Women in science: contributions and challenges

¶ … Role of females in science [...] Rachel Carson and Barbara McClintock and compare each scientist to general principals characterizing the careers of women in science.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE

One becomes a scientist by viewing the world in a particular manner; scientists select for study those aspects of the world that are amenable to analysis by scientific methodology. A person acting as a scientist constructs a scientific domain out of the world when s/he adopts a scientific attitude (Grinnell 2).

Most scientists face obstacles at some point in their career. Their research does not produce the results they expected. They lose their funding and must move to another research location. Critics do not agree with their findings or methods. When the scientist is a woman, she often faces even greater obstacles than her male counterparts. Rachel Carson and Barbara McClintock are two such women scientists, who worked relentlessly toward their goals, and often faced uphill battles with their research, findings, and public personas.

The earliest contemporary feminist scholarship on the natural sciences tended to focus on the barriers aspiring women scientists have faced in the past (and continued to face in the present)...(Keller and Longino 2).

Today, more women participate in scientific discovery and research than ever before, yet many still face barriers. Some have success breaking the barrier by recognizing "The opportunities are the possibilities of understanding phenomena in new ways;...we can entertain the possibility that quite different accounts might emerge from other locations with the benefit of different emotional orientations" (Keller and Longino 269).

RACHEL CARSON

Rachel Carson may be most well-known for writing the classics "Silent Spring" and "The Sea Around Us," but before she became a writer, she hoped to study and work as a scientist, but could not find a position. She did work as a biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, but soon moved to the information service.

She wanted to do scientific research, but as a woman she faced the usual difficulties of the time in getting a decent position in science, whether at a university, in private industry, or with the government. She did manage to get a position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (later the Fish and Wildlife Service), and her talent as a writer led to her becoming the bureau's editor-in-chief of information service (Stevenson and Byerly 200).

She began writing as a way to make extra income to help support herself and her mother, and left the Bureau of Fishers in 1952 to devote herself to writing. She began studying the effects of pesticides on people and animals as early as 1945. "The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became,' Carson recalled"(Matthiessen). She went on to write one of the most influential volumes of the decade, "Silent Spring," which vehemently condemned (with startling and graphic research as evidence) the use of pesticides in commercial and agricultural spraying for the control of insects. Her description of the total annihilation of songbird populations where spraying occurred is chilling even today. "The agricultural chemical industry reacted vehemently to what it perceived as a threat to its existence. Carson was accused of being nothing more than a hysterical woman, a sentimental nature lover without professional credentials who was trying to wreck the agricultural economy" (Stevenson and Byerly 201).

In "Silent Spring," Carson wrote the use of pesticides "raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any 'civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized'" (Carson 99). The same questions face our world today with the threat of nuclear attack and biological warfare looming on the horizon. Carson's work helped the world recognize the destructive and deadly powers of DDT and its relatives, and helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Carson did not live to see the results of her research and writing in "Silent Spring" - she died of breast cancer in 1964, just a year after the book's release. Like McClintock, Carson never married; her devotion was to her mother and her research.

BARBARA McCLINTOCK

Dr. Barbara McClintock won a Nobel Prize in 1983, after more than fifty years of research in genetic transposition (called "jumping genes"). She was eighty-one when the Nobel committee finally recognized her, and was the first American woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize. Born in 1902, Barbara McClintock earned her doctorate from Cornell in 1927. She immediately began studying genetics and chromosomes, and continued this study throughout her life, despite many obstacles. In 1936, an engagement announcement of a young woman with the same name appeared in the local newspaper. The chair of her department informed her they would fire her if she married - a dilemma male scientists never had to face. McClintock never married.

Many scientists opposed her work, and found it complicated to understand. Dr. McClintock moved from university to university when backing for her work failed. She finally settled at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Cold Springs Harbor, NY, where she spent the bulk of her career, from 1941 until her death in 1992. "McClintock's findings, though believed, generally were not viewed to be of major consequence for understanding the 'typical' mechanisms of genetic variation. Once the thought collective of molecular biologists had advanced to the point that it was able to understand the significance of jumping genes, the central importance of McClintock's work was recognized" (Grinnell 49). Other scientists first recognized her work in the 1940s, and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1944, and in 1945 to the presidency of the Genetics Society of America. (She was the first woman to hold the post.) However, it took until the 1970s for her peers to recognize her work. They did not readily accept McClintock's reports of transposable genetic elements, and waited for other scientist to verify the findings, which did not occur until the 1970s.

After graduating from Cornell in 1927, McClintock received and invitation to become an assistant professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1936. After a few years McClintock found her position in Missouri lacking, "She believed that there was 'inadequate opportunity for advancement,' especially since support for women at U.S. universities was -- and, to a certain degree, remains -- notoriously precarious" (Editors). In 1941, she finally found a one-year position the Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. In 1942, the position became permanent, and she worked at Cold Spring until her death.