Scientess
Scientess is a podcast for women about the joy of science, and why women might want to consider a career in science. We talk to women with successful careers in science about how they did it, why they did it, and what they love about the work that they do.
Scientess
Rita Colwell
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Rita Colwell is a pioneering environmental microbiologist recognized for her study of how global infectious diseases spread through water sources. Her research has profoundly changed our understanding of diseases like cholera. She also uncovered critical links between climate, environmental change, and the spread of waterborne diseases. Beyond the lab, Rita has broken major glass ceilings: she served as the first female director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, was the 2010 recipient of the Stockholm Water Prize, and won the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2006. Her memoir, A Lab of One’s Own, chronicles her career. Fun fact- a mountain in Antarctica, the Colwell Massif, is named after her!
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Hello and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science. I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle. I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast. My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun. Let's jump in with today's featured scientists. I'm thrilled to be here today with Rita Calwell, who is one of my personal scientific heroines. She is a professor at the University of Maryland and has a storied career. She carried out groundbreaking work on cholera over multiple decades of research using novel bioinformatics and satellite imaging methodologies. She has authored 19 books and more than 800 scientific publications. She has served in many important leadership roles, including as the first female director of the National Science Foundation. In addition, she has been the president of the American Society for Microbiology, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and Chair of the Research Board for the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. She founded the company Cosmos ID in 2008. Dr. Calwell's accolades are too numerous to mention. She is a member of NASAM, the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, and fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the National Medal of Science in 2006 for her work in studying oceans, climate, and human health. She was the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize laureate. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Dr. Calwell has been a major champion of women in science over the course of her career. While at the NSF, she spearheaded the agency's emphases on K-12 science and mathematics education, increased the participation of women and minorities in science and engineering. She's co-editor of the National Academy Report, Promising Practices for Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine, Opening Doors, published in 2020. And I also highly recommend her memoir entitled A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science. Rita, welcome to the Scientesss Podcast. Thank you for being here with me today.
Speaker 1Thank you, Karen. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk with you about what I enjoy the most, science, and being a woman in science.
Speaker 2That's great. So let's start with some basics. How did you get to where you are today? Can you tell us the arc of your career?
Speaker 1I would say that probably stamina, perseverance, and uh sheer stubbornness brought me to where I am in the sense that I there are things that I love to do, and it's been the career of finding out how to do the things that I love to do.
Speaker 2And so when did you decide to become a scientist?
Speaker 1I think it probably gelled when I was in high school, because my older sister, who was an artist and was studying art, married a physicist who was a Fulbright. He was Dutch. He had come to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, and he at the time was courting her. Now that sounds really archaic, but those were the times where you would meet up periodically, meet the family and that sort of thing. And so Hans Fredricks, my sister's then to become husband, would visit and he would be coming in to Beverly Cove because he was really commuting to meetings at MIT or Harmon, where he was doing low temperature physics with colleagues there, and they would come out to Beverly for lunch or dinner. So I got to hear these young men, they were all men, scientists talking about the science that they were doing, much of which I didn't really understand at the time, but also about the things they enjoyed doing sailing, playing tennis, traveling, the stories of the places they had gone to visit, the meetings they attended, the people that they worked with. And that really sounded fascinating to me. And I thought, you know, that's the kind of life I would like to have. At the time, I didn't really take note of the fact that they were all men, but that that's something we can discuss. That comes later on. So for the interest in becoming a scientist, I think that's when the beginning of of my desire to be a scientist.
Speaker 2So you actually said that looks like a great lifestyle.
Speaker 1Exactly.
Speaker 2Interesting. And how old were you at the time?
Speaker 1I would have been between fifteen and sixteen, I think, at the time.
Speaker 2Interesting. And so then from there, how did you get to actually, you know, moving towards doing science yourself?
