With Courage the Exceptions Rule Inside Cancer Careers

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.  
Show Notes
Nancy Hopkins, Ph.D. The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike ABC News Interview with Dr. Hopkins and Ms. Zernike A Genetic Switch by Mark Ptashne  
Ad: NCI Rising Scholars: Cancer Research Seminar Series
A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (The 1999 Report) Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the Worlds by Tracy Kidder The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by  Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher  
[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 Mar