Christine Guthrie Talk, Back in 2006, Still Good
Dear friends of women in science,
Christine Guthrie is a yeast geneticist and RNA maven par excellence. She's currently a professor at UCSF and she has won numerous awards for her research on RNA. In 2006, she was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the RNA Society.
Her talk on that occasion was summarized in an Editorial in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (see it here), entitled "Telling It Like It Was." She told the audience how much she needed reassurance as a graduate student, and how hard it was to come by. She felt all the others were smarter, more motivated, farther along their pathways to success. But she was passionate about her interest in science, and that carried her through some bad days. She wanted to work on ribosomes and she "asked to join the laboratory of Masayasu Nomura, the
world leader at the time. He was less than encouraging. He told her, 'Girls can't lift heavy rotors or stand long shifts in the cold room. They can do genetics.'" She came anyway, joined the lab, had her struggles there, but found interesting phenomena and finally achieved the PhD.
Christine then went to Germany to pursue postdoctoral research. The article went on to say that at the Max Planck Institute "she encountered an even more hostile lab environment, and this time she decided to end her scientific career for good. But at just the right moment, she met Bill McClain, then a new assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. He set her up with a dream genetic system using T4 nonsense suppressor transfer RNAs to study tRNA structure-function."
Later, as an assistant professor at UCSF, she became depressed after a devastatingly negative mid-career review and was hospitalized. She was amazed at the supportive comments of some of her colleagues. After that, the Group, an informal gathering of mostly women in science, described by Ellen Daniell in her book Every Other Thursday, was formed and helped her and many others with such challenges.
The Editorial author noted that Guthrie would not be expected to have had such a difficult time, given her many important papers on RNA. Sharing her problems makes it clear that women in general can expect to encounter setbacks, but perseverance and community can help address them.
By the way, I highly recommend Daniell's book if any of you have not read it.
cheers,
Laura Hoopes
Hi Ro, Melissa, and Sara,
It seems to me like we have to feel a little bit ambivalent when women don't get respect as scientists, but I know what you mean. We can't take it as personally when even a Christine Guthrie has encountered these put-downs.
cheers,
Laura
Hi Laura,
I guess if she (or other impressive women in science) never got any negative signals, it would be hard for me to conclude my own baddies weren't right on target. It works because we all have to put up with it, so we can dismiss it and go forward thinking only about how well we understand what the experiments are saying louder than our critics' comments.
SRP
Dear Laura,
I just don't know. Sometimes it's depressing to hear that people as wonderful as she is have been kicked down as well and other times, it's more of a you-can-do-it message. She survived, I can survive, I guess. But it's still hard to hear these stories.
MKS
Dear Laura,
Just like that group she was in, having her share what she lived through with others works for me. Each of us has stories like that, things we don't think about all the time, but that eat away at our self-confidence from the backs of our minds. Knowing outstanding scientists like Christine Guthrie also had this to contend with really lifts me up. We can withstand it and come up winners.
RK