Speaker 1Well, I thought, you know, chemistry sounded good because I I was doing well in chemistry. I was getting A's. I hadn't taken physics because, frankly, and honestly, girls weren't allowed to sign up for physics in the high school. That was the boys' topic. And I turned out to be one of the few women who took geometry. And that was a unsettling experience because being the only girl, the instructor obviously was annoyed that I was there. And whenever I raised my hand to ask a question, he would ignore me and never call on Ape. But I I managed to get through that course. But I was thinking chemistry should do it. However, when I applied to university, I asked the chemistry teacher for a recommendation, and he said, no, girls don't do chemistry. Of course I was upset, but I wasn't going to let that stop me, so I went to my other teachers, the other women teachers, so there. The guy who was the chemistry teacher was a man, and they wrote very good letters for me, so I did get accepted to college. I was accepted in Radcliffe and received a scholarship, but it was only half the tuition, which meant that I would have had to live in Beverly Cove and take the train into Boston and then hike over to the Cambridge campus. The train was the Boston and Maine, and we used to call it the Broken and Mended because it wasn't that reliable. And my sister, who did marry Hans and was teaching art at Purdue University, which sounds a little odd, but Purdue has a a good art program there. And Hans, of course, was working with then very active and famous Karl Lack Horowitz, um, low temperature physics, or I guess it was superconductivity. And she said, Why don't you apply to Purdue? It's a good school for science. So I applied, and I was um I applied was accepted, and then I asked for a scholarship. And I remember it was very odd. The exam was sent to my high school, and one of my teachers actually gave me the test. That is, she had an office. I was given the exam. And so I did the exam. It was sent um she took it when I finished and sent it back to Purdue, and I was given a complete scholarship. It covered everything. Um tuition, books. I had some other scholarships that helped with uh travel and so forth. So I decided that going to Radcliffe, where I probably would have been trained into some sort of women's studies program, some sort of program appropriate for women, where if I went to Purdue, it was an engineering school, and a school of science really was a very strong one, and the only program for women was home economics, and I sure as heck was not going to do that. So I chose to go to Purdue, and I have never regretted it. After a semester or two, it became clear that chemistry was not my forte, and I had taken a course in bacteriology, and that that did it. It was fascinating. Uh especially because one of the courses that I took in my, I think, second or third year was taught by Dorothy Powellson, a wonderful woman, who really, really was a great teacher. And I remember distinctly, after three, four weeks in the course, um, I looked through the microscope and I could actually see the bacteria. And I was delighted. Of course, I should have been seeing them the first week, but nevertheless, that really I think sensed it.
Speaker 2So do you think of a specific point, a specific moment that sort of solidified your interest in bacteriology or in you know what you ended up studying in cholera? Kind of what pulled you really into your study area?
Speaker 1Aaron Ross Powell, I think that was um the fact that I had joined a sorority, the Delpha Gamma sorority, mainly because there were some friends there. In fact, my college roommate, whom I met the very first day that I went to Purdue, uh Peg Duran Louby, we and I, she and I had remained friends ever since. I think the really the big turning point was that one of my very, very best friends, roommate, who went on to medical school, she said to me that I should take this course with Dr. Powlson. And I think that combination of the fact that I thought of medical school and having taken the course on the recommendation was what really, I think, solidified the path that I've ended up taking.
Speaker 2And so you I'm fast forwarding a bit, you thought you were gonna go to medical school and you were gonna come to the University of Washington. You were telling me this earlier.
Speaker 1Yes. In fact, I applied to medical school. I wasn't sure that I could get in, so I applied to what I called the safe schools. One of them was stretch, was Yale. Another was Boston University because I was too nervous about applying to Harvard, and then to Western Reserve because it had been recommended to me. I was accepted at all three. In fact, when I interviewed at Boston University, the first thing the fellow said was, Why didn't you apply to Harvard? Which I thought was rather odd since it was being interviewed for, you know, Boston University Medical School. And so I was on my way. In fact, I even got a scholarship to help pay the tuition for medical school. And in March of my senior year, I went on, I guess what you call a blind date. I the boy had the m young boy that I'd been dating had a roommate, Jack Calwell, and Jack had been asked to chaperone this this is the old days now, this is sixty years ago. Was asked to chaperone one of the fraternity parties. I think as I remember it was a skating party, bowl skating or something like that. And he had asked the fellow that I'd been dating, Don Boone, if he could ask me to go as his chaperone, because he had to have a chaperone in order to be able to do this favor for the fraternity. So that was fateful because that night we realized that You were dating the wrong guy. We were married two months later. Wow. And we last. It was a wonderful sixty-two years of a very, very happy life.
