My Genomics Sabbatical

Release date: December 05, 2006 |

By Laura Livingston Mays Hoopes ’64

Editor’s Note: Like her contemporaries, Laura Livingston Mays Hoopes knew she was expected to get married, have children, and not indulge career aspirations. But, as the song goes, two out of three ain’t bad: Lured by special activities begun in response to Sputnik, Hoopes earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Goucher and completed a doctorate at Yale University. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation and the University of Colorado Medical School, she joined the faculty at Occidental College in 1973.

Twenty years later, she moved to Pomona College as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, serving in that capacity for five years before returning to the faculty. Along the way, she married twice and had two children, refusing to become a workaholic but still driven to continue revealing the secrets of molecular biology.

Currently Hoopes, who received an honorary doctorate from Goucher in 1995, is Halstead-Bent Professor in Biology at Pomona, where she continues to teach and mentor undergraduate researchers. The following article is drawn from her forthcoming memoir, Breaking Through the Spiral Ceiling: An American Woman Becomes a DNA Scientist.

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It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. I’m in East Pasadena giving a talk to a group of senior citizens as part of a lecture series on new vistas in science. My topic is molecular genetics. I’ve decided to tell them about the Human Genome Project (HGP), the effort to map and sequence all of our genes. It’s early 1987; the 13-year project of recording the three billion letters that compose the human genome hasn’t yet begun.

“If we could do without one aircraft carrier, then we could afford to sequence the whole human genome,” I venture. “And what can we get if we sequence the human genome? We could find the basis for a lot of human medical conditions. If we can cheaply and quickly sequence the DNA of individuals, then personalized medicine, that takes into account how you yourself might react to different medicines, can become a reality.”

I’m winging it, exaggerating the potential, shooting the moon. After my talk, I’m surrounded by bright-eyed, excited senior citizens who tell me they support the sequencing.

“We are going to write to our congressmen and tell them to forget the next aircraft carrier,” one woman tells me.

I feel that in a small way, their letters might make the difference in getting the project to fly. It would be a lot more significant than one more carrier, I think.

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“Hello, Laura. How’s Q10?”

I jump. Even though it’s 7:30 in the morning, I’m already absorbed in my work. I turn to find Leroy Hood, the head of the molecular immunology group at Caltech-where I’m spending my sabbatical working on a protein called Q10.

“Hi! It’s going well,” I answer. “When did you get back?”

One of the most famous molecular biologists in the world, Lee spends much of his time on the road, talking at academic and research centers, site-visiting labs, attending meetings, and collecting “information pollen” along the way. He’s just come back from meetings with WHOM in Washington, DC.

“What do people think about sequencing the human genome?” I ask him.

“Not as much interest as I’d hoped. One problem is that the sponsor is the Department of Energy, not the National Institutes of Health. People think it shouldn’t be run by the DOE, even though they thought it up and have done a lot of the planning for the project.”

“Why does anyone care?”

Lee leans on the lab bench next to my work table.

“It’s both prestige and money, I think. People look up to NIH. They’re used to getting their grants, so they don’t want to have to learn the house politics for DOE.” He shrugs. “The nay-sayers can’t stop it, though. I’m testifying before Congress next month.”

“Will they try to restructure where the funding comes from?”

Lee thinks it over, pulling on an earlobe. “Maybe. That’ll take a fight, and probably NIH would win. Congress is full of people who need great health research and love NIH.” He straightens. “Come show me your data later.”

He starts down the corridor, looking for more people. I hear his footsteps pause. He’s probably looking at the white board in the hall, where there’s a running joke to which everyone who passes contributes. In response to the current topic, “Whose DNA should we sequence?” people have written “male astronaut,” “female astronaut,”-even “Bob Dylan.” Yesterday, someone added, “Forget feminism. You have to do a male or you’ll leave out a whole chromosome!” True: If we sequence a female, we won’t know about the male-specific Y chromosome.

