ilyagerner: Reading Siddhartha Mukhererjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, I’m struck by the discriminatory barriers that stood in the way of so many talented researchers and physicians. I wasn’t naive about Jewish quotas, but never knew that following undergraduate study at the University of Buffalo, Sidney Farber, the “father of chemotherapy” had to study medicine at Heidelberg and Freiburg before finding a spot at Harvard Medical School. For women, the path to a research career was even more daunting: Almost on instinct, he hired a young assistant named Gertrude Elion, whose future seemed even more precarious than Hitchings’s. The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master’s degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and performing her research for her thesis at night and on weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become one of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Were it not for the good sense of George Hitchings, a biochemist working at the Burroughs Wellcome Lab in NY, the woman who would create agents for counteracting leukemia, gout, malaria, herpes, and meningitis, could very well have spent her life among pickles and mayonnaise.  Which reminds me of an argument in Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation. Cowen theorizes that the US has experienced less stellar growth in recent decades because we’ve exhausted what he calls the “low hanging fruit” of productivity. Among these fruits were the introduction of civil rights laws and progressive social norms: allowing women and minorities to enter the workforce and compete without state-sponsored segregation or societal discrimination was a massive boon for the economy and for American welfare as a whole. Yet the Civil Rights Acts were a one-shot deal in terms of enactment. Nondiscrimination may be the gift that keeps on giving but the “low hanging” legislation has been implemented. Maybe so, but I think there’s more to be done. For one example, check out this study on life-work balance at UC Berkeley. How many more Gertrude Elions would there be if women did not have to choose between family and career? (Image: Elion in the lab, 1980)

ilyagerner:

Reading Siddhartha Mukhererjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, I’m struck by the discriminatory barriers that stood in the way of so many talented researchers and physicians. I wasn’t naive about Jewish quotas, but never knew that following undergraduate study at the University of Buffalo, Sidney Farber, the “father of chemotherapy” had to study medicine at Heidelberg and Freiburg before finding a spot at Harvard Medical School.

For women, the path to a research career was even more daunting:

Almost on instinct, he hired a young assistant named Gertrude Elion, whose future seemed even more precarious than Hitchings’s. The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master’s degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and performing her research for her thesis at night and on weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become one of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise.

Were it not for the good sense of George Hitchings, a biochemist working at the Burroughs Wellcome Lab in NY, the woman who would create agents for counteracting leukemia, gout, malaria, herpes, and meningitis, could very well have spent her life among pickles and mayonnaise. 

Which reminds me of an argument in Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation. Cowen theorizes that the US has experienced less stellar growth in recent decades because we’ve exhausted what he calls the “low hanging fruit” of productivity. Among these fruits were the introduction of civil rights laws and progressive social norms: allowing women and minorities to enter the workforce and compete without state-sponsored segregation or societal discrimination was a massive boon for the economy and for American welfare as a whole. Yet the Civil Rights Acts were a one-shot deal in terms of enactment. Nondiscrimination may be the gift that keeps on giving but the “low hanging” legislation has been implemented.

Maybe so, but I think there’s more to be done. For one example, check out this study on life-work balance at UC Berkeley. How many more Gertrude Elions would there be if women did not have to choose between family and career?

(Image: Elion in the lab, 1980)

1 year ago

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