Speaker 2That's amazing. My parents were married for 55 years and they were only together for three months before they got married. So it goes to show if you know, you know. Yeah. So it sounds like a lot of these things that pulled you in a particular direction that were very influential for you were a result of some social obligations or social fun things that pulled you in friends and things that looked fun to do, pulled you in a direction that was very important for the rest of your life. Absolutely. That's a good lesson. Sort of follow your bliss.
Speaker 1Yes, but I think again, it's interesting how things turn out because I had been accepted to medical school. We did get married, which meant that what was next? Because Jack had just started graduate school. He he was hean applied to Purdue a couple of years earlier and uh was told by the chairman of the chemistry department at Purdue not to worry, he wouldn't get drafted. So he sent back his the orders that he had received when he applied to the Navy to be a Navy pilot. He sent them back and went on to graduate school, which I guess you could do in those days. And then he arrived at graduate school and he was drafted two months later. So he ended up serving in the Army as a electronics person. They didn't quite know what to do with him because he was very bright, and he had first been stationed in Kentucky, and he said he really couldn't stand the the guitar playing, and they finally shipped him off to the German to Germany where he had a very good time and then came back to Purdue. So he here he had spent a year as a graduate student, and I didn't want neither of us wanted him to lose that time, so we compromised. We said, okay, I will try to do a master's in biology, and Jack would finish up the year that he had invested with another year to get a master's in physical chemistry, and then we would apply together where I would go to medical school and he would do physical chemistry. It turned out that he was accepted at the University of Washington, and I applied and was accepted at the medical school. And so everything really looked rosy. Except I, as is very typical for women, I got another letter that said, sorry, you'll have to to be uh formally admitted, you must demonstrate that you have been employed in the state of Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, or Oregon for at least a year, and you must provide evidence that you paid taxes, that you lived there and worked. And it it was the interest of the University of Washington, at least in those days, to ensure that the medical trainees, the physicians that they turned out, would stay in the Pacific Northwest. But it meant for me that um I would have to sort of tootle my thumbs for a year. But the university kindly, without my requesting, said, You have an alternative. We will offer you a research assistantship in microbiology, and you can work there for a year and then transfer to the medical school, or enter the medical school. Because in those days you didn't transfer, you you would do the whole four years. It's different now. I probably would have gotten credit for a year. And so that seems very logical. And Jack and I then packed up our beaker book belongings in a little U U-Haul truck and off we went to the adventures in the Northwest, and that's how I came to the University of Washington.
Speaker 2But you didn't continue in medical school.
Speaker 1No, because w when I got here, I'll be perfectly candid, it turned out that when you arrived in the microdepartment in those days, you were interviewed right away. In order to afford that master's year, I went to the department chairman at Purdue, whom I knew he had fellowships and asked for a fellowship. And he quite bluntly said to me, We don't waste fellowships on women. You'll just get married and have kids and that's the end of that that. So I I was very upset and went to see my undergraduate advisor. And in those days, you couldn't register for classes until you saw your advisor. Things have changed. Now you sign up for whatever you want. But I had to go to Dr. Alan Burdick, he was known as Tex. Dr. Bert, but he was Dr. Burdick to me. I went to Dr. Burdick and said tearfully that I couldn't get this fellowship. And he said, Well, because he knew my grades, he was my advisor, he knew I was practically a straight A student. He said, I just happened to have just gotten a grant to work on the genetics of fruit flies or in fruit flies. Would you like to be my lab tech? And you can do the masters with me, studying crossover and the influences of crossover in um to fruit fly genetics. And that sounded great to me. So that's how I got through the um that year. But when he when I told him I was going on to the University of Washington, uh, he said, Oh, you must look up Herschel Roman. He's a member of the National Academy, he's amazing. So I said, sure. I did go up to talk to Dr. Roman and he was gracious and I worked with him, but it turned out he clearly didn't like women students, purely. And I ended up not working very long with Herschel Roman. It was clear that persona non grata in Herschel's