Lee’s footsteps resume, and I return to my transgenic mice, a project I am sharing with Carol Readhead. Carol was involved in the famous transgenic mouse experiment that cured the ‘shaker’ mice, which have a defect in their myelin-an insulator that wraps their nerves-causing them to shake all the time and shortening their lifespan. Carol’s team injected the correct gene for myelin basic protein gene (the one that was defective) and cured the mice. A photo of the cured mice even made the cover of Cell, a top scientific journal. As usual, though, most people will say that Leroy Hood cured them.

I am here to learn immunology because I’ve been studying rat and mouse aging, and interesting things happen to the immune system during aging. Occidental College is paying me, so Lee’s laboratory provides only supplies for my study. Still, I’m surprised that he actually agreed to let me come. Most of the 100 people in this lab are postdoctoral fellows; the rest are graduate students.

Iwona Stroynowski is my assigned mentor. She has an incredibly fast and penetrating intelligence. Before coming to Caltech, Iwona was a prime mover in the discovery of bacterial attenuation, a major regulatory process that’s in all the textbooks. You won’t find her name, though. If anyone’s name is there, it’s Yanofsky’s, the head of her laboratory.

Iwona is a perfect example of a trend that puzzles me: She’s an excellent woman scientist who has chosen to work as a research associate for the major portion of her career rather than head her own group. I’ve met a lot of women like Iwona on this sabbatical. I don’t have a gut-level understanding of them, because I crave independence. I’ve learned to generate interesting research ideas for my own group to work on and, as is expected of me, to “make scientific progress.” Iwona doesn’t crave independence. She wants to be on the cutting edge. And it’s easier to be on the cutting edge here, in Lee Hood’s group.

I do understand the attractiveness of these positions in one way: It’s an addictive connection to the scientific “in” crowd. What I hear and learn during this year in Lee Hood’s laboratory will take me several more back at Oxy to sort out. It’s like a being a node on the world information highway. When a laboratory in Finland develops a new way to make a transgenic mouse or discovers a new way antibody genes can diversify, we learn about it the next day. Discussion often focuses on what the next breakthrough will be, and how to design a fast and convincing experiment to be the person who makes that breakthrough. At Oxy, I wouldn’t know about this new development for months, until the experiments had been published or presented at a scientific meeting.

When my sabbatical ends, so will my work in immunology. During the year I find myself slowly drowning in a sea of specialized terminology. But I continue my work on genomics, eventually becoming involved with Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT), working with other professors at liberal arts colleges to bring genomics to our students.

I continued to collaborate with Iwona for a time. Eventually, she followed the dangling carrot of a tenured faculty position and became an associate professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Tenure is the academic holy grail; with tenure, you still have a paying job even if you don’t have grants. When I went on this sabbatical leave, I already had tenure. But many women in science don’t want a job like mine. Like Barbara McClintock, the cytogeneticist and Nobel laureate described by biographer Evelyn Fox-Keller in A Feeling for the Organism, they want to be conducting high-level research at a top university, not loaded down with teaching responsibilities at a liberal arts college.

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It’s been nearly 20 years since my talk at the senior center. Rather than exaggerating, today it seems more likely that I was under-representing the real effects the Human Genome Project is having. The HGP was completed two years ahead of schedule, in 2003, helped in large part by the efforts of Hood and the women and men who worked in his lab. My friend Jane Sanders, for example, helped to invent a cheaper, more reliable way to determine DNA sequences by marking each of the four different components of DNA with a different color of fluorescent dye.

The HGP has been compared with the moon landing, a landmark human achievement-and one in which women have played an important but largely unrecognized role. (Nearly 25 percent of the scientists listed as authors in initial published sequences in 2001, for example, were women, a fact you would not know by watching the press conferences where these results were announced.)

Indeed, not much has changed in the two decades since I spent a year as a “Hoodlum” at CalTech. A September 2006 report by the National Academies Women bears this out. “Women are capable of contributing more to the nation’s science and engineering research enterprise, but bias and outmoded practices governing academic success impede their progress almost every step of the way,” said Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. Women, it seems, are still waiting for our turn to “shoot the moon.”