, the-- I can't remember the name of it, a right wing I guess, organization, that was basically didn't think that it was correct, I don't know exactly why. I mean as I say, if you listen, if you've gotten all this email from women all over the country, the similarity of the experience across the country was so remarkable, and stories, and so I don't really know about that, but I think that most institutions then found that when they did the studies, they found the same thing. And then I think really compelling has been the research from the field of psychology. Like Kate's book, I mean when you read this stuff, you realize oh, yeah, we knew this all along, or we should have. This is the way the human brain works, it's fascinating. And I think that was very, very helpful to me was learning from people like Mahzarin Banaji, and Virginia Valian and others about the research in psychology that had shown how you can take identical work, you know, you can take a paper, Xerox it, and have it reviewed, put Jennifer on as the author, and John as the author of the same identical paper and you'll get different reviews depending whether people think it was done by a man or a woman. So this kind of thing, so you realize, yes, this really does happen and it now explains it and now it's pretty simple and we all do it, and it's just check the data and fix it. You know?

OLIVER: So, what does that tell you, what you just said. Because that's really fascinating, and then also, connected to that, it seems to me that critical in your success was forming a group and then getting the data. I mean it's almost like a science project, right? You had to show the experimental results so to speak, of the square footage, the dollar amounts, in order to exact change, when actually as you said yourself, when you were looking for more space for your fish, it wasn't hard to see that you had less space than your neighbor or you know, who was of the same rank and seniority. What does that say about the human mind and what does that mean for young people who are taking on similar problems? What's your advice to them in that context?

HOPKINS: What a great, interesting question. Well I think, you know, yes we'd like to believe that we are totally rational beings but these psychologists, you know, like Daniel Kahneman, Kahneman and Tversky, Liz Spelke, Mahzarin Banaji -- they know we're not. And you know, that you, I think this is, I think it's one of the most remarkable discoveries that's been made about the human brain, actually. And Kahneman won a Nobel Prize, it was in economics, I think there should be another prize myself, in biology probably medicine, for this discovery of unconscious bias and how it operates. Because it underlies so many problems, you know, if you think you're being rational and you're not, that's a problem. So you've just got to go and collect the data and I think you finally have to change the culture to the extent that you have people who accept this is the way humans are. This is the way we're constructed unfortunately biologically. We're not perfect, we may not even be as smart as AI, who knows, I mean but you know, it's a problem. No, we're not perfect. And our judgment's not perfect. I find it, as a biologist, absolutely fascinating actually. And I think Kate's book, I mean as I say, what I think is remarkable about she did was to show how the people who were running things in that era, what they thought about women and difficulty of letting women into a system. What are we going to do with these people? Can they really do this work? And you know, all these things. They reflect the culture of those times. And if we had stopped to think about it, we would have said, is this really going to work? We would have known better why it might be problematic, harder than we thought to do this. You know, I had no idea, as my husband told me, he said, you women, you were all pioneers, they just forgot to tell you.

OLIVER: So you mentioned a moment ago, when the report came out that you had this sort of tremendous response and you haven't really been able to let it go since then, that was how you phrased it. So tell us, what has happened since the 1999 report and where are we today?

HOPKINS: Well this is where I wish I were younger to give you the answer. I mean to me, as an older person, having watched all this change, as I say, the idea that a woman could ever be the president of Harvard, I mean who knew? Okay? So it's unbelievable, we've had now two women presidents of Harvard, two women presidents of MIT, not imaginable to a person of my generation. I remember with one of the women, Millie Dresselhaus, we looked at each other and said, can you believe this? It's awesome. But that's how unimaginable it was. So, you forget that very quickly and you think oh, but what's the big deal, it is a big deal. I think the change there is tremendous. It's interesting about Kate's book, two things I'd say, what has been the reaction of men to the book? There's been amazing, the most remarkable responses from men who said they really thought they'd understood the issue and they really hadn't and they read this book and it's like a revelation. And that's wonderful, I mean because I used to get some hate mail, now I get love letters so I'm very happy about that. That's good. The thing that is interesting is a number of young women who read the book and young of course anything less than me, and I'm very old, but they say, well nothing's changed. And I just don't know what they mean by this. But I know that, I know somewhat what they mean, so for example, one of the things is you know, after the universities took all this on, we had the biotech industry and the women came up against the venture capital world, and so as I say, in the last few years, Susan Hockfield and Sangeeta Bhatia and I worked together on that problem. Because it was just stunning to discover that you could have these two things running parallel, the universities were changing but here was this industry that grew up all alongside it and it didn't change at all. Barely, and so you had to go and work on that project. So I see what the young women mean, it's certainly not all fixed, I think it's, for men too, I think it's still too hard for people to do, you know, two careers and young children, very difficult. And still being adjusted to suit people. And I also think even, I think go back to cancer, I was thinking about, I'd still like to see cancer cured in my lifetime. And sometimes I wonder are we doing everything we could, are we doing it as well as we could? And are we, left too much to biotech industry and not enough to the you know, healthcare and you know, public health industry. You know, this kind of question.

OLIVER: Right. So why do you think the biotech and private sector is lagging or was lagging behind academia in these necessary changes?