lab. So I took a semester off doing what I wanted to do, and I took some courses and I was kind of at sixes and sevens. I wasn't sure what was gonna happen now. And a friend said, Hey, there's a new professor at the University of Washington, just arrived from Aberdeen, Scotland, and he is setting up a lab, needs a tech. Talk to him. So I went down to talk to Dr. John Liston. And that was immediate good connection straight away. I was hired as a technician. I essentially set up his lab. I did the ordering of the equipment and and worked with a carpenter to get the lab benches built. And and after about six months, John said, you know, I need a graduate student. You should be a graduate student. So okay, you go register as a graduate student. So that was the beginning of an extremely productive and fortuitously probably the best possible way of getting a degree because we ended up working on using computers to identify bacteria. So I literally wrote the first computer program to identify bacteria. The University of Washington had just gotten new computer, the IBM 650, which had less computational power than my my my i my Apple watch. But it was all we needed to do. It was installed, ironically, in the attic of the chemistry building. It was air conditioned, not the rest of the building, just the attic for the computer. And students were allowed only between midnight and six AM. And there was no technician. You had to run the computer yourself. Well, you know, you'd turn it on, but you had to there was a board that you had to with plugs that you had to pull up and out and then plug in your program, put it back in, and then run the computer. How big was this thing? Probably half the size of this room. The whole thing.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1And they were c and God forbid, if you should drop the tray of cards, because then you'd have to do up the computation all over again because you couldn't I mean it was probably cards.
Speaker 2Most of the listeners have no idea what you're talking about. Why are you saying a card for a computer?
Speaker 1That's right. Nobody would know what I'm talking about. That's true. That's true. That's very true. Well, the university was very proud. This was their first computer, and in my husband's lab there was a postdoc who had come in from industry. His name was George Constaberas, and he had learned how to program. So he taught me. There was no computer department. There was no you just had to learn this by yourself. Teach yourself and learn by yourself. And so I learned and wrote this program which allowed forty strains and eighty characteristics. And that just about saturated storage. But in addition, we weren't working on genes. Genes hadn't even I think this was 1958-59, and the Watson Crick hypothesis had been published about, I don't know, ten years earlier, six or seven anyway, just so there wasn't any DNA analysis. In fact, the thrill a decade later was to discover that the vibrios that I was studying were 48% G C and that was like a wow. I mean, this is ridiculous now if, you know, if we do a whole every single gene in the chromosome. But that really put John and me right at the forefront because we were doing the first work on using computers to identify bacteria. And what we were cod what I was coding was not the genetics directly, but the ability if you transfer the culture to lactose broth, if you could ferment lactose, you mark plus. If it could break down casein, it was proteolytic plus. So these were phonetic characteristics, the phenotype that we were coding the data. But the fundamental of the correlations and the formation of the trees and so forth were the same as today.
Speaker 2I mean, the most amazing thing to me is that what you're describing, you're still doing with Cosmos ID. It's the exact same thing. It's just the computational power is so much greater, and you know, the reference databases and the information we have, but it's the same concept.
Speaker 1You bet. You bet. And in addition, Cosmos ID now has been acquired by a Danish company, and the new company that I'm still part of, Clinical Genomics, has is also acquired two or three DNA startup companies. And so now it has over a hundred employees. So it's come a long way from the first days of using the University of Washington computer.
Speaker 2And you know what I also think is really incredible about your story is, you know, we often talk about, you know, women in science about some of the f challenges we face with men who get in the way. Like you're f the first person for your first mentor. But there's also these men that facilitate a career. And by believing in you and giving you a chance. And we were talking earlier. My mom had a very similar story where somebody wasn't willing to take her on as a PhD student, but was willing to take her on as a tech. She proved herself as a tech, and then, you know, that then he said, Oh, come on, be my PhD student. So I think I think that the men who are willing to give a chance and your husband who is willing to bring you along, those are really important allies in and support for women in science.
Speaker 1Oh, indeed. Uh John Liston was was remarkable, a wonderful man, and I owe him so much because he treated me as an equal in the sense that I was a student and they were male, subsequently male students, but I wasn't in any way any different. In fact, I got a lot of support. He was very interesting because we one of our first papers was published in Nature, actually on Note. And we were invited to give a paper at the American Society of Microbiology in Philadelphia. And we wrote the paper. I, you know, I had the data, we wrote it up. And then on the morning that he was leaving to go to Philadelphia, he called me and said, Rita, I'm not well. You have to go and give the paper. I swear to this day he was fine. He was just sending me off to give that paper in Philadelphia and to get the credit. I swear. He was fun. We used to have lunches, the students, the text, and together, and he would always have reading, you know, books and poetry that he would insist that we would read, and then we would have to take walks along the canal when it was a nice day. And then he decided one day to teach us how to play it wasn't rugby, it was what's the British sports? Oh, cricket. Cricket. We had to learn how to play cricket. So it was a rainy day, and we're in the main hallway in the Fisheries Biology building, and he is now at bat, and he breaks one of the windows. So i he was fun and very smart. He had graduated from Edinburgh and then did his PhD with James Schuen, who was a leading marine microbiologist, uh, fisheries microbiologist at the world at the time, and then started the new program at the University of Washington.
Speaker 2So talk a little bit more about that fun and science and some of the fun you've had over the years. What's been fun about it, other than breaking windows?
Speaker 1John Liston was was a fellow who really enjoyed life. He he he had three kids. He had two daughters and a son. I think they all now live in Seattle. And his wife had been trained as a botanist, but she hadn't been able to get a position. And so he was highly sympathetic and and and very supportive. But at the same time he also hi liked life. And going to ASM meetings with John was always a joy because Jack and I would often come along, and we'd go to the meetings and we'd end up partying every which way. And I got introduced to all kinds of of uh interesting people. I remember one dinner with oh gosh, I'm trying to remember the name of the fellow who did the stain, the flagella stain. He was famous for thyes and and the ability to see bacteria under the light microscope. And we we gave a paper and he was one of the speakers. We ended up at dinner, and then he turned to me and said, Did your husband know you're here? There was one meeting Jack hadn't come to. D shouldn't you be home pregnant? Literally. Literally. That's what he said. And John just kicked me under the table. So I'll talk to you later. Later he said, Don't pay any attention to him. He's just he's beyond it. So anyway, there was they were the ups and downs that you sort of get used to.
Speaker 2Yeah. And and um talk a little bit about your lab that you ran then and how did you did you take any of the what you learned from how to run a fun lab from John?
Speaker 1Yes. When I got my first position, again, this was I I f I guess I should first tell you how John helped. Jack and I applied to the National Research Council of Canada for postdocs. There had been a um fellow from Carleton University in Canada who had come to the University of Washington to work with George Halsey, with whom Jack was doing his PhD, and we had become friends and he had said, You should you two should apply for an NRC postdocs. You're good once. So we did, and we both got accepted. Except I got a second letter that said, Oops, nepotism rules. Husbands and wives cannot both have fellowships at the NRC, of course that's changed now. And the fellow with whom I was going to work, Dr. Norman Gibbons, and John Liston were good friends, and Norm wrote back to John and said, Hey, don't worry, can't pay Rita and Cole, but I got a lab for her, and she can read the stock room uh for supplies, so it's okay. John said, Ah, he said, I think we can do a little bit better. So he went to the dean. He arranged for me to be appointed research professor, research assistant professor at the University of Washington, and granted immediate leave of absence. So I arrived and in addition, we had applied for an NSF grant, and it was received, and he turned it over to me.
Speaker 2Wow.