HOPKINS: Well, oh boy, I mean I was told that I couldn't join a company because businessmen won't work with women. And I said to the person, oh, I understand that. Don't feel bad about it. I mean it was just something you knew it intuitively, so it was a culture of, just didn't change because I think because really honestly, civil rights, affirmative action, and the fact that there are so many students that have to be, you have to have concern for all the students in the university, they didn't have to deal with any of that, they're just dealing with, you know, just completely different situation. They're not, nobody, they're not beholden to anybody, they do pretty much what they want and so, that, those people, that culture of Silicon Valley and venture capital culture did, because in the field of computer science, there weren't as many women, but biology there's tons of women so you can't claim it's the pipeline, because it's not and so, it's starting to change, but boy, it's got a way to go. And that's a problem. I mean, we'll go backwards if that doesn't get fixed I think.

OLIVER: So I wonder if you'd allow me to put you on the spot. You've indicated there's still room for improvement, even in academia in terms of gender equality and you've also, of course, mentioned other areas of equality where there's much work to do. I wonder if you saw the recent discussion around this topic at a gathering of Nobel Laureates in Germany.

HOPKINS: I was startled, somebody pointed that out, that thing out to me and I started to watch it and like whoa, I think it's, and I think these Nobel Prize winners are getting pretty old too. They need to go check the data.

OLIVER: So it's, is it fair to say you're not kept up at night by worrying about men in this context?

HOPKINS: Well sure I am. If they are being, yeah I am. Seriously, I mean I'm worried I should be, I'm worried about the race thing actually very much. I've been working on that lately and I feel you know, MIT, I was at a meeting recently with Phil Sharp and some members of the MIT Corporation actually, and you know, we were talking about this. I mean this is something so important to the future of science, and to America, and to the world, and you know, getting more blacks and every black man into science is just critically important. So yes, I do worry about it, absolutely. I mean I'm not, I don't favor women over men, I just favor equality for everybody.

OLIVER: I did want to pivot to that question that you just touched on, which is; from what you experienced and learned, how does that inform your thinking about gender, not just gender discrimination, but discrimination on the base of race, ethnicity, and other areas?

HOPKINS: Well I am going to tell you a funny story, I thought now, and it took me 20 years to figure it out about women, I thought now I've really got this. It must be the same for all forms of discrimination, you know? And so, when we went with the president of MIT and the provost, Bob Brown, to try to address the problem at MIT, and we were going to deal with women and minorities, he formed a committee and I was in it, we had the faculty, the we're half black, half Hispanic, and women, and so forth, and they were sitting, and I'm confident that I now understand discrimination, by the end of the first meeting I had found out from my colleagues who were black, that I didn't have a clue of what it was like to be black and deal with these problems. It's this, there are many issues, I mean first of all, discrimination is much worse but also, the fact that yes, that you can't really escape from it somehow, that it so permeates the culture and the living arrangements and just being on the campus and you know, person who was black, really not the same thing if you end up being mistaken for the technician all the time, instead of the professor. The other problem not allow, I mean not allowed here or there because how could that possibly be an MIT professor? Well, you know, it's pretty shocking and it applies to housing, at that era, now this was when I was on the council some time ago, so I have been working over the years, trying to still, if any opportunities arise, you know, something it's really difficult, and not to mention the pipeline really is smaller. And so, we put those two things together, it's a really hard problem but MIT is working, they've worked so hard on it, too, and it's still hard. So I think you have to, it's constant work over very long periods of time. And with people dedicated to realizing how hard it is, what the problems are, and not letting, you know, not giving up and just have to stay with it.

OLIVER: Yeah, and if you'll permit me, I think also people like yourself with courage and vision and the willingness to step forward and do the hard work.

HOPKINS: Well you have to have the support and you have to have the support from the top. So, you know, we were lucky at MIT to have great administration.

OLIVER: So in closing, Dr. Hopkins, I wonder what advice you might give to someone who's listening, who's just starting out, thinking about a cancer career, maybe a career in biomedicine, what would you say to them?

HOPKINS: Lucky you. But I do, I was sort of thinking, you know, you'd asked me about a funny thing I was reading, two things this week, one of them is the Tracy Kidder book about Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. And here is you know, the public health person caring for the poorest of the poor and here in my other hand is by, I guess it's Eric Schmidt, as it comes from Google, about artificial intelligence and how it's going to change the world. And I'm thinking, you know, you've still got to do both. How do you decide, if you're young, what do you do? What do you personally do to cure cancer? You go with AI, so exciting you can't even imagine, do you go with Tracy, with public health, because you can get better and better cures, cost millions of dollars, 10 percent or 20 percent of the people, but the people are still dying of cancer. So I, it's fascinating. But boy the technology's available for you if you're young, what's going to happen with the technology? What's already happening? Unbelievable, so boy, oh to be young again.

OLIVER: Thank you very much, we'll leave it there. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your many experiences and your perspective and wisdom.

HOPKINS: Thank you very much, it was a pleasure.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

That’s all we have time for on today’s episode of Inside Cancer Careers! Thank you for joining us and thank you to our guests.

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