Speaker 1So I ended up at the university I I ended up at the National Research Council of Canada with a lab, access to the stock room, my own grant, money to hire a technician, and I put out a notice, and one of the applicants was a woman PhD. Brilliant. She had gotten a PhD at the University of Wisconsin. She and her husband had had to hide their marriage because the professor she worked for would have fired her if she had gotten married. When she got to Ottawa, Canada, her husband got a job at the agricultural department. She couldn't get a job because they didn't hire women at that time. This is 1961. And so I ended up with a PhD, brilliant woman. And we published I mean, she was fantastic. She she had done her work in Berkeley, undergraduate, and PhD at Wisconsin. In fact, she had worked on, I think, nematodes or whatever. There's even one named after her because it was I'm not so sure he wanted a nematode dean after me, but but it was an honor for her. And so we just were very productive and got along really well.
Speaker 2So you and you she you and her were you you were being moms and being scientists at the same time. Exactly. So can you think of ways that that made you more productive?
Speaker 1Yeah, I was very fortunate. Very unfortunate because the my I shared a lab with Dr. Don Kushner. He since passed away. He was a halophile bacteriologist. He worked with because that's what they were doing a lot of work. Norm Gibbons was the world authority on salt loving bacteria. And it became obvious one day that I was really expecting a baby. And Don said, Well, he said, I I don't mean to be impolite, but don't you think you might need some help? He said his wife was professional. She ended up eventually president of not the University of Toronto, but one of the universities near Toronto. She was brilliant too. And uh he said, We have a they had three boys, and he said, We have a housekeeper who has a friend who needs a job. Don't you need some help? And I said, Well, sounds good to me. It turned out to be an English woman who had come out to help a family friend with some difficult children in Alberta, and he got too much for her, so she was on her way back to England, but she liked being in Canada. So there was an interview set up which was really amusing. Here I am, this young kid, expecting a child, and this is I think she was about fifty-five at the time. Proper Englishwoman who arrives at the apartment door with a little notebook saying, What time do you take breakfast and etc, etc.? Well, we became very good we took her on to help so that I could go back to work as I needed. She lived in Ottawa, yeah. And so she stayed with us for the two years of the postdoc, and then when we got our jobs in the US, we asked her to just continue with us, and she said, Oh, I should go back to England, and then after the next day she came back and said, You know, you two know nothing about babies, and this little girl is beautiful, and I'm going to stay with her. So she lived with us for ten years. Amazing. We got lucky. We did. Do you think that there's ways that you being a woman helped your science, either through your mentorship or through the way you thought about biology or anything else that you could point to that yeah, just I think that one of the things that really has provided me at this time of my life to be at the forefront is the fact that I had to zigzag my way through science. I started out in bacteriology, literally. At Purdue University, you got a degree in bacteriology. There wasn't much being done in viruses. And then I did a master's in fruit fly genetics, which meant that I had to take, at that time, a whole bevy of courses chicken genetics, fruit fly genetics, tomato genetics, neurospora genetics, and a tad of human genetics. So I I was embedded just when genetics is on the upswing. And then I planned to do medicine, but I get diverted to microbiology, and Herschel Roman was doing yeast genetics. So I spent a year there, and then I honed my ability to write and think, because I took courses in philosophy and literature, and then was in oceanography and fisheries biology, the big picture of things, and then work in Canada in this fascinating lab where you study the extremes of life, ability to grow on salt and requiring it to to stay intact, and then coming to Georgetown University and being embedded in really medical approaches because we were practically I mean, all the students went to med school.
Speaker 2Interesting health health applications.
Speaker 1Right. And I did my sabbatical with a wonderful colleague at the medical school, which meant that I could s sort of walk across the street and work in in his lab and spend time with Stanley Falco, a brilliant microbiologist who was at Walter Reed and then had come to Georgetown.
Speaker 2So I got this So it was sort of a forced generalization. That probably really helped you when you became the head of NSF.
Speaker 1Absolutely. Absolutely. Because by this time at Georgetown, I had started a marine microbiology program and I was using the UNOLS vessels, the university operated research vessels funded by NSF. So I I ended up chairing a committee on who was which university was going to get the next ship for their research. And at the same time, I was involved in the genetics program. And I was involved in one of the science programs. And one of the previous directors, before I became director myself, had tried to get me, tried to recruit me to become the assistant director for education. But that wasn't I I was in science, practicing science, so I turned it down.
Speaker 2So this was uh it sort of forced you to become interdisciplinary before interdisciplinary was a thing.
Speaker 1Precisely. And while at NSF, I tried to start interdisciplinary research being funded, and I learned very well that that was going to be tough. This was twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago. Because what I finally did was the experiment where an interdisciplinary program, let's say it was between chemistry and biology, we would send, I did the experiment, I sent the proposal to biology to be review and to chemistry in a septor review, and then I put together an interdisciplinary committee. The biology said, the biology isn't strong enough, it's not good enough, it isn't whatever, whatever. The chemists said, This is biology, this is not chemistry. The interdisciplinary group looked at the program and said, That's a good program. And one of those programs was Simon Levin's program, which is still going. Wow. At the national at Princeton. So That's pretty cool. Strangely, I was much more successful and productive outside the US. And there wasn't for some reason, it was the science that they recognized, and it wasn't the fact that I was female. I was an American scientist. I ended up president of the International Union of Microbiological Societies. I even now have colleagues, Carla Pruso, who professor at uh Ancona, Italy, and now in Genoa, we keep in touch, worked with it.
Speaker 2So something about your your status as an American sort of maybe superseded the lower status of being a woman or something.
Speaker 1Very strange, yes. Uh something to that effect, because at the time that I was rising in different positions, I had wonderful women colleagues in England. Only a few of them ever really broke through, uh which was unfortunate because they were very good. Now it's a bit different. But anyway, you know, our friends in France, um Japan, Latin America. I I could go to presently any country and yeah, the fur.
Speaker 2So you did have this interdisciplinary uh nature, and that made you go from thing to thing and or topic to topic. And many people in science, and I won't just say women, because I think all people in science experience what we now know is called imposter syndrome. Did you feel like you experienced that in your career? And if so, how did you overcome it?
Speaker 1Yes, of course I did. Because particularly when I was doing the work on cholera, the discoveries I made were not greeted warmly, let's put it that way. In fact, when I was proposing that Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium, was in the environment, I was ridiculed openly, openly at meetings. In fact, one of them You and John Snow. That's I hadn't thought of it quite like that. But I guess you could say that. In fact, um Ron Sizemore, one of my very bright students at the time, I think he was number two or three PhD, was sitting in the front row, and I'm giving the talk. Ron told me later that this one guy came in, sat down, and kept saying rubbish, this is all garbage, this is rubbish. And Ron tr turned to her and said, That's my professor. And he just got up and walked away. Not not Ron, but the other guy. So it's not easy.
Speaker 2How did you get past that?
Speaker 1How did you I always kept publishing, publishing and publishing and publishing? In fact, I had to struggle to publish the paper on the viable but non-comfortable, because I made the discovery that these little devils, these bacteria, wouldn't grow if you exposed them to very low temperatures, but they weren't dead. You could you could use radiolabel material, they would take it up and release radiolabled CO2 if they're dead and still intact. Something is different. And then you I figured out that these are part of the flora of their hosts. Their vector, which is the copepod. And the copepod goes into diapause in the winter. It borrows into the sediment, goes to sleep. And so if the bacteria are part of their natural flora, they're gonna do the same thing. And so that was how we discovered that these bacteria during the winter months, which is when you couldn't isolate them, is because they're alive, but they don't have to be. You know, a nice bright green. And so we went out and collected water from the ponds that people were taking for their drinking water in Bangladesh in a remote village, so there wasn't contamination except whatever was in the village, and brought the samples in the lab, and Buck was there. He had he was there, we had he was there for a medical mission. I mean, he was doing some work in the hospital. We were out sampling and bringing it back to the hospital lab, and we did the stains, and I remember it was late at night because we had been out all day collecting samples, late at night sitting in the lab, and put the the the sample under the microscope, stained it with the monoclonal antibody, ligated to the isrothiocyanate, and then looked under the UV microscope and bingo. And Buck sat down. He said, You're right. But he said, You're right, I see it, but you're still gonna be hard to convince the rest of the people. I said, It's okay, Buck, as long as you you know. And so that was sort of the beginning.
Speaker 2Amazing. And you stuck to your guns. So what's the what's the trait there that you think is important for Stubbornness and proud of what I'm doing.
Speaker 1I mean, uh I I love the work, and it's fascinating. I mean, I'm not in the I'm probably dangerous in the lab now, but I I know what's going on, I know the work, and I love the students, and I love it when they get all excited and enthusiastic, and I feel that we're doing good things for humanity. And it it's just there's a lot of joy to it. There's a lot a lot of hard work, but you know, I'd never have trouble getting up in the morning. I in fact, I get up in the morning, and the next thing I know, I'm going to bed, and I'm thinking, what happened to his day even now?
Speaker 2So you are in your how old are you now? Ninety. Ninety. And then in your sharpest attack, physically fit. So what have you done? Have you you know what have you done to take care of yourself?
Speaker 1Well, we've always been athletic. I played basketball girls' basketball in high school, which was frustrating because that was that stupid half-court thing. But I was good. I had um I learned to do a mid-court shot, and I was pretty good at that. So stuff curry. My husband and I played tennis, and then Jack was a champ golfer. He almost went pro at one point. But when we had our children, he said, This is crazy, me going off to the golf course on the weekends and not seeing anybody. I'm taking up sailing. We're going to go we're going to do we started doing some sailing at the U dock. We sailed on Lake Washington a little bit. And then we we joined the sailing club in Annapolis, and he became Commodore at one point. And we were racing. In fact, we went to the Nationals every year. It was great fun. Bring the kids, pack it all up. Jack was good at that. He I would come home late Friday afternoon, and he would have already got the dinghy home from Annapolis, packed with a paint with a camping gear. And as soon as I got home, get out of the car, I get into the the station wagon that had the trailer boat on it, and we off we'd go. So the best we ever did was a second place at Marblehead.
Speaker 2Pretty good, while also discovery my aquatic reservoir of cholera. So you so you kept active and also had a partner who kept you active.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. And and we neither of us get into drugs or anything. We had too much fun doing everything else. So what do you do in your spare time? Well, I I've always been a jogger. Jack and I uh Jack did marathons. I did I the only marathon I ever did was when I was director of NSF. The director had to do this three-mile marathon. If the director didn't go out, the rest of the staff couldn't compete. So I ran. And I but and be ended up in the Washington Post in a squib because it turned out the chairman of the appropriations committee was also in the same regatta uh same race and I beat him. It was called indiscreet. But I grow African violets and I don't garden outside, but I have lots of plants and trees and inside. And so that's my relaxation. My daughter cloned an African violet when she was in high school, and that was a big deal, so I'm perpetrating it. I now have I give them away. I think friends when they come to the house don't go over to say how nice the African violets are because they'll be given one before they leave. But um that's kind of my hobby. Plus I just there are a lot of things that I I that I do that community things I I'm not a joiner as such, but there are things such as I was the first woman elected to the Cosmos Club way back in 1988. I was on sabbatical in Australia and I got a cable because in those days there was no email and phones were very difficult to not speak to the press. Had no idea what they were talking about, but I had just been elected to the Cosmos Club. Wow. But I f I enjoyed that because uh there are lectures and I'm a member of the Explorers Club and the people are interesting.
Speaker 2So if you weren't a scientist, what would you do?
Speaker 1I would have been a physician and I probably would have helped people. I know I would have helped people, but not of a number that I've helped by the work we do on cholera. And and I'm still active because I've been continuing work with really brilliant postdocs who've gone on and we've stayed in touch and collaborate, doing a lot of satellite sensing now for predicting infectious diseases.
Speaker 2It's super cool.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's really great to hear about your career and to hear about how much fun you have with With it.
Speaker 1Yeah, and the similarities with you have been amazing.
Speaker 2Yeah, there's a lot of similarities with my own family and my my my parents and in your own interest. And yeah, absolutely. So it's amazing.
Speaker 1I feel like it's a doppelkin.
Speaker 2That's really cool. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That's an honor.
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